It's Time for a Social Network Neutrality
jakelevine.me
jakelevine.me
Playing the white knight (or social underdog), Google has tended to act in the interest of data portability, but Google’s policy of “we’ll let you import our contacts if you let us import your contacts,” reeks of data protectionism, and should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism, given Google’s own checkered past.
It seems to me that, because it makes its money from search, Google has a special symbiotic relationship with the web. (more on that here: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/7590977101/googles-existentia...) Google benefits from an open web. And I think they demonstrated those incentives (or at least attempted to) with Buzz and Wave.
Google's policy of reciprocation struck me more as a way to open up the existing silos than as a data protectionism measure.
While I'm slightly concerned with how closed Google+ appears to be, I have hope that that's a temporary situation that will change as soon as they think they can execute well on the promise of open, interoperable social networks.
See Hays Code censoring film from 1930-1968. See RCA tying up the FM radio patent for years in court and NBC blocking the emergence of Television. See consolidation in the radio industry limiting the number of participants in broadcasting.
Wu puts it nicely:
“If making yourself heard cannot be practically accomplished in an actual public square but rather depends upon some medium, and upon that medium is built an industry restricting access to it, there is no free market for speech.
We sometimes treat the information industries as if they were like any other enterprise, but they are not, for their structure determines who gets heard.
But barriers in an information industry, trafficking as it does in expressive content, can represent more than a restraint on commercial aspirations; they can, depending on how crucially the information medium figures in a society’s communications, also restrain free speech."
Wu, Tim (2010). The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. Knopf. Kindle Edition.
The whole issue is not economic, it is philosophical, about ethics - i.e. what is moral and what rights people have.
Mr. Wu, with whom you agree, goes well beyond anti-trust. For him, as long as a business is considered essential to the public good, that alone is enough to justify "compulsion" (see your first quote). Do you agree with that? Or would you try to prove (as hard as that can be) that Facebook and Google are monopolies first?
You say "we should vote with our attention", and I fully agree. This is a proper way to make a change. Another would be to write articles like the one you've just written, using your own means. Compulsion should be reserved for criminals.
Janell