MediaViews.de

I take the wonderful article by Tim O’Reilly about Government 2.0 being a platform as a motivation to write down some long-standing thoughts about how/if the social graph should/will be regulated or even run by the government (as a platform).

So why on earth do I think, that the social graph will be run as a platform by the goverment. I have three main points:

• Privacy Concerns
• Competition
• Government Added Services (e.g. Real ID)

Privacy Concerns

Everybody understands that facebook knows everything you do on facebook. They know who you are dating, what you are doing and where you are living. It does not matter how you set your privacy settings – facebook may even know more personal information than the allmighty google. Facebook Connect extends their reach to all other applications using the facebook social graph. Facebook does not only know what you are doing on facebook, they know everything what you are doing on the web (using facebook connect). It was a brilliant move by facebook and i am a big fan of their platform strategy. I also dont think that facebook is evil and plans to do evil stuff with all this information – however in a few years from now (and after facebook had their IPO) facebook may be run by different people and history teaches us that people will abuse power if they can .. at some point.

We are all used to distrusting the government: thats why there all all kinds of checks and balances in place which regulates which and how the government is allowed to collect personal information. The funny thing is: facebook arguably knows more about me than my government and there are very little checks and balances in place to control them. Yes social networks have their terms of services, privacy policies and there are some regulations coming up – but as the financial crisis has shown: private companies are smarter than the regulators and they can and will always be one step ahead (in the case of financial crisis: banks managed to legally take high risks despite heavy regulation (eg Basel 2)  trying to force them to operate conservative). Therefore regulation is good for the moment but probably wont be enough in the long run.  Private companies will always have the incentive to “sell” the information generated by their social graph and government regulations will try to stop this. Instead of playing cat and mouse in this regulations game, the government should at some point just take over operating the social graph and offer it as a service to all companies who want to use it (including facebook). Conflict of interest solved. I want all my personal information handled by democratic institutions and not by a private company. Don’t ask the frog to drain the pond (if you can say this in english^^).

Competition

At this point you may think I am (stereo-)typical European leftist who crys for the government because we Europeans were unable to compete with an US-company (facebook). You may also think its funny that “competition” can be a reason to hand something over to the government.

But think about it: What happens in a few year when facebook really is the global leader in social networking and operates the social graph of (almost) the entire world. Do you really think there will be much competition left? Will there be a new “mySpace” or “Orkut” coming up? Probably not because facebook was smart enough to do the platform-move. People will still try out and use new services, but they will also just use their existing social graph via facebook connect.

So what happens if some of these new services will be considered a threat to facebook by facebook? facebook can (and maybe will) simply shut it down. The result: you can only operate on the facebook platform if you dont compete with facebook. Of course this slows down competition for everything facebook does .. and this is a lot despite operating the social graph: video, picture, social networking, messaging, ..

If the government would operate the social graph and would give everybody equal access to it, there would be real competition on everything on top of the social graph.

Government Added Services (e.g. Real ID)

Democratic control over personal information and improved competition due to equal access to the social graph are not the only advantages of a governent run social graph. The governent could even add services to the equation only the governent can add: verifying the identities in the social graph and therefore adding trust to the social graph. You could use your social graph to do real business digitally. You would have a digital passport which you could use to sign real contracts online and do all the wonderful things which now requires the old snail mail or the “fax-machine”. This would spark a new digital revolution because a whole lot of businesses have just become possible.

Conclusion

Of course i purposely ignored a lot of market trends (e.g. twitter, open social) and/or reasons against a government run social graph (e.g. costs, innovation within the social graph, how to take away the social graph from facebook …) but that is not the point of this post. My guess is that because of the stated reasons (and a lot more which i am currently not aware of) the government should (and eventually will) run the social graph.

So when will it happen? Since there is no “world government” (yet) this issue will not be easy to solve, but it would be totally possible to hand over the social graph of yourself to the country you are living in – of course the countries would have to work together. There a thousand questions more but since this will not happen tomorrow or in the next 5 years there is plenty of time to solve and discuss all these problems. I will still buy facebook shares when they have their IPO

Karsten Wysk Allgemein