Like all big businesses, Facebook calls for across the board regulation to help them and hurt any competition.
So now Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and head honcho at Facebook, is going all in on government regulation.
“The question,”he toldWired‘s Nicholas Thompson, “isn’t ‘Should there be regulation or shouldn’t there be?’ It’s ‘How do you do it?'” On CNN,he said, “I actually am not sure we shouldn’t be regulated. I think in general technology is an increasingly important trend in the world. I think the question is more what is therightregulation rather than ‘yes or no should we be regulated?'”
What gives? I’d like to suggest that Zuckerberg’s response has little or nothing to do with civic-mindedness in the wake of ridiculously overblown panics overRussian trolls buying campaign adsshowing Jesus wrestling Satan, orstill-cresting fearsthat Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data to deny Hillary Clinton her rightful role as first woman president.
Rather, Zuckerberg is using these incidents as a way to cement Facebook’s centrality in a radically volatile social-media landscape. It was only a few weeks ago, after all, that we were treated to a spate of stories about how Facebook was losing younger users by the millions. From a representative account atInc.:
Last year alone, the social network lost more than 1.4 million users in the 12 to 17-year old demographic, according to new report fromresearch firm eMarketer. That represents a decline of nearly 10 percent, or roughly three times what analysts had predicted. Notably, 2017 was the first time that analysts expected the company to see a drop in usage for any age group. Overall, Facebook lost 2.8 million U.S. users under the age of 25, the data found….
2018 isn’t shaping up to look any better. EMarketer predicts another 5.6 percent decline in users between 12 and 17 years old, and a 5.8 percent decline for those between 18 and 24. That likely has executives worried about the long-term dominance of the social media platform.
Only the paranoid survive in Silicon Valley, right? Zuckerberg may be young (he’s just 33) but he’s old enough to remember MySpace and Friendster. He hangs around with people who don’t just remember AOL and Netscape but also invested in them. The history of business is a cemetery of whales, of “too big to fail” juggernauts who are barely remembered these days. The supermarket chainA&Ponce had bigger market share in its sector than Walmart does today. It revolutionized the buying and selling of groceries and has passed away, little-remembered and little-missed. Only 60 companies that appeared in the 1955 version of theFortune 500were still there in last year’s list, economist Mark Perry reminds us. More important for the current conversation (emphasis in original):
At the current churn rate, abouthalf of today’s S&P 500 firms will be replaced over the next 10 yearsas “we enter a period of heightened volatility for leading companies across a range of industries, with the next ten years shaping up to bethe most potentially turbulent in modern history”according toInnosight.