New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. PA Images PA Images

THERE IS PERHAPS more focus on Facebook’s dominant position within social media right now than there ever has been. 

For a tech giant used to being in the firing line, last night’s global outage affecting billions and the explosive testimony of a single whistleblower has put even Facebook on the back foot. 

So much so that Facebook’s anti-competitive practices are again in the spotlight, with US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last night saying that the company should be broken up. 

Ocasio-Cortez reminded her millions of followers that Instagram and WhatsApp were not products of Facebook’s innovation but of acquisition.

Facebook bought WhatsApp for $16 billion in 2014 and bought Instagram for $1 billion two years before that.

Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: 

If Facebook’s monopolistic behavior was checked back when it should’ve been (perhaps around the time it started acquiring competitors like Instagram), the continents of people who depend on WhatsApp & IG for either communication or commerce would be fine right now. Break them up.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 4, 2021

The influential New York politician wasn’t alone, with People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy tweeting that WhatsApp should be “nationalised” to create “fully public spaces, not private spaces masquerading as public spaces”. 

In response to queries from The Journal today, Murphy said the call to nationalise was a bit tongue-in-cheek but that there are serious questions about how we allow a private company to have so much influence. 

“Our Budget document won’t include an estimate for nationalising Facebook, don’t worry, but the point is that something like 7 billion people around the world out of a total of 8 billion were affected by one private corporation going down,” he says.

Today in the US Congress we’re going to hear evidence from a whistleblower inside Facebook who will say that Facebook knew that their were algorithms were prioritising profits at the expense of causing misery for people.

So I think it does raise a question about the extraordinary power that this one private corporation has, which in effect is now a natural monopoly due to its size.

Yes someone can to go and set up an alternative to Facebook, but if all your friends are on Facebook, or more likely, Instagram or WhatsApp, then there’s not much point in being on it. So we need to see a challenge to the monopoly power of Facebook.

Murphy says that what he and others like him would like to see is “ultimately some form of transnational public democratic ownership”. 

He adds the the question of Facebook’s ownership is not separate to the ongoing debate ongoing data centres in this country: 

It’s linked to the points we made about datacenters last week and that we’re going to vote on it this week. Because these are private companies, their algorithms are private, they don’t publish them. And because they don’t publish them we don’t know much of the activity that’s in the data centres, although we suspect a lot of it is micro-targeted ads.  

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. PA Images PA Images

Labour’s Ged Nash TD agrees that there needs to be “an ongoing, global conversation” about the influence of global social media firms.

“There is huge power and resources concentrated in the hands of a very small number of tech giants who can dominate the agenda,” he says.

Monopolies in any respect are not good for society, they’re not good for economies. If there were the kind of monolithic organisations we see in the tech world, introduced to, for example, the energy sector or the utility sector or telecoms then the European Union and individual nation states would have something to say about that.

I think that’s a big question that we are going to have to face globally over the next few years. And I think there will be a reckoning in that regard.

Facebook and Google are just two of the tech giants that have their EMEA headquarters in Ireland and Nash says this means that Ireland must be part of the conversation:

It’s never a good idea that any single company or any group of companies could operate what might appear to be a quasi-monopoly or quasi-cartel. It’s not good for competition, it’s not good for business and it’s not good for society either. It’s an ongoing conversation and it’s a conversation that I think we as a State need to be actively involved in given the presence of very large tech giants in this country.

This is something that was ackowledged in the Dáil today by Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney, who said that “there is a responsibility” on Ireland to be part of discussions about what Facebook and other tech giants are doing. 

“I think we should very much be part of this discussion as a country that hosts many of these platforms and of course has a consumer base that uses them all,” Coveney said today. 

Brussels

In his response, Nash made reference to the role of the EU in regulating against anti-competitive practices. 

Earlier this year, the European Commission launched an antitrust probe into Facebook’s use of data gathered from advertisers

“We will look in detail at whether this data gives Facebook an undue competitive advantage in particular on the online classified ads sector… where Facebook also competes with companies from which it collects data,” the EU commissioner for competition, Margrethe Vestager said at the time. 

The EU is also preparing an ambitious law, known as the Digital Markets Act, that will set up special rules for so-called “gatekeepers”, the largely US platforms that dominate the consumer internet.

Speaking to The Journal in Strasbourg today, Fine Gael MEP for Ireland South Deirdre Clune said that last night’s outage was a reminder of just how powerful Facebook is. 

“It’s quite extraordinary to see the extent of the outage and the amount of people that it did affect and then you realise that it’s Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram and you see how they’re all interlinked. I think that was a real reminder,” she says.

Clune says the Digital Markets Act and its sister bill the Digital Services Act are about acknowledging that these companies have a huge influence not only on society but on businesses and must be kept in check:

If you’re doing business, the amount of people that do use Facebook to carry out their businesses is extraordinary, we got an insight into that from the outage last night. So really what we want to do is recognise that they’re important and they do play a role but they are very dominant.

In some cases they can stifle innovation, snaffle up businesses, they can just eat up small businesses and that’s not good, it’s anti-competitive. So we want to make sure there’s a level playing field with more transparency and that business users would get a better pitch, they wouldn’t be forced out by any of these platforms.

“If a platform has information about a company, then that should be shared with the company itself. And consumers should know when targeted advertising is being pitched at them,” she adds. 

- With reporting by Gráinne Ní Aodha in Strasbourg