Tech Giants are Looking More and More Like Governments

From News.com.au,

"The founder of the world’s most popular social platform outlined his ambitions for Facebook to act as a democratic system, with an independent “Supreme Court”, which people will be able to petition for their content to be restored.

"'I think in any kind of good-functioning democratic system, there needs to be a way to appeal,' said the 33-year-old, positioning the social media network almost as its own state, although staff are not elected. 'I think we can build that internally as a first step.'

"'What I’d really like to get to is an independent appeal. So maybe folks at Facebook make the first decision based on the community standards that are outlined, and then people can get a second opinion. You can imagine some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech in a community that reflects the social norms and values of people all around the world.'"

A Supreme Court for Facebook? Would this be national and presumably ran by rabid, free speech-hating SJWs? Or would it be international and ran by the Chinese given their sheer numbers? Who knows?

But using words like "supreme court" makes these ostensible companies sound more and more like governments. Indeed, something like 90 percent of search engine traffic goes through Google, so they effectively regulate Internet search results. Their algorithms decide what gets to the first page and what gets buried in obscurity. 

This isn't like a normal market. With these large social media you have to have an enormous number of users before your product can even function. And it seems to be similar with Google, which has social media platforms (Youtube, Google+) within it. You can't just open up a competing shop down the road or sell a competing product in your online store. Indeed, Apple and Google pretty much have a duopoly in the online apps market.

And the far-left leanings of these companies is well known, highlighted by the James Damore debacle. Facebook's recent algorithm change seems to have boosted liberal sites' traffic by 2 percent and reduced conservative sites' traffic by 14 percent. And research report by mathematician Leo Goldstein alleges that Google "Is found to be biased in favor of left/liberal domains," and "against conservative domains" with a confidence of 95 percent. 

Honestly, try it yourself. Search some topic on Google and the first results you'll get are The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post and The Huffington Post. The only conservative site that usually makes it to the first page, usually the bottom, is Fox News. 

The question we need to ask ourselves is simple: Do we really want these tech companies governing the Internet?