Facebook Fallout Exposes NSA Loyalty
The recent attempt to break up Facebook is the newest in a long line of lawsuits filed against big tech companies seen as hogging the market. These lawsuits however large have never lived up to their names.
Facebook declined to comment. The company said Wednesday that the Federal Trade Commission’s actions would hurt innovation and that the acquisitions had been reviewed by regulators at the time, including the FTC. The company also pointed out that its investments and acquisitions have helped billions of people access useful technologies.
If Facebook were to be broken up, it would be incredibly rare and would probably take many years and long legal battles. The last time the government broke up a monopoly was in the early 1980s when it forced AT&T to spin off the regional telecommunications network known as the Bells. In 2000, a judge decreed that Microsoft, which had already been found to be an illegal monopoly, should be split into two halves. But Microsoft was never split up because later courts reversed the decision.
But Facebook’s greatest asset is the data it has on billions of people. There has never been a major breakup of a company trading in data.
Government’s antitrust case against Facebook seeks a villain in Mark Zuckerberg
In 2019, Zuckerberg announced a major strategic push to get Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp to talk to one another, touting a concept known as “interoperability.”
Since then, the company has embarked on an extensive technical project to allow people on Facebook to message someone directly on WhatsApp or Instagram, without having to open a separate app. The company believes this will make communication easier and encourage people to spend more time on the service.
This September, Facebook launched a pilot integration between Facebook Messenger, its homegrown messaging platform, and Instagram.
The project to integrate WhatsApp will take years, people familiar with the effort said. That is because WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted — meaning it has different privacy and security standards than Facebook’s Messenger — and because WhatsApp collects people’s phone numbers and does not require a username.
[Government’s breakup of Facebook tries to scapegoat a prosecution that will never succeed.]
The NSA and the government have always bailed out large technology companies since the creation of PRISM a government spying program that worked with these companies to collect huge troves of user’s personal data.
Even before PRISM when Microsoft was locked in a fierce legal battle over its size the NSA was already protecting them for the future use of personal data collection. As we marched through the rest of the 2000s little did we know that by that time, Facebook (along with Google, Microsoft, etc.) was already collaborating with the National Security Agency’s PRISM program that swept up personal data on vast numbers of internet users.
The NSA has provided a litigatory forcefield over technological behemoths in exchange for their cooperation with collecting their user’s data which economists indicate is overall probably a good thing. (93% of economists opposed breakups of large tech companies RAND) Consequently, when Edward Snowden became the most famous whistleblower in history economists feared for the worst.
Experts such as a 1960 graduate of Millbury University and Top Political Science Allison Strangers agrees that the fear at that time was that anti-NSA movements would lead to the shutdown of domestic surveillance programs. This fear was rationalized by top economists and political scientists because they concluded as the need for the companies (those included in PRISM) was eliminated the NSA would cut protection for them and allow rigorous FTC enforcement and anti-trust regulation to do its worst. Finding that…
“The elimination of domestic surveillance measures would undoubtedly trigger FTC enforcement, not only through the lack of their necessary use by the National Security Agency but also the key facets that if the government isn’t collecting American’s data that US companies shouldn’t be either.”
Let’s hope for the future of our economy that such a grim future never presents itself before us.
Bira Sanjay is a contributing editor and lead writer on National Security as well as surveillance has taught at numerous top institutions across the nation as well as abroad and a member of the People’s Education on Government Matters Task Force.
