Facebook CEO speaks to select members of European Parliament
politico.eu
politico.eu
(For reference: https://www.wired.com/story/why-zuckerberg-15-year-apology-t...)
Currently I love how the EU is making the British Brexit team look like a bunch of clowns, but the EU is no saintly organization, the way they couldn't let go of austerity politics made a lot of people suffer, and has indeed lead to the rise of populism as well (the right wing in France, Germany, and populism in Italy).
My guess is that there will be a FB sell-off today. Other countries will see the opportunity to raise a high tax rate on a natural monopoly, and FB returns will be tax-adjusted.
Really though, I think maybe the act of combining data to form contiguous blocks of PII tied to online personas may need to be made illegal outside of some official, state database. Ie the government gives you a citizen entry and only they may produce such information. So you simply may not have access to certain PII.
thats a tad dystopian don't you think?
The EU is 250m of Facebook's 2.2 billion users. They could easily drop all EU business if they needed to (the business operations within the EU is the easiest aspect for the EU regulators to target). Their profitability would drop from ~$23 billion for 2018 to $19 billion or so at worst. That'd be made-up for with one year of growth. Once Facebook's business operations in the EU are shut down, Facebook could continue to operate the user accounts and leave it to the EU to attempt to censor what their population is allowed to access online.
Watching the EU attempt to install Chinese style repression and censorship to limit what its people can access online, would be quite the comical circus.
Facebook is still registered in Ireland, since 2010, which is still in the EU, making Facebook an entity subject to them. (Ireland has also expressed a desire to rejoin the EU, post-Brexit).
The sovereign state called "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" is leaving the EU as part of Brexit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_blocking_access_to_T...
Quite a few countries in the EU have already ordered ISPs to block The Pirate Bay, and the EU last year made it easier for ISPs to do so. So the capability is there, and there's precedent. TPB responded by decentralising but that isn't an option for Facebook, they wouldn't dare to anything to get round a continental ban: and even if they did it would have to be 100% effective, if 50% of people can't figure out how to change DNS settings to get around ISP blocks then the other 50% will likely migrate to another platform too.
I said to a friend a few weeks ago that I actually want to see FB get blocked in Europe. The shitshow would be glorious.
At which point does the shit show turn around and reflect bad on the EU though? I m no fan or user of facebook but it would be too serious a restriction that only dictators have taken so far. EU's problems with facebook so far are taxation and privacy. The second is presumably solved by GDPR. Even if the first one is solved somehow, i feel these MEPs were more concerned about political implications.
Would it? Facebook has 2.2 billion users out of 7 billion people total, and not all of those users are worth the same to Facebook. The US and the EU have more valuable users solely because those users can spend more money and are more valuable to advertisers. A lot of people on the planet who arent on facebook anymore cant even run facebook.
Its not like everyone has a new flagship phone every year, and its not like everyone on the planet has internet access. China is also not gonna be an easy target for them to crack since China pushes their own countries industries first.
I really dont believe that facebook could just grow to paper over their loss of the entire EU at this point
>Watching the EU attempt to install Chinese style repression and censorship to limit what its people can access online, would be quite the comical circus.
I don't like China's censorship either, but if the other option is for foreign companies to come in and abuse your citizens, then blocking out those companies doesn't seem like a terrible idea
I don't believe the US will be "keen" to protect FB if that's in fact what you are stating here. There is just as much concern about FB in the US as there is in the EU, even if the political will to act might be blunted in the US by lobbyists and money.
I would argue that FB isn't a "US monopoly" per se but a global monopoly.
You might want to re-read my comment where I say there is no political will on account of lobbying and money.
US Citizens are just as concerned as EU citizens about FB. Especially given FB's role in the last US Presidential elections.
What is your justification for asserting that US citizens are not as concerned as EU citizens?
If a significant amount of them cared it would be reflected in the user numbers.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/31/facebook-q4-2017-earnings/
https://springboardccia.com/2018/04/17/icymi-wsj-nbc-poll-fi...
WSJ/NBC Poll respondents say social media platforms are… regulated too much: 14% have the right amount of regulation: 37% not regulated enough: 37%
It's for a good reason too - consumers have noticed they have more choices and freedom than in industries that are highly regulated by the gov. Laws like GDPR would make large swaths of business models useless - such as free games or apps the rely on targeted advertising. Since under GDPR, you cannot ask someone to either allow ads to be personalized or pay for the app (it has to be without detriment), tons of tools people otherwise enjoy would suddenly become paid only or disappear. Not to mention the effect it would have on the startup economy - it would be a big deal. Can't see it happen here.
>"Some 37% of people in the new survey said social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are not regulated enough, while the same share said the sites have the right amount of government regulation, and 14% said there was too much regulation."
So its actually pretty evenly split between the "not regulated enough" and "have the right amount of regulation."
I think its fair to say that the 14% that said "there was too much regulation" of social media when in fact there is virtually none are simply doctrinaire anti-regulation Republicans who don't support regulation of any kind anywhere. So the fact that they were specifically being asked specifically about social media is basically irrelevant.
I have to wonder what his employees back in Menlo Park think when they watch their CEO shoveling such obvious bullshit.
It might be the case that he has already discounted that possibility and simply doesn't care if EU wants to ban facebook anymore.
Mr Zuckerberg's own private jet is a Gulfstream V which unlike the XLS is transatlantic capable.
He said: " ... There are a number of questions that have been put by other colleagues that I want an answer to. That said, I'm anxious about this brave new world that Mr. Zuckerberg has presented us -- a brave new world what tens and tens and tens of thousands of private people are scrutinizing us and are saying “what is fake news” and “what is not fake news”, “what is hate speech” and “what is not hate speech”. Don't you think that this is a public task?"
He very subtly mentioned that the anti-trust bodies could mobilized to look into this if questions wouldn't be answered [1] -- https://youtu.be/bVoE_rb5g5k?t=5285.
[1] "... And competition for example: an anti-trust thing, that's important! Do we need -- I think we're gonna push our anti trust agency to go into this if there is no good answer to!"
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Here's an interview with Guy Verhofstadt (thanks, repolfx! I wasn't aware of who he is): https://www.channel4.com/news/guy-verhofstadt-mep-on-mark-zu...
I don't know what gave you hope about that. It's mafia tactics and confirms the worst suspicions people have had about EU anti-trust enforcement.
What does privacy rules have to do with monopoly or anti-trust? As far as I can tell, nothing. But the EU appears dangerously close to taking an official policy that anti-trust fines are based on whether Guy Verhofstadt and his friends personally like your answers at unrelated hearings. Make Guy happy or you'll be inconveniently re-classified as a monopoly. Never mind the existence of LinkedIn or Google+ or other competing networks.
Don't fool yourself ; the normal state of affair would have been for them to be torn appart, and the current state is corrupt.
In America they've escaped anti-trust attention because it's hard to prove any consumers have been harmed by their activities.
That's the problem with metaphors - sometimes they obscure the reality of things. Anti-trust covers much vaguer and more debatable 'crimes'. For instance Microsoft was rapped over bundling Internet Explorer although every OS comes with a web browser these days and nobody considers it controversial anymore. The main crime was giving exclusivity discounts to customers, but that isn't specifically forbidden as far as I know. It's just an interpretation.
At any rate, the EU doesn't require even the slightest analogue to 'blowing up tires'. They went after Google Shopping although Google was providing search referral and advertising to their own competitors - actually helping them, not hindering them. The existence of other big product search engines like Amazon didn't help, the EU fined them anyway. I didn't believe before that EU anti-trust enforcement was based on the rule of law, and Verhofstadt appears to have confirmed it today.
...And Google uses all of their products to tell you it's better to use Chrome, frequently destroy businesses by offering their own services in cards at the top of searches, which represent billions in free advertising, force Google store with their android OEMs, etc.
If Microsoft has been condemned for leveraging their dominant position in a market to get advantage in another market, Google should have been condemned years ago, for the same reason.
They are becoming related.
Monopoly laws traditionally apply to commercial transactions. Facebook's customers are not experiencing a monopoly, they can easily switch to other ad-space vendors.
Many of Facebook's "crop" however happen to be voters who feel new laws are required to deal with Facebook's "network monopoly" especially as it is entirely arbitrary, harmful and very profitable.
Privacy aka legal ownership and control of data is one way to erode that "network monopoly".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(2017_film)
"German Christian democrat MEP Manfred Weber, who leads the centre-right EPP group, ... asks Mark Zuckerberg why the company has not stopped access to user data to all developers, not just Cambridge Analytica.
He says he would be interested in his arguments as to why, given Facebook's power, its algorithms should not be made public.
He also asks Mr Zuckerberg to name a competitor it has in Europe, and asks him to "convince him" with arguments as to why his company is not a monopoly that should be broken up."
On issues raised relating to competition, [Zuckerberg] says that communication is a "competitive space" where people have "many choices".
"It feels like there are new competitors coming up every day," he notes.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-politics-parliaments-44210...
Such as Instagram and WhatsApp? It's not competition if you just buy them up as soon as they start to compete...
Before social media, it was admitted a lot harder for unreliable sources to get an audience, so that skepticism was less critical.
But I think it will come back. Education is the antidote to social media news. Deity willing, the next government will see that and push for better education.
I have not found that to be the case and I think you should scrutinize that assumption very carefully.
Perhaps a majority of intellectuals in the West thought the Soviet Union was a step forward - again and again it's the 'smart' people who get the big things wrong.
I wasn't there at the time, so I have no way of knowing, but this smells like hindsight bias.
It had become obvious decades earlier that the Russian revolution had gone horribly wrong, after western powers realised that Soviet lumber exports were coming from forced labour camps.
And the fact that a Russian revolution would go wrong in this way was obvious even at the turn of the century. Lenin was put on a train in Switzerland and sent back to Russia specifically to cause chaos.
Going even further back, it was a constant frustration of Marx that the working classes in the UK (where he lived) stubbornly refused to rise in violent revolution. His ideology was well discussed in his own time but somehow actual working people were too smart to believe in it. Only intellectuals far removed from the real lower classes thought his theories were good.
tl;dr it's widely known that academics and other intellectuals couldn't accept the disastrous nature of communism long after supposedly more "stupid" people had fully understood the nature of Marxist ideology.
Even shorter tl;dr - education often seems to make people dumber in important ways, not smarter.
For example, a lot of conspiracy theorists are educated people. Their research just took an interesting turn at one point or another.
@bachbach's example of pro-Soviet intellectuals is a good one as well. There was a similar downtown on the other side of the wall too. Quite a few anti-soviet dissidents turned into conspiracy theorists later on. In both cases, people were happy to rebel and look for alternatives and their education did help them. But eventually their curiosity took them too far.
This is an interesting article on this topic:
Once you start evaluating arguments and doing your own research, a lot of difference opinions emerge. Which sometimes are labeled as fake news, even though they're not truly fake. If everyone did assess all news, most crazy fake news would be gone. Which is awesome. But many of non-mainstream opinions that technically are not fake would survive. Which is good too in my books, but some people wouldn't agree.
Unless you're in the world where facts and truth don't actually matter.
It's interesting to observe how the institutional and technological changes since the American founding, and the systemic problems we easily note, align with his discussion. He theorized that each of the unmixed systems had weaknesses that led them to eventually be supplanted by another form, initially well-administered, which too would in time succumb to its inherent weaknesses. The mixed form resisted this cycle. So to the extent that the polity "un-mixes" the arrangement of powers, e.g. making the Senate directly elected instead of chosen by state legislatures without making a corresponding anti-democratic change, the system becomes more exposed to the cyclic risks associated with the unmixed state that was favored.
Historia civilis has a great video on the constitution of ancient Athens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIgMTsQXg3Q
This is quite the hypothetical syllogism.