When Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp collectively experienced outages last Monday and then Friday, the proponents of trustbusting and regulating Mark Zuckerberg’s company were quick to capitalize.
One news headline dubbed Monday as “The day Facebook went dark”—as if the outage was an end-of-the-world doomsday scenario rather than a six-hour pause on scrolling. Some pundits argued that the disruption from the outage was “proof” that the company has monopoly power and should be broken up. Others claimed the incident highlighted how Facebook’s services have become “critical infrastructure”—akin to public utilities—and ought to be regulated as such.
Of course, millions of businesses do derive revenues through Facebook advertising, and billions of people use Facebook’s services for cheap communication (especially in the developing world). Facebook itself will primarily bear the costs of the outage, with users and advertisers updating their priors about how much they value the product given that experience.
But if the outage proved anything, it was surely both the weakness of the FTC’s current case against Facebook and the lack of context deployed by those calling the company’s services “critical infrastructure.”
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