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On Thursday, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes wrote an editorial in the New York Times calling for the dissolution of the company, the splitting of its subsidiaries, Instagram and WhatsApp, and the banning of future prohibited acquisitions for several years. Hughes claimed that Facebook and, by extension, its all-powerful CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is cracking down on the competition by "acquiring, blocking or copying", have considerable power over speech and are so powerful that They can ignore virtually all forms of external responsibility. He also called for the creation of an independent government agency to regulate technology companies.
In response, Facebook published its own column in Saturday's New York Times, this time written by Nick Clegg, former UK vice-minister and current Facebook vice president for global affairs and communications.
Clegg has retraced a line that corporate leaders have sliced so often that it's beyond a cliché: they know they still have work to do. He also proposed an absurd interpretation of Hughes' argument, summing it up to the word "big" poses a risk to society, "reiterated Facebook's stance that" it is unusual to ask for more regulation, not less ", and previewed the company's game notebook to defend against future theoretical antitrust penalties.
Hughes pointed out that over two-thirds of the 70% of US adults on social networks used Facebook, while one-third used Instagram and one-fifth used WhatsApp, while "less than one-third used Pinterest, LinkedIn or Snapchat ". Clegg responded that "All our products and services are fighting for customers" against these companies:
The first misunderstanding concerns Facebook itself and the competitive dynamics in which we operate. We are a large company with many small parts. All our products and services are fighting for customers. Each of them has at least three or four competitors and hundreds of millions or even billions of users. In photo and video sharing, we compete with services such as YouTube, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest and TikTok, an emerging competitor.
Mr. Clegg also blurred the tracks by claiming that iMessage text and video messaging services to Skype constituted a competition for Facebook's main product – that's why he immediately spoke about China. Clegg wrote that breaking Facebook would amount to "dismantling one of the world's biggest players in America," which seems to be an attraction for paranoia in the current economic rivalry between the United States and China:
When it comes to messaging, we are not even the leader of the three major markets – China, Japan and, according to our estimates, the US – where we compete with Apple, iMessage, WeChat, Line and Microsoft, Skype . At a global scale, a context in which social media must be understood, China alone has several large social media companies, including powers such as Tencent and Sina. It will seem perverse to the citizens of Europe, and certainly from China, to see American politicians talk about the dismantling of one of the world's leading players in America.
Clegg also argued that Facebook drew virtually all of its online ad revenue from advertising and controlled only about 20% of the entire online advertising market in the United States – which is in itself a very large number! But it's also a statistic that contradicts Facebook's actual dominance of advertising funds on social media around the world. In the United Kingdom, for example, eMarketer estimates that Facebook controls more than 80% of the social advertising market.
Clegg then responded to Hughes' argument that US courts and antitrust authorities were increasingly reluctant to intervene in cases where large firms did not lower prices, ignoring "the total cost of market dominance ", such as the elimination of competition and innovation. Clegg basically avoided this by simply reminding that Facebook is free, barely paying attention to these other allegations of anti-competitive behavior:
The second misunderstanding concerns antitrust law. These laws, developed in the 1800s, are not meant to punish a business because people do not agree with its direction. Their main objective is to protect consumers by guaranteeing them access to quality, low-cost products and services. And especially in the case of technology, rapid innovation. This is precisely where Facebook puts its attention: creating the best products, free for consumers and funded by advertisers.
In other words: tl; dr.
Clegg completed his response by touting Facebook's alleged advances in the security and safety of their services. Aside from the fact that Facebook has actually done incredibly bad work, ranging from safeguarding user data to effectively responding to accusations of complicity in the genocide in Myanmar (and its misinformation, false news, and misinformation). Electoral interference, remain empty of sensations) maw), this has very little to do with the antitrust law itself.
In fact, this could reasonably be described as an attempt to justify Facebook's largesse on the grounds that only the latter had the scale necessary to solve the problems it created. (This becomes even more a source of migraine, as platforms often use their huge scale to justify their inability to stop the proliferation of hateful content.)
Zuckerberg also alluded to this defense in separate comments while he was waiting in Paris for a meeting with President Emmanuel Macron, by TechCrunch, and told France Info: "When I read what?" 39, he wrote, my main reaction was that what he proposes to do is not going to do anything to help solve these problems. So I think if you care about democracy and elections, you'd like a company like this to invest billions of dollars a year, as we do, to create really advanced tools to fight against electoral interference. "
"Our budget for security this year is greater than the overall revenue of our company when we went public at the beginning of this decade," added Zuckerberg. "This is largely because we have been able to build a successful business that can now support this. You know, we invest more in security than anyone else in social media. "
Hmm. Too big and important to fail, you say.
To a certain extent, there is not much new here: Zuckerberg has already called for greater external regulation of Facebook, although this is mainly the type of regulation that would solve big problems for Facebook. society and would not dramatically affect its results and its sprawling expansion around the world. Most of Clegg's discussion topics are generic remixes of those that the company has already published.
But Facebook is clearly at least a bit scared by Hughes' suggestion of dividing it, and is deploying its best matching gobbledygook.
[New York Times]
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