Last weekend, users of popular social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp were frustrated due to an outage where most functions on the app were unusable for over 6 hours. According to representatives of Facebook, the outage was a result of a “faulty configuration change”. Shortly after the outage was reported at 11:39 pm EST, engineering teams from Facebook were working to restore services as soon as possible and customers were able to retrieve some access by 6 pm EST. However, all functions weren’t restored to the app until later Monday night. After the outage, many criticized Facebook because of their dominating influence in social media because of their ownership of popular social media apps: Whatsapp and Instagram.
Facebook was mocked and criticized by many competitors including Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal, who took to the company’s official Twitter account and simply tweeted “ hello literally everyone”. Amongst these critics was congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez(AOC) who described Facebook as “monopolistic”. One of AOC’s biggest arguments was that apps such as Whatsapp are vital to life around the world in places such as Latin America and outages like this disrupt and inconvenience the lives of millions. In addition, she notes that Whatsapp was a previous competitor to Facebook but they were bought out in 2014. AOC argues that Facebook planned to eliminate the competition, and the accumulating influence and power the company has will result in “destructive effects on free society and democracy”. She claims that the demands of Facebook customers will be overruled by business decisions because of their extensive power and size. Thus, she supports the notion that large tech corporations such as Facebook should be “broken up” to ensure that the needs of customers and users are understood. Last weekend's outage inflames continuing backlash for Facebook, on a 60 Minute episode aired on Sunday, an unnamed whistleblower confessed that Facebook covered up its role in spreading misinformation about the January 6th insurrection in the U.S. Capitol Building.
Questions:
Should major corporations such as Facebook be broken up?
How can Congress prevent companies from becoming “monopolistic” and ensure that customers' voices are still being heard?
Sources:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/tech/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-outage/index.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/aoc-facebook-is-a-monopoly-that-is-destructive-to-democracy-2021-10
15 comments:
I personally feel like breaking Facebook up would benefit a lot of people and make the general public less reliant on Facebook in general. However, I don't think it's plausible to expect the company to all of a sudden make huge changes to the way they manage their different apps. I agree with the annoyance at Facebook's monopolization of media but at the same time it's very understandable that the company is acting in its best interest to limit competition and increase its influence. I can't think of a way that Congress can enforce any rules on Facebook's expansion without good reason. I feel like the only way for this to happen is if Facebook violates citizen/human rights, in which case, government can involve themselves and try to make Facebook adhere to certain guidelines/rules.
- Edan Barrios
I think large businesses like Facebook (and Disney, for that matter) have too much power in society and should be broken up by the government. Facebook is “monopolistic” and their services are becoming essential (or already have become essential) in everyday life for most people. We should not have the utmost faith that these companies will always act for the good of the people and there definitely should be more regulation to ensure that from all major businesses. Of course, what qualifies as “major” or “for the good of the people” are ambiguous terms -- however if there is strong evidence linking Facebook prioritizing monetary gain over (potentially dangerous) misinformation, then that should definitely make it more reasonable to expect the government to step in to protect its people.
I agree that Facebook, among many other corporations, has become monopolistic over the past 20 to 30 years and that something should be done to regulate them. However, it will be difficult to argue against the fundamental concept of capitalism. As Edan said, it will probably require a violation of human rights or something along those lines to elicit any action against these corporations. Most importantly, I believe that Congress needs to better educate themselves about social media as we have repeatedly seen lawmakers be completely oblivious to the premise of social media. The other issue lies with the regulation of free speech on these platforms. The main issue with social media is that it gives people an easy way to connect and spread their ideas. Unfortunately, misinformation like this undermines the foundation of free speech and can endanger many people. It's difficult to understand the detailed implications of misinformation, but it has certainly contributed to the polarization and divisions present within our nation today. Thus, I believe that there is absolutely a need to better regulate the social media world, especially if monopolies like Facebook are broken up.
I agree that when monopolies have too much power their incentive for quality and how much they value their consumers drops. Even though Facebook doesn't provide a physical product, their monopoly over information can still be bad, especially if their errors inconvenience millions of people or even worse, don't protect their user's information. However I don't think major corporations such as Facebook should necessarily be broken up since that would give the government too much power over the economy, and defeat the purpose of capitalism like Alex Kao said. I think the Congress should pass laws protecting consumers against their information getting leaked instead of directly intervening to stay capitalistic but also be fair.
Firstly, I want to clarify something that was unclear in the blog post. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez did not make the connection between WhatsApp and Latin America. It was actually Jose Caparroso who said that "Latin America lives on WhatsApp." However, she obviously supports the idea that many populations are reliant on WhatsApp to contact family and friends. To answer the question of whether corporations such as Facebook should be broken up, I WANT them to be broken up, but there would need to be a legal reason. For once, I agree with AOC that Facebook exhibits monopolistic behavior, and this article explains why it is a monopoly: https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/19/todays-real-story-the-facebook-monopoly/. It's difficult to comprehend, but the article argues that Facebook's monopoly is evident through its revenue. Anyways, I'd like to add that monopolies aren't always illegal! Only monopolies attained through improper conduct or "anticompetitive monopolization" are illegal. But the public's reliance on Facebook to communicate with others is quite scary. Obviously, nobody is saying that these social media services are a right (so people don't have to use them in the first place), but society has made it extremely difficult not to use those apps. Lastly, I agree with Eden that Facebook's attempt to control the market is understandable and that it would be difficult at this point to shut down Facebook without compelling legal issues (human rights violations). There is anecdotal evidence of minors being "auctioned off" as wives on Facebook, but evidence of widespread abuse in this way is not solid.
I think it's very interesting that an outage that seems to have been simply a technology mistake/error, led to discussions about the nature of facebook as a company and monopolies. Relating to the questions, I'll preface that monopolies can be problematic because with total control over the whole market surrounding their product, there is not much stopping them from doing whatever they want and disregarding the effects on the welfare of their clients. With that in mind, and the massive role that Facebook and all their assets (Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger) play in people's lives and privacy, I do believe Facebook should be much more regulated, maybe in part by being broken up. Considering all these factors, they simply have too much control and impact on people to go unregulated or under-regulated. Although not exactly the main consideration behind regulation of monopolies, this outage illustrated the aforementioned impact and a clear consequence of lack of regulation.
I agree with Jacob that it is interesting that a discussion about monopolies was started because some apps were unusable. To answer the question, I do think that Facebook should be broken up, however, I doubt that this is likely to happen. Like many of my peers have said, as of right now there is no significant reason that the government can pull that would allow them to break up Facebook. According to CBS (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-antitrust-case-wall-street/), the only way that Facebook might be broken up is by showing that they are dominating every other personal social network. For example, they could say that Snapchat, another personal social network, has much less users because of facebooks large following. However, Facebook claims that there are many of other competitors like Youtube, TikTok, and Spotify. Something interesting that I learned while reading an article from cnet (https://www.cnet.com/news/can-facebook-be-broken-up-what-you-need-to-know/), is that even Chris Hughs, who cofounded facebook , wants it to be broken up. I think that Facebook with both Whatsapp and Instagram under its belt they are dominating other social media platforms. They have also taken a large amount of inspiration from both snapchat and Tiktok with the implementation of sending photos through direct messaging and Instagram "reels". All in all, Facebook is clearly trying to get rid of all its competition through implementing more assets into their apps and buying out other companies. Whether the government can actually do something about it is very unlikely.
I agree with Edan that although monopolies are unideal, it is not reasonable to expect these large changes suddenly. However, I do believe that it would be beneficial for Congress to place more rules to restrict the creation of these large monopolies. It is clearly affecting many lives across the globe as seen when a simple outage largely created such a dent in the media. Having large figures like AOC take a stance against situations like this is essential to helping America move in a direction of a more fair marketplace. Restrictions on the scope of business ownership should definitely be considered to thwart further problems.
I strongly agree with the others that social media monopolies, such as Facebook, should be broken up to protect users and the general public. However, according to past behavior, I doubt that Facebook will voluntarily do this because it will greatly decrease their income/value. I think that the only way Facebook would break into smaller organizations is if they are forced to by the government, like how the FCC prevents companies from owning all broadcasting platforms. I don’t think that Facebook could fall under the FCC, but because so many people get news and information from social media outlets, something similar should be created for social media and there should be new regulations put into place. This may be very difficult, if not impossible, to get enough support in Congress to pass this, but I think it would greatly benefit American society and how we interact with social media on a daily basis.
I agree with you Edan and Anthony that corporations such as Facebook in recent years have accumulated too much power and influence and there isn't much that congress can do to regulate it without a good reason. However, one thing that I think could place pressure on these companies to slow down growth is placing emphasis on the consumer and establishing councils or committees which could possibly slow down monopolization and ensure there is communication between the two groups.
Stephanie, I agree that large corporations such as Facebook have become so powerful that they disregard the demands of the public for business and financial decisions. Although I think there should be some regulations, I think the process of passing it will cause conflict in Congress because both parties are polarized regarding this issue. How do you think Congress should take steps to limit the power of monopolistic corporations?
Alex, you bring up a lot of interesting points and while I don't know what the process would be like to regulate the powers of large corporations, I agree that they need to be held accountable for what's on their platforms and the amount of worldwide influence they have. Additionally, I also agree that it's hard to impose any regulations without people criticizing it and bringing up human rights.
Major corporations should absolutely not be broken up. In my opinion, AOC has stepped out of line here. Facebook was working on an engineering problem to optimize their database or create something positive for their consumer to improve their product, yes there should've been more communication on the test engineering side of things, but consumers should absolutely not feel entitled to a free product. Yes Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram do serve important purposes for their consumers, but this mistake should be forgiven. WhatsApp and Instagram on their own might not possess the business sense that Facebook does, and 5-10 years down the road they might not be able to survive. Additionally, Facebook made a business decision for themselves that in order to capture more of the demographic, they need to make strategic acquisitions. There is no problem with this. I know I write this from a somewhat privileged point of view, especially considering the effect WhatsApp has in developing countries (this is the lifeblood of nations like India). However, in the end it was only six hours, and because of the way time zones are configured, much of this was in the late night/early morning so people using WhatsApp for more critical communication might not have been online at the time. Also, integrating engineering teams from multiple companies puts all the best talent together. Separating them means that the talent bar could be lower, potentially leading to more outages. The bureaucracy at a company like Facebook means that most launches/releases go through a lot of different people before reaching anywhere near production. If these companies became smaller, then there would be less product testing (as a function of the individual vs. collective importance of Instagram on its own vs as part of a corporation and less employees) and possibly more mistakes.
I think that big companies such as Facebook should be broken up; a prime example of how this could happen is Elizabeth Warren's legislation to define large tech companies as platform utilities.
Essentially, designating these companies as platform utilities means that they can no longer own the companies that are on their platforms. For example, Amazon cannot own Amazon Marketplace while selling products on it. Companies would be prohibited from owning both the platform utility and any participants on that platform.
Currently, Amazon dominates online retail and outcompetes smaller businesses. According to the Washington Post in 2018, Amazon held 48% of the US online retail market. Their everyday use by billions of people means that anything they offer immediately reaches a huge audience, potentially swamping any similar product from smaller, independent companies.
Through Warren’s legislation, huge tech companies would have a lot less control over who buys their products, how they do so, and where, in hopes of making the system a bit more competitive. In practice, AmazonBasics (Amazon’s product brand) would have to be separated from Amazon Marketplace, exclusively allowing third party sellers to utilize the platform. Google Ads would similarly have to be separated from Google Search, as this would be considered a conflict of interest.
Unwinding these mergers will promote healthy competition in the market. The plan will put pressure on big tech companies to be more responsive to user concerns, including privacy concerns.
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