Facebook is struggling as a public company, with its stock hitting an all-time low last week and almost half of Americans predicting that the social networking giant will eventually fade away. Still, Facebook remains a social networking "monopoly" as well as "a public good and an important social resource," says University of Washington professor Philip N. Howard in Slate, and "if neither users nor investors can be confident in the company, it's time we start discussing an idea that might seem crazy: Nationalizing Facebook." Only the U.S. government can "fix the company's woeful privacy practices, allow the social network to fulfill its true potential for providing social good, and force it to put its valuable data to work on significant social problems." Is Howard's "thought experiment" just plain crazy, or is nationalization worth considering?
What a terrible idea: Howard's suggestion is "really, really, really awful," says Ed Krayewski at Reason. The government is the last entity you want to entrust with private data, given its frequent security breaches and self-serving misuse of personal information. Also, Facebook isn't a monopoly, or a "public good." It's a publicly traded company, and if it fails, that creative destruction will simply spur the internet to innovate and thrive. Once the government steps in, Facebook "becomes, by definition, too big to fail."
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