Will social networks become regulated utilities?
Now, no, probably not. But in the near future this could happen.
Will Social Networking Sites Invite The Buzzsaw Of Regulation? | TPM Idea Lab
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In a recent inaugural speech fired off as a warning shot of sorts at the new Google Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin, Callas predicted that social networks such as Facebook and Google’s Google product will face more heavy-handed regulation if the companies don’t start treating their account holders as respected citizens rather than vegetables to be watered, kept cultivated and taken care of and to be sold off at market.
“Social networks need to be more sensitive to the needs of their users,” he said in an interview after the speech with TPM’s Idea Lab.
Though the idea of social network as regulated utility sounds preposterous, looking ahead, and with founder Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions, it can almost seem a certainty. Acknowledging this essential role that Facebook is taking on in our lives, Fortune’s Jessi Hempel even recently called Zuckerberg the “Robert Moses of his generation, building out not just an operating system for the web or a way to organize it — but the web itself.”
Strict oversight of the social networks and how they use their account holders’ data in the United States doesn’t sound like as if it’s something that’s going to happen in any meaningful way anytime soon, but regulators in Europe and especially Germany have been active in investigating Facebook everytime it rolls out new features and causes a stir with those new features. Germany’s widely-respected newspaper Die Zeit liked the ideas in Callas’ speech so much its editors ran it in full as an editorial the day after he delivered it.
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