Facebook's Monopoly Advantage

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I've basically left Facebook because I find it repellent. But people do seem to like Facebook, right? Or at least, you know, most people left it last year. The monopoly part is that it's not hard to imagine a third party service that would allow you to monitor the things going on with the little league game while not having to have a Facebook account. You should and in fact, Zuckerberg in these leaked audio recordings that were just came out this week as we're recording this from his internal meetings. He says that Elizabeth Warren is misguided in wanting to break up Facebook because only someone with the kind of resources that Facebook has could prevent political manipulation. That's a benevolent dictatorship

Like so many technological innovations, the internet is something that burst on the scene and pervaded human life well before we had time to sit down and think through how something like that should work and how it should be organized. In multiple ways — as a blogger, activist, fiction writer, and more — Cory Doctorow has been thinking about how the internet is affecting our lives since the very beginning. He has been especially interested in legal issues surrounding copyright, publishing, and free speech, and recently his attention has turned to broader economic concerns. We talk about how the internet has become largely organized through just a small number of quasi-monopolistic portals, how this affects the ways in which we gather information and decide whether to trust outside sources, and where things might go from here.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer, activist, journalist, and blogger. He is a co-editor of the website Boing Boing, and works as a special consultant for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He is the author of the nonfiction book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free as well as science-fiction works such as Walkaway and Radicalized. He has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the Open University, where he is also a Visiting Professor, as well as being an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate and a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of South Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science.