Discover more from REACTION
Theresa May seeks to regulate or break up Facebook and Google. Good
On Friday afternoon Twitter went down. I know this because I had favourited a tweet from something called Buzzfeed about the Tories planning in their election manifesto to regulate the internet. I wanted to find it for this piece and then could not get it. That made me stop, and think.
If you don’t use the social media site Twitter, or claim ostentatiously never to have heard of it, you may say that this latest crash is of no consequence. Or that Twitter-users should have used the breakdown to try talking to other people, look at the view, read a book, or get on with their work.
If you are a Twitter regular, like me, and have come to rely on it being there whenever you want it, your reaction will be probably have been entirely different. Perhaps you experienced a strange sensation of withdrawal and panic when the site showed only an error message saying that something technically is wrong. What do we do now? When it’s down you can’t even search Twitter to find out what’s wrong because, er, it’s down. I know, here’s an idea. Check Facebook to find out if there is any news on the Twitter outage.
Many of us are now dependent on this cursed thing Twitter that is a never ending merry-go-round of news, links and stupid videos. We use it as personal newswire and aide to old-fashioned information gathering that involves the phone and other sources of gossip. Without Twitter what happens? This is existential. If Twitter doesn’t exist then do we really exist? Help.
Journalists love Twitter, especially of all the social media forms, for obvious reasons. As has often been observed, the short 140 character format suits “snark” and rapid-fire satirical sarcasm. It is the online equivalent of what used to take place around the water-cooler or at the bar.
Many politicians and public relations people like it too, for the speed of the flow of information and the way in which it, theoretically, enables parties and companies to go direct and unregulated to the timelines of consumers.
Some naughty people pretend not to be on there while secretly lurking. Any Twitter addict will have enjoyed being asked mockingly about their overuse of social media by someone, a friend, who claims never to go near it. One evening you’re talking in the pub:
Friend: “Yeah, you wrote that thing the other day about the Wotsit and Top of the Pops.”
Journalist: “No, I didn’t.”
Friend: “Yeah you did.”
Journalist: “Nope, I wrote about Philip Hammond and the Budget and tax. I did not write an article about 1970s snacks and Top of the Pops. I must have just said that as a joke in a tweet. Hold on, you always say you hate Twitter and have never seen it?”
Friend: “Er… I need to look at it for work. I have to see if Donald Trump has ended the world overnight. I don’t have a proper account. Really. My Twitter name is Morag. Please don’t tell my employer. I didn’t mean all that stuff about our finance director.”
There are millions of such people dipping in and out. And then there is Facebook, which is even bigger among what cynical Fleet Street hacks used to call “the civilian population.” It is estimated that 60% of the adult population now have an account.
There is, it is always worth saying, a serious upside here. In the news business, thankfully the old hierarchies have been opened to challenge and reader feedback and contribution. Alternative and non-Establishment voices can speak up. In terms of family interaction and fostering friendships across hundreds or thousands of miles it is a boon.
This weird eco-system has emerged in a chaotic splurge of innovation and activity, that has broken down barriers to entry and raised up new mega-companies such as Facebook and Google out of almost nothing, in an astonishingly short timespan. This is the market roaring. Technology flattening sleepy traditional businesses that got fat on taking their monopolies for granted.
Well, sure, only up to a point. The revolution happened at such speed and not on a legal level-playing field that only belatedly did it become obvious that what had happened was a heist. The news business let the new guys walk right in, help themselves to the content, and then keep coming back for more, rather than shout “stop, thief!”.
Early on, a catastrophic mistake was made, which will have to be reversed at some point unless we all as citizens want to be owned and steered by a dominant Facebook. Those firms declared themselves, and are legally recongised to be, mere networks rather than publishers in the traditional sense.
A publisher is fully legally liable for the content that appears on their platform. Large news companies spend a fortune ensuring they stay on the right side of the law and pay a heavy price when they do not. Even a tiny, artisan business such as Reaction has to be vigilant on that score and pay lawyers for advice.
Facebook, Google and other such firms are different and operate in a grey area. They provide the network, the digital wiring, the space, in which hundreds of millions of others publish, link and share. They are not, they say, publishers. This is at root what explains their tardiness in taking action on ghastly online user content that would get newspapers or TV companies closed down within hours.
The digital giants could go after all that material in an instant – the hateful stuff, the live videos of murders and abuse, the jihadi propaganda – but then monitoring it all would be very expensive and doing so would amount to an admission that they really are the publisher, thus risking their bizarre business model in the courts. Instead, they now take down some material, hoping it will be enough while making sanctimoinious noises about us all having a responsibility to be nicer to each other. What a cheek.
Behind all the chino-clad, hippy dippy, Silicon Valley bollocks, what they really are is the biggest and most successful and ruthless advertising business ever seen.
They get almost all their content from other people, that is users or traditional publishers who had to pay to research and produce it. Against this free content, stolen with permission, data is harvested and analysed by Facebook and Google and Twitter and others when you visit. And ads are then sold, targeted at you by Facebook and Google. It is not free. You are the product. You are for sale. They own your data. They own your online life and make a lot of money out of you.
This process, this spying on you, makes the old newspaper approach from twenty years ago of running readership surveys and quizzing consumers to find out what they paid attention to, in order to sell ads to car companies and banks, look positively quaint and charming.
The resulting rise of the digital giants pushing “free” content (stolen, remember) and taking the overwhelming bulk of ad dollars has hit the news industry hard, as it did the music industry before it. Newspapers by the thousand have closed in the US. The pressure has reduced wages and fees for content producers, or journalists and photographers. If you want well-reported news and analysis it costs, and when the overwhelming majority of digital ad revenue goes to the giants, then the news business shrinks or has to become more hysterical to keep up via seeking hits chasing a diminishing share of the ad dollars that the giants keep.
Only those established old media businesses smart enough to charge properly for edited and curated content via subscription are punching back. But they cannot do it alone, with the vast empires of the internet allowed to carry on profiting from their grey area status as ad platforms pretending to be a utility.
It is quite simple this, and all the lobbying and nonsense from the tech giants has somehow obscured a very straightforward truth about markets and how to regulate them. If their businesses really are mere networks – the piping – then they are utilities such as electricity or water and they need to be regulated, and/or broken up to create much more competition. If they are not that and they are publishers, they should be fully legally responsible for what they publish or air and have to operate within precisely the same constraints as all their conventional rivals. There is no plausible reason for any in-between arrangement to continue, other than the Facebook and Google case that it makes them billions of pounds or dollars in profits.
Refreshingly, the Conservatives in the UK are promising action, with a pledge to introduce measures that will begin the process of treating online giant just like other media businesses. The inclusion of a new Conservative policy on regulating the internet makes their manifesto a landmark document.
“Our starting point is that online rules should reflect those that govern our lives offline,” says the party’s manifesto. “We will introduce a sanctions regime to ensure compliance, giving regulators the ability to fine or prosecute those companies that fail in their legal duties, and to order the removal of content where it clearly breaches UK law.”
There is talk of a levy, international co-operation on regulation as there is in banking, and a push to “ensure content creators are appropriately rewarded for the content they make available online”. That probably means paying the publishers who generate the articles, and other content that get the clicks, a share of the ad revenue. At last.
In a Germany highly conscious of privacy there is also pressure for the introduction of a regime of large fines. In the White House is a US President who is far too stupid to grasp what it all means. Donald Trump has been flattered and duped by the attentions of tech titans who ran rings around Obama too. A future President may be smarter and get the message.
In essence we are being conned and cheated on an epic scale by vast global tech firms posing as our friends while they pick all our pockets. The emergence of this new eco-system is also doing strange things to the conduct of our democracy, via unregulated political advertising, and, most importantly, to our privacy.
This critique will not be endorsed by my more libertarian friends, who see in the development of the internet a digital pure repeat of the process of evolution. Avoid getting in the way or you will slow the pace of progress, they say. Let it take its course and relax, even if it hurts a lot. The good will flourish and the weak will perish, to our mutual advantage, in the end.
There is something in this, although not a lot. Government – via defence spending in the UK and the US and educational subsidy – was integral to the invention of computers and to the development of the internet and the web. After that, it is true, it was private enterprise that ran with the results. If the UK government had taken charge of planning the internet and mobile devices, we would only be at the white paper stage.
But during or after every great every innovative surge in modern history (oil, telecoms, banking) there comes a moment when the mad and wild rush, the dash westwards across open territory, has to be constrained somehow and dealt with sensibly for the sake of the rest of us to avoid excessive concentrations of interest. The rule of law and fair rules and normal business principles have to be brought to bear, as they are for the rest of us.
Google, Facebook? Your moment is now.
Subscribe to REACTION
Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.