Pardon me for a moment while I shed a few crocodile tears. The proximate cause of this grief is the news that the revenues of Snap, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are down by an estimated $9.85bn in the second half of this year. Just to put that in context, as I write, the stock market valuations of the first three of these behemoths are $86.9bn, $930.36bn and $44.07bn respectively. YouTube is harder to estimate because it’s part of Alphabet, its holding company, but since that’s valued at $1.93tn (that’s trillion, by the way) we may safely assume that YouTube’s revenue decline was, as engineers say, “in the noise”.
And yet all these outfits were complaining loudly at the injustice that had been done to them by one of their peers – Apple. Why so? Well, back in April, the iPhone manufacturer introduced its grandly named app-tracking transparency policy via a tweak to its mobile operating system, which forced iPhone apps to ask for permission before they tracked the behaviour of users to serve them personalised ads.
Predictably, most users declined to be tracked, which meant that those who had hoped to target them were left floundering. After all, the supposed USP of surveillance capitalism is that it enables advertisers to direct messages at people who might be disposed to receive them. So, after Apple tweaked iOS, many of them switched to advertising on Android and – this is the really delicious bit – to Apple’s own growing advertising business!
While the sound of moguls grinding their teeth is music to any columnist’s ears, there is, however, one sobering thought that emerges from this little farce. It is that it also provides a vivid illustration of the exercise of corporate power in a digital age. At a stroke (or at any rate a change to the operating system code), Apple had been able to take away almost $10bn in revenue from four of its fellow tech giants. This was the exercise of formidable power.
The great unsolved problem of our time is how to deal with – and where necessary curb – the unaccountable power of these giants. The first step on that road is to reach a collective understanding of what kind of power they actually wield. And for that we need a taxonomy. In an earlier era, the political theorist Steven Lukes proposed one. There were, he said, three kinds of power: the ability to compel people to do what they don’t want to do, the ability to stop them doing something they want to do and the ability to shape the way they think. This last one was useful in addressing the power of influential media owners (Rupert Murdoch, for example) in the old media ecosystem. But although it still applies in some ways to social media, it’s less useful for the networked ecosystem we now inhabit; we need another category.
“Platform power” is one possibility. The tech giants all possess it to a greater or lesser degree. In Apple’s case, for example, it owns and controls two important platforms – ie, software systems on which other agents can build businesses: they are the operating systems on which its devices run and its app store, which decides what apps are allowed on Apple devices. Google owns several platforms – a search engine and its associated advertising marketplace, the Android mobile operating system, YouTube and Google cloud services. Facebook (whose holding company is now rebranded as Meta) also owns several – Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp; Twitter owns, er, Twitter; Amazon owns its marketplace and cloud services; and Microsoft owns the Windows/Office platform and a fast-growing cloud service, Azure.
The difficulty is that there’s no single regulatory tool for controlling the abuse of platform power. In Apple’s case, for example, there are good arguments for the view that the change to its mobile operating system that so discombobulated Snap & Co was legitimate: it offered users a choice as to whether they wanted to be tracked or not and they decided that they didn’t. But with its app store, there are grounds for regarding its mandatory levy of 30% on apps’ revenues as monopolistic price-gouging or rent-seeking.
For democracies, though, the trickiest questions about platform power arise when they become part of society’s critical infrastructure. As social media platforms have turned into key components of the public sphere on which democracy depends, so their power to include or exclude voices has taken on a new significance. Just think of what happened when Trump was suddenly banned from Facebook and Twitter, but also remember that the same power to exclude or “de-platform” could be deployed against voices of which we approve. And there’s no proper appeal process.
Then there’s Amazon, which really has become part of the critical infrastructure of many democracies, as we found during the pandemic. This is not just about home deliveries, either, but about the functioning of states, as the recent revelations about Britain’s security services becoming reliant on Amazon’s cloud services have demonstrated. Once upon a time, the first thing revolutionary coup leaders had to do on assuming power was to secure control of the TV stations. Next time, all they’ll have to do is nationalise Amazon and declare mission accomplished.
What I’ve been reading
New frontiers
Hey, Facebook, I Made a Metaverse 27 Years Ago is a lovely essay by Ethan Zuckerman in the Atlantic about his attempt to build a metaverse and what Facebook’s bid to create one means.
Zero hour
Historian Jill Lepore’s New Yorker review/essay, The Next Cyberattack Is Already Under Way, is on Nicole Pelroth’s book about the cyberweapons arms race.
History boys
Much of What You’ve Heard About Carter and Reagan Is Wrong is a really interesting post by Noah Smith on his Substack blog debunking the traditional narrative about the former US presidents.