If you’re one of that breed of free marketeers who don’t believe Facebook should be broken up for its dominance of the media landscape, try listening to Chris Hughes.
In the New York Times, the Facebook co-founder and friend of Mark Zuckerberg assembles the most powerful arguments about why the beautiful creature they built at college has become a monster that now endangers the world.
Governments, he argues, have stood by doing nothing as the Zuck, through his 60% control of Facebook’s voting shares, has built himself more personal power than anyone on the planet.
This one man controls the algorithms that dictate what news billions of people consume, which media they watch and who they talk to. He has the power to follow their hobbies, interests and opinions, and an unprecedented ability to monetise that knowledge through advertisers.
The decisions from monopoly watchdogs to allow the Zuck to buy Instagram and Whatsapp mean he controls the vast majority of platforms used by the 70% of Americans using social media.
These deals have destroyed competition disastrously and, Hughes argues, must be undone.
He’s right. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, people stormed off Facebook for fear of what it was doing. Where did they go? Instagram.
When Zuckerberg doesn’t buy the opposition, he uses his might to copy them to death. Innovation is stifled.
Now he says he’s open to the idea of more regulation, but this is surely just a bid to avoid his empire being broken up. And that is what we need.
There was another man who would have agreed with Hughes. His name was Adam Smith, the greatest free marketeer of them all.
