Facebook is having a particularly bad moment right now. Earlier this year, it was the Republicans in the US demanding that “something must be done” about Facebook. Now, after discovering that the Trump campaign did exactly what the Obama campaign did in 2012, it’s the Democrats insisting that “something must be done”. In Britain, it’s both the Tories and the Corbynistas howling for action. Well, [nationalizing | regulating | breaking-up] Facebook is something, and here’s why we shouldn’t do it:
The latest bright idea from Paul Mason is that Facebook must be regulated or changed in some manner to make darn sure it does what Paul Mason wants Facebook to be doing.
Reminder: nobody needs to #Deletefacebook if there is one of a) strong regulation b) breakup c) public ownership
— Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) March 20, 2018
There are lots of problems with the Corbynista columnist’s idea. They include: not understanding how the internet or corporate law works; ignoring how innovation happens; and the political problem of allowing the government to control a social network, real or digital.
That’s not to mention the broader point that the people best placed to control Facebook are the 2 billion users of Facebook, who can choose to use the service or not. But such free-market liberalism isn’t quite the fashion de nos jours, is it?
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Mason, along with far too much of the British Left, is pretty relaxed about repeating Soviet mistakes, but there’s no reason why the rest of us have to go along with it. That rather covers the regulation and ownership aspects. As to breaking the company up, we find more in his thread of tweets on the subject.
He points to the UK corporate registration as proof that we can control the local bit, or break it off from the whole. Such a conclusion is hard to square with the complaint about the Facebook profits HMRC struggles to tax. The reason Facebook doesn’t pay UK corporation tax on all the money collected from the UK is that the UK company just does some engineering bits, and doesn’t actually run the service. That engineering could be done from elsewhere just as the ad sales are. And the design. And there’s absolutely no one at all who has insisted that there must be a UK company out there before signing up for the service, is there?
We then come to what is arguably Mason’s silliest claim: “Next comes the f***wittery about ‘we don’t want the state owning our data.’ Me too. Hence I proposed a public owned digital ID service.“
There might be some manner in which “public owned” and “state” are different, but I’m absolutely certain that this wouldn’t be the case in modern Britain. As even Gordon Brown ended up agreeing when he revealed that the BBC license fee was indeed just another tax all along.
