> Zuckerberg’s power seems quintessentially American to me and reveals the fundamental contradiction at the heart of our economic model: compete until you succeed, but if you succeed too much you’re being anti-competitive. Free-market fundamentalists should be rejoicing at the success of Facebook, Amazon and Google. They represent the holy grail at the end of the Darwinian quest. Isn’t this perfection? What could go wrong? There’s no better time to wake up and realize we’re in bed with the Devil. — Mark Holmes, Twain Harte, Calif.
This is what happens when deregulation is taken to the extreme. Facebook is a company that breaks laws, flagrantly violates our privacy, buys or clones all its competition, and offers mere tokens of recompense when people use it to influence elections or coordinate genocide — but also experiences virtually no repercussions for its actions, because it's making investors money.
Free markets and democracies are good at a lot of things, but self preservation is NOT one of them -- in fact, if practiced at the extreme, it is basically guaranteed that a sufficiently large winner-takes-it-all will take over {free-market,democracy} and dismantle it.
That's why you need all kinds of checks and balances and regulations.
The problem with FB is they are too big to impact with regulations. There are too many people who have acquiesced to FB and eagerly handed over all their data without any issues.
What if you take 200 million of their users off the platform? They still have north of 2 BILLION users. That's a huge number of consumers to contend with to get them to willing leave the network or band together to demand better privacy oversight on the platform. Even with additional oversight, nothing is going to happen, period. We are at the point where the only way to change FB is to destroy it completely or break it up into many, many, many smaller parts.
Lastly, the comment by Mark Holmes from California is right, this is capitalism at its best and at its worst. All three companies he mentions spend billions every year to avoid oversight and regulations to continue to monopolize and dominant their industries. Pay a few hundred million in fines? No problem. Come out of any number of privacy scandals unscathed? Sure, no problem.
All three companies should be way more regulated. You can have a free-market and still have sensible government oversight. Our economy shouldn't be untethered capitalism or the over use of government regulations to stifle competition either. There is a balance in there somewhere.
> Zuckerberg’s power seems quintessentially American to me and reveals the fundamental contradiction at the heart of our economic model: compete until you succeed, but if you succeed too much you’re being anti-competitive. Free-market fundamentalists should be rejoicing at the success of Facebook, Amazon and Google. They represent the holy grail at the end of the Darwinian quest. Isn’t this perfection? What could go wrong? There’s no better time to wake up and realize we’re in bed with the Devil. — Mark Holmes, Twain Harte, Calif.
This is what happens when deregulation is taken to the extreme. Facebook is a company that breaks laws, flagrantly violates our privacy, buys or clones all its competition, and offers mere tokens of recompense when people use it to influence elections or coordinate genocide — but also experiences virtually no repercussions for its actions, because it's making investors money.