Nationalize Facebook? The idea is in the news these days, but has been circulating in the media since at least 2012, the year when Facebook went public. Is it realistic? What if the solution was to nationalize the entire Internet network?
If we look back 15 years, we see that Facebook is not so much the source of the problem as the most recent symptom. Net neutrality, the taxation of foreign media companies, before that the piracy of music and video, these are all problems with which we ended up associating a particular company: Rogers, Netflix, Napster …
Another of these problems is the exorbitant cost of Internet access in Canada, which makes it difficult for people in many regions to have decent quality high-speed access. The endless quarrel between Bell and Videotron over the famous access to poles to route optical fiber where it has not yet set foot has been going on for long before Twitter was born …
Perhaps the question should therefore be: and whether to nationalize the Internet infrastructure? In its time, Hydro-Québec was created in part for reasons similar to what we see today with the Internet: access to the network is expensive and is uneven from one region to another, which penalizes a part of the population. Today, digital technology is the driving force that increasingly drives education, the economy and the cultural industries.
And yet, its infrastructure is controlled by a handful of private companies.
An inevitable nationalization?
Using the same arguments as those who propose to nationalize Facebook, entrusting a state-owned company with the management of the network’s national infrastructure would be a more lasting remedy, argues Robert Proulx. Mr. Proulx has 40 years of experience in Canadian telecoms. This MIT graduate led independent supplier Xittel before selling it to rival Maskatel in 2015, then becoming a consultant for various tech company help centers.
“The nationalization of infrastructure, I believe in it. It is sure that it will happen one day. If we had entrusted the task to a crown corporation fifteen years ago, all of Quebec would now have high speed at a low price, ”he said. To have to. Ironically, fifteen years ago Robert Proulx was already saying the same thing.
The time that has passed since has not made the question of nationalization less relevant, on the contrary. On the other hand, nationalization is no more fashionable than it was then. The only time we’ve talked about nationalization lately is on the cannabis side. The success of this approach still needs to be proven.
On the telecoms side, the approach could still benefit both consumers and service providers, believes Robert Proulx. They would be the clients of this organization, which could optimize the infrastructure and thus reduce its management costs. “A single pair of fiber optic cables would connect major centers across the country, where current vendors have deployed four or five cables, which obviously drives up costs for everyone,” he says.
National and regional suppliers would fight on equal terms and would be forced to distinguish themselves in the services offered to their customers, which would stimulate competition and innovation, two themes that the federal and provincial governments are constantly trying to highlight. .
You have to have a memory to remember it, but Canada was once a world leader in innovation in telecommunications: Bell innovated on the telephony side and the cable companies on the television side. These companies were at the time… monopolies.
Would such a model in 2021 correct the failings of the industry? “The infrastructure was not a problem at that time,” recalls Robert Proulx at the very least.
Facebook, Crown corporation?
Nationalizing optical fiber would undoubtedly be less of a puzzle than nationalizing social networks, even if their immense popularity means that they have become, in a way, the essential (digital) public place of today.
Between dismantling or nationalizing Facebook, almost everything has been suggested to correct the faults of social networks. Yet, nothing says that Facebook will continue to be the most frequented platform for everyone. Its management is also worried about the greater popularity of its rivals Snapchat and TikTok among young Internet users.
How to supervise this sector, the evolution of which remains uncertain? Without nationalizing, authorities can target big data. Whether it is Facebook the social network or Meta the virtual world, these data are in a way the infrastructure of the digital world, explains the professor of law at the University of Montreal Pierre Trudel, who is very interested in this question. .
“Social networks are a transnational phenomenon that goes beyond governments, but we must recognize the common good behind all these platforms: big data. These data are the traces we leave behind us everywhere on the Internet. If States define rules to regulate their use, it will be possible to distinguish what is legitimate from what would be abusive use. “
Data is a resource, a bit like air and water, summarizes Pierre Trudel. It is up to companies to then transform them to derive any value from them. This is what Facebook is doing these days. Like it or not, Facebook plays by the rules. The problem is, the rules still don’t know what to do with big data. And we haven’t talked about metaverse yet …
We know that Ottawa wants to come back to Facebook in the coming weeks. The federal digital bill was buried by the fall election, but the Liberals will return to the charge shortly. They could obviously supervise social networks to limit their shortcomings. But that won’t solve everything. It might just be putting a bandage on a gaping wound, when a larger scale remedy will probably be needed.