Facebook – Global Issue Without (Existing) Solution?
Facebook is recognized as a technological giant with possibly unprecedented power. It is assumed that recent large-scale scandals show just a glimpse of what might happen if the company fails to recognize its power. Voices calling for regulation are stronger than ever. Yet, before we move towards proposing a new regulation, a proper analysis should be done in order to establish what kind of socio-economic power Facebook has and whether the existing regulating mechanisms are capable of preventing and solving potential problems. We focus on three regulating mechanisms: data protection, consumer protection and competition law, which are presented as the relevant regulating mechanisms also by the literature. In order to assess the suitability of these mechanisms, we present a brief case study of the recent Facebook's redesign. In 2017, Facebook introduced Explore Feed in a few selected countries. As a consequence, posts of pages (including prominent media, politicians, etc.) were shifted from a default wall - News Feed, into a secondary wall - Explore Feed; unless the pages owners decided to pay for sponsored posts shown on the default wall. We assume that such an ad hoc change of service might have had serious consequences. We analyze the existing regulatory mechanisms and their suitability to make Facebook (or other social media platforms) accountable for some of the problems and find that overall there exists a wide regulatory gap in capturing the main problems of platforms, one that may be filled with a new proposal of public supervision over the platforms