The Great Social Media Blackout of 2021
What can the international community do about Facebook’s monopolistic hold on digital communications and its impact on the Global South?
Paola Salas Paredes is a Master’s in Public Policy Candidate at the Max Bell School. Originally from Panama and educated in the United States, Paola leverages her multicultural perspective to inform evidence-based policy making. She is interested in the intersection of science, technology, and democratic governance for addressing social inequality and tackling our greatest global challenges.
Facebook and its counterparts (Source: CBC News)
ON ANY GIVEN DAY, NEARLY 3 BILLION PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD USE MESSAGING APPS like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram to stay in touch with their loved ones, conduct business and even govern. For about 6 hours on October 4, that all came to a screeching halt as Facebook, the parent company of these apps, ran into errors while running routine maintenance.
Although these messaging apps are seen as secondary modes of communication in the developed North, across the Global South, they are the primary mode of communication and conducting business. Messaging apps have democratized global communication by replacing costly international calls with free app-based ones. In many rural places where the internet exists but cell service infrastructure is lagging, WhatsApp is the only reliable communication.
One positive externality of messaging apps is that they allow for the effective coordination of social action. For example, they have helped galvanize people across the Global South in mass social protests and amplified images of state repression and violence, most recently during the wave of anti-corruption, anti-neoliberal policy protests across Latin America in 2019.
Monday’s blackout had widespread impacts across the Global South. In India, where more than 500 million people use WhatsApp daily, the blackout prevented doctors from coordinating schedules and posting ward updates. Government offices, companies, and schools in the Philippines, which use Facebook's infrastructure for information sharing, found their operations hindered. Many small businesses saw commerce come to a halt. All saw the blackout as a wake-up call for just how dependent we are on social media platforms.
U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brought attention to how Facebook’s monopolistic behaviour of wiping out or buying up competitors has destructive impacts for society. Indeed, this has raised eyebrows in the past. In December 2020, the United States’ Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company, accusing it of being a monopolist that acquired Instagram and WhatsApp in order to secure its dominance over this market. However, this lawsuit was later thrown out by an FTC judge due to insufficient evidence that Facebook was behaving in monopolistic ways.
Absent regulation of Facebook in the United States and given the disproportionate impact of the Blackout on the Global South, can the international system do anything to curb the monopolization of social media messaging apps?
One pitfall of the international system is the absence of a transnational regulatory body like the FTC. With no equivalent of the Federal Trade Commission globally, it is up to regional competition bureaus to reign in the monopolistic practices of Big Tech to protect their citizens. The clearest hope here lies within the European Union, where EU policymakers are drafting sweeping regulations that would cripple Facebook’s power. The Digital Markets Act (DMA) sets out a list of dos and don'ts for Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google that in essence will force them to change their core business model to allow more competition. It was introduced by EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager who also spoke last week of the blackout, “[it] shows the repercussions on relying on just a few big players and underscores the need for more rivals.”
To understand how Big Tech has consolidated such power that it rivals that of governments, one must look at the opportunities to challenge big tech’s acquisitions, including Instagram in 2012, WhatsApp in 2014 (both by Facebook), Waze in 2013 (Google), and Whole Foods in 2017 (Amazon). The FTC’s failure to act then brought ushered in a reality where Facebook now claims that its platform is “too complex to break up”, suggesting that any regulatory intervention would cause disruptions worse than the Blackout.
Facebook is right—any attempt to regulate big tech to curb the monopolization of social media messaging apps must come with thoughtful national and regional policies to address the scarcity conditions which have led billions across the world, and countless industries, to become reliant on these apps. Investments in landlines, cell towers as well as domestic subsidies for communications carriers could create an alternative for those who rely on messaging apps. For those in the Global South that cannot afford such infrastructure investments, there must be Foreign Direct Investment opportunities available.
Further, fostering competition in the web-based messaging app market by placing protections on infant industries could help them better compete against the behemoth that is Facebook. Regulators in the EU have been pursuing this through “digital sovereignty,” resorting to other tools to foster domestic competition such as “digital services taxes,” protectionist regulations, and subsidies for domestic tech players in high-growth industries. In the battle between Big Tech and governments, Big Tech portrayed itself as David and became Goliath while governments pretended to be Goliaths and became Davids. Wriggling free from Facebook’s hold on communication globally is about more than just monopoly and power, it is about ensuring equitable access to resources and connectivity for the world’s most vulnerable populations. (PSP)
The Bell is edited by Jaclyn Victor, Jason Kreutz, Shweta Menon, and Phaedra de Saint-Rome of the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University.