More About That Facebook Antitrust Suit

From Wired come some tantalizing details of information from internal Facebook correspondence that have bearing on the anti-trust suit about which I posted yesterday:

Did Facebook actually compete for users by offering better privacy protections? And did it really renege on those commitments later on simply because the company’s leaders thought they could get away with it?

The case filed by the state attorneys general provides new evidence suggesting that the answer to both questions is yes. It cites an internal report from 2008 in which the company identifies strong privacy controls as one of four pillars of “Facebook Secret Sauce.” The report observed, “Users will share more information if given more control over who they are sharing with and how they share.”

The most revealing insight comes from the summer of 2011, when the company was gearing up to fend off the threat of Google’s rival platform, Google+. The complaint quotes an email in which Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote, “For the first time, we have real competition and consumers have real choice … we will have to be better to win.” At the time, Facebook had been planning to remove users’ ability to untag themselves in photos. One unnamed executive suggested pumping the brakes. “If ever there was a time to AVOID controversy, it would be when the world is comparing our offerings to G+,” they wrote. Better, they suggested, to save such changes “until the direct competitive comparisons begin to die down.” This is close to a smoking gun: evidence that, as Srinivasan hypothesized, Facebook preserves user privacy when it fears competition and degrades privacy when it doesn’t.

If the remedy being sought is to force Facebook to divest Instagram and WhatsApp, that isn’t nearly enough. And if the case proceeds at the pace at which the antitrust case against Microsoft did, that’s far too long. That suit was filed in 1998 and wasn’t settled until 2002. That’s an eternity in IT time.

The harm caused by Facebook has already been done and will be hard to reverse. How much harder will it be in several years?

We really need a more agile government and, particularly, legal processes. We’ve got an 18th century legal system in the 21st century. And, of course, much of government at all levels is still rooted in the 1950s, when government in the United States was at its highest level of trust and prestige. That was a long time ago.