Is Facebook too big to fail?

Facebook last week broke a new record in massiveness, when it became a trillion dollar company. It wasn’t the first, but the youngest, at only 17 years old to be so luscious. Notably, the other four companies that have hit this level are also new tech giants – Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (the artist formerly recognised as Google) and Microsoft. To make it more concrete, here is a trillion in numerals:

1,000,000,000,000. 

A number and twelve zeroes, almost inconceivable to process mentally, especially when compared with your pay packet (I presume). It was a brief moment, as Facebook’s share price jumped after a favourable court judgment.  

I’m a coin when it comes to Facebook (ie two sides). Professionally, I’ve spent a decade or more warning students about the potential evils of this supposed vehicle for communication that in fact sucks the juices out of all who use it, at least in commercial terms. But on a personal level it is so darned handy and pleasurable to keep in touch with loads of people, especially on the other side of the world, and remain part of each other’s lives. It’s fashionable among certain cohorts to scorn Facebookery as trivial, nosey, intrusive, and yes it can be all that. But the 2004-born phenomenon is just carrying the can for all of social media in taking those criticisms.

And Facebook ain’t going away soon. But an interesting development in the US was the appointment of big-tech critic and academic, Lina Khan, as head of the Federal Trade Commission. Khan made her professional name with a detailed takedown of Amazon in an academic paper and can be expected to take a very tough line with all the tech biggies.

But in all this conversation about reining in what used to be the FAANGs, and now thanks to Google’s Alphabetisation, are the FAAANs, what exactly can be done? Fines for misbehaviour, however that is construed, would have to be astronomical to hurt these entities. Facebook was fined $5 billion over allowing users’ data to be used by third parties, stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and even that massive penalty was almost laughable, like fining me 50 cent. Facebook makes about that in revenue every month.

So is the answer licensing? Social media companies will have to jump through certain hoops to get their internet driving licence. Regulation has come dropping slow to the online world, and it was painfully obvious at Mark Zuckerberg’s Congressional hearings in 2018 that the legislators’ general level of knowledge of his world hovered around zero. This is a big subject and I’ll be keen to return to it.