It's time to disarm Facebook

The last time I saw Mark Zuckerberg, it was in the summer of 2017, several months before the start of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. We met at Facebook's office in Menlo Park, California, and headed back home, in a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood. We spent an hour or two together while their youngest daughter was walking around. We mainly talked about politics, a bit of Facebook, our families. When the shadows became long, I had to leave. I kissed his wife, Priscilla, and said goodbye to Mark.

Since then, Mark's personal reputation and that of Facebook collapsed. Business Mistakes – the unscrupulous privacy practices that have left tens of millions of user data in the hands of a political consulting firm; slow reaction to Russian agents, violent rhetoric and false news; and the limitless desire to capture more and more of our time and attention – headlines dominate the media. It's been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard and I have not worked for the company for a decade. But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility.

Mark is still the same person I saw her kissing her parents as she left the common room of our room at the beginning of our second year. The same person who postponed her studies to the exam, fell in love with her future wife while she was lining up to go to the bathroom at a party and slept on a mattress on the floor. floor of a small apartment many years later. In other words, he is human But it is his humanity that makes his power out of control so problematic.

Mark's influence is incredible, far superior to anyone else in the private sector or government. It controls three major communication platforms – Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – used by billions of people every day.. Facebook's advice works more like an advisory board than a supervisor because Mark controls approximately 60% of the voting shares. Only Mark can decide how to configure Facebook's algorithms to determine what people see in their news sources, what privacy settings they can use, and even what messages are sent. It sets the rules for distinguishing violent and inflammatory speech from merely offensive speech and may choose to terminate a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it..

Mark is a good and kind person. But I am angry that its concentration on growth has led to sacrificing security and courtesy for a few clicks. I am disappointed in myself and the first Facebook team for not thinking more about how the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence the elections, and empower nationalist leaders. Y I'm afraid Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them..

The government should hold Mark to account. For too long, lawmakers marveled at Facebook's explosive growth and neglected its responsibility to ensure the protection of Americans and the competitiveness of markets. Every day, the Federal Trade Commission should fine the company $ 5,000 million, but that is not enough. Facebook's proposal to appoint a privacy officer does not either. After Mark's testimony at Congress last year, there should have been calls for him to really take care of his mistakes. Instead, the lawmakers who interviewed him were ridiculed for being too old and for not understanding how the technology works. It's the impression that Mark wanted the Americans to get, because it means that little will change.

We are a nation with a tradition of controlling the monopolies, as well-intentioned as the leaders of these companies are.. Mark's power is unprecedented and anti-American.

It's time to disarm Facebook.

We already have the tools to control Facebook's dominance. It seems we have forgotten them.

The United States was built on the idea that power should not be focused on one person because we are all fallible. That's why the founders created a system of checks and balances. They did not need to foresee the emergence of Facebook to understand the threat that huge companies would pose for democracy. Jefferson and Madison were voracious readers of Adam Smith, convinced that monopolies hinder competition, which drives innovation and leads to economic growth.

A century later, in response to the rising oil, rail and banking monopoly of the Golden Age, Ohio Republican John Sherman told Congress: "If we can not stand a king as a power political, we should not do it the production, transportation and sale of all that is necessary for life.If we do not submit to an emperor, we must not submit to a trade autocrat having power to prevent competition and fix the price of any commodity. "The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 prohibited monopolies. In the twentieth century, new laws were promulgated, creating legal and regulatory structures to promote competition and impose corporate responsibility. The Ministry of Justice has dissolved monopolies such as Standard Oil and AT & T.

For many people today, it is hard to imagine the government doing things right, let alone dismantling a company like Facebook. This is not a coincidence.

Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and politicians laid the foundation for our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, magazines, social clubs, academic centers and media to teach the new generation that private interests must take precedence over the public. His gospel was simple: "free" markets are dynamic and productive, while government is bureaucratic and inefficient. By the mid-1980s, they had largely succeeded in relegating the energetic application of antitrust legislation to history books.

This change, combined with favorable corporate tax and regulatory policy, ushered in a period of mergers and acquisitions creating megacorporations. Over the past 20 years, more than 75% of US industries, from airlines to pharmaceutical companies, have experienced greater concentration and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decrease in entrepreneurship, stagnant productivity growth, higher prices and fewer options for consumers.

The same thing happens in social media and digital communications. Since Facebook dominates both social networks, it is not subject to market responsibility. This means that Whenever Facebook makes a mistake, we repeat an exhausting schema: first indignation, then disappointment and finally resignation.

In 2005, I was in Facebook's first office, Emerson Street, in downtown Palo Alto, when I read that Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation was in the process of acquiring the site Myspace social networking for $ 580 million. The lights above were out, and a group of us were giving our keyboards, our 21 year old face half lit by the brightness of our screens. I heard a "whoa", and the news went through the room silently, uttered by AOL Instant Messenger. My eyes widened. Really? $ 580 million?

Facebook was competing with Myspace, but obliquely. We were focused on students at that time, but we had real identities while Myspace had fiction. Our users were more committed, they visited us every day, or even every hour. We thought that Facebook surpbaded MySpace in quality and that it would be easily moved with enough time and money. If Myspace was worth $ 580 million, Facebook could be worth at least twice as much.

From our earliest days, Mark used the word "dominion" to describe our ambitions, without any hint of irony or humility.. At that time, we were competing with many social networks, not only with Myspace, but also with Friendster, Twitter, Tumblr, LiveJournal and others. The pressure to overcome them has spurred innovation and given rise to many features that distinguish Facebook: simple and aesthetic interfaces, information section, link to real-world identities and much more.

It was this competitive effort that led Mark to acquire, over the years, dozens of other companies, including Instagram and WhatsApp, in 2012 and 2014. These decisions were not ethical or suspicious.

One night, during the summer of selling Myspace, I remember going home after work with Mark, then coming home that we had shared with several engineers and designers. It was in the pbadenger seat of the Infiniti SUV that our investor Peter Thiel had bought to replace Mark in replacement of the unreliable used Jeep he was driving.

Turning right on Valparaíso Avenue, Mark confessed to the immense pressure that he felt. "Now that we employ so many people …" he said softly. "We really can not fail."

From project developed in our bedroom and in our chaotic summer homes, Facebook had become a serious business with lawyers and a human resources department. We had about 50 employees and their families depended on Facebook to put food at their disposal. I looked out the window and thought: It will never stop. The bigger we are, the more we have to work hard to keep growing.

More than a decade later, Facebook won the prize of domination. It is worth half a trillion dollars and represents, according to my calculations, more than 80% of the income of the social networks of the world. It's a powerful monopoly that overshadows all its rivals and eliminates competition from the category of social networks. This explains why even during Annus Horribilis In 2018, Facebook's earnings per share increased by 40% over the previous year. (I've liquidated my Facebook shares in 2012 and I do not invest directly in a social media company).

The monopoly of Facebook is also visible in its usage statistics. About 70% of US adults use social media and the vast majority use Facebook products. More than two-thirds use the main site, one-third use Instagram and one-fifth use WhatsApp. In contrast, less than a third reported using Pinterest, LinkedIn, or Snapchat. What began as casual entertainment has become the primary means of online communication for people of all ages.

Even when people want to leave Facebook, they have no other valid alternative, as we have seen after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Concerned about their privacy and the lack of trust in Facebook's good faith, users around the world have launched a "Facebook Suppression" movement. According to the Pew Research Center, a quarter of them have deleted their accounts on their phones, but many have done so only temporarily. I've heard more from a friend saying, "I'm leaving Facebook completely, thanks God for Instagram," without realizing that Instagram was a subsidiary of Facebook. In the end, people have not left mbadively the platforms of society. After all, where would they go?

The domain of Facebook is not an accident of history. The company's strategy was to beat all of its competitors in plain view, and the regulators and the government tacitly and sometimes explicitly approved it. In one of the government's rare attempts to stop the company, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) issued a licensing decree in 2011 in which Facebook did not share any private information beyond what the users had already accepted. Facebook largely ignored the decree. Last month, the day after the announcement of a profit, the company would have to pay up to $ 5 billion as punishment for its negligence – a pat on the wrist – Facebook actions have Increased by 7%, which represents an increase of 7%. added 30,000 million USD to its value, six times the amount of the fine.

The biggest mistake of the FTC was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the new platforms were on the heels of Facebook because they were designed for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain ground. Mark responded by buying them and the FTC approved it.

Neither Instagram nor WhatsApp had significant revenues, but both were incredibly popular. The acquisition of Instagram has allowed Facebook to retain its domain in the photo networks and WhatsApp has offered a new entry in mobile messaging in real time. Now The founders of Instagram and WhatsApp left the company after colliding with Mark for managing their platforms. But its previous properties remain those of Facebook, which largely explains its recent growth.

When you have not gained your way to the domain, Facebook used its monopoly status to exclude companies from competition or copied its technology.

It is said that the news feed algorithm prioritized Facebook-created videos on the competition's videos, such as YouTube and Vimeo. In 2012, Twitter He presented a video network called Vine that contained six-second videos. The same day, Facebook blocked the hosting of I came of a tool allowing its users to search their friends on Facebook while they were on the new network. The decision hindered Vine, who closed four years later.

Snapchat This represented a different threat. Snapchat's stories and immanent messaging options made it an attractive alternative to Facebook and Instagram. And unlike Vine, Snapchat did not interact with Facebook's ecosystem; there was no obvious way to harm society or isolate it. So Facebook simply copied it.

The Facebook version of Snapchat's missing stories and messages was a huge success at the expense of Snapchat. At a meeting in 2016, Mark told Facebook employees not to let their pride hinder how to give users what they want. According to the magazine wired, "Zuckerberg's message has become an informal slogan on Facebook:" Do not be too proud to copy "".

(Regulators can not do anything about it: Snapchat has patented its "ephemeral message galleries", but the Copyright Act does not extend to the abstract concept itself.)

As a result of all this, potential competitors can not raise the funds needed to compete with Facebook. Investors realize that if a business starts, Facebook will copy its innovations, close them or buy them for a relatively modest amount.. Thus, despite the economic expansion, the growing interest in new high-tech companies, the explosion of venture capital and the growing public disgust on Facebook, no big social networking business n & # 39; 39, was created since the fall of 2011.

As markets become more concentrated, the number of new businesses decreases. This is true in other areas of high tech dominated by individual businesses, such as search (controlled by Google) and ecommerce (supported by Amazon). At the same time, there have been many innovations in areas where there is no monopolistic domination, such as labor productivity (Slack, Trello, Asana), urban transport (Lyft, Uber, Lime, Lime, Bird) and the cryptocurrency exchange offices (Ripple, Coinbase, Circle).

I do not blame Mark for his pursuit of dominance. He showed nothing more vile than the virtuous work of a talented businessman. However, he created a leviathan that displace entrepreneurship and limit consumer choice. Our government must be careful never to lose the magic of the invisible hand. How do we allow that to happen?

Since the 1970s, courts have been increasingly reluctant to dissolve corporations or block mergers Unless consumers pay inflated prices that would be lower in a competitive market. But a close dependence on whether or not consumers have increased prices does not take into account the total cost of market dominance. Do not recognize that too we want markets to be competitive to encourage innovation and keep power under control. And this does not correspond to the history of antitrust law. Two of the last major antitrust cases against AT & T and IBM in the 1980s were based on the argument that they had used their size to stifle innovation and crush competition.

As Tim Wu, law professor at Columbia, writes, "It is detrimental to the laws and their minds to keep as close a focus on price effects as the measure of all that the defense of competition was meant to make."

Facebook is the ideal case to turn the tide, precisely because Facebook earns money with targeted advertising, which means that users do not pay to use the service. But it's not really free, and it's certainly not harmless..

Facebook's business model is to capture as much of our attention as possible to encourage people to create and share more information about who they are and who they want to be. We pay for Facebook with our data and our attention, and whatever the measure, it's not cheap.

I was part of the original News Feed team (my name is on the patent), and this product now receives billions of hours of attention and draws an unknown amount of data each year. The average Facebook user spends an hour a day on the platform; Instagram users spend 53 minutes a day browsing images and videos. They create huge amounts of data – not just what they like or do not like, but the number of seconds they watch a particular video – that Facebook uses to refine its targeted advertising. Facebook also collects data from companies and badociated applications, without the knowledge of the majority of users, according to tests performed by The Wall Street Journal.

Some days lying on the floor next to my aged son while playing with his dinosaurs, I browse Instagram, waiting to see if the next picture will be more beautiful than the previous one. What do you do? I know it's not good for me, not for my son, but I do it anyway.

The choice belongs to me, but that does not seem to me to be a choice. Facebook is filtered in every corner of our lives to capture as much as possible our attention and our data. Without exchange, we carry out the exchange.

The dynamic marketplace that once led Facebook and other social media companies to compete for better products has virtually disappeared. This means that new businesses will be less likely to develop healthier and less exploited social media platforms. It also means less responsibility in areas such as privacy.

Last month, Apparently, Facebook has been trying to bury information that tens of millions of user pbadwords were stored in plain text format, which thousands of Facebook employees could see. Competition alone will not necessarily boost privacy – regulation is needed to ensure accountability – but Facebook's market control ensures that users can not protest when they switch to alternative platforms. ..

The most problematic aspect of Facebook's power is the one-sided control of speech by Mark. There is no precedent for its ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.

Facebook engineers write algorithms that select users' comments or experiences that appear in the news of their friends and family. These rules are proprietary and so complex that many Facebook employees do not understand them.

In 2014, the rules favored "clickbait" owners arousing curiosity. In 2016, they allowed the diffusion of marginal political opinions and false news, which facilitated the manipulation of the American electorate by Russian actors. In January 2018, Mark announced that the algorithms would promote non-informative content shared by friends and information from "reliable" sources, which his engineers interpreted – to the confusion of many – as an impetus for any element of the category "politics". , crime, tragedy. "

Facebook has responded to many critics about how it manages freedom of expression by hiring thousands of contractors to enforce standards developed by Mark and senior executives. After a few weeks of training, these subcontractors decide which videos are considered an incitement to hatred or freedom of expression, erotic and simply artistic images, and live broadcasts that are too violent to broadcast. (The edge reported that some of these moderators, working through a provider in Arizona, were paid $ 28,800 a year, had limited breaks, and faced significant mental health risks).

As if the opaque algorithms of Facebook were not enough, Last year, we learned that Facebook executives had permanently erased their own messages from the platform, from the recipient inbox. The justification was the concern for the safety of the company. When I look at my years of Facebook posts with Mark now, it's only a long stream of my own comments in light blue, clearly written in response to the words he once sent me. (Facebook now offers this feature to all users).

The most extreme example of Facebook's manipulative speech has occurred in Myanmar at the end of 2017. Mark said in an interview to Vox that he personally made the decision to erase the private messages of Facebook users who were inciting genocide there. "I remember one Saturday morning when I received a phone call," he said, "and we found that people were trying to broadcast sensationalist messages – in this case, Facebook Messenger – on both sides of the conflict, basically saying to Muslims: "Hey, there's an uprising of Buddhists, so make sure you're armed and go to this place." And then, the same thing from the other side. "

Mark called, "We are preventing the transmission of these messages." Most people would agree with their decision, but it is deeply disturbing to have done so without being beholden to any independent authority or government. In theory, Facebook could also mbadively erase messages from Americans if its leaders decided not to like that.

Mark had always insisted that Facebook was only a "social utility", a neutral platform for people to communicate what they wanted. He now recognizes that Facebook is both a platform and a publisher and that it inevitably makes decisions about values. The company's lawyers testified before the courts that Facebook was a publisher and, therefore, entitled to first amendment protection..

At Facebook's headquarters, no one chooses the news that everyone in the United States is waking up, of course. But they decide whether it's an article from a reputable store or a clip from "The Daily Show", a photo of the wedding of 39, a friend or an incendiary call to kill others.

Mark knows this is too much power and pursues a double strategy to mitigate it. It now puts the focus on Facebook to encourage more private and encrypted messaging that Facebook employees can not see, let alone control. Second, he expects friendly supervision from regulators and other industry leaders.

At the end of last year, he proposed an independent commission to deal with difficult content moderation decisions made by social media platforms. Mark argued that he could afford an independent control of Facebook's decisions and that users could appeal to him if they were not in agreement. But their decisions would not have the force of law, as companies would voluntarily participate.

In an opinion article in The Washington Post in March, he wrote: "Legislators often tell me we have too much power over speech, and I agree." And she went even further than before, asking for more government regulation, not only in terms of public speaking, but also in terms of confidentiality and interoperability, the ability of consumers to leave a network without problems and to transfer their profiles, friend connections, photos and other data to another.

I do not believe that these proposals were made in bad faith. But I feel that they are trying to avoid the argument that regulators need to go further and dissolve the company. Facebook is not afraid of some extra rules. He fears an antitrust case and the type of responsibility that would be created by real oversight of the government.

We do not expect calculated rules or voluntary commissions to work to regulate pharmaceutical companies, health companies, car manufacturers or credit card providers. Agencies oversee these industries to ensure that the private market serves the public good. In these cases, we all understand that the government is not an external force that immisces in a market for organic products. This is what makes a dynamic and fair market possible. This should be as true for social networks as for air travel or pharmaceuticals.

In the summer of 2006, Yahoo offered us $ 1 billion via Facebook. I desperately wanted Mark to say yes. Even my small part of the company would have made me millionaire many times. For a 22-year-old boy from North Carolina, this sum was unimaginable. I was not alone, almost everyone in the company wanted the same thing.

It was taboo to talk about it openly, but I finally asked Mark, when we had a moment of loneliness, "What do you think of Yahoo?" I've received a shrug and a response from a line: "I do not know if I want to work for Terry Semel," Yahoo's CEO.

Apart from a few jobs at the university, Mark had never had a real leader and seemed not to be interested in this possibility. I did not like the idea, but it would have changed to have a boss for several million dollars every day of the week. Mark's impulse was infinitely stronger. Domination meant domination and the effort was too delicious.

Mark n'a peut-être jamais de chef, mais il doit pouvoir contrôler son pouvoir. Le gouvernement américain doit faire deux choses: dissoudre le monopole de Facebook et réglementer l'entreprise pour qu'elle soit plus responsable envers le peuple américain..

Tout d'abord, Facebook doit être séparé en plusieurs entreprises. La FTC, avec le ministère de la Justice, devrait appliquer les lois antitrust en annulant les acquisitions de Instagram et WhatsApp et en interdisant les acquisitions futures pendant plusieurs années. La FTC aurait dû bloquer ces fusions, mais il n'est pas trop tard pour agir. Il existe un précédent en matière de correction des mauvaises décisions: récemment, en 2009, Whole Foods a résolu des plaintes antitrust en vendant la marque Wild Oats et les magasins qu'elle avait achetés quelques années auparavant.

Il existe certaines preuves que nous pouvons aller dans cette direction. La sénatrice Elizabeth Warren a appelé à un renversement des fusions sur Facebook et, en février, la FTC a annoncé la création d'un groupe de travail chargé de surveiller la concurrence entre les sociétés de technologie et de pbader en revue les fusions précédentes.

Comment une pause fonctionnerait-elle? Facebook disposerait d'une courte période pour séparer les activités d'Instagram et de WhatsApp, et les trois sociétés deviendraient des sociétés distinctes, qui seraient très probablement cotées en bourse.. Initialement, les actionnaires de Facebook détiendraient des actions dans les nouvelles sociétés, bien que Mark et les autres dirigeants devraient probablement se dessaisir de leurs actes de gestion.

Jusqu'à récemment, WhatsApp et Instagram étaient gérés en tant que plates-formes indépendantes au sein de la société mère, ce qui devrait faciliter le processus. Mais le temps presse: Facebook travaille rapidement pour intégrer les trois, ce qui compliquerait la tâche de la FTC pour les séparer.

Certains économistes sont sceptiques sur le fait que la dissolution de Facebook stimule cette concurrence, car Facebook, dit-on, est un monopole "naturel". Des monopoles naturels sont apparus dans des domaines tels que les réseaux de distribution d’eau et le réseau électrique, où le prix de l’entrée sur le marché est très élevé – car il faut installer des conduites ou des lignes électriques – mais il devient de moins en moins cher d’ajouter chaque client. supplémentaire En otras palabras, el monopolio surge naturalmente de las circunstancias del negocio, más que de las maniobras ilegales de una empresa. Además, los defensores de los monopolios naturales a menudo argumentan que benefician a los consumidores porque son capaces de prestar servicios más baratos que cualquier otra persona.

Facebook es más valioso cuando hay más gente en él: Hay más conexiones que un usuario puede hacer y más contenido que puede compartir. Pero el costo de entrar en el negocio de las redes sociales no es tan alto. Y a diferencia de lo que ocurre con las tuberías y la electricidad, no hay ningún buen argumento de que el país se beneficie de tener sólo una empresa dominante de redes sociales.

A otros les preocupa que la desintegración de Facebook u otras empresas tecnológicas estadounidenses pueda ser un problema de seguridad nacional. Debido a que los avances en la inteligencia artificial requieren inmensas cantidades de datos y poder de computación, sólo las grandes empresas como Facebook, Google y Amazon pueden permitirse estas inversiones, dicen. Si las compañías estadounidenses se hacen más pequeñas, los chinos nos superarán.

Si bien son graves, estas preocupaciones no justifican la inacción. Incluso después de una ruptura, Facebook sería un negocio enormemente rentable con miles de millones para invertir en nuevas tecnologías, y un mercado más competitivo sólo estimularía esas inversiones. Si los chinos se adelantaran, nuestro gobierno podría invertir en investigación y desarrollo y llevar a cabo una política comercial táctica, tal como lo está haciendo hoy en día para mantener a raya la tecnología 5G de China.

El coste de la desintegración de Facebook sería casi nulo para el gobierno, y mucha gente puede ganar económicamente. Una prohibición de las adquisiciones a corto plazo garantizaría que los competidores, y los inversores que apuestan por ellas, tuvieran espacio para prosperar. Los anunciantes digitales de repente tendrían múltiples compañías compitiendo por sus dólares.

Incluso los accionistas de Facebook probablemente se beneficiarían, como lo hacen a menudo los accionistas en los años posteriores a la escisión de una empresa. El valor de las empresas que formaban parte de Standard Oil se duplicó en el plazo de un año desde su desmantelamiento y se quintuplicó unos años más tarde. Diez años después de la desintegración de AT&T en 1984, el valor de sus empresas sucesoras se había triplicado.

Pero los mayores ganadores serían los estadounidenses. Imagínese un mercado competitivo en el que pudieran elegir entre una red que ofreciera estándares de privacidad más altos, otra que costara una cuota por unirse pero tuviera poca publicidad y otra que permitiera a los usuarios personalizar y ajustar sus feeds según lo consideraran conveniente. Nadie sabe exactamente lo que los competidores de Facebook ofrecerían para diferenciarse. Ese es exactamente el punto.

El Departamento de Justicia se enfrentó a cuestiones similares de costos y beneficios sociales con AT&T en la década de 1950. AT&T tenía el monopolio de los servicios telefónicos y de los equipos de telecomunicaciones. El gobierno presentó una demanda bajo las leyes antimonopolio, y el caso terminó con un decreto de consentimiento que requería que AT&T liberara sus patentes y se abstuviera de expandirse a la naciente industria informática. Esto dio lugar a una explosión de innovación, aumentando considerablemente las patentes de seguimiento y llevando al desarrollo del semiconductor y de la informática moderna. Lo más probable es que no tuviéramos iPhones o laptops sin los mercados competitivos que la acción antimonopolio introdujo.

Adam Smith tenía razón: La competencia estimula el crecimiento y la innovación.

No basta con disolver Facebook. Necesitamos una nueva agencia, facultada por el Congreso para regular las empresas de tecnología. Su primer mandato debería ser proteger la privacidad.

Los europeos han avanzado en materia de privacidad con el Reglamento General de Protección de Datos, una ley que garantiza a los usuarios un nivel mínimo de protección. Un proyecto de ley de privacidad histórico en los Estados Unidos debería especificar exactamente qué control tienen los estadounidenses sobre su información digital, exigir una divulgación más clara a los usuarios y proporcionar suficiente flexibilidad a la agencia para ejercer una supervisión efectiva a lo largo del tiempo. La agencia también debería encargarse de garantizar la interoperabilidad básica entre plataformas.

Finalmente, la agencia debe crear pautas para un discurso aceptable en los medios sociales. Esta idea puede parecer antiestadounidense: nunca toleraríamos que una agencia gubernamental censurara un discurso. Pero ya tenemos límites para gritar "fuego" en un teatro lleno de gente, badgrafía infantil, discursos destinados a provocar violencia y declaraciones falsas para manipular los precios de las acciones. Tendremos que crear estándares similares que las empresas de tecnología puedan utilizar. Por supuesto, estas normas deberían estar sujetas a la revisión de los tribunales, al igual que cualquier otro tipo de limitación de la libertad de expresión. Pero no existe el derecho constitucional de acosar a otros o de transmitir violencia en vivo.

Estos son desafíos difíciles. Me preocupa que los reguladores gubernamentales no puedan seguir el ritmo de la innovación digital. Me preocupa que una mayor competencia en las redes sociales pueda llevar a un Facebook conservador y uno liberal, o que las redes sociales más nuevas puedan ser menos seguras si la regulación del gobierno es débil. Pero mantener el statu quo sería peor: si no tenemos a los funcionarios públicos que dan forma a estas políticas, las corporaciones lo harán.

Algunas personas dudan de que un esfuerzo para desarmar Facebook ganaría en los tribunales, dada la hostilidad en el tribunal federal a la acción antimonopolio, o de que este Congreso dividido alguna vez sea capaz de reunir el consenso suficiente para crear una agencia reguladora para los medios de comunicación social.

Pero incluso si la ruptura y la regulación no son inmediatamente exitosas, el simple hecho de presionar por ellas traerá más supervisión. El caso del gobierno contra Microsoft -que usó ilegalmente su poder de mercado en los sistemas operativos para obligar a sus clientes a utilizar su navegador de Internet, Internet Explorer- terminó en 2001 cuando la administración de George W. Bush abandonó sus esfuerzos por desmantelar la empresa. Sin embargo, esa acusación ayudó a frenar las ambiciones de Microsoft de dominar la primera versión de la web.

De manera similar, la demanda del Departamento de Justicia de los años 70 acusando a IBM de mantener ilegalmente su monopolio sobre las ventas de computadoras personales terminó en un punto muerto. Pero en el camino, IBM cambió muchos de sus comportamientos. Dejó de agrupar su hardware y software, eligió un diseño extremadamente abierto para el sistema operativo de sus ordenadores personales y no ejerció un control indebido sobre sus proveedores. El profesor Wu ha escrito que este "policía a la cabeza" llevó a IBM a evitar "cualquier cosa que se aproxime a una conducta anticompetitiva, por temor a añadir algo al caso en su contra".

Podemos esperar lo mismo de una demanda sin éxito contra Facebook.

Finally, un caso agresivo contra Facebook convencería a otros gigantes como Google y Amazon de que se lo piensen dos veces antes de sofocar la competencia en sus propios sectores, por miedo a ser los siguientes. Si el gobierno aprovechara este momento para resucitar una norma de competencia efectiva que tenga una visión más amplia del coste total de los productos "gratuitos", podría afectar a toda una serie de industrias.

La alternativa es sombría. Si no tomamos medidas, el monopolio de Facebook se afianzará aún más. Con gran parte de las comunicaciones personales del mundo en sus manos, puede extraer esos datos en busca de patrones y tendencias, lo que le da una ventaja sobre sus competidores durante las próximas décadas.

Asumo la responsabilidad de no dar la alarma antes. Don Graham, ex miembro de la junta directiva de Facebook, ha acusado a los que critican a la compañía ahora de tener "todo el coraje del último hombre saltando sobre la pila en un partido de fútbol americano". Las recompensas financieras que obtuve al trabajar en Facebook cambiaron radicalmente la trayectoria de mi vida, e incluso después de haber cobrado, vi con admiración el crecimiento de la empresa. Las consecuencias de las elecciones de 2016 y de Cambridge Analytica me hicieron darme cuenta de los peligros del monopolio de Facebook. Pero cualquiera que sugiera que Facebook es similar a un jugador de fútbol inmovilizado tergiversa su resistencia y poder.

Una era de responsabilidad para Facebook y otros monopolios puede estar comenzando. La ira colectiva está creciendo, y una nueva cohorte de líderes ha comenzado a emerger. En el Capitolio, el representante David Cicilline se ha interesado especialmente en controlar el poder de los monopolios, y los senadores Amy Klobuchar y Ted Cruz se han unido al senador Warren para pedir más supervisión. Economistas como Jason Furman, ex presidente del Consejo de Asesores Económicos, están hablando sobre los monopolios, y una gran cantidad de juristas como Lina Khan, Barry Lynn y Ganesh Sitaraman están trazando un camino a seguir.

Este movimiento de funcionarios, académicos y activistas merece nuestro apoyo. Mark Zuckerberg no puede arreglar Facebook, pero nuestro gobierno sí.