After the FTC Fails to Fix Facebook, Commissioner Chopra’s Powerful Dissent Points to a Path Forward
The orginal article can be found here.
On Wednesday, the
Federal Trade Commission announced the details of its $5 billion fine
and settlement with Facebook over charges that it violated a 2011
consent decree with the enforcement agency. In addition to the fine, the
FTC and Facebook agreed that Facebook would establish a privacy
committee within its board of directors to review all privacy issues and
choices along with an “independent assessor.” Other conditions of the
settlement include transparency and security measures around gathering,
storing, and sharing user information, as well as requiring Facebook
Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to certify Facebook’s ongoing
compliance with the FTC’s order. Facebook also announced in its second quarter earnings call that the FTC had opened an antitrust investigation into the social media giant.
Enforcers
and policymakers should pay particular attention to FTC Commissioner
Rohit Chopra’s powerful dissenting statement. Chopra condemned the
settlement, writing, “This framework does not protect the public — it
protects Facebook” and “ratifies Facebook’s governance structure instead
of changing it.” But Chopra’s statement also lays out where
policymakers and law enforcers should go in the future — which is to
directly address the dependence of Facebook’s business model on
“surveillance and manipulation.”
Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rohit Chopra penned an forceful dissenting statement.
“The case against
Facebook is about more than just privacy – it is also about the power to
control and manipulate,” Chopra wrote. “Global regulators and
policymakers need to confront the dangers associated with mass
surveillance and the resulting ability to control and influence us. The
behavioral advertising business incentives of technology platforms spur
practices that are dividing our society. The harm from this conduct is
immeasurable, and regulators and policymakers must confront it.”
Facebook
being, after all, a private for-profit corporation, Chopra added, “We
should reasonably assume it seeks to advance its own financial gains.
Here, Facebook’s behavioral advertising business model is both the
company’s profit engine and arguably
the root cause of its widespread and systemic problems. Behavioral
advertising generates profits by turning users into products, their
activity into assets, their communities into targets, and social media
platforms into weapons of mass manipulation. We need to recognize the
dangerous threat that this business model can pose to our democracy and
economy.”
Also see the letter
from Sens. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Richard
Blumenthal, D-Conn., calling the settlement “woefully inadequate.” And
read reactions to the initial reports of the FTC’s $5 billion fine from
Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Mark Warner, D-Va., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Reps. David Cicilline, D-R.I., and Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill.
See coverage of the FTC’s settlement quoting the Open Markets Institute from PBS, HuffPost, The Hill, and CNN Business.
Barry C. Lynn, Open Markets Institute <info@openmarketsinstitute.org>
