“We Were Naïve,” Says FCC Chair Who Oversaw the Creation of Section 230
The problem is not really in markets, but in society. What is the Facebook market? The market for no one charging you to put your own content on a page? If you look at it as a market, as with Facebook, you see that a fairly small percentage of the overall online advertising market goes to Facebook, and that doesn’t really worry you. But you are worried about the embedding of the company in the society. And it is the same thing with Amazon and the same thing with Google. It is exactly the same as with AT&T: one company, everybody has a phone line, they define the technology and they do everything—so the government broke it up.
My conclusion is that Mark Zuckerberg, god bless him, who is a smart but really lucky guy, should not be surprised that people want to break up his company, because it’s exactly the same thing that happened to AT&T and also Standard Oil. Standard Oil was also embedded in society in every conceivable way: in shipping, transportation, industrial process, heating. When companies are that deeply entrenched, it isn’t anymore just about efficiency and markets—it is about their political power, social power, and influence power. And if you are Facebook and you say, “We know that we are powerful, but our powers are such superpowers that we ourselves cannot control them’”—this is not what I would call a workable excuse.
See the full story here: https://promarket.org/we-were-naive-says-the-fcc-chair-who-oversaw-the-creation-of-section-230/