There was a tempest recently when it was revealed that Facebook had conducted a psychological experiment on several hundred thousand users, manipulating news feeds in order to assess emotional reactions. People were outraged, of course. Nowadays, people are outraged by things seemingly as banal as being asked for directions on the street. I don’t expect the Facebook revelation to persist too long, but I do expect that there will be some revelation of this sort that tips the scales enough to gain the interest of politicians. We already know that Google in Europe has been mandated to set up a right to be forgotten, and that Google, Facebook and other companies that fall under the “social media” umbrella are mandated to obey European privacy rules, no matter where they’re headquartered.
It is both amusing and disheartening to contemplate the utter lack of awareness that many users have about these and other Internet giants. The companies provide free services – why? – because they’ve figured out how to monetize what they learn from your use of their product. They don’t exist simply to answer your search questions and connect you with your friends, they’re private corporations whose purpose is to make money for their shareholders. Yet people are shocked when these private, for-profit corporations operate as private, for-profit corporations do. The “free” aspect of the service is taken at face value, or perhaps at head-in-the-sand value.
Google’s a free service, yet it has a market valuation of nearly four hundred billion dollars. Facebook, another free service, has a market cap of $170 billion. Consider a more traditional company like Disney. Disney, owner of ABC television, ESPN, A&E, Marvel Entertainment, Lucasfilm, Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney Records, half a dozen theme parks, a cruise line, and literally over a hundred other companies, has a market cap of $150 billion. It’s easy to figure out how all those Disney companies make money. People “get” how money changes hands with respect to movie tickets, DVD sales, television advertising, theme parks, and so forth. But, ask how Google and Facebook make money? The average person might guess advertising and “computer-y stuff.” The principles of massive data collection and targeted marketing are likely off the radar for most people, so when the curtain gets pulled back a bit, they react with shock. As the idea that the big social media companies make their money by selling “them,” by putting together detailed profiles of their tastes, their interests, their search histories, even their travels and movements, in short by invading their privacy, those who didn’t think about this in the past may become outraged.
This outrage is a wonderful thing for politicians. It gives them cover to regulate, to legislate, to pontificate and to otherwise meddle in what should be consensual interactions between providers of services and consumers who want to use those services. A recent headline indicated that the FCC was thinking of enforcing a rule on internet video clips that mandates closed captioning for any content that was originally aired with them – and that’s just one rule of an increasing number.
Given this trend, how long will it be before some politicians decide that social media is such a vital component of modern society that even more stringent regulation and even more regulated (and possibly required) access is necessary for functioning in today’s society? As our lives become increasingly wired to the Internet, as social media become more and more ubiquitous in our daily routines, will there come a day when the services provided by the internet giants are deemed so vital to society that government decrees everyone must not only have access, but access according to the government’s terms?
That wouldn’t be an issue today, given that the companies provide their services without charge and with little in the user agreements deemed egregious by the average person. What if that changes? What if there’s another episode of experimentation or use of gathered data that’s objectionable to someone? Will government decide that, for the benefit of society, social media is a public good to be managed by public servants? We’ve witnessed this phenomenon with health care and health insurance – the insurance providers are told what they have to cover, are often told how much they can charge, who they must provide coverage to, and so forth and so on. The Google right to be forgotten over in Europe might be the proverbial nose under the tent. In a decade or two, we might find that Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the others buried in an avalanche of regulations and watched like hawks by regulators, and as a result the free flow of information that is doing such wonders for the advancement of society and liberty could very well be clamped down.
John Stossel, the television journalist, writer and author, has observed that technological advances are what keep us ahead of government regulators. We can only hope that trend continues.
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