Last week a rather bold and ambitious class-action lawsuit was lodged with the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal. Competition law expert Liza Lovdahl Gormsen is suing Meta (the not-so-new name of Facebook and WhatsApp’s parent company) for breach of competition law.
Gormsen is the director of the Competition Law Forum and a senior research fellow at the British Institute of International & Comparative Law. She’s been vocal on the matter for a while, presenting to UK parliamentarians on Facebook’s market dominance and authoring academic research on the topic.
She’s arguing abuse of market dominance in that, she says, Facebook sets an “unfair price”, specifically “the surrender of UK users’ highly valuable personal data … for using the network”. On www.facebookclaim.co.uk, Gormsen argues: “In return, users only received ‘free’ access to Facebook’s social network, and zero monetary recompense while Facebook generated billions in [advertising] revenues from its users’ data.”
Advertising accounts for 98% of Meta’s global income. The action is seeking an estimated £2.3bn damages, which would go to the 44-million UK users of the platform if the suit is successful. But the final amount would be decided by a judge — again, if Gormsen wins, which is a big if. To my mind this is less about the prospect of winning and more about principles and prospects, imagining the global business and social models of tomorrow.
Also last week, a US federal judge found that the Federal Trade Commission could proceed with its lawsuit, which seeks to force the unbundling of Instagram and WhatsApp from Facebook.
So its fair to say it’s been a bad week for Meta. On the flipside, it would probably have that UK payout covered in about 10 days if it came to that, having made about $2.3bn that week — based on its third-quarter 2021 advertising revenue figure of $28.2bn.
Now, I’m not wholly opposed to capitalism and the globally adopted American dream of swimming in a giant pile of cash, but the sheer scale of this company and similar tech giants is starting to grate. It’s not their success that I resent, but that that success is seemingly premised on shifting the world towards extremism, isolation and fear, instead of the community and sociability Meta promises.
Contrary to appearances, I don’t sit down each week to think about how to stick it to tech giants. Yes, I spend a considerable amount of time thinking and writing about Meta. I’ve not done a full audit, but at a glance I’m prepared to say it was my most regular subject in 2021. So much so that I feel increasingly uneasy these days when something newsy happens involving Facebook and I want to write about it. I find myself asking: is this topic tired? Have I started to sound biased?
In my defence, it was a beast of a year for Mark Zuckerberg’s megaweight company. There was Facebook’s news blackout in Australia; the dreaded WhatsApp privacy policy drama that dragged on and on; dozens of competition and regulation skirmishes around the world; the worldwide outage when the platform briefly blinked out of existence on the internet; revelations on its role in the proliferation of disinformation online; and the Facebook Files, leaks that (I would argue) laid bare its very soul.
With the latter we peeked behind the curtain and found that the wizard wasn’t just some old guy with a smoke machine and loudspeaker. Rather it was a c-suite of people, apparently brazenly putting profit before people and ignoring the warnings sounding from both inside and outside its digital walls.
Still, I (and 3-billion others) remain on the platform. WhatsApp is still my go-to communication app, and Instagram my favourite place to waste a few minutes (or hours) between bouts of productivity. The appeal of these apps is immense, and every year they are entrenched deeper into our lives. Meta and its products are not the only ones, of course. We see this pattern (and our struggles with it) playing out in similar ways with Google, Apple, Amazon and others.
So, how do we address the conundrum of a Facebook-like company, with proprietary products that have achieved this level of world domination and are virtually inextricable from our lives? Hoover’s early brand recognition meant vacuum cleaner companies all over the world lived in the shadow of that name, but you don’t take your trusty vac out into the world with you and write food reviews on it. Coca-Cola may be the world’s most valuable brand, but you don’t need to be sipping on one to chat to grandma. Come to think of it, is Facebook the ANC of social media, in that we remain fiercely loyal even when its contempt for us is so apparent? And my final rhetorical for today ... do we need a new category, a new paradigm for how we think about and manage entities like this?
The notion of worrying about a company’s soul may seem alarmist, but company culture is a powerful force that has ramifications for those it employs and its end users, and the stakes are even higher with the way some of these have crept into our lives. So, the problem might not be a little ol’ columnist with an axe to grind, but that the world is beginning to grapple with what we’ve given away, at what cost, and if it’s even possible to walk it back.
• Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.
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