Regardless of their origins or ownership, social media sites like FB have become the defacto communications utilities of our age. And all utilities should be wholly publicly owned and supplied universally at cost with means-tested rates.
And if you think this would be unfair to the billionaires who have colonized the internet, which was developed and paid for mostly by public spending, then consider that one of the most pernicious facts of Facebook’s policies and management is that they do not give one fuck about what is fair. Facebook is greedy, petty and arbitrary, and dispenses its version of justice with extraordinary fickleness and zero accountability. This is what is so very very wrong with privatization. Zuk cares not one iota what is fair to you. So, I can’t care what is fair to him. He has gleaned his billions, now he can fuck off. The status quo is unfair.
Before YouTube, Canada had this CBC arts program called ZED. It was not very good, but they had a website that was called ZED.ca. It was basically a super version of YouTube. So we got rid of it and now Google has a near monopoly on force-feeding people ads so they can get richer and richer. While at the same time they treat their content providers and users worse and worse.
With ZED, or the great and glorious St Lawrence Seaway, we have the solution, which is an arms-length crown corporation with a mandate from the government, rather than a government office.
And the bureaucratic argument one might make against making any utility wholly publicly owned is just a soiled tissue waved vaguely by billionaires to protect their extractive mechanism.
