The wrong questions at the right time
In today’s DCMS Committee questioning of Facebook I had a real sense of the wrong questions at the right time.
Let me unpack that.
This is the right time (never has there been a more right time!):
- 2.2 billion people on a single digital platform — never before has humanity been so united.
- A single, centralised provider of a rich communications network — not since the Roman empire has so much design and governance power been concentrated in a single entity.
- There is still a chance for “one internet” to win out — the trend is away from this — the unregulated global internet has led to countries like China and India feeling they have to self regulate and create great firewalls.
But these were the wrong questions. This was a group of politicians who had not mastered their brief without a clear sense of what their role really should have been.
Instead of “how can we solve these problems together” and preserve our civilised, peace loving, liberal democracy from the threat of an unregulated internet— we had:
- Ignorant finger pointing on irrelevant, already long since resolved issues such as abuse of friend data by third party apps (Cambridge Analytica)
- Derivative questions taken from congress and the EU’s previous questions with Facebook on how decisions are made within Facebook.
- Basic, “how does the platform work” questions around personal privacy that any secondary school pupil could have answered and saved us all the time and bandwidth
- Poorly understood theories such as Facebook making money out of non-users, er no it doesn’t, and so what if it does, that’s how the online advertising industry (that’s not owned by Facebook) works.
- Committee members who declared that they hadn’t read their briefs fully because they had been worrying about Brexit…why even bother being there?
- A rounding up that included an accusation of anti-trust against a free service that is not subject to US anti-trust laws by virtue of being free at the point of use.
and worst of all, we had to suffer the continued, repeated expression of powerlessness that the foreign CEO of a global corporation had “sent his cat” rather than show up in person. Get over it. Nobody likes a whiner.
Zuckerberg wasn’t there because the conversation wasn’t worth his time. He’s too busy trying to fix the problems not baby sit politicians who can’t be bothered to do their home work.
If the combined governments that were on show today, really do want a conversation with Zuckerberg, then they need to step up to the plate:
- do their homework — master the brief — Facebook has been around for 15 years — that’s plenty of time to understand how it works. Those questions should have been discussed with a social media technology expert first.
- bring money to the table — show a readiness to invest in delivering digital justice.
- act like a regulatory partner instead of an ignorant and impune overlord
- get their own ducks in a row first — establish a global internet regulator with a mandate from national governments. Then Facebook has an entity with which it can do business.
Right now we are heading for two internets. A free internet and a controlled internet with more than a hint of the Stasi.
The DCMS had the opportunity today to set a tone and direction that could lead to a better regulated, free internet, delaying or perhaps preventing entirely, the formation of the authoritarian internet such as what we see behind the great Chinese firewall.
Instead they fumbled the ball and came across as a group of poorly informed, local politicians bemoaning their loss of power in a digital world they don’t fully understand.
The right time, but the wrong questions.
Opportunity missed!
