Power and responsibility - Is Facebook a service or menace?

The dark side of internet technology in general and Facebook — which now owns WhatsApp and Instagram — in particular have been among the many problems governments have wrestled with throughout 2018. They remain unresolved as we welcome the new year. Like the hydrogen bomb, the technology cannot be uninvented, yet legislatures around the free world struggle to find ways to curtail its destructive power.

The European Union’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, talked this week about the ways in which technology’s potential has been damaged by data abuse and lack of respect for individual rights, and called for concerted international action. We have heard all this before; many times. Something must be done is the call, after which little if anything is done until the next bout of hand-wringing. The masters of the wired universe, safe in Silicon Valley but seemingly citizens of nowhere, are impervious to censure.