Facebook Should Pay All of Us

Maybe so, or at least it's an interesting thought experiment.

I've thought for a while that the dominant business model of the web is for-profit piracy. I don't mean The Pirate Bay -- those are small time players and are not very profitable if at all. I mean Google, Facebook, etc.

To make that argument work you have to define piracy independently of whether or not it's illegal piracy. In this case we'd define for-profit piracy as the "indirect monetization of content you did not produce or license and in which you do not pay the producer."

Google monetized the entire web. They didn't create the content, but they sold ads on it. It's like having a radio station where you don't make the music, don't license the music, and don't even run the transmitter, but you get to present ads in-stream. Then on top of that you get to charge people for those ads while you are also monetizing them. It's brilliant.

That's not illegal (in this case), but it is perhaps a form of piracy. Google would have had no value had the web not been full of people dumping valuable information online.

Does this mean Google is a value extraction enterprise rather than a value creating one? I'm picking on Google but this applies to a whole lot of the web's business models. I think it's legitimate to question the economic justice of this. Again it's not illegal, but there are many things that are not illegal that are shady. Is the monetization of what began as an open gift culture shady?

Obviously Google's founders didn't think of it this way when they built Google, but one of the things social criticism does is to question what things really are or really become independent of their original intent.

The counter argument is that Google provided a valuable service that made the web more useful. That's undeniably true. But how much effort went into that vs. creating all the web's content? Does building a road to make it easier to reach someone's farm entitle you to 100% of the proceeds of their farm?

You can use the endpoints for the Facebook Android App. You will not comply with their ToS, but you will get all that data.

> "Look at all of the other social networks that tried to solve this in the past and failed."

FB has a network effect, which a a major reason all those products/services get used. However, it's not really fair to imply that FB is 'succeeding' at all the things you listed. If it were, then there'd be little talk of existential threat from things like Instagram/Whatsapp etc...

80% of that is provided by dropbox or onedrive for free without any charge or privacy invasion.

From what I observe[1] they're on it all the time because its a diversion. TV is another worthless diversion[2] but at least the TV networks don't (yet) sell your private information. But ultimately there is very little on Facebook that I see as critical or something I can't get from a myriad of other sources.

1: Watching my wife peruse FB but I suspect she is an example of a typical user.

2: I'll grant that worthless diversions have their place when used sparingly. But neither FB nor TV are used sparingly by most people unfortunately.