I’m heartened at the prospect that the amazing engine of private enterprise may find creative ways to tap into and reinforce our civic instincts

Jonathan Zittrain reports on governance reform at Facebook. While freedom has never been granted from above, this move may be seen as a response to social pressure and a way to obtain a buy-in from its users for future decisions.

Zittrain writes:

“The consumer/vendor relationship – governed by contract and fair trade law – is different from that of citizen/government. Citizens identify with something larger than themselves – if one’s country is attacked, it can feel like a personal attack in a way that a fellow bank customer’s account theft does not feel like a personal invasion. (”Today we are all Bank of Americans” doesn’t leap to the lips.) And in non-authoritarian systems, citizens have a voice in the affairs of state distinct from the metaphorical vote a consumer makes with his or her feet – or that a shareholder makes in a quaint proxy proceeding.

Facebook has followed through with the analogy. In a rather unusual move it has published Facebook “governance documents,” opened them to public comment in a manner intentionally reminiscent of American administrative agencies’ notice-and-comment periods, enlisted law students to help process the responses, and now is putting a revised set of documents up for a vote.

This isn’t meant to be a one-off deal. Instead, there is a Facebook Principles document – translated into multiple languages – that expresses commitments to such things as open platforms and standards, free flow of information, universal availability of the service and its contents regardless of one’s country, and freedom to control one’s own data, including removing (or extracting) it from Facebook.”
And he comments:

“the fact is that most companies wouldn’t dream of going as far as Facebook just has, because the kinds of public pressures that create privacy crises can also be elicited when cynical choices are presented. Facebook has intentionally placed itself in a new zone, borrowing elements of .org and .gov to inform how a .com is run. Coming from .edu myself, I’m disappointed that something initially as academically-related as Facebook – a social networking site for university communities – wasn’t begun and nurtured under university auspices, naturally incorporating public interest values.

So Facebook draws from the public and public interest sphere, a simultaneously bold and modest step towards acknowledging that our new networked technologies deeply affect our lives in ways not always captured or best shaped by the typical template of consumer and seller.”

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