We don’t follow Elon Musk, we have no interest in the self-centered opinions he spouts like a spoiled teenager in search of personality. But Musk uses a public platform to project (impose?) his obsessive views on 370 million twitter users. He does it in the name of a peculiar concept of free speech: privileging expression for himself and blocking from “his” platform those he does not like.
What is the issue?
It’s not just Musk’s open invitation to Trump to return to twitter — through which Trump incited a rebellion and brought his country to the brink of civil war. It’s also that Musk is treating a global public information medium like his private vehicle. He looks like the awkward motorist, who wants to have a say in the passengers’ destination: “The taxi is mine, where I want to take it.”
The bewildered customer rightly reminds the clumsy taxi driver that his vehicle is a vehicle for public use, even if it belongs to his driver. The European Commission rightly reminds Musk that public use online platforms are subject to public rules, which defend public goods: freedom of access to information, preventing fake news, blocking hostile content that incites violence, protecting consumers from arbitrary practices , of democracy from its enemies. Free business competition against abuses of a dominant position by private monopolies or oligopolies.
We are indeed living in the age of indiscernible boundaries between public and private. It is people’s voluntary relinquishment of their privacy when they post the most personal aspects of their lives on social media. Their right. But it is also the hostile invasion of privacy in the era of “surveillance capitalism.” It is still the colonization of the public sphere and the appropriation of public goods by powerful private interests.
Look at Trump
Ηe treated the office of President like an extension of his business. He hired his children as advisers, used the organs of the state to hunt down and blackmail his personal opponents, refused to hand over power when he lost the election, and took home a few hundred classified government documents when he left.
A neighborhood shop can operate under regulatory approval. However, if it becomes gigantic, through mergers and acquisitions, well done, but it will be subject to reasonable regulatory rules, because it produces externalities that concern society as a whole.
The Problem
Problem is, the power of many private giants makes regulators powerless. The accumulation of lobbying power requires a strong mobilization of countervailing regulatory will to offset it. Before the 2008 crash, regulators turned a blind eye to the excesses of Wall Street as supervisors looked to a subsequent career in the service of the companies they supervised.
In the Qatargate-stunned European Parliament, the problem is not “lobbies” – a necessary evil in our pluralistic societies. Better that their action be official and public, than informal and secret. The problem is the transformation of public action, which derives from the position of (Euro)MP, into private action as an opportunity for illegal enrichment. That is why legislators and regulators are paid generously, so that their decisions do not depend on the powerful interests they regulate. Unfortunately, for many, “it’s never enough.”
The regulatory pendulum relaxes during periods of calm, but swings decisively after every major crisis, corruption scandal or market failure. This is what we have to look forward to after Qatargate. Otherwise, the constant search for a balance between public and private, in cases of excessive economic power, is a more demanding task. It is the job of regulators and legislators to make the boundaries between public and private as distinct as possible. It is also their job to save the credibility and integrity of the public space from the invasions of greed, arbitrariness or simple anti-social stupidity.
