The Implications of a Facebook Bankruptcy

One reason companies like Facebook should be interested in what I am proposing is that planning a regulation regime is better than morphing involuntarily into a dull regulated utility, which is what would probably happen otherwise. Suppose Facebook never gets good enough at snatching the “advertising” business from Google. That’s still a possibility as I write this. In that event, Facebook could go into decline, which would present a global emergency.

It’s not an outlandish scenario. It once seemed unthinkable that tech giants like Silicon Graphics could disintegrate. If Facebook starts to fail commercially, suddenly people all over the world would be at risk of losing old friends and family ties, or perhaps critical medical histories. Companies would suddenly lose connections with their customers. Facebook is only one example of many recent highly successful network players that have made themselves essential in advance of making themselves sustainable.

Facebook is becoming more like an electric utility every day. It’s a piece of infrastructure people need, and when people need something they eventually ask the government to make sure they have it. That’s why government ended up in the middle of water, electricity, roads, and the like. Businesses also demand that access to these things be constant and secure, so it is not a question of corporations versus individuals.

People would lose their friends, contacts, and much online history.