1. The problem with Facebook and Google is not a speech issue, it's a *business model* problem that becomes a speech issue. That's why we have to look at ad markets and public policy rules going back to the 1980s and 1990s. nytimes.com/2019/10/17/opi…
2. In the 80s, both the right and left accepted the logic of, 'big is good.' So we allowed the concentration of big media. Rolled back FCC rules on media ownership, ended the Fairness Doctrine, etc. In the 1990s passed Telecom Act. Unleashed Clear Channel...
Pro-concentration!
Pro-concentration!
3. Elimination of financial syndication rules for TV in the early 1990s, roll-up of movie theater chains in the 1990s by private equity, imposition of Section 230 in 1996, rollback of open access in 2003-2005... mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-slow-dea…
4. The key tradition that protected free speech was *diversity* of viewpoints which requires a *diversity* of funding streams. Lots of advertisers, subscribers, gov't funding. Local, regional, and national ad markets. Public policy pushed a monoculture from the 1980s onward.
5. When Google and Facebook really consolidated the industry through the mid to late 2000s merger wave (which required gov't to allow a mass of illegal mergers), it was a land of media giants. That was bad. What Google and FB did was worse. They radically concentrated power.
6. But it wasn't just that FB/Goog *concentrated* ad revenue for themselves as publishers. They aren't even publishers, they are communications networks. And this is where the second problem, aside from the monopolization comes in. They are information utilities.
7. FB doesn't do newsgathering, it makes money off of other publishers who do newsgathering. It's a middleman. And it makes that money by manipulating its users, because users don't pay with money, you pay by being unwittingly manipulated by those who rent FB's platform with ads.
8. These are communications platforms paid by third parties to corruptly deliver information you don't want but which serves Google and FB and their advertisers. Larry Page and Sergey Brin knew this would happen. They wrote about it in 1998. Advertising is inherently corrupting.
9. We have systems, imperfect ones, to address that in media. Those systems have been seriously weakened by the 1980s and 1990s concentration of media power. But they still exist. We have no such systems for information utilities like Google, FB, Snap, etc.
10. That's why Google and Facebook both kill existing publishers, and promote toxic social content globally. It's the business model that is inherently about delivering addictive and manipulative content based on the needs of advertisers. nytimes.com/2019/10/17/opi…
11. We over-consume social media and information utilities, because we don't pay for it directly with money. If you want to fix the problem, fix that. No more ads. That will turn the incentives back to just connecting people and efficient operation. Get you on and off FB quick.
12. And then split up Google and FB into their component parts so there's actual innovation and competition, but within the context of a market where people pay honestly for what they get instead of pay by being manipulated.
13. Further, if you are mad at big media, well... you should be! We should have a lot more diversity among media companies. We should return to the decentralized model that existed from the 1770s to the early 1980s, though improve it with the internet.
14. Each of us has a supercomputer in our pocket that lets us tell stories. If there were a diversity of advertising and public markets enabling a genuine media market again, that phone would be a tool of liberty instead of the most surveillance capable leash ever created. /Fin
