There has been no more engaged observer of these developments than Emily Bell. First digital editor of the UK’s ‘Guardian’ newspaper, she was wooed by New York’s Columbia University to head its Tow Center for Digital Journalism. She retains her association with The Guardian as a member of the Scott Trust (which owns The Guardian and The Observer). So she spans both the Atlantic and the worlds of old and new media.

When UnHerd was looking to focus on the future of journalism and the impact on it of social media, we were anxious to hear from her. These are lightly-edited excerpts from her interview with Nigel Cameron, our tech editor.    

Recommended reading

Social media. What are we to do?

By Nigel Cameron

Those pre-Facebook days

The dawn of the commercial internet was around 1995 – internet 1.0. Most publishers began to be aware that there was this thing called the internet that would affect their businesses and that they needed to do something about it. In the very early days for journalism it meant that we saw things through a pretty narrow lens. Publisher after publisher imagined a world in which they could just publish more – in other words they thought it would be an expansion of the existing pipes. A way of just pushing more text and still pictures onto the public, because of course that was what we were talking about back then. 

There was a period of around five years between 1995 and 2000 when publishers thought this would just be a big opportunity to basically put newspapers online, almost literally. I remember that the Daily Telegraph was the first – I recall going to the launch at the Science Museum. We watched a video of a newspaper on the internet, complete with the ads placed where they were in the print edition. 

Then we all started to work on what this would really mean. In 1999 my boss, Alan Rusbridger, wrote a piece in The Guardian about how he thought by 2020 we wouldn’t have print any more. A bit of an over-estimate, but the broad direction of travel he got right. 

When readers began to post…

So in the pre-Facebook period that stretches from 1995 to 2005 you had a lot of what now looks like pretty crude experimentation. Some of the more experimental – and I think The Guardian was the most experimental in the world – did begin to add talk threads, for instance, where readers would post things themselves. 

That may seem like very small fry these days, but it was a big philosophical step for a company that had spent over 100 years editing everything that it put under its masthead to allow not merely journalists, but anyone, to post things. It was a really significant change in how we thought about connecting to our readers, and also about taking risks.

But then in 2002-04 web 2.0 technologies started to emerge, and peer-to-peer networks, commenting systems, the ability of anybody to post multi-media from anywhere at any point… That was when the publishing industry started to realise that it wasn’t just going to be a disruption to the form or frequency with which they published, but a complete inversion of the way that people consumed, made, participated in, media. 

Some of us had already realised that this was going to be a really significant change. But we still saw the real-time social web as something that journalists could participate in as long as their news organisations were digitally literate enough – providing new kinds of services and voices to a much broader, often global, public. It was an exciting time, and don’t forget that up until 2005 we might not have been making huge amounts of money but we were certainly breaking even and seeing very good returns on advertising revenue. So when people say why on earth didn’t you all put up paywalls in 2000 or 1996, the answer was that there was a very healthy initial advertising environment. 

Facebook and Google: the advertising revolution

But that was where the real change occurred. The disruption from Facebook and Google wasn’t so much in the creation or distribution of content, but in the advertising model. It was totally re-created through targeting technologies based on people’s behavioural information. 

For broadsheets, broadly speaking, the split of revenue in high-quality news organisations was 70% advertising, and 30% reader or subscription revenue. You could invert that in the tabloid press. But advertising completely underwrote the press, and had done for 150 years. 

We could see that it was going to migrate. First, Craigslist came along with chronically low overheads and a free classified offer. In places like The Guardian that were heavily dependent on classifieds, we realised we had to re-think our own classified businesses. With the passage of time, we came to see a coming exit from classified – which was pretty terrifying for local papers and for big publishers. But we still felt that Google was really bad at delivering what we call display advertising, which would still be a pretty healthy business online if we could connect audiences to products in a slightly more creative way. But then that opportunity disappeared as phones became smartphones and Facebook went public.

The Guardian's modern mission

Will Guardian readers approve of their Editor's mission to understand?

By Tim Montgomerie

Today, in the real-time social web, nearly all social consumption takes place through mobile. Social and mobile are basically the same thing. We might have 30-40 apps loaded on our phones, but on average we only use five or six every day, and the percentage of overall usage is about 30-40%; news and weather apps are about 3%. So if you’re trying to get people to come to your owned and operated property, particularly in the mobile environment which is increasingly where your readership is located, well, you’re playing a losing game. 

In any case, digital for many in news organisations both on the commercial and editorial side always felt like a forced march. Print is a very specific set of skills, and some of them are transferable to digital but some are quite different. The journalists, the reporters, had the easiest time, because really in a way they were the ones least affected by how the format was being changed; and they really liked the idea that you could get stories out to people in different ways, and report them as they happen. But for everybody else, there was a lot of foot-dragging. People were pretty scared. They could see that disruption was not necessarily going to be a good thing for them. 

Facebook’s arrival was not just a challenge to traditional journalism and publishing, but also to a lot of other social networks set up between 2000 and 2010 – they were all swept away by Twitter and Facebook. And back in 2013-14 everyone thought Twitter was going to be bigger than Facebook. But then, through superior strategy, Facebook began to swallow up journalism and swallow up the rest of the world. 

Instagram and IPO: Facebook’s brilliant strategy

The two things it did that were absolutely genius moves in the market, which people underestimated at the time, were purchasing Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, which seemed an absurd amount of money, and pivoting into mobile; Instagram gave them a hinge. So pre- the Instagram purchase, and pre- the Public Offering, people thought that Facebook didn’t really get mobile, didn’t feel like a mobile site, and they were pretty stuck in their tech. Post- the IPO and re-investment in mobile with the purchase of Instagram, things started to look really different. 

And that’s when journalists began to really think, hang on a second, if this platform grows at the rate it’s growing at the moment… The thing about Twitter is it’s a broadcast platform – composed of links back to our world. Facebook has become much more of a walled garden. They have your identity, they publish long posts and pictures, and it’s very clear that they are encouraging you to do that regularly. I think 2013-14 was when people in the publishing industry really started to see Facebook as a revenue generator – that they might be able to reach a different audience on, or that could very easily take their business away overnight.

In 2014, I gave the annual lecture at the Reuters Institute, which was entitled prophetically “Silicon Valley and Journalism: Make-up or Break-up?” – in which I described the fraught nature of this relationship. Silicon Valley companies, especially Facebook and Google, and to some extent Twitter, were taking on some aspects of being publishers without picking up on the responsibility or the real cost of creation. And, therefore, it was beholden to the news industry and the Valley to work out what that relationship really meant, particularly since these platforms are not very clear about their intent. They don’t see themselves as publishers, or certainly didn’t in 2013 or 2014, even though those of us who study publishing do see that that is very clearly the direction of travel.   

The feeling that they could sidestep their responsibility by just insisting that this was a mutual technology was so patently not going to hold.

Facebook goes after the old publishers . . .

From 2015 we saw this rapid roll-out of new products aimed specifically at publishers. These were from Facebook, from Google, from Apple, from Twitter, all designed to capture more of your content and more of your audience’s attention and time and keep them within whichever app it was they were on. The idea was that it would be good for publishers, because there would be a beneficial financial relationship that would formalise the somewhat scrappy and somewhat adversarial relationships of the past. 

But the money just didn’t move quickly enough to the publishers, and in some sectors – particularly local journalism – the devastating effects of having two players (Facebook and Google) in the market mop up 90% of the growth, particularly in mobile, meant that local newspapers started to close. 

. . . and sees off the new?

And in the last year we’ve seen the digitally native companies that everybody thought would be the new institutions – the Buzzfeeds, the Voxes, and so on – beginning to fail. And they’ve begun to fail because they don’t have a model that can survive outside the patronage of something like Facebook, and Facebook is not going to pay Jonah Peretti (Buzzfeed CEO) enough to maintain a 2,000-person creative workforce around the country when Facebook can actually be doing that and making bigger margins on it for itself. 

Interestingly, right now, having a legacy brand is not necessarily a bad thing. There are reasons why companies like The Washington Post and The New York Times and even maybe to some extent The Guardian and the Financial Times and so on are weathering the storm, while all the VC-backed, advertising-based new players in the space like Vox and Buzzfeed are all facing bigger challenges than traditional publishers are. 

Impact of the 2016 US election

The game-changer in 2015-16 was the US election. It was about that point that people began to realise that the way to reach big audiences really was through Facebook. We at the Tow Center did a report on this, recently written up on Gizmodo, that the sites on the Right were being disadvantaged. 

The point was, this publisher wasn’t being honest about its effect on the news sphere. The 2016 election result, combined with Facebook getting rid of its curators, a series of disclosures about “fake news” and then Buzzfeed’s sensational series on it post the election, meant that things really changed. 

Facebook’s experiment with six fragile democracies

Facebook began to panic: how could they deliver good quality news to populations without being accused of spreading fake news? So they decided to run an experiment in six small geographically disparate markets – all with fragile emerging democracies – in which they re-adjusted their news feed. Editors in these markets began to notice that they were losing 60% of their traffic. These countries didn’t really have an established legacy press, so issues of media and news literacy were being learned by populations coming online through mobile and into an environment controlled by Facebook. 

We’ve been tracking that at the Tow Center, and some of it is definitely true. But most of that drop happened before the changes were announced. So we think that Facebook implements changes, then announces them, rather than the other way around.  

The shocking thing was the lack of notice. Facebook did this completely experimentally; they didn’t warn any of the news outlets in these territories, didn’t work with them, and then post hoc said that they were dropping the experiment. 

Inside Facebook they’re saying that what they’re trying to do is ensure that good journalism does better. That over time what they are trying to do is essentially the thing that they have always pretended they wouldn’t do, which is pick winners in this market and create a set of machine-readable standards through which certain types of publishers will do better. 

The overall effect is that the fake news and the spam sites and the viral sites are meant to be less prominent in the news feed, and higher quality news more so. The problem is we just don’t know how that’s going to play out, and I don’t think Facebook knows either. 

The need for regulation

But we do know that for publishers Facebook is this (sometimes but not always benign) dictatorship. And we know that the political conditions for living in an autocratic, repressive, regime are that you don’t have due process, and you can’t predict what’s going to happen tomorrow – the rule of law is flimsy or non-existent. And in a way that’s what Facebook has imposed on the publishing world: an opaque dictatorship with no real rules in terms of your own agency, and where you have no foresight or insight into changes it’s going to make. 

Even if, as techies say, screens are going away and we’ll be living with ambient media and different types of wearable technology in the future, it doesn’t mean we won’t have the same big data-aggregating companies controlling most of what you see and do and buy. And really only regulatory intervention will stop the landscape being completely dominated by the people who are currently dominating it.

I do think we will have this period, a bit like we did after the industrial revolution, of social and governmental reform and regulation. We have to decide whether or not it’s right for large pan-national organisations like Facebook to be the United Fruit of the 21st century – going into new territories, harvesting data (not bananas), perhaps causing democratic upheaval, and not paying the price.

And the future?

So I think in the future publishing and journalism will split between those that have the ability to aggregate audiences and reader-centric revenues offline, or in any case away from the big platforms, and those who can use the distributive super-powers of Big Tech to their advantage. 

We can expect to see a smaller number of bigger publishers, and we will we have to see a much bigger move toward civic media that is not dependent on the free market. Europe already has this through public-service broadcasting and public media traditions. In America there’s much less of it. But I don’t see how otherwise we’re going to replace local reporting, as it just isn’t going to be profitable in the environment we’ve created. 

On a Thursday, in early March, Casey Hopkins decided that it was time to bite the hand that fed him. Hopkins, co-founder and CEO of the design company Elevation Lab, wrote a long, righteously angry blog post describing how Amazon.com had repeatedly allowed counterfeiters, probably based in China, to sell knockoff copies of brand-name Elevation products through the site. A counterfeiter had, most recently, created copies of The Anchor, Elevation’s popular headphone hook, using a poorly-cast mold and photocopied box graphics. For five days, Hopkins wrote, the counterfeiter had stolen “all” Amazon sales of The Anchor by undercutting the price of the genuine article.

Moreover, Hopkins said Amazon was “complicit” in the problem, because it profited from the copycat sales, and wasn’t doing much to stop them. Amazon has sold knockoffs of a plethora of innovative, niche products – from phone cases to bedsheet helpers  and baby clothes. Each product was crafted with thoughtful attention to an unaddressed need, and in each case, an imitator quickly stole the idea, along with as much as 90% of Amazon sales.

Introducing our social media series

Social media. What are we to do?

By Nigel Cameron

Of course, these niche products and companies might not exist in the first place if it weren’t for Amazon. The retailer’s ability to connect customers to the precise product they want – whether hipster baby clothes or a hook for headphones – is exemplary of the rise of the data economy.

In his new book, Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger says data-rich marketplaces, such as Amazon, are making commerce drastically more efficient by using trackers and algorithms that predict consumer desires. But Mayer-Schönberger and his co-author, Thomas Ramge, also warn that the nearly-inevitable concentration of digital marketplaces and advertising channels is making society more vulnerable to market breakdowns.

The logic of algorithmic targeting also drives online media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube, though they’re selling targeted advertising rather than hawking products directly. That slight distinction is what makes the problems of these social media sites more attention-grabbing than Amazon’s counterfeit epidemic.

In building systems that let them find the perfect customers for a headphone hook, social networks also gained the ability to push the specific rage buttons of narrow, vocal social groups. And just as Amazon isn’t structurally punished for selling counterfeits from China, Facebook doesn’t care much if the content demanding user attention is coming from Russia. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dragged his feet over any admission of flaws in the platform, moving towards reform only after a massive post-election backlash.

Fraud that exploited data targeting would be a minor annoyance at worst, of course, if the malefactors were tricking one or two online outlets out of 20 that were equally popular. But Amazon, Facebook, and Google overwhelmingly dominate their sectors. Google answers 90% of all search queries. Amazon generates nearly half of all online sales. And for niche products, Amazon can generate up to 90% of sales  – making its tolerance for counterfeiters a systemic menace.

Of course, Amazon was a pioneer of ecommerce, so maybe its market share is just a product of first-mover advantage. By standard economic logic, its early lead should now be slowly eroding under competition from new entrants. After all, anyone can start a website – right?

But no – Amazon gained 5% more market share last year alone. That’s because the pathway to market dominance has changed since the age of railroads and telephones. Those systems benefited from ‘network effects’, with each new node making the whole operation more appealing for new customers, and eventually eliminating healthy competition. Mayer-Schönberger and Ramge argue that the combination of data-gathering and machine learning instead leads to what’s called a ‘feedback effect’ – which is something like a network effect on steroids.

As they collect data and refine their algorithms, those such as Google and Netflix pull ahead in the race to predict consumer desires – which helps them win more customers, and in turn more data, until they can’t be overtaken. Because of the resulting concentration, any flaws in the algorithms used by Amazon and Google have immediate and widespread effects. In another alarming example, an unknown group has successfully gamed YouTube and showed algorithmically-generated, often violent videos to millions of children.

But these problems don’t need to be caused by fraudsters, cheats, and counterfeiters. Alex Jones’  Infowars channel was recently censured by YouTube after nearly a decade of spreading dangerous conspiracy theories there. Jones is an American who seems to at least partly believe what he is selling – and has made millions of dollars not only for himself, but for YouTube too. Systematic harassment on Twitter doesn’t necessarily come from the Russians. Amazon could be misreading consumer preferences in ways that are unseen, but have vast distorting impacts on the market. We don’t know because we don’t have access to its data or algorithms.

The only way to preclude such deep distortions of our social and economic systems is to let companies try to out-predict each other – to create competition at the level of the algorithm itself. Because of the nature of machine-learning feedback effects, though, there are big barriers to new entrants. A startup social network has neither Facebook’s current audience, nor its historical trove of data about how audiences in the abstract behave. Without that data, a Facebook competitor can’t hope to train its own system to be nearly as effective at keeping users’ attention, and selling ads against that attention.

There are a number of policy recommendations on the table to encourage competition among data-driven companies. Some have suggested forcing transparency of algorithms themselves, but that wouldn’t give competitors the training data they really need. Chicago Booth School of Business Professors Luis Zingales and Guy Rolnik have proposed that individuals should have a property right to their own data, creating smooth portability between platforms. That might make switching social networks much easier, perhaps applying pressure on Twitter et al to curb abuse.

But those individual data rights wouldn’t create the critical mass of data to let an Amazon or Google competitor come up with new and better ways to match audiences and buyers with creators and sellers.  For that, Mayer-Schönberger and Ramge say we need what they call a “progressive data-sharing mandate”, which would force companies to share their data with smaller competitors in proportion with their market share.

So, for instance, Amazon might be mandated to share half of its current consumer preference data (anonymised, of course) with smaller competitors. Of course, data isn’t sufficient to build a viable Amazon competitor, but it might very well be necessary. Competing startups might apply different insights to raw data gathered by the giants in their field, or simply structure their offering in a different way, or impose different policies – such as more closely scrutinising low-cost Chinese resellers.

For Casey Hopkins, a viable alternative to the Everything Store can’t come soon enough. Amazon pulled the counterfeiter that had squatted The Anchor’s product page within hours of Hopkins’ blog post going viral – but just three days later, another one had taken its place.

More from our social media series

We CAN act to reduce the damage screens do to our children

By Susan Linn

• Could Mark Zuckerberg win the White House?
• And would he use Facebook’s huge presence in so many Americans’ lives to help him win?
• Would he run as a socially-liberal, pro-immigration Democrat? Or, like key directors he’s appointed to his company, would he more likely be a Republican offering low taxes and less red tape? Or would he run as an independent?
• With both of the main two parties experiencing challenging times (some would say decline, others would say stagnation or even breakdown), does America need a young leader like the 33-year-old Zuckerberg[1.  By the time of the next presidential election he’ll have passed 35; the minimum age requirement for this highest of the USA’s democratically-elected offices.], rooted in the transformational technologies of our time, to take it forward?
• Or would he choose to use the White House to stop Washington’s politicians from forcing the tech giants of Silicon Valley to surrender some of their huge market power?

While the documentary, presented by our technology editor Nigel Cameron, is framed around Mr Zuckerberg’s increasingly discussed exploration of a presidential bid, it is first and foremost an illuminating overview of how the hugely powerful founder of Facebook thinks – and also of the looming battle between Apple, Google, Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, Facebook etc – and the growing number of politicians on both sides of the aisle who feel the tech companies need to be cut down to size.

https://soundcloud.com/user-350933778/is-mark-zuckerberg-running-for-president

UNHERD’S ‘ZUCKERBERG FOR PRESIDENT?’ SERIES…

This audio is part of a  still unfolding series of articles examining the obstacles between Mr Zuckerberg becoming the second successive US President to have leapt directly from business and into politics with no experience of either electioneering or law-making.

The articles are all gathered here.

OTHER UNHERD PODCASTS

This is the third of UnHerd’s audio documentaries – all produced for us by Sean Glynn.

• The first examined whether a rolling, 24/7 news culture is damaging western democracies.
• The second – presented by Juliet Samuel – assessed the health of our capitalist economic system ten years after the crash.

Next week we’ll publish the fourth. Presented by UnHerd columnist Douglas Murray, it will ask why the advanced democracies do so little to remember the victims of communism – and if that failure is of consequence.

Please go to our podcasts and videos page for more – or follow us on Twitter to ensure you learn quickly about all of UnHerd’s podcasts, articles and events.

In the fashion of today’s digital economy, the scene outside is one of constant movement. Every minute, young people – mostly unkempt white men dressed in jeans and t-shirts but wielding the latest thousand dollar iPhones – emerge from Uber or Lyft cars.

These casually dressed young men – the alumni of Google, Facebook, Apple and other multi-billion dollar Big Tech companies – contrast dramatically with the homeless littering Battery Street’s doorways. The Battery Club members are mostly multi-millionaires and even billionaires, the masters of our new digital universe; the street people of San Francisco, in contrast, are so destitute that they don’t even own the defining accessory of our networked age – those expensive smartphones.

Where Breugel meets Gibson

Welcome to Silicon Valley, a place in which beggars and billionaires co-exist in a jarringly surreal tableaux. Part Breugel the Younger[2.  Bruegel’s work can be sampled here] and part William Gibson,[3.  Gibson is a contemporary Canadian-American writer, whose 1984 debut novel Neuromancer set the pace for the cyberpunk sci-fi sub-genre.] it’s a mash-up of medieval village life and 21st century apocalyptical science fiction. “The future is already here,” Gibson famously wrote in 2003. “It’s just not evenly distributed.”

And there are few places in Silicon Valley – the narrow peninsula of land squeezed between the Northern Californian metropolises of San Jose and San Francisco – that capture the future’s uneven distribution of resources than the Battery Club. Founded by Michael and Xochi Birch, a couple of Anglo-American internet entrepreneurs who sold their social media network for $850 million to AOL in 2005, their club is an exclusive, members-only establishment.

“We are fans of the village pub where everyone knows everyone,” Michael Birch explains of his seemingly modest communitarian thinking. “A private club can be the city’s replacement for a village pub, where you do, over time, get to know everyone and have a sense of emotional belonging.”

“The club offers diversity, but it isn’t about the haves and the have-nots,” adds Xochi Birch of the 58,000 square foot establishment, which boasts a 200-person domestic staff, a 23,000-pound floating steel staircase and a 3,000 bottle wine cellar. “We want diversity in every sense. I view it as us trying to curate a community.”

The truth, of course, about the Battery Club is that it only caters to the wealthiest and most connected of Silicon Valley’s new elite. Only the new plutocracy can buy the privilege of membership. Only Google, Facebook and LinkedIn alumni can afford the gourmet food and wine in Michael Birch’s “village pub”.

This hypocrisy extends all the way up and down the peninsula – from the Victorian mansions on San Francisco’s hills to the nondescript office parks on the San Jose flats. The digital revolution has been sold to us as an experiment in radical democracy. Everyone now – including, presumably, Battery Street’s army of homeless people) – would have access to the same information. We would all be empowered.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for example, has talked endlessly about bringing transparency, a new spirit of openness, to the world.  But Zuckerberg doesn’t  live up to his own utopian rhetoric. Having acquired a multi-million dollar home in a radically gentrified part of San Francisco, he also purchases the two adjoining houses. Openness is for everyone else.

Seasteading on land: a privatised world

Much has been made of Silicon Valley’s libertarian ideology, represented most controversially by Peter Thiel – the Donald Trump supporting billionaire who was the first outside investor in Facebook. The notoriously rightwing Thiel also invested in the Seasteading Institute,[4.  More on the Seasteading Institute here] a libertarian project to politically replicate the disruptive Silicon Valley economy by building completely new communities off the Northern Californian coast.

But the truth about this stateless utopia is that there’s no need to build anything off the Californian coast. Thiel’s libertarian fantasy, you see, has already taken root on land. What we are seeing is the construction of a beta version of a privatised 21st century world, which is being grafted onto the analog realities of 20th century public life.

The network is replacing the state in this Silicon Valley utopia. A radically privatised socio-economic reality is being superimposed on top of public social services and products. So, for example, companies like Google and Facebook operate their own commuter network, whisking their programmers and salespeople up and down the peninsula in luxury corporate buses – mobile versions of the Battery Club. Silicon Valley is establishing its own privatised housing system, fuelled by the room sharing network Airbnb, which is driving up real estate prices so radically as to drive out those with the bad fortune to work outside the Silicon Valley ecosystem. And then, of course, there’s Uber and Lyft and the other privatised ridesharing companies, which are superimposing a “sharing” transport network on the traditional taxi system.

The Silicon Valley landscape literally even looks like al mash-up of feudalism and 21st century science fiction. Zuckerberg has commissioned Frank Gehry to build a new Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, an exclusive suburb in Silicon Valley’s heart. It’s been designed as a mock village with coffee shops, ice cream stores and bicycle repair stations, plus four hectares of wifi powered wildflower meadows.

But it’s only Facebook employees, of course, who have access to this idealised community – an unintended parody of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village”. (5) Outside this exclusive campus, the underclass of Silicon Valley struggle to survive. In neighboring East Palo Alto, for example, half of school-aged kids are homeless. So all of Silicon Valley is, in reality, an extension of San Francisco’s Battery Street – with its bizarre coexistence of billionaires and beggars.

The apotheosis of this spectacle is the new $5 billion Apple headquarters in Cupertino. Designed to resemble a spaceship, the 2.8 million square-foot circular building looks as if some Martian vessel has touched down on earth.

And, in a sense, it has. An alien practice of perpetual disruption is transforming this region of northern California. Silicon Valley is the Battery Club, amplified. The invaders are the new reality, and they’re spreading.

Is the tide turning against the tech monopolies?

The US debate over tech monopolies has been shocked to life by a succession of illustrative cases. First and foremost, the evidence that a Russian-backed social media campaign skewed the 2016 election has driven home a sense that Facebook has transformed from a toy for teenagers into a behemoth in need of serious oversight. Congressional hearings on the issue began Tuesday. Meanwhile, Amazon’s $13.7 billion takeover of Whole Foods in July triggered terror among grocers, and Congressman David Cicilline requested hearings about the deal on antitrust grounds.

A lower-profile but more insidious episode came in late August, when the Open Markets anti-monopoly research group was pushed out of the think tank New America. While the details are disputed, Open Markets head Barry Lynn alleges that his group’s ouster came under pressure from Google, a major funder of New America, after Open Markets praised the EU judgment. Lynn, in the statement that he says got him fired, said the decision protected “the free flow of information and commerce upon which all democracies depend” against Google’s massive reach.

A tale of David and Google-iath

The responses have been remarkably direct, considering that tech innovators have been held up for decades as icons of American exceptionalism. The American Conservative in September called Facebook, Amazon, and Google “the new robber barons” and crony capitalists. New York Times tech columnist Farhad Manjoo in October officially launched his own crusade against what he calls the “Frightful Five.”

Manjoo gets to five by generously granting Microsoft and Apple legacy status. Those companies are indisputably giants, and they fit an easily-grasped rubric. In the 2001 U.S. antitrust case against Microsoft, courts found that the company had illegally used its control of a piece of infrastructure – Windows – to protect its other software from competition. Apple has similarly worked to lock down everything from entertainment to payments in its iOS ecosystem. It’s not a giant conceptual leap to connect such tactics to the way 19th century railroads extorted farmers: successful operating systems, like consolidated rail networks, are an opportunity for rent-taking.

When users aren’t customers

But Google, Facebook, and Amazon are different. Their defenders often argue that “competition is just a click away,” since you can easily use a different social network (they do exist), a different search engine, or a different web store. And because Google and Facebook are free for users, it’s difficult to square them with our image of the ur-monopolist who corners a market and then inflates prices.

That’s because Facebook, Google, and even Amazon’s users aren’t actually their customers. Despite what can look like wildly diverse product portfolios, Facebook and Google make almost all of their revenue from web and mobile advertising. Though Amazon’s profitability is surprisingly dependent on its cloud computing services, the bulk of its revenue is driven by its ability to show users products they want to buy – the fact that they actually fulfill the resulting orders is secondary.

This sort of targeting depends on one asset: user data. It’s user data that lets Amazon show you the same ad, for something you didn’t even know you wanted, on three different websites. It lets Google individually tailor both search results and accompanying ads, and Facebook keep you coming back by insulating you from facts that conflict with your beliefs. In essence, user data are these companies’ rails, delivering buyers to sellers with unbeatable efficiency.

Robber baron technique, then and now

The tech giants built those rails in much the same way previous robber barons did – through a combination raw creative vision, first-mover advantage, and relentless expansionism. Google was undoubtedly superior to almost any other search engine when it first appeared in the late 1990s. Similarly, Facebook won the social network wars because it was simply better than MySpace or Friendster.

But just being dominant doesn’t make a company a monopoly deserving of regulation – the new giants have worked furiously to build anti-competitive moats after gaining their early leads. That has included some old-school tactics, with Google in particular inheriting AT&T’s lust for regulatory capture to supplement its funding of friendly policy research.

Google’s vast appetite for data

But the new giants also have a novel path to total dominance: acquiring huge caches of data wherever they may be found. For Google, that began with the reasonable-enough purchases of ad networks like AdMob and Doubleclick, but has since metastasized wildly. It has gathered patient health data from Britain’s National Health Service, got inside your house with smart-home pioneer Nest, and regularly harvests road traffic data through local governments.

Not all of that data has been brought to bear on ad targeting, but it takes a great deal of credulity to believe Google won’t eventually do just that. In fact, one compelling argument that Google and Facebook have anticompetitive market positions is their apparent inability to make money on much other than advertising. They are, at root, the same sort of media conglomerates that U.S. regulators once regarded as enemies of democratic discourse – but on a global scale.

Collateral damage mounts

The casualties of this concentrated ownership of consumer data are plain to see. Newspapers and magazines have been gutted because their audiences aren’t large or diverse enough to be anything but feedstock for Facebook and Google’s gargantuan ad mills. Brick and mortar retailers are cratering left and right, partly because we’ve (re)discovered the convenience of delivery, but mostly because even sellers with robust online stores can’t profile customers as precisely as Amazon.

The biggest firms have also crushed their online advertising competitors. Google has brazenly appropriated the content of smaller websites to place snippets in search results, gutting the smaller sites’ traffic. Twitter, despite its cultural omnipresence, can’t figure out how to effectively make money from ads without Facebook’s scope. Neither could Yahoo!, a diversified entity that might have actually had a shot, and the once-hyped social network Snapchat is currently playing out the same narrative of futility. In perhaps the ultimate indicator, BitTorrent directory The Pirate Bay is apparently struggling to turn a profit selling ads even against stolen content, and has experimented with hijacking users’ computers to mine cryptocurrency.

Winner take all?

There are a few possible ways of muting these anticompetitive effects. Through the mid-20th century, it was still common in America to simply break up firms that became too dominant. Something like the AT&T settlement, which assigned separate geographic territories to newly created “babies,” could work for Facebook or Google. Amazon could be constrained to stick to online retail and spin off side-projects. More modestly, regulating particular behavior could make Facebook and Google more like public utilities – recent proposals to regulate political advertising on social sites would be a step down that road.

But another, more radical solution is worth considering. Mandatory data-sharing regulations would force web companies to compete on the basis of what they create, not just what they own, by taking away the insurmountable head start enjoyed by Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Right now, the sale of access to user data in the form of advertising seems like a textbook example of rent-seeking. It’s debatable, in fact, whether there should be a right to third-party ownership of such personal data in the first place – just ask the EU. Or Equifax.

But of course, no antitrust action at all seems plausible under the current US regime, despite President Trump’s rhetorical claims to care for the little guy. Peter Thiel, an entrepreneur and early Facebook investor who is one of Trump’s only remaining supporters in the tech sector, explicitly calls Google a monopoly in his 2014 book Zero to One. But he defines monopoly as “a kind of company that’s so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute,” and explains that Google’s monopoly is socially beneficial because it lets it treat its employees well.

Google has about 70,000 employees, less than a quarter as many as even today’s much-weakened General Electric. Thiel’s belief that serving them is a worthy tradeoff for a radical concentration of economic power is just one more index of how little bothered he or the other Trumpists are by the winner-take-all reality that we live in now.

Because once a start-up starts up, the very last thing it wants to have to do is compete, face markets, and meet the challenge of innovation. It wants to rise rapidly to dominance, destroy competitors, and quash any innovative and potentially disruptive upstarts. A rising star company is as interested in market capitalism as  Lenin. If you doubt me, ask Zuckerberg (Facebook), or Page and Brin (Google), or Bezos (Amazon); although, of course, you might not get a candid response.

If you want a straight answer, go to Peter Thiel, venture capitalist-cum-entrepreneur, co-founder of PayPal, and Facebook’s first outside investor. Not to mention always worth listening to, as he speaks his mind. “Competition is for losers,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal [1.  Peter Thiel, in the Wall Street Journal for September 12, 2014: “Competition Is for Losers: If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536.]. Every company should aspire to become a monopoly. Monopolies are good things.

The monopoly conundrum

Of course, monopolies are nothing new, and governments since at least the days of Roman Emperor Justinian have been pushing back[2.  Sir Edward Coke writes in his judgment in “the Case of Monopolies” “For we read in Justinian that monopolies are not to be meddled with, because they do not conduce to the benefit of the common weal but to its ruin and damage.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darcy_v_Allein.].

Sometimes they’ve taken advantage of cosy relationships with business favourites; sometimes they’ve broken them up. It may make sense for a power or water company to be a sole supplier, and in that case governments have often used regulation to control their prices.

But the classic monopolies of the 20^th century involved industries like steel and railways. In 1902, America’s most flamboyant President, Teddy Roosevelt, confronted the leading tycoon of his generation, J. Pierpoint Morgan, and fired the first salvo.

Morgan’s Northern Securities Corporation was an effort to control a large slice of America’s railways, and – why else? – enforce monopoly pricing. Roosevelt used the 1890 Sherman Act to stop this railway gamble in its tracks. And the US went on to break up the “trusts”[3.  On US anti-trust law: Marvin Ammori, in Wired for October 16, 2012: “Monopolies: Anti-Trust Law Protects Consumers, not Competitors.” https://www.wired.com/2012/10/antitrust-is-supposed-to-protect-consumers-not-competitors/.], as they are known in the United States, in industry after industry[4.  Some background here: Elena Holodny, “19 robber barons who built and ruled America,” in Business Insider for July 29, 2017. https://uk.businessinsider.com/robber-barons-who-built-and-ruled-america-2017-7.].

Is the new economy different?

In place of the old industrial and banking giants that used to dominate the global economy, we now have tech companies. Three of them have grown into vast monopolies.

Amazon dominates e-commerce. Among many striking statistics, it owns 74% of the e-book market. But it’s into other things too, like selling cloud storage and, just recently, buying Whole Foods, a US supermarket chain.

Facebook displaced early social-networking pioneers like MySpace and now commands 77% of mobile social traffic, with two billion monthly users. The aim is to sign up everyone on the planet. Excluding China, where the service is banned, they’re half-way there.

Google brushed aside Yahoo and other early search machines – and has never been challenged since. It now has 88% of global search advertising. Its aim, of course, is to have absolutely everyone use it to access all the world’s knowledge.

What’s more – and this is potentially sinister – between them, Facebook and Google account for 75% of referrals to major news and entertainment sites[5.  Some data sources on Facebook and Google: Adam Hartung, “The Trend To Facebook Referrals Is A Risk To Google Search.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2017/05/26/the-trend-to-facebook-referrals-is-a-risk-to-google-search/#242e21a16715. “40 Essential Social Media Marketing Statistics for 2017.” https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/01/05/social-media-marketing-statistics.].

Social networking and search are offered “free” to consumers in exchange for data. And data, as The Economist magazine has said[6.  “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data,” The Economist, May 6, 2017 https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21721656-data-economy-demands-new-approach-antitrust-rules-worlds-most-valuable-resource.], is the new oil. They use (our) data to target ads, and they sell it on to others for similar purposes. From one point of view, both Google and Facebook are in the same business: advertising driven by user data.

Amazon is different. Its business model has been to build e-commerce market share to the exclusion of all else, including (at the moment) profits. Like the robber baron monopolies of the early 20^th century, its approach has been predatory. It destroyed much of high-street bookselling, including the large US bookseller chain Borders. It fought viciously with the Hachette publishing group to keep book prices where it wanted them. A monopoly to customers in several sectors, in publishing it has operated as a “monopsony” – a dominant buyer, who can set prices with suppliers in the way in which monopolists set them for consumers.

The key to making monopolist profits, of course, is to stay a monopolist. Peter Thiel’s defence of monopolies includes the idea that they are “serial” in nature; in due course, a fresh disruptor will come along and send the current one packing. But this is disingenuous. If you’re a monopolist, absolutely everything depends on stopping that from happening. The incumbent advantage of these huge global companies is formidable. And if someone could become a threat? Buy them, like Facebook’s done with Instagram and WhatsApp.

What would Teddy do?

While Amazon sells things for cash, Facebook and Google seem to give things away. One estimate has it that these online “freebies” are worth $280 billion a year. One result is that users tend not to see themselves as “customers” and tend not to see Facebook and Google as “real” companies – like BP, Starbucks and British Airways.

Of course, this “free” use is not the result of generosity on the part of Zuckerberg, Brin and Page. It’s an optical illusion. Their business model makes it highly profitable for them to offer users social media and search services in exchange for their data. An illustration of the scale of data being bartered by users: in 2012 Max Schrems, an Austrian law student, asked Facebook for all his data. What he got was a pdf that ran to well over 1,000 pages[7.  Olivia Solon, in Wired for December 28, 2012: “How much data did Facebook have on one man? 1,200 pages of data in 57 categories.” https://www.wired.co.uk/article/privacy-versus-facebook You can download your own data: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/01/18/how-to-download-facebook-archive/.].

Neither Facebook nor Google has offered a subscription-based alternative to their obscure barter business model. Why? Because it would alert their billions of users to what is really going on, as we hand over data and privacy for service.

Breaking up is never easy

Three huge challenges face any effort to treat Facebook and Google and Amazon as the anti-competitive monopolies that they are.

First, users like them. And because most people are users, that means that most people like them. They have become integrated into our daily lives in complex ways.  They just don’t look like overbearing corporate giants run by the 21^stcentury equivalent of the “robber barons” that Teddy Roosevelt tackled head-on. While Bezos is plainly a businessman, his company has a genius for consumer-friendliness. Zuckerberg, Page and Brin still look enough like kids who make fun stuff – and have joined the ranks of the multi-billionaires by some kind of fluke. The effect is dangerously disarming.

No-one refers to any of them as “tycoons” or “moguls”. The intimacy of our engagement with their businesses – we use their services in bed and in the bathroom and in the car – has blinded most of us to the fact that these young men have inherited the corporate mantle of JP Morgan and Andrew Carnegie – and that they run their companies just as ruthlessly[8.  Natasha Bertrand, “How Amazon’s Ugly Fight With A Publisher Actually Started,” in Business Insider for October 7, 2014. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-did-the-amazon-feud-with-hachette-start-2014-10?IR=T .].

Second, as we’ve noted, we don’t pay Facebook and Google directly for their services – in contrast to the widely disliked cable and phone companies whose monthly bills are costly. The obscure data-for-service barter system they have developed leaves most users barely aware that they are consumers at all.

Third, these three companies have mastered the lobbying process; they are powerful players in Washington (and other capitals). As a recent article in the Financial Times by Rana Faroohar pointed out, “Big Tech has quietly become the dominant political lobbying power in Washington … to avoid regulatory disruption of its business model, which is now the most profitable one in the private sector.”[9.  Rana Faroohar, “Release Big Tech’s Grip on Power,” in the Financial Times, June 18, 2017. https://www.ft.com/content/173a9ed8-52b0-11e7-a1f2-db19572361bb?mhq5j=e6.] They don’t just lobby politicians – the process is more sophisticated. According to Faroohar, Google alone has funded more than 140 Washington-related organizations with grants and sponsorship – to make friends and quieten criticism, “trying desperately and in myriad ways to avoid the ‘m’ word.”[10.  Ibid: “Over the past few years, Big Tech has quietly become the dominant political lobbying power in Washington, spending huge amounts of cash and exerting serious soft power in an effort to avoid regulatory disruption of its business model, which is now the most profitable one in the private sector.”]

So where do we start?

A modest proposal

Even if monopoly pricing (the main monopoly bugbear) is not present (Amazon, at the moment, makes little profit) or obscure because of barter (Google and Facebook), governments must ensure the integrity of the market. They need to encourage innovation, and therefore a fair crack of the whip to new entrants as they challenge incumbents. So why permit takeovers of challengers? Why not push for tech solutions such as open APIs[11.   API stands for Application Programming Interface – the protocols that enable one programme to speak with another. If they are made public, people from other companies can develop applications that interface with them. So, for example, you might not need Facebook Messenger to chat with someone using the service.] to set developers free to innovate?

Why can’t there be a dozen companies, some data-bartering, others subscription-based, enabling Facebook-type service – and inter-connected like our phone companies are?

Second, markets need pricing. Never before have we had major enterprises operating on the basis of a foggy barter. Data-for-service deals need to be explicitly priced, and cash alternatives (service for cash, or cash for your data) offered.

Third, to the extent that any of these companies is a natural monopoly like a water company – because, for example, that’s the only way to capture network effects or deliver economical service –  it must simply join the list of regulated industries.

Fourth, monopsony effects (such as Amazon’s dominance of book-buying from publishers) are legitimate concerns if the integrity of the marketplace – as the health of small business – is seen as in the public interest.

Winning through freedom

It was Adam Smith who pointed out long ago that capitalism magically transforms the pursuit of private profit into a winning situation for all of us. But that is true only if the market is free to do its work. As the factors behind the monopolistic growth of the Unholy Trinity become increasingly prevalent in the global internet economy, securing a win for the consumers of the 21^st century will require us to challenge their pretensions and encourage new entrants to compete with them.

This will involve facing down powerful interests, but that’s hardly new.

In 1602, Sir Edward Coke, doyen of English jurists, faced off against Queen Elizabeth I herself. In what is known as “The Case of Monopolies”[12.  Key facts are given in the Wikipedia entry on Darcy v. Allein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darcy_v_Allein.] he struck down a monopoly (for playing cards) that the Queen had handed to a courtier. Darcy Esquire v Thomas Allin, London Haberdasher and the arguments Coke used in his judgment are just as relevant today.

Like all the gods standing guard over the gates to this brave new world, Zuckerberg poses as a benevolent philanthropist in his jeans and grey T-shirt. Five of the world’s most valuable firms are technology firms, and their founders like to claim they are changing the world for the better, even as they crush rivals with cold-blooded ruthlessness. Google’s motto is famously ‘Don’t Be Evil.’

The Facebook boss celebrated the birth of his first child with claims he was giving $45 billion to charity. This led to a fresh crop of fawning headlines, although closer scrutiny found he had shifted stock into a tax-efficient limited liability company that he controls. Microsoft founder Bill Gates is hailed a hero for his oft-stated mission to save the world’s poor, telling countries to hit the United Nation’s silly target of giving away 0.7 percent of national income in aid as he sprays around his own cash.

These two tech gurus spend massive sums on their good deeds. Many of their fellow billionaires in Silicon Valley are doing the same – and it is laudable they are trying to help poorer people rather than frittering away their mountains of cash on cocaine and flash cars. Yet as Zuckerberg tours the United States, with growing talk he seeks to follow Donald Trump into the White House, let’s pause for a second before cheering on their seemingly selfless generosity.

For a frightening arrogance lies behind these plutocrats posing as latter-day saints. People such as Gates and Zuckerberg built up astonishing wealth by running firms that persistently refused to pay a fair share of tax to governments around the world. Having subverted Western democracies and weakened public services by abusing revenue-raising systems, they now claim to hold answers to our pressing problems.

This is gross hypocrisy. When Gates ran Microsoft the firm was even held up as a case study in the United States Senate for an inquiry into tax avoidance. By shifting mammoth earnings around smaller countries, it escaped paying an estimated £3bn a year. Last year, the firm was exposed for avoiding up to £100million a year in Britain alone by booking sales in Ireland under a secret deal with tax authorities.

Sure, he says he pays his personal taxes. But Gates became the world’s richest man off the back of massive corporate tax dodging. Yet because he is now giving away much of his money on his own terms rather than through the collective will of elected government, he thinks he has the right to tell the rest of us how to spend the taxes we do pay. He insists rich nations have moral duty to hit that risible aid target, despite growing evidence much of the money is wasted and, worse, backfires by fostering conflict and corruption.

Zuckerberg has called Gates his hero. This is unsurprising, given Facebook has adopted similar corporate tactics. Three years ago this giant firm paid an insulting £4,327 in corporation tax in this country — significantly less than my own personal tax bill. Yet we can presume staff, taking home an average £210,000 each, relied on state-funded public servants to provide health care in hospitals and police on streets as they helped grow their world-beating firm.

The following year it paid £4.2 million in corporation tax, but this was more than offset by a tax credit made when share options issued to employees pay out. “In practice, Facebook UK appears to have paid nothing in corporate tax to the UK public purse — less, even, than the £4,327 in 2014,” Alex Cobham of Tax Justice Network told the Financial Times. Last year, after deductible expenses, it handed over £2.58 million in UK corporation tax on £842.4 million revenues and pre-tax profits of £58.4 million.

Zuckerberg became rich because he had a clever idea allied to entrepreneurial skills, but he was aided by some of the world’s most sophisticated experts in tax avoidance. These firms may not be breaking the law, but the state is no match for armies of highly-paid accountants and lawyers using outdated regulations designed for the pre-internet age as they shift paper profits around the planet. A report last month found a digital business with international operations pays a typical 10.1% tax rate in Europe, compared with the 23.2% coughed up by other companies.

One multi-millionaire financier has even defended what he termed ‘self-tax’, the idea the super-rich are so smart they should determine how they spend their income rather than the state. Yet with such contempt for their fellow citizens or common values, these cut-throat capitalists are like a new wave of robber barons: first they get rich through ruthless tactics, then they purify their public image giving away big sums. We saw such practises before with the likes of oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller.

These tech billionaires pose as philanthropists and pledge to innovate in health and education having built fortunes on grubby tax avoidance. Yet one reason the public sector struggles is its constant funding shortage, partly due to rampant corporate tax dodging signed off by wealthy bosses. “We should be careful not to fall victim to a perverse form of Stockholm syndrome, coming to sympathise with the corporate kidnappers of our democracy,” wrote the author Evgeny Morozov last year.

If Zuckerberg makes a presidential bid, he could harness the huge power of his platform to create a tidal wave of support. Yet good businessmen often make lousy politicians, due to instinctive reliance on top-down decision-making and reluctance to compromise. And for proof these people are often no better than politicians in tackling the toughest problems, look at what happened when the Facebook founder himself promised to transform America’s schools.

Seven years ago, Zuckerberg told a cheering television audience of a $100m gift to turn schools in Newark, New Jersey, into “a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation.” His donation was doubled with other funds. Yet the scheme failed after blowing $20 million on consultants, making a series of blunders and running into opposition from parents, teachers and community leaders. “There was this enormous gap between the people who came to save the Newark children and the people who actually cared for and taught the Newark children,” discovered writer Dale Russakoff.

It is fine to admire plutocrats laden with gold as they promise to change the world and give vast chunks of cash. But do not be fooled: for all their fine words and casual clothes, these people have displayed arrogance towards the rest of us. They talk of changing society for the better but hid their piles of money through grotesque tax-avoidance schemes that undermine democracy and fuel populism. Gates, Zuckerberg and the self-aggrandising technology titans are part of the problem, not the solution.

Dear Zuck (as I think you like to be called),

I’m Nigel[1.  Nigel M. de S. Cameron, Editor of the Technology section of UnHerd.com – a new website which, as one of its priorities, will be examining how we ensure that Facebook and other tech giants work for societies across the planet (rather than the other way round).].

There’s a rumour going around that one day you’d like to be President. I mean, why else would anyone go to Iowa?[2. The small, midwestern state of Iowa plays a unique role in the US primary election system, as the “caucuses” – small-group events across the state – are the first event in the long process to select the candidates of each party. These caucuses have picked the successful nominee around half the time. In a Facebook post (where else?), on 3 January of this year, Mark Zuckerberg explained it this way: “My personal challenge for 2017 is to have visited and met people in every state in the US by the end of the year. I’ve spent significant time in many states already, so I’ll need to travel to about 30 states this year to complete this challenge.”]

(Sorry, Iowa.)

What’s more, you’ve started employing some of the nation’s top political talent: Joel Benson[3.  “Benenson is the latest in a series of seemingly political hires that Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have made as they expand their nonprofit, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, including 2008 Obama campaign manager David Plouffe and former Virginia governor Tim Kaine’s communications adviser, Amy Dudley.” – report in Vanity Fair, 3 August 2017.], Hilary Clinton’s chief strategist; David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager; and Ken Mehlman, George W Bush’s campaign manager. The headline on Quartz[4. “The choice to hire from both sides of the political aisle—with Plouffe and Mehlman—is notable in light of Facebook’s scandal over suppressing conservative news last May, and its controversial role in spreading fake news and fostering politically polarised echo chambers ahead of the election.” – from Quartz, 10 January 2017.] reporting the Mehlman hire, said all that needed to be said: “Mark Zuckerberg just hired the guys who helped win three of the last four presidential elections.” I don’t expect you’ve finished either and will it be long before you have key people from all four of the most recent presidential victories on your wage bill?

When Americans actually trust politicians even less than car salesmen (literally: 9% salesmen, 8% pols)[5.  Gallup survey, from December 2016, car salespeople “enjoyed” “very high” or “high” level of trust from 9% of Americans and – at the bottom of the table – Members of Congress scored 8%. Top, by the way, were nurses. ] you’ve clearly got a shot. As Donald Trump showed, there’s an appetite within the American electorate for outsiders and – in contrast to the current Tweeter-in-chief who inherited a fortune – you’re a more genuine example of the American dream. And considerably richer. Twenty times richer, according to estimates by Forbes[6.  Forbes estimated Mr Trump’s total worth at $3.5 billion and Mr Zuckerberg’s at $69.7 billion – Forbes.]  You’re also nicer than the current guy. More charitable. And, what’s more, no one is suggesting you’re a Russian agent. No surprise, then, that you’re tied at 40% with Donald Trump in one head-to-head survey[7.  The July 2017 survey, reported by Business Insider also gave Mr Zuckerberg a 24% favourable rating and a 29% unfavourable rating – with 47% undecided.] – even before all of your campaign advisers have begun to market you.

But, equally, you’re on 40% before Mr Trump or Senator Elizabeth Warren or any other yet-to-be-identified opponent has done the ‘oppo’[8.  “Oppo” or opposition research refers to the American political practice of investigating candidates to find negative information about them. Here’s a how-to guide: The Opposition Research Handbook, 4th edition] in order to open fire on you. And I hate to be a party pooper but there’s plenty of ammunition which will be coming your way if you do decide that at 36 years old[9.  Which will be Mr Zuckerberg’s age at the time of the next presidential contest – meaning Facebook’s founder will just exceed the minimum age of 35 that the Constitution specifies  for anyone wanting to be Commander-in-Chief. But, notably, he’ll be six years younger than the previous youngest ever president – Theodore Roosevelt – who, in September 1901, was 42 years and 322 days old.].

Here are ten attack lines that could cause you some serious damage:

1. Facebook collects up to 98 pieces of data on more than two billion people in the world. If data is the new oil, that makes Facebook the most powerful company in the world today – perhaps ever.
2. It took Facebook EIGHT MONTHS[10.  The delay received the Maureen Dowd treatment on 23 September 2017, New York Times ] to confess to the $100,000 spent by Russia on 3,000 pro-Trump ads.
3. Facebook enabled advertisers to target their products to users of the world’s largest social network who had expressed interest in “How to burn Jews,” and “Why Jews ruin the world.”[11.  This was exposed by ProPublica, 14 September 2017.]
4. It takes social media firms like Facebook 36 hours on average to remove extremist propaganda from organisations like ISIS. The British government thinks it should only take two hours[12.  ‘Tech giants told to remove extremist content much faster’, TechCrunch, 20 September 2017.]
5. In many countries Facebook hardly pays any corporate tax at all.[13.  Adam Creighton, The Australian, 20 May 2017: “The five US technology giants at the helm of the digital revolution wreaking havoc on the media, retailers and financial services are paying as little as less than 1 per cent of their local earnings in tax — about one-fifteenth as much as the major banks — despite new rules meant to stamp out tax avoidance by multinationals. Analysis by The Weekend Australian of the 2016 profit-and-loss statements of Google, Facebook, Apple, eBay and PayPal, which together employ fewer than 6,500 people in Australia, show their tax expenses as a share of revenue varied between 0.8 per cent (PayPal) and 1.5 per cent (Google).”] And it’s unclear how much it actually pays in the US. One expert writing in the business magazine Forbes says “it would not surprise me at all to find that Facebook has never actually paid any federal income tax, despite the substantial provisions that you see.”[14.  Los Angeles Times, 14 July 2016.  Peter Reilly in Forbes for November 3, 2016]
6. The BBC discovered 100 images of ‘child abuse’ on Facebook earlier this year. Not only were 80% of these images NOT removed, Facebook reported Britain’s public service broadcaster to the police[15.  “The BBC used the report button to alert the company to 100 images which appeared to break its guidelines. They included: pages explicitly for men with a sexual interest in children images of under-16s in highly sexualised poses, with obscene comments posted beside them groups with names such as “hot xxxx schoolgirls” containing stolen images of real children an image that appeared to be a still from a video of child abuse, with a request below it to share “child pornography” Of the 100 images only 18 were removed.”BBC News, 7 March 2017].
7. Six of Facebook’s eight directors are white men. A company that claims to be global has no black, no Hispanic and no Asian board members.
8. Facebook blocked 55,000 pieces of content in just six months – at the request of censorious countries like Russia. It is now developing software that will stop content likely to upset China’s government from even appearing[16.  New York Times report, 22 November 2016.].
9. The European Commission just fined Facebook €110 million for providing misleading information after it had bought WhatsApp[17.  European Commission statement, 18 May 2017].
10. Facebook hardly does any journalism itself but with Google is getting 99% of growth in digital advertising. A free country needs a free press and that free press needs advertising.

You’ve seen the attack ads that characterise US elections, Mark. Attacks on your presidential bid might not just destroy any hopes you may have of being the youngest ever occupant of the Oval Office – they could do serious damage to the company you’ve built, too.

Do you want that? The tide does seem to be turning against you and your fellow tech giants just at the moment. Look at Uber’s difficulties in London. Apple’s battle with the European Union on tax. More and more local protests at Airbnb from people who feel they are being priced out of their communities by this letting game

Which brings me to a key question. Why exactly do you want to be president – and so early in your life? Are you wanting to help the machinery of the American state catch up with the possibilities of technology? Washington DC certainly needs more Silicon Valley – as I’ve written[18.  ‘Don’t go South, Mr President: Go West!*’, 1 August 2017 ] Or do you want to be the person who stops someone like Elizabeth Warren from becoming president, with her agenda[19.  Senator Elizabeth Warren’s speech of 29 June 2016, “Reigniting competition in the American economy” set out her concern at concentrations of power in retailing, air travel, finance — and, far from last or least in her list, technology.] of stopping tech giants from doing more of what you’ve done – swallowing up the competition? I think of Instagram ($1bn), WhatsApp ($19bn), and Oculus ($2bn).

As you and your wife mull the potentially momentous decision to run or not, here are one or two things you might like to address first. Actually, ten. Some more important than others. They’re my suggestions for moves you might make in the next couple of years to give your candidacy a better chance – and, if you don’t run, are the right things to do anyway.

PART 1: Stop behaving like a monopolist – you’ve got enough money, after all

While most of us love Facebook, I’m not sure we love a vast corporate monopoly. And it’s obvious that you are one. Your first big backer, Peter Thiel, is so proud of the fact he’s going around saying that monopolies are wonderful and we need more of them. “Competition is for losers.” Yes, he said that[20.  Peter Thiel in the Wall Street Journal, 12 September, 2014. “Competition Is for Losers. If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly.” The article ends like this: “Tolstoy famously opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: Each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: They failed to escape competition.”].

And Peter Thiel is on your board. That suggests you don’t mind his views – or perhaps you share them?

There’s really never been a monopoly like yours – the scale of what you’ve built is astonishing:

• Every month, there are two billion users around the world; more than a third of the adult members of the species. With India just ahead of the USA[21.  Statista, reporting 241 million users of Facebook in India and 240 million users in the USA.].
• In the US alone there are 240 million.
• More than 40% of Americans are reported to get “news” from Facebook[22.  NiemanLab, 26 May 2016, reports research from Pew: “Two-thirds of Facebook users access news on the social platform, and with 67 percent of U.S. adults active on Facebook, that translates to 44 per cent of the overall US population which accesses news on the social platform, the study said.”].
• Facebook and Google together now account for one-fifth of global advertising[23.  The Guardian, May 2, 2017], and online ads have now overtaken television.

For an example of monopolistic behaviour, see Brian Feldman, New York Magazine: “Is Facebook a Monopoly? Just Ask Snapchat.”[24.  New York Magazine, 14 April 2017.]

Of course, as leader of a company it’s not your job to police competition policy – whether in Washington or in Brussels or in any other key market. But the rise and rise of the tech monopolies is worrying a lot of people on left and right alike. Bill Kristol, lightning-rod of Washington’s neo-conservatives, has just launched a new effort in partnership with well-known Democrat Bill Galston. And the first item on their joint agenda? You guessed. Taking down the tech monopolies. Eleanor Clift of the Daily Beast[25.  Daily Beast, 11 September 2017], talking to Galston, found that the numbers didn’t so much talk for themselves, but shouted:

“Just look at the figures, says Galston. “John D. Rockefeller would have died for a market share like that.” Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company epitomised the excesses of last century’s robber barons.  Today, one out of every two dollars spent online goes through Amazon. Facebook and Google got 99 per cent of the revenue growth from digital advertising last year. Facebook owns 77 per cent of mobile social traffic.”

While the American Left, epitomised by Senator Warren, has been more willing than the US Right to take on monopolies in recent years, the tech giants have been the exception. “Silicon Valley is part of the Democratic base,” notes Clift, “providing mega-donations and votes.” Some estimates suggest 80% of “tech cash” goes generally to the Democrats[26.  The Hill, 6 July 2016.] but went to Hillary Clinton rather than Donald Trump by 60-to-1 [27.  CNBC, 7 November 2016.].

So what can you do?

Here are some suggestions.

You really need to come out in favour of market capitalism – and against monopolies. As President you will need to police a market-place full of powerful crony-capitalists, every one of which is a rent-seeker or monopolist or wannabe. And, Zuck, running one yourself isn’t a great start. But there are commitments you can make that would make quite a difference:

• First, make it absolutely clear that you are an undying fan of the market capitalism that enabled Facebook to succeed in the first place. (Bye-bye, Myspace!)

• Then give us an assurance that you don’t plan to take over any more potential rivals (as you did with WhatsApp and Instagram) – because you really will welcome their healthy competition – or do another ‘Sherlock’ on the likes of SnapChat[28.  NYMag, 14 April 2017.].
• And I’m hardly the first person to suggest that you open up Facebook’s APIs – the keys to enable other programmes to connect with Facebook, so the powerful network effects that the internet makes possible don’t lock us all in to a single, monopoly platform[29.  “Application programme interfaces” are the keys to enable other apps to connect with Facebook – so smart developers will be able to come up with new ways of using Facebook – and integrate the platform with other online services. More here Wikipedia Open API.].
• Then assure us that you will soon roll out a Facebook-for-a-fee alternative to the fuzzy barter arrangement we all use at the moment. So for $x a month, users have an option to use the service while keeping all their data private (and getting no ads or merely generic, untargeted ones). This would also make all of us much more aware of how Facebook actually makes its money – and that it’s really an enormous and highly-profitable corporation.
• It may seem too much to ask, but I’ll ask it anyway: you could then assure us that your lobbyists in Washington and Brussels and other capitals will hold back from lobbying against efforts to use competition policy against your company (or any others). What, by the way, was the objective of the $2.38 million you spent on Washington lobbying[30.  The Register, 21 July 2017 reported that “In the second quarter of 2017 – April through to June – Google spent $5.93m on sending its representatives to meet with Senators. Amazon came next with $3.21m, then Facebook with $2.38m and finally Apple with $2.2m.”] in the second quarter of this year?

I know, the monopoly issue is hardly a simple one. A hundred years ago enormous public concern and some brilliant campaigning journalism[31.  For example by the pioneering journalist Ida Tarbell. See UnHerd’s short video tribute to her, narrated by Liam Halligan.] led the United States to take down destructive monopolies (the “trusts”), a tradition that continued right up to the break-up of the AT&T telecommunications monopoly into the Baby Bells in 1982[32.   Andrew Beattie, “Why is the 1982 AT&T breakup considered one of the most successful spinoffs in history?”].

Since then we have been kinder to monopolies, at the very time that technology has enabled new kinds of monopolies to flourish. But the pendulum will swing back as political interest on left and right builds to hold to account those who – like you – have amassed vast fortunes with your creative use of what was, let’s face it, originally publicly-funded US government technology[33.  Mariana Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State (Anthem Press, 2013) powerfully summarises the manner in which the US Government either funded or in some cases directly developed the core drivers of value in Silicon Valley’s technology.].

One reason we have not so far seen much backlash against Facebook (and Google) is of course that unlike traditional companies (the trusts of the early 20^th century, and AT&T more recently) most users don’t think of themselves as customers. The service looks as if it’s “free,” and Facebook (like Google) some sort of charity. Of course, we pay with data, or you would not be making any money. And you are making a lot.

So we need you to come out as a crusading fan of innovation and market capitalism, not a contented beneficiary of monopoly power. Because people from Senator Elizabeth Warren, scourge of financial and corporate abuses, on the left, and Bill Kristol, godfather of the anti-Trump right, are calling for it and will call for it until the monopolies are reined in.

Will this cause you discomfort? I expect so. But hey, you’re not going to end up a pauper. And you’re the one who looks like he wants to be George Washington’s successor.

There’s no clearer way to redefine yourself as committed to public service rather than private business.

PART 2: Pay your fair share of taxes

Like most Americans, I love the idea that companies make money, and I’m no fan of the IRS[34.  The Internal Revenue Service, the US federal tax-collecting agency, is famously unpopular among Americans.]. But much as we hate paying taxes, we know we will end up paying more if your company and others like it don’t pay a fair share. You may have noticed that retirement, health and other programmes are under threat, that the deficit continues to grow, and the nation’s infrastructure is not exactly the envy of the world. At some point voters will get angry and they’ll get angriest with the tax dodgers.

At the moment Facebook appears to be doing more than just take advantage of general deductions, but is playing hardball. Last year there was a story that the IRS had issued Facebook seven summonses within one month, and got no response. Did that get sorted out?[35.  Seth Fiegerman for CNN, 29 July 2016. “Facebook could owe $5 billion in taxes.”]

Then there’s the rather dramatic way the company has used Ireland – a famously low-tax economy – as a base for international operations.  As a result, it is not just the US treasury that has suffered. Fortune magazine reported that in the UK “Facebook Pays Astonishingly Little in Corporate Taxes.”[36.  See David Kravets, 12 December, 2016. “Facebook tells IRS it won’t pay billions over Irish tax maneuver.”
 and Michael Addady, 21 January, 2016.]

Jack Schofield reports from ZDNet that the IRS is after Facebook for these international tax games:  “America’s IRS is chasing Facebook for back taxes starting in 2010: Facebook opened its international headquarters in Dublin in 2009. Other American tech giants, including Apple and Google, are already under pressure from European tax authorities for channelling revenues through Ireland, which has a 12.5 per cent corporate tax rate. The US rate could be as high as 35 per cent.”[37.  Jack Schofield, July 30, 2016. “IRS wants more tax cash from Facebook, while Europe’s tax collectors target US tech.” and for more details on Facebook’s tax behaviour in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and elsewhere, see Liat Clark, Wired UK, May 4 2017.]

Oh I know, you have top-end tax advisers and follow their advice. And I’m also aware that corporate leaders have a fiduciary responsibility to investors (including you) to make as much profit as they can. But there’s a lot of scope for discretion in these matters, as the image of the company is itself enormously valuable. You might want to exercise it in a manner that leaves Facebook in the clear with tax authorities at home and abroad – and looking good with the public in the many nations in which you now operate.

If you’re wanting to be president it’s not enough to say you’re only acting like all other companies. Because, Mark, public service is very different from maximising your own bottom line, whatever the consequences for the wider nation.

How about firing your tax advisers and putting out a statement that you want Facebook to be a model corporate global citizen? So your plan is to start over, and pay tax in rough proportion to the average, standard rates in the nations that you operate – and which schools, police services and other public amenities require.

Part 3: You are taking a lot out of the news industry – perhaps it’s time to put more than a little something back

We can’t blame you for the internet and every way in which it has devastated traditional journalism – though the fact that we have around half the number of professional journalists than a generation ago[38.  The Pew Research Center reports a precipitous fall in newsroom journalists from 55,000 to less than 40,000 in the nine years between 2003 and 2012.] should keep all of us awake some nights. But if you want to be leader of the free world you need to be chief cheerleader for a free press – and you need to acknowledge how your huge and growing share of the online advertising market is killing more of the media outlets who actually do proper journalism.

More than 40% of Americans are reported to go to Facebook to get their news. Together with Google, you now control two thirds of online advertising[39.  Mathew Ingram for Fortune, 4 January, 2017, “How Google and Facebook Have Taken Over the Digital Ad Industry”: “Based on the International Advertising Bureau’s numbers and public financial numbers from Google and Facebook, the two digital giants accounted for about 99% of the $2.9 billion in advertising growth in the third quarter – with Google making up about 54% of the total and Facebook about 45%, leaving just 1% for everyone else.”], and continue to squeeze traditional media who depend on selling ads to stay in business – and, of course, who do the reporting.

Three quick ideas for you:

• Serious[40.  I emphasise “serious” because your “Journalism Project” doesn’t really count given the scale of the revenues you are winning from the industry.] investment in journalism: what about a big initiative to partner with local and international papers to train new recruits, to foster journalism on both sides of the digital/analogue divide? Maybe your friends at Google could be persuaded to go halves? Plainly it would need to be done blind (although you could think about addressing under-reporting of, eg, the poorer southern hemisphere). Otherwise, if you are involved in determining who gets money, it would be seen as just another Facebook move into the news space. You do, after all, have controversial form in this area[41.  Gizmodo on the 9th of May 2016 reported: “Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential ‘trending’ news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.”].
• Second, there’s “fake news,” and the shocking news – which you have just confirmed – that hundreds of Russian-linked accounts placed highly-targeted ads during the election campaign. Quite apart from the general “fake news” stories that Russia and other used to sway opinion. (See section seven for more on the Russian connection.)
• And third: some people are worried that, if you run for President, Facebook could play the part of the Zuckerberg cheerleader, as Fox lined up for Trump. If that’s not the plan, we need to know how this is going to work. Perhaps a high-level panel of independent journalists should be given editorial control of the site as soon as you decide you are going to run? Since you’re already rumoured to be running, something of that kind could not start too soon.

Part 4: Make Facebook (the Company) look less like 1950s Mad Men

There are two big issues here.

First, diversity. I know, this is a problem with other Valley companies. But why isn’t Facebook as diverse as America? Why do so many Silicon Valley companies look more like the Mad Men ad agency world of the 1950s than workplaces of the 21^st century?

While there can be genuine problems in recruiting diverse talent in a field like engineering where most applicants may be male, what about the top? Eight pictures come up when you put your board of directors in a search engine. There’s Sheryl Sandberg, your Chief Operating Officer and then there’s Susan Desmond-Hellman of the Gates Foundation, the sole female independent director. Then there are six white guys. No other women. No black or Asian or Hispanic directors. This looks odd enough in the context of the America of 2017 – and to a growing number of people it looks deeply offensive. But given your two billion users span the globe, it looks bizarre and is bizarre.

Here are some quick ideas:

• The board of directors issue can be sorted out pretty quickly, as you don’t just run the company, you control it. Sit down with yourself one evening and think up a dream-team board that brings in some of the extraordinary, proven leaders who represent the global community you serve. Start, perhaps, with India where there are more individual Facebook users than in America – it is, as you may have noticed, a country with quite a tech-savvy population.
• It’s harder further down the company, especially among engineers. But you’re good at the hard stuff. Why not ‘move fast and break some things’ to turn this situation around? Set the company the challenge of becoming America’s most diverse new-technology organisation. Be the major source of initiatives, scholarships, internships, prizes, for women and minorities in every area where you have found them hard to recruit. But please, please, begin with the board.
• Then reflect on what amazing value all this fresh, and fresh-thinking, talent will bring to the next round of Facebook’s global development.

The second part of this question focuses on Facebook the corporation. Why is the world’s top “social” company run on oil-baron principles?

The corporate structure of Facebook is as old-economy as you can get. Like Rupert Murdoch’s media empire[42.  Myles Udland, Business Insider, April 27, 2016. “Facebook has a new class structure and Mark Zuckerberg is still in control.” “This is not a traditional governance model.” And on Murdoch and others: Cynthia Littleton, in Variety for March 25, 2015: “Control Issues: How Media Moguls Keep a Tight Grip on Their Empires.”] there are two “share classes.” It sounds a technical issue, but it’s actually very simple. What it means is that even though you don’t actually own more than half the company you personally control it with a majority of the voting shares. (When Facebook went public, you owned 22%, but ended up with 57% of the voting shares.) Many people see this as a thoroughly bad business practice as it drives a wedge between investors and decisions about their money, which can be a big enough challenge in a standard corporate structure where share value is reflected in voting power. It’s also illegal in some other parts of the world, such as the Hong Kong stock exchange[43.  Matt Orsagh, CFA Institute for April 1, 2014. “Dual-Class Shares: From Google to Alibaba, Is It a Troubling Trend for Investors?”]

Of course, like many iffy practices, it doesn’t defy the principles of the market. When Facebook went public investors knew what they were letting themselves in for. The market priced Zuckerberg’s control of the super-shares into the valuation. They reckoned they could live with it, and would have to if they wanted a piece of the action.

But the oil-baron corporate structure highlights something even bigger: the world’s leading “social” company is just about the world’s least participatory. It’s as top-down as they come.

There was a famous example of this a few years back when you decided to change Facebook’s privacy rules. There was a system in place from the early days that gave power to users by actually letting them vote on such changes. People organised to defeat a proposal using this system. As a result, the system was scrapped[44.  Josh Constine in TechCrunch, 1 June, 2012. “Facebook Forced By Privacy Activist To Put Policy Changes Up For Worldwide Vote Until June 8th.”].

Of course, there’s a silver lining: you’re the boss, and pretty much every one of the changes we’re suggesting to boost your chances on the ballot could be implemented in a memo from your desk.

So tell your lawyers to work on a re-structuring option that will bring investment into line with shareholder control – with only one class of shares.

Then begin an aggressive programme of user participation in decision-making. For example: what about reviving the idea that users should shape privacy policy, though in much more detail than before? You could start by giving us all half a dozen basic privacy models for the company, and take an informed vote of users – supervised by a body like the League of Women Voters[45.  The League of Women Voters is a widely respect non-partisan organisation that has been responsible for sponsoring some of the US Presidential Debates. In the UK, the Electoral Reform Society might play such a role.] That is separate from the need to offer users more and better personal privacy choices. And more control over the feed we see. Users could be given a big say in all of these.

I’m not suggesting you re-structure as a non-profit (though that wouldn’t be the worst idea). Maybe better, mutualisation – like a credit union or (the UK term) building society – where all the users are the shareholders: that would certainly best fit the “social” idea.

And why not add to your board two or three distinguished public figures as thoroughly independent directors, both to represent users (who could elect them) and to act as the conscience of the company? Both in its external commitments: to such causes as fighting poverty, supporting journalism, and addressing the mental health challenges of social media. And internally: protecting children, and preventing the use of Facebook by criminals and terrorists and foreign powers.  What about people like President Jimmy Carter, physician and commentator Charles Krauthammer, former Irish President Mary Robinson, and social science researcher Sherry Turkle?

Part 5: Put free speech before profiting in China, Russia and other censorious regimes

There are plenty of us who think that a president who is Mandarin-speaking (as you are) would be a wonderful idea. Beijing will be our biggest rival and our closest strategic partner throughout this 21^st century and it’s not going English-speaking any time soon.

Which makes it all the more important that we should be able to trust you on the China front. And if we get into a campaign, there will be serious scrutiny of how Facebook has handled the demands of the Chinese government.

That’s why it was especially disturbing to hear that your company is engaged in detailed preparation for a potential return to China – and by detailed preparation I fear I mean the development of software that will identify and suppress material likely to offend Beijing’s rulers[46.  Mike Isaac, “Facebook Said to Create Censorship Tool to Get Back Into China,” New York Times, 22 November, 2016]. Is this true? I know, it’s complex to operate in another country and that every country has its own rules. But freedom-loving westerners need to make hard choices. Cambridge University Press just decided to refuse to unpublish hundreds of articles on subjects like Tibet and Tiananmen Square from its academic journals[47.  Maev Kennedy and Tom Philipps in The Guardian, 21 August, 2017. “Cambridge University Press backs down over China censorship.”] The Chinese may ban CUP entirely in response or maybe they will decide that, on balance, they would rather have the benefits of access to its enormous store of knowledge.

Unfortunately it’s not just China where Facebook appears ready to compromise in order to maintain a piece of the market. It removed a page that was advertising a protest in support of the democracy campaigner Alexei Navalny – at the request of the Kremlin[48.  The Verge, 22 December 2017] By the way of another example, it has removed materials regarded by Pakistan’s government as “blasphemous”[49.  Daily Mail, 28 March 2017]

So: what about a Facebook Charter on Free Speech and Human Rights Worldwide, setting out, in the most transparent terms, what local and national laws you are wiling to operate within and what kinds of censorious laws or interventions are too compromising? This Charter could be endorsed by the board and audited by independent outsiders? And can you clarify if there’s truth behind the New York Times story? And whether you have nixed the project?

Part 6: Do more to help the fight against terror

In light of September’s fortunately botched attack on the London underground system, a headline from MailOnline stated:

“Web giants with blood on their hands: PM to order internet bosses to clamp down on extremism as ‘it takes minutes on Google to find how to build the bomb which brought terror to the Tube’ – PM will take on Google, Facebook and Microsoft after terror attack in London.”[1.  See Daily Mail of 16 September 2017.]

There’s plainly a balance to be struck when it comes to private sector companies collaborating with governments, not least because not all governments hold the freedom of their citizens in equally high regard. But there are all kinds of problems, now that cyberspace is where we live so much of our lives and get much of our information. There’s terrorism, and ISIS is the new and deadly kid on the block. And then there’s the fresh and enormous problem of Russian efforts to influence the outcome of western elections – through Facebook. This terrifying subversion of democracy was something you ridiculed just a few months ago:

“What a ridiculous notion, Mark Zuckerberg scoffed shortly after the election, that his social-media company — innocent, well-intentioned Facebook — could have helped Donald Trump’s win. ‘Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook . . . influenced the election in any way — I think is a pretty crazy idea,’ he said. ‘Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.’ You even ignored a warning from President Obama about misuse of your network[2.  Washington Post, 26 September 2017, “Obama tried to give Zuckerberg a wake-up call over fake news on Facebook”].

Were you being too defensive? Complacent? Insufficiently aware of how your advertising system worked? Too greedy to check? We’d like to know. Because of course we now know – and your company has furnished us with certain details – that a highly sophisticated effort was made by Russia to tip the election in Trump’s direction, side by side with the planting of “fake news”, through buying targeted ads. Groups and individuals who were fronts for the Russian government paid Facebook to push their favoured candidate. The Washington Post’s legendary Margaret Sullivan has concluded Russian efforts on Facebook tipped the election in Donald Trump’s favour[3.  Margaret Sullivan, in the Washington Post, September 7, 2017. “Facebook’s role in Trump’s win is clear. No matter what Mark Zuckerberg says.”]. This is simply horrific and its dark cloud hangs over all the assurances we have been hearing about a new level of co-operation between Facebook and the security services.

“On terror, it looks like your company has had a change of heart and decided to be a lot more helpful”, says Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the programme on extremism at George Washington University. About a year ago Facebook intensified efforts to combat terrorism, resulting in the removal of a great deal of that activity from its platform, “Facebook at some point in the last year planted a flag in the ground and said: Not on our platform,” Hughes said.”[4.  Jessica Guynn, in USA Today, 15 June 2017]

Part 7: Make Facebook a lot more child-friendly

It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious but what on earth was your company thinking of when, after the BBC pointed out 100 sexualised images of children on Facebook, you not only failed to remove all of these images (only 18 were actually removed),  but you reported the BBC to the police!? The BBC also identified five convicted paedophiles with Facebook profiles. These weren’t removed either.

I hope you’ve fired those people already. But this does not look like the behaviour of a corporation fundamentally committed to children.

Natasha Lomas of Techcrunch[1.  Natasha Lomas, Techcrunch, 7 March, 2017. “Facebook’s content moderation system under fire again for child safety failures.” ] is clear about the problem:

“Facebook is not putting in the resources needed to fix the current problem it has with moderation – even as it directs resources into trying to come up with possible future solutions where AI-moderation can be deployed at scale. But if Zuckerberg wants to do more right now, the simple fix is to employ more humans to review and act on reports.”

Why not bring in a group of experts in child protection, and give them all the budget they need and authority over every Facebook function so they could clean this up and keep it clean? For our children, and the company and – oh yes – your candidacy, this could be a terrific investment.

But in the child protection arena, stopping the posting of X-rated imagery is the easy bit. Much more profound and challenging is the growing evidence that social media is bad for the mental and social health of young people. Facebook, like other social media platforms, has “a negative effect because they can exacerbate children’s and young people’s body image worries, and worsen bullying, sleep problems and feelings of anxiety, depression and loneliness, the participants said.” This is from a poll of young people[2.  Denis Campbell, in The Guardian, 19 May, 2017, “Facebook and Twitter ‘harm young people’s mental health’.”]. It chimes with warnings from child protection charities like Britain’s NSPCC, which blames rising incidents of self-harm on social media. It also meshes with serious academic research[3.  For example, there’s MIT professor Sherry Turkle’s extensive research. Here is a review of her book Alone Together. Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. From that review comes this helpful summary: “Those children, meanwhile, are absorbed in the digital world in a way that older generations, with memories of analogue living, can barely comprehend. Turkle interviews teenagers who are morbidly afraid of the telephone. They find its immediacy and unpredictability upsetting. A phone call in “real time” requires spontaneous performance; it is “live”. Text messages and Facebook posts can be honed to create the illusion of spontaneity… This digital generation also expects everything to be recorded. In any social situation, there are phones with cameras that relay personal triumphs and humiliations straight to the web. Turkle’s interviews debunk the myth that web-savvy kids don’t care about privacy. Rather, they see it as a lost cause. The social obligation to be part of the network is too strong even for those who resent the endless exposure. Teenagers perform on the digital stage, suppressing anxiety about who is lurking in the audience… Turkle has interviewed people of all ages and from a wide range of social backgrounds and finds identical patterns of compulsive behaviour. We start with the illusion that technology will give us control and end up controlled. We get Blackberries to better manage our email, but find ourselves cradling them in bed first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Children compete with mobile phones for their parents’ attention. From that anxiety flows ever greater reliance on technology to mediate human relations. Human beings can be needy, capricious, threatening, but at least calls can be diverted, emails blocked, Facebook friends “unfriended”. Turkle sees this too as a symptom of incipient roboticism. The network encourages narcissism, teaching us to think of other people as a problem to be managed or a resource to be exploited.”].

As a parent and a responsible business owner and a prospective President of the United States, what do you have to say about the impact that social media is having on our kids? We need to know, and we need you to be using your vast resources and influence in their interest. How much research does Facebook fund on the impact of social media on children – and how much influence does that research have on how Facebook operates? Perhaps you’d like to publish it, Mark? Don’t parents deserve to see it? And if you’re not commissioning such research, don’t be surprised if some people are reminded of the tobacco industry and its historic refusal to face up to the impact on their customers’ physical health.

Of course, the challenges go way beyond social media use by healthy kids. I just Googled “Facebook and child,” and four of the first five choices were these: protection, predators, safety, and trafficking (the fifth was custody). That is bad news for your company – and you. Especially if you plan a career in public office.

Part 8: Poverty in Silicon Valley. How can you solve the nation’s problems if you can’t those on your own doorstep?

You don’t need me to tell you that you are rich. Or that all around you there are people who are poor.

California is the world’s sixth largest economy, but it’s also the state with the highest levels of poverty in the US. What’s more, there is a special concentration of poverty and homelessness around Silicon Valley[1.  Median house prices in the mostly poor city of East Palo Alto have gone up by 200% in 5 years, to $800,000. Richard Waters in the Financial Times, 24 August, 2017. “The great Silicon Valley land grab.”].

Then there’s the family who work for Facebook who are living in a garage[2.  Julia Carrie Wong in The Guardian, 24 July, 2017 “Facebook worker living in garage to Zuckerberg: challenges are right outside your door.”].

Stories of the Valley’s wealth, and the homelessness and poverty of so many people living nearby, keep hitting the headlines. Of course, it isn’t one problem, it’s several. East Palo Alto (roughly three miles from your house?) has historically been a poor (and violent) community. Things there are actually, slowly, improving. San Francisco has a long-term housing shortage (though it has been driven up dramatically by the high salaries paid by Valley companies). The mild climate attracts homeless people who sleep rough.

Poverty in a land of plenty is nothing new. But extreme poverty cheek-by-jowl with the enormous wealth being generated by the Valley is a growing national embarrassment. What’s more, all that innovation rhetoric is at stake. Can’t fabulously wealthy super-smart people solve a problem in their own backyard? Can’t you? And, Mark, don’t underestimate the importance of this. You’ll know that many fear the future is set to be characterised by inequality on a scale we haven’t yet experienced. To simplify: people fear the owners of robot technologies getting rich beyond imagination and the masses whose jobs are taken by those robot technologies sinking more than swimming. How you deal with your own backyard gives something of a clue, in many minds, to how you’ll behave in the future.

Here are some quick ideas:

• Your charity effort is focused on other worthy things, so how about launching another one to fight poverty in the Valley? Maybe it could partner with Facebook, in a vast effort in corporate social responsibility. Either or both?
• You could twist arms as hard as you need to so every other Valley leader is strongly encouraged to join in. And they could start by ending efforts to minimise their property taxes.
• You could recruit a brains-trust of the smartest thinkers on poverty-solving, and give them funding to start up innovative projects – or copy tried-and-tested efforts from elsewhere.
• You could promise that no Facebook employee, from janitors and food service people up, will lack for a home in reasonable commuting distance – and then come up with a way to make that work that does not further distort the housing market.

Helpful?

Part 9: Slow down. You don’t need to be President for a decade or two

We’re just listening to rumours and trying to put two and two together from places you’ve been to and people you’ve hired. The focus does seem to be on the presidency, with the implication that you might try for it in one shot. But – and sorry to be so blunt – why do you expect hundreds of millions of Americans to trust you to run the country when all you have ever done is run Facebook? Why should we trust you, for example, to outmanoeuvre Vladimir Putin when, in the dark arts of statecraft, this graduate of the KGB has been at it for as long as you’ve been alive? He already seems to know more about how to abuse your advertising systems than you do.

Here are some quick suggestions:

First: “Move fast and break things,” your widely quoted motto, may not be the best approach to take when it comes to the messiness and complexity of politics. Maybe move a little more slowly, or at least more carefully, and try not to do unnecessary damage? At a very basic level we really do need to hear you speak more. When you have spoken in public[1.  For example your Harvard 2017 Commencement Speech. Not bad for a drop-out!] you’ve often had really interesting things to say – whether in English or Mandarin!

But we are genuinely puzzled as to what you think about so many things – from strategy on North Korea to tax reform to the kind of people we need on the Supreme Court to stem-cell research (a point  that former White House economist and current robotics company head Pippa Malmgren made forcibly when we met her). In fact among those we have been speaking with there was even uncertainty as to whether you might run as an independent, a Democrat (the general assumption), or a moderate Republican (which Pando’s Sarah Lacy suggested).

It’s time for a series of speeches, picking up the poverty issues we’ve just discussed, or the health issues the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is tackling, and then starting to outline your take on the other great questions of our day. Whether you prefer the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco or the World Economic Forum at Davos as a starting-point, what’s really needed is a barn-storming tour around those states you are busy visiting. (Dealing with hecklers is a key political skill – and you aren’t likely to acquire it in all-hands meetings at Facebook HQ.)

Why not start by running for governor of California like another famous “outsider” who had never held public office did before you. (The springboard worked just fine for him.) Your state, the state of Silicon Valley and Hollywood and the greatest fount of creativity on the planet, is also the state with the highest rate of poverty in the United States. The State with perennial budget crises. The world’s sixth largest economy. A state replete with challenges – and resources. That would give you time to build your image as a public servant and a political leader – a fighter for the poor and the homeless, and for decent, well-run companies – in the Valley, the state, the nation, and around the world.

Part 10: Whose side are you on?

If you were to become President you would be the most powerful elected politician in the world but you’d also be one of the richest people in the world and, because data is the 21st century equivalent of what oil was to the industrial age, you would be a tech power, too. When was the last time that such power would have been concentrated in one person? I asked a handful of historians and the best answer anyone could give was to make a case for a Chinese emperor at the time of gunpowder’s invention.

For a corporate superpower to also seek to be a political superpower would raise questions at any time but this isn’t any ol’ time. You’re leader of a huge corporation at a time when many Americans – right, left, centre and not normally bothered by politics – are concerned about the rise of big businesses. Let’s not forget that it’s less than a decade after Wall Street and a handful of “too big to fail” institutions brought the global economy to a juddering and very painful halt. Whether it’s the airline industry, banking, supermarkets  or your own area of technology, power is concentrated in very few hands. We need to know what you think about all this and we’d like to know now.

Bill Kristol, founding editor of the Weekly Standard, and Bill Galston, former adviser to Bill Clinton, have teamed up to form The New Center[1.  Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post, 12 September 2017: “The New Center: Will it work?”], a think tank seeking to frame new issues that cut across the traditional political spectrum. And their top issue? “Challenging the Titans of Technology.”

This is what they have said:

“These companies have competed and acted in their interests, which is exactly what we expect in a free market system. But as these companies have grown, they have also become more prone to engage in the grungier anti-competitive practices that the public and political leaders decry when practised in other industries. In recent years, large technology companies have been investigated for colluding with a secret agreement not to hire one another’s best workers; fined billions of dollars for unfairly favouring certain services on their platforms over other rivals; and been accused of mishandling sensitive consumer information or of obtaining new customers under false pretences.

“Government can’t be expected to sit idly by if the size and power of certain companies begin threatening the vigorous competition and innovation upon which any healthy economy depends. The power of technology companies presents government with a challenge very different from the corporate monopolies of old. These companies don’t just dominate a commodity, as Standard Oil did before it was broken up by the Supreme Court in 1911, or physical infrastructure, as AT&T did with telephone lines before it was split into the “Baby Bells” in 1984. They own an unprecedented amount of data, the most valuable asset in the world today. And the more data they own, the more powerful they become.

“Successful market economies require new companies willing to challenge the status quo and find new answers to old problems. The New Center must clear the path.”

This is just one illustration of a new tide in political thought – as you must know.

So, Zuck, are you wanting to be President to help reverse the concentration of power or, like your board member, Peter Thiel[2.  Wall Street Journal, 12 September, 2014. “Competition Is for Losers. If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly.”], do you think that “competition is for losers”?

You don’t need me to tell you that for all the admiration the nation has for the innovation and dollars flowing from the Valley, we’ve become increasingly tired of the scandals. Whether it’s sexual discrimination and harassment, or just really unattractive people in charge, the Valley’s culture is now famous not just for its creativity. Some of us have been really surprised, since it would be reasonable to assume that companies led by young people – whose parents and grandparents fought for civil rights, and the equal workplace treatment of women – would be models of inclusiveness and corporate social responsibility. Plainly that hasn’t happened. So what are you doing about it?

Sure, you aren’t Sheriff of Silicon Valley but there seems to be a vacancy. There’s barely a company without serious issues, and maybe you’re just the guy to challenge them – from the top, and (always the most uncomfortable place for both parties) from among their peers. They can’t get you fired, like the guy working for the New America Foundation in DC who got too critical of Google and found himself searching for another job because the biggest search engine did not approve[3.  Kenneth P. Vogel in the New York Times, 30 August 2017, “Google Critic Ousted from Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant.” ].

So maybe you should run. For Sheriff, I mean, for a start. America would begin to pay attention.

But now to some details, about you and your company. Things you should maybe look at afresh if you want to run a campaign that goes beyond Sheriff of Silicon Valley. Whether you focus chiefly on doing this as Mark, or Facebook does it as a corporation, or the pair of you do it in cahoots, there’s a golden opportunity to challenge poverty and corporate misbehaviour both in your backyard and across the planet. Not sure quite how you do the latter but that’s probably why you have hired Messrs Benenson, Mehlman and Plouffe, rather than me. I imagine you’re paying them handsomely. Make them earn it.

And as for less than best practice, there’s your “charity”, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Aside from hiring high-octane pols to help, it’s begun to hand out big sums to researchers. But, of course, it isn’t actually a charity, is it? And no one seems to know why. It’s another private company that you control. You might think of shifting it into the world of regular charities by registering it with the IRS as a 501 (c)(3) – like the Gates Foundation and the Red Cross. Then what about having your lawyers draw up a deed that would make your enormous promised gift irrevocable? Just so we all know you’re really serious. This all might seem very untrusting but another businessman made very big promises on his recent road to the White House and you’ll have to forgive us if the idea of another one won’t be greeted with universal glee.

Best regards,

Nigel

(>>> Return to introduction).