Facing the music

Ashadowy political consulting firm’s backdoor grab of as many as 87 million personal profiles from Facebook gave House and Senate committees all the reason they needed to haul founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in for two days of grilling this week. But let’s be honest, since we’re among friends: How Cambridge Analytica exploited Facebook to ID voters likeliest to fall for Donald Trump in 2016, even how Facebook fumbled its followup, press far less urgently than big questions about how an experiment birthed in a college dorm room came to amass half a trillion dollars in value mined one willing user at a time.

That billions of individuals have made the conscious choice to trade some measure of privacy for convenience — and in so doing empowered a wide array of marketers, political and otherwise, to profile and sell to them — isn’t itself a scandal.

What is scandalous is how Facebook enabled others to weaponize that power for foreign meddling in the presidential election. That problem stems from the company’s unprecedented and largely unchallenged market reach.

It’s Facebook’s toxic combination of unsettled privacy and corporate power that demands still more scrutiny: how a single player became so damn dominant, whether it leverages that dominance in anticompetitive ways, and ultimately what tools Washington might exercise, if any, in the face of that consolidation.

Eighty-seven percent of adults use Facebook or one of its products like photo-sharing app Instagram or chat app WhatsApp.

Sen. Lindsey Graham pitched a rare hardball question to Zuckerberg Tuesday: Is Facebook a monopoly? “If I’m upset with Facebook, what’s the equivalent product that I can go sign up for?”

Zuckerberg couldn’t name a single competitor. Can you?