Carriers are basically infinitely evil all the time. I'd much rather be at the mercy of a Silicon Valley company than an "open standard" that leaves anything up to the telecoms.
I never thought I'd defend ISPs... (especially since an ISP destroyed my credit "on accident" 10 years ago) but there is no comparison to Facebook.
ISP's list of evil acts: failing to update infrastructure, failing to protect against intrusions, general technical and customer service ineptitude, absolute fealty to state requests for information (both official and sometimes unofficial), hijacking web requests to inject ads, and adding surprise undisclosed fees on a seemingly-random basis.
Facebook's: Where to even start.
Burying internal research directly linking Instagram to teen suicides (including a majority of teens surveyed saying they wish Instagram didn't exist even though they use it 5+_hours a day).
Running nonconsensual psyop experiments on unsuspecting users and measuring their emotional responses like unpaid guinnea pigs (in fact, because of Facebook's revenue model, it was like users were paying Facebook for the privelege!)
It's like comparing a molotov cocktail to a dirty bomb. Yes, both are evil and bad, but we can tell there's a difference there, right?
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To go beyond list wars, it's also just a matter of scale. You can be a mini-Hitler but if you're in an empty room you're not going to do that much damage. If you're at the Superbowl, though...
The largest US ISP is Comcast at about 30,000,000 subscribers.
Facebook has 2,900,000,000 monthly active users.
The sheer scale is also the problem. Scale gives them unfathomable power and access. It should make every non-Meta shareholder uncomfortable IMO. If there were only one mega-monopoly-ISP for the whole of the US, I'd feel similarly uncomfortable. But that isn't the case, in fact more ISPs seem to be starting up recently.
Put another way: An evil act from an ISP would hurt X number of people. An evil act from Facebook would hurt X^5 people. And I believe Facebook's acts are in general more evil than an ISPs.
You left out the fact that ISP’s are effectively a monopoly in most regions of the US, which is a problem even if it happens to be a different company holding the monopoly per region.
Exactly my point. Everyone knows that "Facebook sells your data" but what's actually demonstrable is Facebook uses your data internally for ad targeting purposes, which I'm fine with. Verizon, AT&T, et al are at just as problematic a scale (if not more!) and they are literally out there exchanging CSVs for cash.
Supporting open standards and getting mad about Cambridge Analytica in the same breath is incoherent. The critique here, and the response that Facebook and other tech companies actually undertook to placate the outrage, was that the platform APIs were too generous, and users should not have been allowed to delegate their accounts’ privileges to third parties not vetted by the platforms.
