Re: Wow
The problem is that these companies share 'second-order' business models -- business models where instead of paying for something their users get it 'for free' and the real business involves some different, second-order process, which in the case of these companies is harvesting data & selling either access to it or algorithms based on it to their real customers (for whom the business is first-order: they pay for what they get).
Second-order business models (more generally any non-first-order model) hve inherent conflicts of interest which drive people to behave in a shitty way. This, I think, has three results: people who are not initially shits are pressured to become so (I think this is what has happened to Google); people who are not shits and won't become them leave (probably all of the big internet companies); and finally people who are already loathsome shits tend to start such businesses & actively drive out the non-shits (Facebook / Zuckerberg).
One interesting thing to look at is other, older, businesses which have second-order models, to see how they have been dealt with, and how successful that has been. There's an obvious example: modern retail banking. For almost everyone banks provide accounts 'for free', providing a very useful service for no cost to the user. They then make their money elsewhere by reusing their retail customers' money &c. And there are terrible conflicts of interest involved, of course, and banks similarly attract shitty people & convert non-shitty people into shitty people. To deal with these problems retail banks are absolutely covered in legal regulations and internally have a mass of processes to enforce these regulations and try and prevent the conflicts of interest and shittiness-conversion from taking over (I've worked in a bank: banks are really frightened about the possibility of losing their licenses). And this works ... most of the time. Mostly, retail banks behave OK as a result, but sometimes they don't and sometimes they behave badly enough to destroy or badly damage the global economy. None of this is helped by regulatory capture, which is why the problems that caused 2008 didn't really get addressed I think.
So retail banking is covered in regulation and this solves the conflict-of-interest problems to an extent which is, optimistically, barely adequate. Facebook &c essentially are entirely unregulated, and actively oppose regulation on the grounds that it will suppress innovation.
There was, probably, a time when the internet businesses were small enough that regulation was possible, but they are now so large and have so effectively captured the people who run the legal frameworks in which they operate that this is not realistically possible: governments are not going to regulate the organisations they rely on for communication & propaganda, still less the ones that feed them the stream of surveillance data they masturbate over, or the stream of backhanders they need to keep themselves in drugs and prostitutes.
This is not going to turn out well: Facebook is a parasite which has avoided any meaningful regulation & will continue to lay its eggs in the body of its host until the parasite load becomes so large that the host dies and the parasite is all their is.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
