If Norway bought Facebook (or Google)
This story is about how the states of the world completely missed out on their primary power-perk during the digitalization of the past decades. It is essentially a story of the passport, and how a non-factual dramatic move by Norway could fix most of the problems created by not having humans as a subject in our technology infrastructure (BTW; we are a resource right now).
During the past decades, there were several occasions where we *almost* defined a global standard or protocol for humans. Unfortunately, it never happened, which paved the way for commercial players to grab the address-book of the world.
Now, the human race is stuck in “login-fatigue” and introducing another login is close to dead on arrival. But what would happen if someone bought an established user-base and gave it back to us?
As a Norwegian citizen, I am part owner of our national pensions fund (commonly known as “the Oil Fund”) which is currently valued to about USD 1000 billion.
That’s more than enough to buy controlling stake Facebook, which is in time of writing has a market cap of USD 442 billion. Hell, we could buy the whole thing and take it private Elon Musk-style. We could even buy Alphabet at USD 778 billion if we felt for it.
So, who gave you the credit card?
Granted, I am not the prime minister of Norway, nor his Majesty the King. I am not even skilled in large financial transactions, and a mere novice when it comes to the stock market, so who am I to suggest such a radical gamble with pensions of my fellow Norwegians?
I believe that we live in a time where the idea has more power than ever before, and both good and bad ones tend to spread fast. We are hammered by biased political and economical messages, so it becomes our responsibility as citizens to call out ideas that could benefit humanity when we see it.
With my background as a tech entrepreneur and business consultant with a fairly high social engagement, I’ve acquired a skill for spotting where technology could do a better job for humans. A majority of the business I’ve landed have been on calling out misguided tech strategies, usually by making human-friendly arguments on why it just won’t work in practice, and proposing how to adjust the application of technology (often by simplifying) to engage regular human beings.
The idea behind this Facebook and/or Google intervention is just the largest scale-up I could think of, where responsible humans with an understanding of the complete picture (society and the human well being), intervenes on technology enterprises to adjust their path to better serve our common needs.
Recently, this avenue of ideas has been popularized by folks like Elisabeth Warren, but the anti-trust approaches of the 90'ies will not be effective in our current landscape. We have to address the principal root cause.
New rules of engagement, also for small states
So let’s explore why Norway would buy Facebook, and what could happen.
There seems to be a common conception right now that there is no way to quickly influence the global tech giants. The American default of the free and close-to-untouchable enterprise carries this illusion, but the simple comparison of market cap and the size of Norway’s Oil fund proves that wrong, at least at a conceptual level.
Norway *could* buy Facebook or Google, or less dramatically increase the existing shareholding enough to start influencing in meaningful ways. The Norwegian Oil Fund is doing this today, by enforcing an ethical investment policy, and also through active ownership engagement in a small portion of the portfolio.
If world peace is threatened, it will render the fund investments highly volatile and putting our pensions at risk, so why then, would not Norway use the fund to its full power for political gain? In the political environment pre-2016, this would, of course, be unthinkable. In 2019 however, when everyone seems to play their strengths with complete disregard for any code of conduct, it does not seem far fetched that even smaller states like Norway will have to play their hand.
It’s not communism, it’s about ownership where it belongs
Imposing a subtle check on free enterprise is something Norwegian government has done successfully in the past too, by retaining ownership in key sectors like telecom, energy, and oil, gradually reducing ownership in a balanced way between public interest and market dynamics.
Furthermore, we will explore later in the article how these large tech giants are infringing on the sovereignty of states, so why would not states take action to regain control? And from a value standpoint of the western liberal democracies; isn’t it better with a financial intervention from a transparent public entity, rather than convoluted private interest?
Much effort has gone into keeping the fund as transparent as possible, while at the same time ensuring profits. Anyone can explore our shareholding positions, and even see how the Oil Fund votes in the general assemblies of these public companies. Just check out the public reporting page and search for “Facebook” to get a sense of how real it could be:
Will 5 million brown-cheese eating fishermen give away their pensions?
As a small nation of only 5 million people, Norway is completely dependent on sustainable global growth, and as oil becomes less and less relevant, we are also in dire need of new avenues of income. Our secondary industries to oil, such as fishery and renewable energy are heavily reliant on both the global market and containment of climate change problems.
This makes global problems like unchecked AI, climate change and the decline of constructive global collaboration our most important problems. At the same time, we are so small that we have relatively little influence, not even a vote in the EU.
Secondly, Norway prides itself with a peace-keeping tradition, being praised by both current and former US Presidents for our efforts (granted the current president simply favors us over folks from sh$#%le countries). More famously we award the Nobel Peace Prize, and we tend to be a willing contributor in conflict resolution, probably because we are too small to win anything based on strength.
We are also one of the world’s biggest contributors to the UN and like to see ourselves as a stronghold of the liberal democracy, defender of free speech, human rights and all those things that make you warm and cuddly inside.
So if we find ourselves in a situation where an unchecked tech industry is causing societal problems which might lead to the deterioration or collapse of liberal democracies — we as a small state would quickly be very much alone holding our USD 1000 billion, only protected by a mere 5 million peace-loving Norwegians and about 40 or so F-35 fighter jets still pending delivery from Lockheed-Martin.
That would probably be a bad long-term strategy for us, especially considering our striking geographic and strategic resemblance with other tiny coastal communities, such as the Crimea.
In this situation, we would need to support improved global collaboration, as outlined by Nick Bostrom in his Vulnerable World Hypothesis, where the risk of innovation is explored in a very interesting, yet gloomy perspective.
So in this nutty thought experiment, this should suffice as to why, hypothetically, WE would go buy Facebook and/or Google. For the sake of brevity, I’ll focus on Facebook and its user base here, but the same case could be made for Google and its user base + search index.
What could we make them do?
Given that Norway still hasn’t signed up protectionism tit-for-tat we would probably not decide to relocate the entire Facebook Menlo Park HQ to the Norwegian west coast.
Even if it would help employ Norwegian engineers left unemployed by the coming oil downturn, we would pass. Even if our clean-energy waterfalls would enable ethically sound cloud computing compounds, we would say no.
No, we wouldn’t do that. Norwegians would feel bad about Silicon Valley engineers. We don’t like making people sad. A better idea is needed.
For a small nation with insane amounts of cash, we would rather invest in the global community. The smaller you are, the more return you get from investing in your team — in our case; the planet.
We also feel increasingly bad for the planet, given that all of our wealth stems from pumping up very hard-to-reach fossil fuels from the seabed. Our silent excuse; “better we collect the cash and use it for good, instead of OPEC filling the order books for private jets”, just won’t suffice anymore.
So what would be the maximum good that could be done by taking altruistic control over Facebook?
Buy the login
First, we would direct Facebook profit towards contributing to a new set of Internet standards, aiming to correct the (IMO) biggest flaw of the Internet right now, and set the stage for a convergence of the liberal democracy and the next generation infotech and biotech: Identity.
Just to be clear; I am not talking about identity politics here, I am simply referring to the most basic of all technology interactions: the login.
The lack of an open Internet standard for managing human identity, can be argued to be a root cause of more or less all the problems technology are creating for us now, and which will grow exponentially in the future.
It is very basic; without a global means of establishing a credible standard of human identity, there can be no robust accountability. Besides all of our current problems with this, just consider how this turdstorm will grow as Artificial Intelligence and intelligent visual deepfake bots claim ground in the coming years.
The founding fathers of the internet decided to procrastinate the standardization of identifying and authorizing a human being, leaving this as the single biggest business opportunity in human history.
Facebook acted on this opportunity, and in many regions of the world, they are now synonymous with “internet”, simply because that’s the primary thing folks log into to get the goods.
Due to the human inability to understand computer login-schemes, there is not a single person on the planet who would ever say “Yes please, I would like to manage another username and password combination”.
This is, in my opinion, the main barrier to solving the problem of standardized identity on the internet: People *HATE* creating a new login and password combination. This is easily proven by the success of Facebook and Google login-buttons across the internet.
How to give it back
However, being the custodian of the personal profile information of 2 billion humans on the planet is not a task for a single private corporation, with a business model based on manipulating those people into buying products or ideas from the highest bidder. Distributing responsibility across competing private and public entities do not work well either for the simple reason stated above: humans hate logins.
So who should take on this responsibility? I could go on to speculate about some utopian non-partisan Global World Government entities here, but I won’t, because it is just so darn simple:
The provisioning of Identity to humans is a mechanism that is already reasonably well taken care of by states. Let us decide to do the simple thing and give it back to them.
Granted, there are enough corrupt and not-so-benign states out there, but thinking about digital identity in the same way as passports do not create any new problems — it simply transfers existing ones into a digital arena.
The internet has already solved the problem of addressing huge amounts of machines and things all over the planet, using the Domain Name System (DNS — go here for an in-depth or here to see how close it is). Simply put, we’ve placed top-level address books across the globe, which routes you down to the local custodian to find what machine you are looking for. This does not exist for humans though; therein lies the potential.
Using a DNS inspired hierarchical approach, the apps, and sites who need to identify a user could easily determine if the user logging in was identified by a state, or by a credible 3rd party.
NGOs like Red Cross and Kiva are already working on digital identities, as first done by Nansen back in 1922.
Sites and apps would know that logins are done by someone who holds credentials as a real human issued by a state organized under the UN, or Amnesty or the Red Cross — depending on what root-identity your site decides to trust.
The misuse scenario of this identity architecture would essentially be equivalent to someone holding a fake state passport. It is doable but mainly done by spies.
No new login, but endless opportunities for humanity
Humanity would eventually only need a single login (except spies), and data privacy concerns, aka what the site or app should know about you, would be entirely up to you. This provides a huge benefit for our ongoing data privacy issues.
Much of our GDPR related complexities would eventually wither, as sensitive information would move into our user-owned guarded datastores (state-run, outsourced, or user-sourced). Opportunities would arise in areas such as health through a trustworthy starting point for true anonymization of things like health data.
If the internet can reach the same level of certainty about human identity as a passport control gate, we really can’t do much better right now, and it would make it a LOT harder to be a bot or, or in the near future; An artificially intelligent entity, who will be able to represent itself with live video looking like anyone Tom Cruise could impersonate during a Mission: Impossible movie.
Even benign AI will probably not be able to detect these fakes, so we need another solution, and standardizing the digital passport could be a big step in the right direction.
This how we do it
So, in summary, Norway would want to buy Facebook for its user base and make them adopt standards that would allow for the return of the responsibility of identifying humans to states, while also allowing for NGOs as a biased act in favor of liberal democracy.
Because more than 2 billion humans already hold a Facebook account, there would be zero practical implications for them. They would just next-next-next themselves through some benign policy updates over the next few years, and then suddenly realize that they could log in to their government services with the same mechanism as Facebook.
In the back-end, a new Identity Architecture will emerge, with a high degree of flexibility for states to adopt liberal or more strict containers for citizen identity information. The physical storage of user data would probably move geographically to locate within state borders, and efficient P2P technologies will rapidly emerge to establish the replication architectures of Facebook.
The only difference would be that your personal data had been formally moved away from Facebook, and identity and login are now part of the internet standard, just as addressing a webpage, mailbox or other resource has been an open standard since the inception of the internet.
So Norway would have Facebook help drive open standards for identity, establishing a protocol that could be adopted by any state. We would make sure the protocol would also work for dictators, but compensate by ensuring that there was a UN NGO established to cater to the stateless and downtrodden.
Norway would then vote on the board to have Facebook adopt this standard, which would put identity-ownership back to the individual, potentially ratified by states or other entities.
Most developed states out there have some form of citizen identification mechanism in place, and they would have clear incentives to adopt the standard, simply by the effect of simplified citizen engagement towards public services.
As the internet has democratized information, it should do the same for identity. As a consequence, we will see paradigmatic shifts in several areas, and technology will have a much greater potential of being net positive in the future.
However, just establishing a standard protocol will not be enough — humanity cannot take another username and password combination.
