I would suggest that there's a level at which social media becomes more like the phone company when they're large enough and they should no longer have the ability to choose their customers once they serve a significant fraction of the population.
Phone companies are monopolies and own all the physical infrastructure. Social media services are not anywhere close to being that powerful in actuality.
All of social media's power comes from their userbase. A userbase that failed to read the terms, and failed to listen to the savvy tech voices that warned them this was all coming.
If we continue to be uneducated technology users, we are going to continue to make poor choices and suffer poor outcomes. There will always be some company looking to prey upon dumb consumers. We need to stop feeding those companies, and instead support services that actually treat their users fairly and with dignity.
These services have been around, some come and go, but they existed. The problem was that your average user didn't care and instead followed the herd off the cliff.
Social media services are not anywhere close to being that powerful in actuality.
The network effect (how networks become scale in value with the number of connections they make) causes them to form natural monopolies.
I can understand being skeptical of government regulations, but all they need to do is create a tort where someone can sue for being denied service on services of a certain size (e.g. that serve more than x% of the country, or possibly that have more than X users for some large X).
That's not nearly as intractable or unenforceable as other regulation might be. That said, I know there are plenty of ways to do this wrong and that governments love to screw up things like this...
It is not that I am skeptical of gov regulations. They are very necessary in specific circumstances. They just won’t work here. Regulatory whack-a-mole would not change the core business model of the service, which is based on abusing the end user.
I’ve spent years gaming out the scenarios. The only real solution with lasting impact is tech consumer education.
We are in this mess because almost no one is making informed decisions. This sets the stage for abusive relationships to form.
A better educated consumer would read the TOS before signing up and say “no, I do not agree to grant the service a license to do whatever it wants with my content”. And that consumer would move on, and instead elect to use a different service that respected their needs.
See, I can't see this as a solution. People have, as you say, needs when they go to some service. There's something they want to do there. And so they click past the privacy-stealing gibberish because there's nothing they can do about it while still doing what they want.
To get people away from this, they need real alternatives. I think the "smaller internet" movement may help. The social graph needs to be private again, it's one of the worst tools for manipulation ever invented and it's being abused like hell. Also, people's communications need to belong to them again, they're being datamined for all kinds of bad things. Anyone who thinks that, e.g., Google is offering 8.8.8.8 out of the goodness of their heart is sadly mistaken. Google is one of the worst and most subtle manipulators out there.
Phone companies are monopolies and own all the physical infrastructure. Social media services are not anywhere close to being that powerful in actuality.
All of social media's power comes from their userbase. A userbase that failed to read the terms, and failed to listen to the savvy tech voices that warned them this was all coming.
If we continue to be uneducated technology users, we are going to continue to make poor choices and suffer poor outcomes. There will always be some company looking to prey upon dumb consumers. We need to stop feeding those companies, and instead support services that actually treat their users fairly and with dignity.
These services have been around, some come and go, but they existed. The problem was that your average user didn't care and instead followed the herd off the cliff.
Gov regulations won't solve this issue.
The network effect (how networks become scale in value with the number of connections they make) causes them to form natural monopolies.
I can understand being skeptical of government regulations, but all they need to do is create a tort where someone can sue for being denied service on services of a certain size (e.g. that serve more than x% of the country, or possibly that have more than X users for some large X).
That's not nearly as intractable or unenforceable as other regulation might be. That said, I know there are plenty of ways to do this wrong and that governments love to screw up things like this...
It is not that I am skeptical of gov regulations. They are very necessary in specific circumstances. They just won’t work here. Regulatory whack-a-mole would not change the core business model of the service, which is based on abusing the end user.
I’ve spent years gaming out the scenarios. The only real solution with lasting impact is tech consumer education.
We are in this mess because almost no one is making informed decisions. This sets the stage for abusive relationships to form.
A better educated consumer would read the TOS before signing up and say “no, I do not agree to grant the service a license to do whatever it wants with my content”. And that consumer would move on, and instead elect to use a different service that respected their needs.
See, I can't see this as a solution. People have, as you say, needs when they go to some service. There's something they want to do there. And so they click past the privacy-stealing gibberish because there's nothing they can do about it while still doing what they want.
To get people away from this, they need real alternatives. I think the "smaller internet" movement may help. The social graph needs to be private again, it's one of the worst tools for manipulation ever invented and it's being abused like hell. Also, people's communications need to belong to them again, they're being datamined for all kinds of bad things. Anyone who thinks that, e.g., Google is offering 8.8.8.8 out of the goodness of their heart is sadly mistaken. Google is one of the worst and most subtle manipulators out there.