Editorial: Nobody puts Facebook in a corner
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How do you punish a company that is bigger than a country?
How do you control an industry that evolves at light speed?
Can you?
The Federal Trade Commission tried last week. Facebook was hit with a $5 billion fine on Wednesday.
That’s a huge number. As individuals, it’s hard to wrap our heads around it. That’s the five largest, life-changing U.S. lottery wins combined.
For Facebook? The biggest fine ever leveled on a tech company is almost incidental. To put it in perspective, it’s about $2 per each Facebook user.
Those users are the victims in regards to the fine. The FTC is penalizing Facebook for privacy violations. The government is collecting the money, but the people are the ones whose privacy was violated. The Department of Justice has said the company “repeatedly used deceptive disclosures and settings to undermine users’ privacy preferences.”
Some of that is because a giant company that makes a lot of money would like to make a lot more money. That’s on Facebook for its own practices, like pretending the users are the clients when really, they are the product being weighed, measured and sold to the real customers — data collectors like Cambridge Analytica.
But some of it is because of what Facebook has been allowed free rein to do because the government doesn’t really seem to understand what social media is, what it can be or what it can become.
More people get their news from Facebook than anywhere else, but they aren’t a publisher. No, they are a promotion and distribution venue for all kinds of publishers, including the Tribune- Review. People communicate through it, but it’s not a communications company per se. It’s a sales hub, an advertiser, an entertainment provider, a town hall, an employment agency, a dating service and almost anything else you used to find in the Yellow Pages.
Except it’s also not. And company leaders including founder Mark Zuckerberg have no problem arguing that they should self-police because they don’t fit in other boxes.
That made the fine and the strings that came with it less of a punishment and more of a negotiation between a precocious child and an overwhelmed parent. Facebook was sent to its room without dinner, but will order pizza and play video games while waiting for it to be delivered.
The fine is huge. It just isn’t big enough to matter, and until government can move as quickly as the tech industry, there won’t be any way to keep Facebook from making — and breaking — all the rules.