Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s column in the Washington Post identifies four areas of regulation.
Background: Facebook’s call for regulation is no longer a surprise: Zuckerberg and other company executives have admitted the need for regulation for about a year now. Repeated privacy scandals have shown Facebook’s shortcomings in protecting users’ privacy, and have brought the company to accept some oversight is necessary.
The new call for regulation: Last week, Mark Zuckerberg wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post, in which he identified four areas for regulation, including: harmful content; protection of elections; privacy and data protection; and data portability. Zuckerberg recognised Facebook’s inability to deal with the first two issues without regulatory oversight. On privacy, he called for EU GDPR-like rules to be implemented more broadly across the world, and for data portability to facilitate competition and the rise of new services.
Why it matters: The latest intervention in the debate shows that the company will not simply wait for rules to comply with, and is part of an effort to steer the debate and avoid fragmented approaches. Patchworks of regulation across the world would be even worse for Facebook than prescriptive measures applied consistently. However, global approaches for internet regulation will continue to face significant hurdles for several reasons, such as contrasting long-term objectives of the world’s most powerful countries.
