Capitalism is good — and the best part is that businesses fight for you. Businesses need your attention, they need your money, and if they start losing your interest, then another entrepreneur is likely to swoop in and take you and your money away. That is what drives every single company to fight every day for their customers.
That’s capitalism.
This is important to understand, because Congress has been ratcheting up their rhetoric more and more over the past couple of months against the tech giants — Facebook, Google, and Twitter have each been under attack. First, they were under attack for their leftist bias and now, to round out the year, another privacy battle.
But almost 100 percent of the attacks have been based on claims, or at least an understanding of the Internet, that just isn’t true. If Congress didn’t have their Internet tubes in a bunch it would make sense. These companies want to make money. They don’t benefit if customers leave their platforms. They are operating under capitalism.
When it comes to claiming a leftist bias, I get really frustrated. It is that type of ignorance that will give us a North Korea-style web experience. The Internet doesn’t work by one guy deciding what gets posted and what doesn’t (that would make a great movie, though). It doesn’t even work by a team of people doing it. Google is what it is because of their algorithm. Facebook’s the same, and that is how tech works — the platforms that they spend money and invest in can scale so that we can all watch cat videos at the same time.
In an email to Google employees last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said it best, “We have a long-term incentive to make the right decisions to ensure our products work for everyone.” That is a capitalist. The thing about business is that personal politics don’t matter: Everyone’s money is green.
When it comes to privacy concerns, I get it — but data on social media are something that should really be a personal responsibility to protect or not protect. Only share what you would share to the world. That can be hard nowadays, but attacking a company like Facebook, Google, or Twitter, all providing access to their platforms for free, just doesn’t make sense. Mainly because they want you to be happy — and that means that if you want privacy, they are going to try to give you privacy.
That said, the recent uproar about a grand data-sharing arrangement (that isn’t a grand data-sharing plan) is a chorus of people who don’t understand how the Internet works. Hint: It isn’t magic.
When Facebook makes its platform, it secures itself. When Google is programming its platforms, they make them secure. The same with Twitter. That doesn’t mean they are perfect, and since the platforms are under an almost constant threat of hacker, they are always changing (spoiler: it is not Silicon Valley’s fault that there are hackers in the world). However, it also means the platforms don’t just automatically work together. They have to give permissions to other companies — and those permissions can benefit both companies.
From a Facebook response to the conspiracy theory:
Now that is how the Internet works.
But what we need to come back to is how capitalism works. It might seem like these companies are too big to fail. But that just isn’t the case. They can go away as fast as a viral video loses its luster. These companies are fully engaged in the fight of their lives every day — and that’s a good thing for all of us. That means that they want us to be happy. They want us to be their customers. And, they are constantly working on ways to make both of those things happen.
If you wanted to prove me wrong, your first step would likely be to open a browser and use Google to start your research, and the reason that you would do that is because Google provides search results that are amazingly relevant. You might post your search result on Facebook, because your friends are there and will find it interesting. Those things aren’t political, they aren’t necessarily personal, you do them because the platforms work.
The fastest way to break them is to bring the government in to run them, or help run them. The large tech companies will make mistakes, but remember I started this article saying that capitalism is good. I didn’t say capitalism is perfect.
Charles Sauer (@CharlesSauer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is president of the Market Institute and previously worked on Capitol Hill, for a governor, and for an academic think tank.
