“Democracy is dead” proclaim online pundits as Facebook closes down their corporate governance feedback pages.
The question though is whether democracy really exists online; the internet is largely a privately run operation which makes the hysteria about the International Telecommunication Union’s attempts to impose standards on the web all the so more fascinating.
As a consequence of almost every internet service being run by private organisations, rights and concepts like “democracy” are pretty well irrelevant and have been since the first connection to ARPANET.
When we use services like Facebook, or even our internet provider’s email account, we are only being allowed to do so within the companies’ interpretation of their terms and conditions.
Often those interpretations are wrong or bizarre as we see with Facebook’s War on Nipples and often the results of misinterpretation are costly for businesses.
But we have little recourse as these sites are private property and the owners can do pretty well what they like within the law.
Just a like a shopping mall, if the managements of Amazon, Google or Facebook want you to leave their service then you have no choice but to do so.
We can squeal about rights online, but in reality we have few.
That’s something we should keep in mind when investing our time or business capital into any particular platform.