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Terms of Disservice. Dipayan Ghosh
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isbn 9780815737667
Автор произведения Dipayan Ghosh
Издательство Ingram
A final concern about the subscription proposal: if all of the major companies were to enable the option due to regulatory requirement, how would consumers react? Each of the firms might potentially attempt to establish its own network effect given the new economic regime and as such might attempt to undercut rivals and attract users to its own platforms. Facebook, for example, might undercut prices set by Twitter, which might drive users off Twitter. It makes little sense to pay for a service that is more expensive, especially if Facebook can establish the one-to-many design through a new service that subsumes Twitter’s business. Creating such a requirement might thus prompt further unwanted anticompetitive effects in the internet market. If consumers decide it only makes sense for them to pay subscription fees for one social media service, could there be deleterious effects for the consumer market overall? It is difficult to say.
Still others claim that the business of social media and the internet is all about data.53 This, too, is an oversimplification of the problems at hand. Yes, the firms that sit at the center of the consumer internet collect inordinate amounts of data on the individual—more so than any other corporate entity or government in the history of humankind. Data collection must be a significant contributor to their businesses, otherwise they would not undertake it. But such collection of data has happened to varying degrees in other industries for decades. While the data-collection practices in other industries have never been as extensive as that of a company such as Google, the business model of Google cannot end there. How does it actually make money from those data? Why does it collect so much data? And why cannot other companies themselves make profits at the margins Google appreciates from such rich data collection? (Google was among the companies with the most cash in reserve at the height of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States.)
These are critical questions that need to be addressed on our way to defining the consumer internet business model and designing a remedy to contend with its overreaches.
The Contours of the Consumer Internet
Given the noise injected into the public’s conceptualization of the consumer internet’s business model, it is important to first define the contours of the consumer internet, which I believe democratic societies more broadly are most concerned with.
In recent years, these public concerns have become laser focused on a series of harms that have gravitated into the crosshairs of public outcry: the spread of hate speech, the disinformation problem, foreign election interference, algorithmic discrimination, terrorist recruitment, incitement to violence, and anticonservative bias. One could ask the pertinent question: Are these the harms that are indeed the most important to society when it comes to thinking about what the consumer internet has foisted on us? At one level, I think they absolutely are. They represent the uppermost layer—the externally observable symptoms—that is associated with a much deeper problem. They are the “here and now” that the people of Paris, Jakarta, Bombay, Christchurch, and Charleston care about today. They influence our national politics and the direction of our social countenance.
At a more critical level, however, is the business model of the consumer internet itself—the precise expression and manifestation of the commercial desires of the largest firms that occupy the center of the consumer internet splayed out against the theoretical economic and regulatory boundaries that the U.S. government has set for them—along with the commercial appendages and entities that the firms bring along in support of their core business, including the data brokers and ad exchanges. At the very center of the consumer internet—beyond the superficial manifestations of harm such as the disinformation problem or the spread of hate speech or the encouragement of persistent algorithmic bias—is a silent mechanism that works against the will of the very people whose attention, desires, and aspirations it systematically manipulates with cold technological precision.
This machine is principally responsible for the proliferation of society’s concerns about the technology industry, including the terrible symptoms of disinformation and hateful conduct that we experience at the surface of the internet. And it is this machine that should be the subject of our policy analysis.
But how can we manage—or even begin to address—such a wide variety of problems engendered by a business model that is so staunchly defended by the robber barons of the internet behind the closed doors of Congress itself? We will need to incisively cut past the noisy exterior of the industry’s advocacy about its self-proclaimed positive impacts on society and pry through the engineered spiderwebs into the heart of the problem. If we fail in this—if we fail to consider that the central business model of the consumer internet is so clearly responsible for all of these harms in the first place—then we will ultimately fail American consumers and citizens.
A Walk through Silicon Valley Today
What is the business model of the consumer internet? What do we mean by the “consumer internet”? And what separates it from other segments of the digital economy? Let us first examine a list of the biggest internet companies in the United States by revenue:54
| Revenue (US$ billions) | FY | |
| Amazon | 253.9 | 2018 |
| 120.8 | 2018 | |
| 55.01 | 2018 | |
| Netflixˆ | 15.8 | 2018 |
| Bookingˆ | 12.7 | 2017 |
| eBayˆ | 10.75 | 2018 |
| Salesforce* | 10.5 | 2018 |
| Expediaˆ | 10.1 | 2017 |
| Uberˆ | 7.5 | 2017 |
| Grouponˆ | 2.8 | 2018 |
| 2.44 | 2017 | |
| Airbnbˆ | 1.7 | 2016 |
| Workday* | 1.56 | 2017 |
A number of observations can be drawn from this list. Missing are some major Silicon Valley firms that have been in the news recently—Apple among them. I have excluded companies such as Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel because they are not primarily internet businesses. While elements of their businesses surely touch the internet—not to mention certain business practices they undertake that effectively impact consumers and citizens—the main portion of their revenues does not derive from operating services that run over the internet. Apple’s economic strength comes from its sale of electronic consumer-device technologies along with its hegemony over closed-source mobile-software technologies operated exclusively over its devices—including iOS, the App Store, and the bundled ties established between its many other services—that it has developed over the past twenty years. Some of these companies will be the subject of inspection in various respects in my analysis, but they do not constitute the central part of the internet economy; they did not inflict public harms such as the disinformation problem that have been of concern in recent years.
The list also excludes another set of well-known software companies—Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and SAP among them. These companies, too, do not make the bulk of their revenue from operating internet services. Instead, they sell software,