Over the past decade, Google and Facebook have built globe-spanning digital platforms that impact almost every facet of our lives, and often in harmful ways. Apart from their use of “surveillance capitalism” on a massive scale, or their distribution of disinformation during the 2016 election, the algorithms Google uses at YouTube have been implicated in the rise of alt-right groups like QAnon. Facebook’s private groups and WhatsApp messaging service have been cited by the United Nations as helping to perpetuate a genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar. And yet traditional antitrust legislation, or at least the way it’s been interpreted for the past couple of decades, makes it difficult to regulate these two giant platforms — as does Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which absolves them of liability for anything that is posted by their users, and gives them wide latitude to moderate content as they wish.

Is there another path we could take that might allow us to harness the benefits of these huge services, while also blunting their negative effects? Dipayan Ghosh thinks there is. He’s the director of the Digital Platforms and Democracy Project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, a former policy adviser to the Obama administration, and a former adviser at Facebook. He’s also the co-author of a recent paper with Joshua Simons, a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard and a former adviser to the UK Labour Party, as well as a former policy adviser at Facebook. Their paper is titled “Utilities for Democracy: Why and How the Algorithmic Infrastructure of Facebook and Google Must Be Regulated.” CJR used its Galley discussion platform to speak with both men about their proposals, and their belief that the algorithms used by both companies have become part of the infrastructure of our public sphere, and should be regulated as public utilities.

“These companies control the social infrastructure we all use for communication and organization, political expression, and collective decision-making,” said Simons. “Their control over this infrastructure concentrates not only economic power, but social and political power too.” In effect, he and Ghosh argue, the kind of oligopoly that Google and Facebook have created isn’t that different from the massive “trusts” of previous generations, which controlled railways or oil production. Innovation is a good thing, Simons says, but “it creates new concentrations of power — railroads, oil trusts, telecommunications companies — and those concentrations of power matter for democracy in different kinds of ways.” The strength of the public utility concept that was developed in the Progressive era, he says, was that it offered a way to think about how and why different kinds of corporations might pose a threat to democracy.

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The first question we should ask is, Ghosh argues, is whether Facebook is powerful enough to be considered a monopoly. “I think it is,” he says. “In fact, in several important markets including social media and web-based text messaging, Facebook is a dominant monopoly,” with more than 50 percent of the relevant market, and in some cases as much as 90 percent. The next question, Ghosh says, is whether the company has used this market power to cause broad social harm. The answer to this is also yes, he says. “I think we can make the case that Facebook has indeed caused harm in the three traditional areas where competition regulators look — namely, in market innovation; quality of service; and consumer pricing (i.e., the amount of data-and-attention monetized by the firm).” In each of these areas, says Ghosh, you could argue that Facebook has caused real harm not just to consumers but to society as a whole.

If both of those statements are true, Ghosh argues, then the only proper course of action is to regulate them in a variety of ways that reflect the different functions they serve, and to ”treat them like the utilities they are.” There is a case to be made, he says, that the two companies may actually be what are called “natural monopolies,” in the sense that the market barriers that come from the network effects they rely on can be insurmountable for smaller companies. And both have then reinforced those monopolies by acquiring firms like Instagram and Doubleclick, which make the barriers higher. “This is not innovation any longer,” Ghosh says. “It is a pair of behemoths getting ever fatter at the expense of everyone else.”

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