Funny, I haven’t noticed that Facebook is a user-configurable platform. Facebook doesn’t even let me control the preference hierarchy of my own feed, let alone let me modify the platform otherwise or facilitate adding third-party systems.
Nothing new about any of this, of course. Free-market fundamentalists have always been blind to the way that the state has normally been used to sanctify one company’s operations and crush competitors from the 19th Century onward, as well as how companies that achieve functioning monopolistic control over a key choke point in a given system of commodity production and exchange tend to use that control against possible competitors. But heads of corporations aren’t blind to it because they’re mostly not ideologues. They do whatever needs doing for their own interests to win out.
Which is almost never the interests of the end consumers or wider public. I have no particular brief for Apple—I switched from an iPhone to an Android in part because I got so tired of Apple’s particularly gross version of planned obsolescence. But if Apple is promising strict vetting of the apps it allows to go onto its devices—and promising (if not delivering, not yet) a much stricter version of privacy constraints—then that seems quintessentially the sort of thing that a free market should allow a manufacturer to sell to its customers, because quite certainly there is a market for those desires.
I know I’m tired of viewing every commercial transaction I have online as putting me in serious danger of being ripped off, of downloading a deceptive, shoddy, or malfunctioning app onto a device that I am unfortunately now quite dependent upon for organizing my work and my life. I don’t buy anything from advertisers on Facebook precisely because Facebook doesn’t vet any advertisements on its site.
If Apple does eventually deliver a strict privacy standard that it’s prepared to enforce and has strict quality standards for apps it will allow on its devices, then that might be enough to entice me back to an iPhone. It’s at least a kind of approach that ought to exist in the market.
More to the point, it’s a standard that ought to exist as a regulation. But we’re not even remotely there at the moment (well, the EU is: good for them). At least let me buy the standards that I think ought to exist as a matter of public policy. If that’s really so bad, well, let the market decide.
Even though I know that in fact capitalists have often suborned a compliant state to prevent competition (often while prattling on in faux-libertarian ways), I can’t help but shake my head and wonder how we arrived at a point where a far-right Republican governor and possible future President is advocating with apparent seriousness that the federal government should force a private company to do business with another private company and to not be allowed to sell the version of their product that some of their consumers very ardently prefer to buy. That’s a more interesting twist than a simple cry of “hypocrisy” can cover (though I think a cry of “incipient fascism” might be a bit closer to the mark).
Image credit: Photo by Julian Hochgesang on Unsplash