The Future of Social Media Giants — Protect or Regulate?
Social media’s innovation and expansion keep benefiting individuals’ lives and enhancing social networks. Nearly 40% of the population in the world use social media daily and the time of people spent on social media per day is growing. However, there are some disturbances in the development of social media. In general, issues of market monopoly, privacy and data security are the most concerned in the growth of social media. I will focus on introducing the monopoly in the social media market at this blog.
The issues of dominance and monopoly of tech giants are discussed in the United State for years. Kara Swisher argued about taking the power back from big tech firms in her article, “When it Comes to Facebook, the Need for Action Has Been Obvious for a Long Time”, using the example of Facebook. As the leader of the social media market, Facebook has used its dominance status and monopoly power to bully smaller rivals and eliminate competitions. Based on the massive resources of data and money, Facebook executed anti-competitive strategies to impede those companies in the market that could cause threats to it.
The “buy or bury” strategy and anti-competitive strategy are normal implements used by giant tech companies to eliminate potential treats and competitions. As the result of an unlimited and unregulated market, big tech companies kept expanding, utilizing the data resources to occupy most of the market share, while new entrants and smaller companies faced challenges of merger and anti-competition. The situation of market dominance led to a damper innovation for the whole industry.
Other example
The monopoly in the social media market is not a unique phenomenon in the U.S. It also happened in other markets globally. In the article, “ByteDance Sues Arch-Rival Tencent Over Alleged Monopolies”, it reported that, on February 2nd, the TikTok owner, ByteDance, filed a lawsuit against the owner of Wechat, Tencent. According to the lawsuit, it claimed that Tencent had violated Chinese antitrust laws by blocking access to content from TikTok on WeChat and QQ. As a social media platform which has over 1 million users, Wechat established a “walled garden” that controls what content and services its users can interact with, in a long term. Users of Wechat can not access the video content in TikTok so they can only use the short video platform owned by Tencent, called Weishi. The ByteDance spokesperson said “we believe that competition is better for consumers and promotes innovation”. It shows that the anti-monopoly to big tech companies and protection to innovations are significant issues in most global markets.
What to limit and regulate?
It is hard to balance the relationship between government interference and free innovations of tech companies. Regulating giant tech companies does not simply mean that innovations in the industry are protected because these giant tech companies are still the main driver of industry innovation, rather than small companies.
In Sintia Radu’s article, “The World Wants More Tech Regulation”, it argues that “the internet was developed on a permissionless innovation, a principle that allows creators to freely experiment with technology and business models.” In fact, the freedom and competition in the tech market incentivized the innovation and development of tech companies thus these companies can keep creating improvements and benefits to the whole market.
Nonetheless, there is still a majority of views which support regulations on giant tech companies. Sintia Radu reported a survey that asked people’s views about limiting the power of technology companies based on more than 20,000 people in 36 countries. Here is the result:
“Roughly 74% of respondents say technology giants should see their powers limited. That sentiment is strongest among survey takers who are at least 55 years of age, and among respondents in Australia, where 87% say Big Tech companies should face limits to their power. Survey respondents in the United Kingdom and Canada registered the second- and third-strongest levels of agreement, respectively, in the need for curbing big tech companies’ power.”
Conclusion
It is true that the social media market should be regulated to avoid bullying and anti-competition, but the focus should be around protecting the innovation of small companies and new entrants, rather than completely limiting big tech companies.
