Peggy Noonan, like everyone else, has all the answers on how to “fix” Facebook and other tech giants.
“Break them up,” she wrote Thursday in the Wall Street Journal. “Break them in two, in three; regulate them. Declare them to be what they’ve so successfully become: once a pleasure, now a utility.”
On these very obvious solutions to “fixing” Facebook and the others, she wonders, “Why are Republicans so slow to lead?”
Indeed, Noonan wondered, why, oh why, won’t Republicans in Congress simply “lead?”
Some people are apparently still under the impression that it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s job to take care of them and their children, and while he’s at it, make sure that everyone can use his dumb website for their own financial gain.
What exactly would it mean to “break them up?” Facebook owns Instagram and the messaging service WhatsApp, so they could be three distinct companies. But what’s the purpose of that? What benefit would there be for the consumer? All three of these companies operate the same way — they mine every bit of personal data from their users so that they can sell it to advertisers. Are users better off having their data sold to even more buyers?
What exactly would it mean to “regulate them?” If the government were to prohibit Facebook from sucking up user information, it would just go out of business. It could try charging customers a fee, but then people would stop using it. The company would be reduced to a fraction of its current self.
If that’s what Peggy Noonan and Facebook critics want, they should say so.
Noonan writes in her column that now is the time to take political action on Facebook et al., because “the mood in America is anti-big tech.” That’s not true. Yes, there are now 15 million fewer Americans using Facebook than there were in 2017. But that’s likely a migration of young people moving away from a platform associated with senior citizens. Instagram, meanwhile, is white hot in popularity. And, again, Instagram is still a Facebook property.
Anyone will tell you they don’t like having their personal data taken from them and sold to other companies but then they’ll delightedly upload another photo and tag another location.
The problem is so easily solved that Noonan concluded her column by calling on Congress to do “something,” anything at all. “Do it incompetently,” she wrote, “but do something.”
That sounds like a fantastic idea. Make up a crisis and then pass some some law, any law to “fix” it. Noonan’s train of thought is exactly how we got Obamacare.
Think of that: Obamacare, but for Facebook. I’ve got an even better idea: Why don’t we also inject ourselves with the bubonic plague to stop school shootings?
There is only one answer to “fixing” any problem, real or imagined, caused by Facebook: Delete your account.
