#Natural monopoly install#

The steady expansion of the internet has created new terrain - new areas in which human interactions and economic activity can grow and evolve. With advances in technology setting an ever-faster pace, social media has become the forum in which citizens and consumers access the news, view entertainment and engage with others. Today it is not only a critical fulcrum in the media ecosystem but, by extension, a crucial component of society and the social experience. Since its Harvard days, Facebook has become a fundamental part of the digital experience.

#Natural monopoly install#

the engagement in aggressive platform growth and corporate development practices that serve to install and maintain hegemony in the consumer internet marketplace, by keeping would-be rivals at bay through anti-competitive measures and maintenance of monopoly.įacebook took advantage of these circumstances, as did Google, Apple and Amazon - the four firms whose chief executives were at the centre of the House of Representatives’ recent antitrust hearing.the use of highly sophisticated but tremendously opaque algorithms, which curate social content and target ads at people and.the sudden rise of a new business model, premised on the mass gathering of personal and proprietary information to the end of behavioural profiling.But sometime during the past 20 years, we reached and surpassed a threshold that enabled a number of other social and economic changes, including: There is nothing new about these trends they have been growing apace over the past 60 years or more. These principal three technological trends have, together, enabled the rise of new business models such as Facebook’s. The media environment is changing before our eyes as a result of evolutions in technology - with ongoing advances in the efficiencies of computing, data storage and connectivity. This article, building on a new paper co-authored with Nick Couldry on the need for a “digital realignment,” explores the specific case of Facebook: What role does the company play in our media ecosystem, how has the company achieved this position of economic importance, and how can we link its current business with the bevy of social harms that apparently emerge out of its platforms’ very existence? Finally, given the present (apparently adverse) circumstances concerning Facebook’s role in democratic societies, what must we do to contain the bad and uplift the good? Facebook’s Ride to the Top This begs an obvious question: Is the general thrust of this regulatory action moving in the right direction - that is, the direction that favours consumer protection, competitive markets and human rights? The public indeed appears to be increasingly aware that change to these effects is necessary, but what contours should that change exhibit in the long run? Jurisdictions such as Europe and the United States have already launched a slate of cases against the company, leading to suggestions that a breakup might follow.

Only now are we beginning to see the regulatory picture emerge, as national governments the world over have taken on the mantle of tackling Facebook’s monopoly power in social media. These events have thrown open the case against the entire consumer internet industry, but, most substantially, against Facebook.

presidential election later that year that featured heavy campaign use of questionable digital advertising and social media engagement the steady trickle of all-too-late assertions by the company that its networks had been infiltrated by Russian disinformation operators throughout the course of the 2016 cycle the implication that this and other activity may indeed have swung that election a slew of tremendously harmful content disseminated over the platforms, resulting in the spread of hate, conspiracy and genocide and perhaps most shocking of all, the Cambridge Analytica revelations.

The 2016 Gizmodo story that first alleged claims of corporate anticonservative bias the U.S. But it goes without saying that the headlines have mostly implicated a single company: Facebook. In recent years, the term “techlash” has emerged in the media to epitomize the steadily rising public concern about leading Silicon Valley firms, as bombshell after bombshell has fallen in quick succession.