Terry McCrann: Time to shackle 21st century parasites Google and Facebook

Google and Facebook have become monstrous parasites in our hi-tech world and will stop at nothing to exploit us all. Now it’s time to return fire, writes Terry McCrann.

Facebook and Google are quite literally out of control. Like benign viruses introduced into the community for some “good” purpose, they have turned virulently deadly.

They are destroying competition and privacy, lapping up and misusing the personal data of millions of Australians and censoring what you can read or even know about like no government or even the most powerful media organisation has ever come remotely close to before.

Any suggestion that they could reform themselves — far less be trusted to ‘behave’ in any reasonable or responsible manner — is utterly, utterly laughable.

The only language they know and respond to is financial pain and even that’s not certain.

It’s laughable to suggest Google can reform itself, says Terry McCrann.

Facebook has just agreed to a $7 billion payment — yes, that’s billion, not million — to the US FTC, their equivalent of the ACCC, which prepared this latest report.

This was for misusing and disclosing the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users.

Surely that would make at least Facebook behave?

Good luck with that. For huge as that figure was, it only amounted to one month’s revenue. No, Facebook — and a pre-warned Google — will just get craftier and more devious.

Why? To use their own term, the fundamental operating business ‘algorithm’ of both Facebook and Google is actually built on predatory, parasitical behaviour, against and into the most intimate detail of the lives of as many millions of Australians (and Americans and Brits etc etc) as possible.

Always listening: Facebook exploits the personal details of people who use the platform.

They are not about delivering information to their users, but the exact opposite: delivering your most intense and intimate data to other parties to exploit, manipulate and indeed misuse, often — mostly? — without you even knowing.

Absolutely critically, they need to make their intrusions, their aggregation of your personal data and then its exploitation, disclosure and distribution and outright misuse, as monopolistically exclusive and manipulative as they can make it.

They could no more stop relentlessly attacking and ripping — in their case, figuratively — at these most sensitive and intimate parts of your life as could a Great White Shark stop attacking and ripping flesh.

The only answer is — the desperate need is for — legislation and powerful regulation.

But it has to be smart legislation and even smarter — and 24/7 real-time effective and punitive — regulation.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg must not put tech regulation in the “too-hard basket”.

You’d have to say, in the wake of the disclosures at the banking royal commission, good luck on that.

Bluntly, Facebook and Google make our bankers (and our regulators) look like rank amateurs in the exploitation game.

If Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is going to take the next three or four months to try to get it right; fine. If he’s just putting it into the ‘too-hard basket’, very definitely not fine.

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The first thing to be done is that it has to be bipartisan. Frydenberg has to bring Labor into the tent to agree on the full spectrum of the legislative and regulatory approach and to agree as quickly as possible.

This has got nothing to do with politics; it’s about the national interest; it’s about the most fundamental personal interests now and into the future of every single Australian.

The ACCC also has to get its — very heavy — boots ready and indeed on. We need to ‘go’ as soon after the new year ticks around as possible.

Originally published as Terry McCrann: Time to shackle 21st century parasites Google and Facebook