Mozilla Foundation: Internet is NOT Healthy! FB Google, Amazon and Tencent Hold Too Much Power

The Mozilla Foundation has published its 2018 Internet Health Report, specifically citing consolidation of control as a concerning issue. Other areas of concern include web literacy, “digital inclusion,” openness, and personal privacy and security.  “Fake news,” IoT security weakness and hacking are symptoms of larger problems.

Mozilla Foundation Executive Director Mark Surman explained the harm done by Facebook’s failure to enforce its privacy policy.  In a blog post today, he described the process of creating the 2018 Internet Health Report. As Surman and foundation fellows were discussing how to examine the topic of “fake news,” he wrote, “I sketched out a list on a napkin to help order our thoughts:”

What the napkin said:

Collecting all our data

+ precision targeted ads

+ bots and fake accounts

+ FB dominates news distribution

+ not enough Web literacy

= fuel for fraud and abuse, and very bad real world outcomes

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Edited by Solana Larsen and written by Mozilla Foundation research fellows, the Internet Health report is an evaluation of “what’s helping and what’s hurting the Internet,” and it focuses on five broad areas of concern—personal privacy and security, decentralization, openness, “digital inclusion,” and general Web literacy. And Facebook’s part in the health of the Internet is writ large across the report.

Of particular concern were three issues:

  • Consolidation of power over the Internet, particularly by Facebook, Google, Tencent, and Amazon.
  • The spread of “fake news,” which the report attributes in part to the “broken online advertising economy” that provides financial incentive for fraud, misinformation, and abuse.
  • The threat to privacy posed by the poor security of the Internet of Things.

The foundation’s report isn’t all bad news—it highlights progress in affordable access and the adoption of cryptography. But the cautionary notes outweigh the optimistic ones, especially on the topic of consolidation of control over Internet content and collection of personal data. While the data collected and transformed into intelligence by the big social media and e-commerce vendors is vast, the Mozilla Foundation report warns, “The network control of major Internet services is only part of the grip they hold on our lives. Through sheer size and diverse holdings, a few companies including Google, Facebook, and Amazon—or if you live in China, Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba—have become intertwined not only with our daily lives, but with all aspects of the global economy, civic discourse, and democracy itself… they are too big. Through monopolistic business practices that are specific to the digital age, they undermine privacy, openness, and competition on the Web.”

That impact extends into the realm of “fake news,” as the report points out, because “most people are getting at least some of their news from social media now.” This enabled the Russia-based Internet Research Agency’s efforts to distort reality by creating dozens of ‘fake’ Facebook pages, including “BlackMattersUS” and “Heart of Texas,” as the report cites—using the language of US political movements to attract followers and spread misinformation—as well as organizing actual protests, “and once even a protest and a counter protest at the same time,” the report notes.

At the same time, thousands of “fake news” stories were created entirely to generate revenue from advertising—many of them created by people in one town in Macedonia. Social media platforms allowed these fraudulent articles to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for their creators.

Social media sites are a natural platform for this sort of deception and fraud, because it’s where the eyeballs are. The reach of social media companies has continued to expand, as the report shows in this chart of monthly active users, in millions, for each social media platform. During 2017, Facebook managed to expand its monthly active user base from 1.87 billion to 2.17 billion, while expanding its reach into users’ lives as millions more adopted Facebook’s Messenger application and WhatsApp (each of which now has approximately 1.3 billion monthly active users).

A chart from the Internet Health Report showing, in terms of monthly active users, how the reach of social media has expanded over the last year.
Enlarge / A chart from the Internet Health Report showing, in terms of monthly active users, how the reach of social media has expanded over the last year.

The precision with which these platforms can be used to target particular types of users and to effectively distort their perception of the world around them makes the dominance of the Internet by Facebook and others even more dangerous, the researchers asserted.

The emerging Internet of Things poses its own sort of danger to the privacy and security of individuals. With 30 billion Internet-connected devices expected by 2020, the report’s authors expressed concern about both the privacy impact of those devices and the threat posed by malware like the Mirai botnet that struck the Internet last year. The report warns that “the risk of all these insecure ‘things’ still exists, and the scale grows bigger with every new connected device.”

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/04/mozilla-foundation-report-details-decline-in-health-of-internet/

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Here’s the link to an excellent webinar that analyzes the crux of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica fiasco.  The bottom line is Facebook didn’t enforce its stated privacy policies and there was no regulatory oversight to hold them accountable.  This author asked the first question towards the end of the webinar at 56:05.  The presenter said “That’s a very weighty question but I’d appreciate it.”

https://santaclarauniversity.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=b124f22c-08b9-4b35-82fa-a8bf0118386a

 

 

 

4 thoughts on “Mozilla Foundation: Internet is NOT Healthy! FB Google, Amazon and Tencent Hold Too Much Power

  1. Mozilla: “The Internet remains decentralized, but the things we do on it every day are controlled by just a handful of global technology giants. These companies are starting to look more and more like monopolies of the past. Given the importance of the Internet in our lives, this is not healthy.”
    https://internethealthreport.org/v01/decentralization/
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    Open innovation on the Internet is threatened by bad policies, the devaluation of common standards, and the fragmentation of the global Internet.

    Billions of new devices are connecting to the Internet in homes, cities, public and private spaces, but proprietary software is usually prioritized over open standards and interoperability, leading to fragmentation, higher development costs and security risks for the Internet of Things.

    We need to push for open source practices, transparency and standards for all new Internet technologies, including virtual reality, artificial intelligence and machine learning (including training data) – not least to ensure that they also function properly on the Web.

    We need more people, governments and companies to build openness into their thinking and practice, or we will gradually see it erode. And we need more people to acknowledge, that: ‘Yes, openness is to thank for all the major achievements we ascribe to the Internet today.’
    https://internethealthreport.org/v01/open-innovation/

  2. Though tech giants in the U.S. and companies like Alibaba and Tencent in China have “helped billions realize the benefits of the internet,” the report calls for regulation of these players to mitagate monopolistic business practices that undermine “privacy, openness, and competition on the web.”

    “They box out competitors, restricting innovation in the process,” the report reads. “As their capacity to make sense of massive amounts of data grows through advances in artificial intelligence and quantum computing, their powers are likely to advance into adjacent businesses through vertical integrations into hardware, software, infrastructure, automobiles, media, insurance, and more — unless we find a way to disrupt them or break them up.”

    Governments should enforce anti-competitive behavior laws and rethink outdated antitrust models when implementing regulation of tech giants, the report states.
    https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/10/mozilla-foundation-tech-giants-like-amazon-and-facebook-should-be-regulated-disrupted-or-broken-up/

  3. IMHO, the internet giants have too much power and are stifling competition. All of it is now dominated by a handful of companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Baidu, Tencent, Microsoft, etc). Only the EU Regulators are clamping down on them. In the US they are completely unchecked with no regulatory oversight! It’s not just about privacy. They are also stifling competition as they are monopolies

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