While I have some sympathy with Mitchell’s stance on Facebook – I haven’t joined it either – a monopoly it ain’t. No one is forcing you to join and no one is preventing competing products. Therefore, it is not a monopoly. This is something that Mitchell acknowledges later on in the article:
I’m sure Facebook would claim it’s not a monopoly – strictly speaking it isn’t – but it clearly wants to be and, if there are whole sections of society who feel obliged to sign up in order to be able to communicate with one another, then its dreams are coming true.
Yeah, but we have a choice. There is no pressure to join up – none at all. There are plenty of other ways of remaining in contact with people. That said, Mitchell does seem to have a point about how people behave with perceived pressure. When Mrs L’s sister came to stay with us in France a year or so back she wanted to get in touch with her daughter so persuaded Mrs L to sign up to Facebook, so that she could use it to do the necessary. I never did get to the bottom of why she couldn’t just sign up herself – or, better still, use the email or telephone. Since then, the account has gone into stagnation. There is no need for it as it serves no purpose. We get by perfectly well without it.
The killer though is this:
When you’re getting something free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
Quite so. As I have no desire to be one of Zuckerberg’s products I can very easily avoid signing up. There is no pain involved whatsoever and I feel no compunction, no pressure at all.
Is it really in the public interest for Facebook, this service that we all use, this lobster pot we’ve swum into, to remain in private hands? After all, it’s practically a public good. There must be strong economic arguments in favour of nationalising it.
He’s joshing isn’t he? That’s the problem when comedians write articles like this, you can never be sure what’s serious and what is satire. This being the Guardian, unintentionally both, I suppose.
That would protect our children from the purveyors of hard drink. It would also reduce by up to 50% the amount of online bullying and abuse they suffer, force us to cut down on the time we waste staring at our computers and increase by a similar ratio the leisure hours we spend getting exercise or meeting people. How would Facebook hit these targets if it were taken into state ownership? By doing what the public sector’s harshest critics always accuse it of: not working half the time.
I think he has a point in there somewhere. Facetious comment with an underlying barb of reality. Maybe he has a case – take Facebook into public ownership. That would put an end to it tout suite.