That really, really, strong desire to regulate Facebook no matter what

We have the latest entrant in the we must regulate Facebook stakes. Our working assumption is that the insistence upon regulating the site - as with Google and other Big Tech enterprises - is nothing actually to do with whether regulation is necessary or not. They’re simply big organisations and a certain mindset insists that bureaucracies and politics must regulate such. Despite, you know, the inability of bureaucracies and politics to ever create such. Either that or there are an awful lot of bored prodnoses around.

Today’s reason why the regulation is what would happen if the sites failed?

Like banks in the 2008 financial crisis, Facebook and other tech giants are “too big to fail”, according to research from Oxford University that calls for new regulations to protect users, and society, in the event of a possible collapse.

That’s to misunderstand what too big to fail actually means. Which isn’t that the organisation is big enough that we don;t want to see it fail therefore we’ll rescue it if that failure looks likely. Rather, failure would bring the rest of the system down with it which is why we’ll save such organisations. Losing Facebook - their example - would be somewhere between annoying and damaging but it wouldn’t cause the collapse of Google, or Apple, or other social media and certain not the web or the internet. Sure, it’s big and valuable but it’s not systemically important and therefore not too big to fail.

The other mistake in the analysis is this, from the actual paper:

Indeed, the closure of an online social network would not in itself be unprecedented. Over the last two decades, we have seen a number of social networks come and go — including Friendster, Yik Yak and, more recently, Google+ and Yahoo Groups. Others, such as MySpace, continue to languish in a state of decline. Although Facebook is arguably more resilient to the kind of user flight that brought down Friendster (Garcia et al., 2013; Seki and Nakamura, 2016; York and Turcotte, 2015) and MySpace (boyd, 2013), it is not immune to it. These precedents are important for understanding Facebook’s possible decline. Critically, they demonstrate that the closure of Facebook’s main platform does not depend on the exit of all users; Friendster, Google+ and others continued to have users when they were sold or shut down.

Furthermore, as we examine below, any user flight that precedes Facebook’s closure….

Their method of Facebook closing own is that most to all users have already left to go elsewhere. In which case it’s clearly not worth saving because the reason for the failure is that it’s not being used - is not worth saving.

Which rather neatly seems to skewer this justification for regulation of the platform. Not that that will stop people talking it up, For there really are a lot of bored prodnoses out there - or perhaps people who just cannot live with the idea that voluntary cooperation can be left to get on with itself without the oversight of bureaucracies or politicians.