Third, there is the simple cost of monopoly: Facebook as a for-profit enterprise will have strong incentives to overcharge us in the sense of selling too much of our attention to advertisers (or over-charging the advertisers who in turn over-charge us).įourth and finally, there is the basic impact on freedom choice: today you or I have little choice but to accept Facebook’s rules if I want to connect with others online because they are the only game in town. We never allowed our phone and postal systems this degree of unregulated, unsupervised monopoly and those systems had nothing like the control over the what we get to see and know that Facebook has with its platform and the newsfeed. That is bad for innovation and bad for competition and is especially pernicious because the impact is largely invisible – it is hard to imagine the innovations we never saw!īeyond that, Facebook’s monpoly of essential common communication infrastructure gives them an unacceptable degree of unsupervised, undemocratic power and control over our social and political affairs. Specifically we have the Kronos effect: that is the fact that a monopoly such as Facebook will want to kill off or take over any innovation that threatens its monopoly, for example by denying competitors access to its platform or buying them off and keeping them tame e.g. First, there are the core economic problems of stunted innovation and growing inequality. With its current monopoly, Facebook get to make the rules of who gets to participate and how – and we have no say in that process or even visibility into it (cf the napalm girl affair, Cambridge Analytica etc). Today more than two billion people are on Facebook and Facebook has become the place where many “live online”. Furthermore, we have a better “open” way that would provide all the benefits of a well-functioning social network whilst restoring those essential freedoms of choice, participation and enterprise. It means control of those freedoms lie in the hands of an unregulated monopolist who has demonstrably abused their power and our trust. In your book “The Open Revolution” you argue that the Facebook monopoly is a problem? Why is that?įacebook’s monopoly of dominant social networks undermines fundamental freedoms and fairness: freedoms of choice, of speech, of association, and of enterprise and innovation. Open Facebook in a paragraph from The Open Revolution.Facebook as Marketplace and how to make it an Open One.OpenSocial: the Open version of FB and How it Works.Preliminaries: Facebook as the Internet and Platform Economics.A remuneration rights approach provides a robust system for rewarding innovators whilst ensuring the openness that prevents monopoly and preserves the benefits of competition and free enterprise. Ensure that Facebook provides access to these new Social Service Providers on standard, regulated and nondiscriminatory terms.įinally, and crucially, we should put in place a remuneration rights system as a way to incentivize innovators to keep improving and developing new OpenSocial protocols and software.
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