Last week, the ex whose pics I can’t bear to delete from my phone walked into the political gin joint I've taken refuge in since he left last year. At his top-secret remarks at the Sloan Conference, Barack Obama had something to say about platforms and the public interest. Per Recode:
“Former U.S. President Barack Obama isn’t happy with Facebook and Google. They’re no just incredibly profitable tech companies, he said, they are ‘public goods’ with a responsibility to serve the public."
Shocker: Obama sounds right to me. Maybe we’re in an era where to be a giant internet company trafficking in users’ personal information should obligate you to some kind of public responsibility. Facebook didn’t break the rules in 2003 when it built an easy and fun interface for connecting and interacting with people on the internet. But in 2018, maybe the rules have changed. Too much of the population relies on Facebook to maintain emotional connections with people and figure out what’s going on in the world. It’s weird that one company has ownership over people’s ability to do those things, but so long as that’s the case, the company should be a worthy steward. Other companies with similar levels of power over critical aspects of people's lives, such as their income, should bear similar responsibility.
But none of the items on government’s usual menu for steering private enterprises towards the public interest are all that appetizing. Nationalization feels too much like steel plants in China that have net negative profits going back decades and consume taxpayer money, or like economies where people with gray hair take home fat paychecks and drink really good wine every evening, but people without gray hair have no credible life ambition except to be a civil servant.
Utility style regulation, with its focus on protecting consumers from price-gouging, doesn’t feel relevant. People pivot to anti-trust because it’s the word we use to define government action against companies that seem too big and powerful, feels wrong, because breaking up Facebook and Google into smaller pieces would work only by diminishing the platforms’ utility to consumers we want them to serve better. Ownership by users, the Green Bay Packers model for the future of capitalism, is too radical for me to fully understand its implications, but I wish I knew more about how it's worked in industries other than football.
I do think that continuing to treat internet platforms like they are no different from fast food chains or O-ring manufacturers is going to lead us to a very unequal, culturally fragmented, insecure place. But I’m not sure the best way to squeeze the public interest into a seat at their table.
Ideas, please?