On her blog, Technosociology, Zeynep Tufecki writes:
There is a growing debate about whether people should leave Facebook and whether there should be government regulation. I’d like to argue that it is very difficult for most people to leave Facebook three reasons: network externalities, social norms and technical competence. Network externalities, which I discuss below, means that the first to become a standard has an enormous advantage that can make it very hard for competitors. Plus, I believe that users of sites such as Facebook, Google, and even Ebay, Amazon, Craigslist and Wikipedia (a non-profit), have solid reasons they can make moral, legal and perhaps even regulatory claims on these companies. Such companies exist by the virtue of the work their users have put in without monetary compensation. Also, they deal with often intimate personal information that deserves protection irrespective of claims about ownership.
Read the whole piece here.
