Regulating Facebook

For the past few days, one of the most powerful men on the planet has been on Capitol Hill answering questions. Not President Trump, of course, but the founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. If ever there was a clash of generations it was on show here. The youthful Mr Zuckerberg, looking like he could still be at Harvard, where he set up the social media behemoth in his dorm, faced ranks of US senators, congressmen and women, some of who had a tenuous grasp on the online world they sought to understand.

Mr Zuckerberg had to spell out that Facebook made money not by selling data, but by directing advertisers towards potential customers. Too much of the questioning afforded the politicians a chance to grandstand rather than elicit much of note from the elusive CEO about the questions of privacy and regulation. Mr Zuckerberg apologised for the way in which the data of unsuspecting users was accessed by third parties, including, it is alleged, political campaigners. He accepted this was a breach of trust that needed to be addressed but without quite saying how, beyond an investigation into the millions of apps that might be implicated.

Around the world, governments are grappling with how to deal with Facebook and other monopolistic internet giants. Are they, or should they be, beyond the reach of regulators? Should they be broken up? Mr Zuckerberg was reluctant to accept that Facebook should be treated as a publisher, not as a tech platform, since that would open it up to laws that affect other media outlets. He was also asked whether he would be in favour of regulation. But that, surely, cannot be a matter for him to decide.