Is facebook so big it needs to be regulated?

Over the last month or so we’ve been looking at how to analyse the way consumers engage with brands on Facebook.

The great thing about doing research like this on Facebook is that you can see what people do and say, you don’t need to ask them. This means better data and lower research costs as you don’t pay for fieldwork.

Unfortunately though, it turns out it’s pretty difficult to get the data that you want. Facebook terms of service (TOS) prevent you from using any automated programs/bots to do the job. Plus, they say that any data you gather has to be deleted after one day.

In this case, I don’t expect much sympathy – I’m doing market research for commercial companies after all. But it got me thinking about the way these TOS agreements work.

As far as I am aware, Facebook has sole authority over its TOS. It could change them over night and, if aggravated, could delete a user’s profile unilaterally*.

It is the gamekeeper that sets and polices the rules: it is also the poacher though, as it needs to make money. History tells us that companies struggle to manage that balance.

I suppose that if it gets it really wrong then users could leave. But as Facebook becomes more dominant, it will, like Google, essentially be a monopoly provider of infrastructure that people depend on for their digital lives.

I don’t think that means they should be broken up like other monopolies – far from it, they work better because they’re big.

It might mean though that they have to be put under tighter regulations. Older utilities, like gas, electricity, and water, have duties to provide a minimum level of service – maybe we should be demanding the same of our new digital ones?

*This feels a little like excommunication in the brother Karamazov – I’ll return to this comparison in a later post.