CARL MORTISHED: Facebook and its tech rival giants should be carved into pieces

Nor can you negotiate with Facebook. When you signed up, you were more concerned about your profile picture than the deal you were offered. You probably didn’t think it was a deal; Facebook is free, right? Wrong. In the small print you didn’t read, Facebook states in return for sharing pictures of your holiday with your chums, you are handing over something valuable: “you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide licence to use any IP content that you post.”

In other words, Facebook can exploit your intellectual property as it wishes and use it to sell ads: “You give us permission to use your name, profile picture, content and information in connection with commercial, sponsored or related content.”

This is how Facebook makes money and until recently the stock market was convinced it was a money machine. But doubts have emerged. On Monday, the stock price fell 7%, a loss of $37 billion after weekend stories Cambridge Analytics, a data analysis firm, had harvested the Facebook profiles of tens of millions of Americans without their direct consent. Vast amounts of personal information was extracted from the social media company’s platform in order to target people with campaign propaganda during the last US presidential election, according to the stories in the New York Times and Observer newspapers.

No one is suggesting Facebook connived in this data hijack but the stock market has woken up to political risk. Not the risk that the US election was hijacked (the stock market doesn’t care about that) but that social media companies, such as Facebook, Google and Twitter will suffer intense regulation.

And so they should; the European Union is already well ahead of the US with its General Data Protection Regulation, which will impose maximum fines of 4% of worldwide turnover for serious data security breaches. But this fails to get to the root of the problem: the enormous market share and global reach of the social media colossi, their ability to control data, manipulate markets, avoid taxation and escape responsibility for publishing dangerous material. Up until now, most politicians have swallowed the libertarian tosh served up by the social media tycoons — it’s all about free speech. They didn’t read Facebook’s terms and conditions, which dump responsibility for dangerous, libellous or criminal content on to users. Facebook can make money out of the stuff you do on its platform but if you do bad stuff, that’s your fault.

Social media is a cash machine. Some cash was spread among the political class in Washington to smooth the bumps but the embarrassment has become intolerable. It’s one thing for politicians to be accused of being too close to corporate power. It is quite another to be thought to be a puppet, the plaything of a data analytics company.

There is a solution which avoids more rules, regulation and compliance. We have seen huge infrastructure providers ride roughshod over consumers and the political process before. When energy companies were too big, we broke them up, taking their pipelines and grids away and carving them into small bits.

We should do the same with Facebook et al. Take the platforms away and turn them into pipeline utilities. These can sell network access to real publishing companies that take full responsibility for their content. It can be done; it just requires political will.