“Let me paint the two scenarios for you. They correspond to two companies in the Valley. It’s not completely this extreme, but they are on different sides of the spectrum. On the one hand you have Google, which primarily gets information by tracking stuff that’s going on. They call it crawling. They crawl the Web and get information and bring it into their systems. They want to build maps, so they send around vans which literally go and take pictures of your home for their Street View system. And the way they collect and build profiles on people to do advertising is by tracking where you go on the Web, through cookies with DoubleClick and AdSense. That’s how they build a profile about what you’re interested in. Google is a great company . . .” He hesitates. “But you can see that taken to a logical extreme that is a little scary.
“On the other hand, we started the company saying there should be another way. If you allow people to share what they want and give them good tools to control what they’re sharing, you can get even more information shared. But think of all the things you share on Facebook that you wouldn’t want to share with everyone, right? You wouldn’t want these things to be crawled or indexed—like pictures from family vacations, your phone number, anything that happens on an intranet inside a company, or any kind of private message or email. So a lot of stuff is getting more and more open, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s not open to everyone.
“This is one of the most important problems for the next ten or twenty years. Given that the world is moving towards more sharing of information, making sure that it happens in a bottom-up way, with people inputting the information themselves and having control over how their information interacts with the system, as opposed to a centralized way, through it being tracked in some surveillance system. I think that’s critical for the world.” He laughs a little nervous laugh, realizing he sounds awfully passionate. “That’s just a really important part of my personality, and what I care about.”
Facebook’s position in all this is not entirely benign, despite Zuckerberg’s high-minded tone. Regardless of Google, Facebook has not always protected personal information carefully. It initially made wrong choices about such information in the News Feed, Beacon, and terms-of-service incidents. It got enormous criticism in the late 2009 for strongly encouraging members to select the “everyone” privacy settings for their personal information.
For all the protections it can offer our data from the potential depradations of others, Facebook the company will always be able to see our data. It is itself a centralizer, gathering all this information about us under one corporate umbrella. It is comforting that Zuckerberg is so personally passionate about the importance of protecting people from information predators. But what guarantee could Facebook’s users possibly get that his good intentions will last indefinitely? In a worst-case scenario, possibly in some future when Zuckerberg has lost control of his creation, Facebook itself could become a giant surveillance system.
Zuckerberg’s big-picture adviser and board member Thiel makes a similar point about Google. It’s clearly something they’ve spent time talking about. “Google in many ways is an incredible company with an incredible founding vision,” says Thiel. “But a very profound difference is, I think, at its core Google believes that at the end of this globalization process the world will be centered on computers, and computers will be doing everything. That is probably one of the reasons Google has missed the boat on the social networking phenomenon. I don’t want to denigrate Google. The Google model is that information, organizing the world’s information, is the most important thing.
“The Facebook model is radically different. One of the things that is critical about good globalization in my mind is that in some sense humans maintain mastery over technology, rather than the other way around. The value of the company economically, politically, culturally—whatever—stems from the idea that people are the most important thing. Helping the world’s people self-organize is the most important thing.”
Some aspects of the contrast Zuckerberg and Thiel point to is already evident. Facebook poses a concrete threat to Google’s mandate to index and organize the world’s information. “What happens on Facebook’s servers stays on Facebook’s servers,” wrote Fred Vogelstein in an insightful July 2009 article in Wired magazine titled “The Great Wall of Facebook.” “That represents a massive and fast-growing blind spot for Google.” Insiders at the search company confirm that this is a much-discussed worry there. If data inside the largest and fastest-growing Web service is off-limits to Google, its ability to serve as the definitive search site could be in jeopardy. The quantity of information we’re talking about is considerable. Status updates alone on Facebook are estimated by company insiders to amount to more than ten times more words than on all blogs worldwide. The Compete research firm reports that in January 2010, 11.6 percent of all online time in the United States was spent on Facebook, vs. 4.1 for Google.
The problem for Google is compounded as personal information begins to help us all search for information online. If a friend has previously found benefit from some data source, or purchased an item you’re looking at, that’s something you’re going to want to know when you conduct a search. In a rare public admission, a Google product manager conceded to journalists at a May 2009 Tokyo meeting that for many types of searches, users find information more trustworthy if it comes from friends, and that Facebook can potentially help users achieve that level of trustworthiness better. Then, in a public appearance in late 2009, Google CEO Eric Schmidt conceded that one of the top challenges his company faces is figuring out how to search, index, and present social media content like that created in Facebook. He called this issue “the great challenge of the age.”
Facebook itself continues to improve its own tools for searching content on its site, but it isn’t very good at it, either. Now it’s possible to search all Facebook commercial pages as well as data for which individuals have removed privacy controls so “everyone” has access. The company aims to further encourage use of the “everyone” setting even as it improves its search tools. This not only tweaks Google, but also helps fend off Twitter, whose success has been aided by the fact that tweets can be searched easily. For standard Internet searching from inside the service, Facebook adds insult to injury by using the Bing search engine from Microsoft, Google’s archrival.
The competition between Facebook and Google will remain heated, though it could be resolved a number of ways. One cannot rule out the possibility of a rapprochement—even possibly some sort of deal or business combination that enabled the two companies’ data to somehow intermingle, despite Zuckerberg and Thiel’s protestations. Google probably would still like to buy Facebook, but as the search giant encounters more and more regulatory and anti-trust resistance, the chances that it would be allowed to make such a purchase diminish rapidly. Alternatively, if Facebook got closer to Microsoft its rivalry with Google could become more acrimonious. Most likely Facebook will continue to play the two giants against one another, as it did when Microsoft invested.
In the meantime, Facebook and Google battle for online market share and mindshare as well as for executives and engineers. Facebook has become the clear number two Internet company worldwide in numbers of users, behind Google, even as it has surpassed Google and all other sites in the total time its users spend there. As for employees, Zuckerberg’s hiring of Sheryl Sandberg, as well as top Google communications executive Elliot Schrage, did not go over well at Google. In January 2008, Zuckerberg rode to Davos on the Google jet, chatting much of the way with Sandberg, just prior to hiring her. Neither of them was offered a ride in 2009. Google got some revenge in 2008 when it lured back one of its other prominent defectors. The talented programmer and manager Ben Ling had been in charge of Facebook’s platform for only ten months before he returned to Google. A large number of Facebook’s employees are former Googlers.
I tried to get Google CEO Eric Schmidt to respond to Zuckerberg’s comments about Google and surv
eillance. “My preference is not to comment on things others say about Google,” he replied diplomatically in an email. “Mark has done a masterful job of navigating a tough set of waters over the last few years, and he is obviously an exceptional leader and strategist, especially given his relatively young age.”
Facebook may soon begin to share something else with Google: the perception that it has become too big. Regulators in Europe opened a formal antitrust investigation into Google in early 2010. Microsoft became so powerful that the Department of Justice moved to break it up. Though that effort failed, Facebook’s ambitions and potential to exert control over both users and platform partners are at least as great. “Facebook controls its platform more tightly than Microsoft ever did,” says one close observer. “Facebook can flip a switch and turn you off. Anybody. Anytime.” If Facebook keeps growing and Zuckerberg appears not to abide by his intended path of user consultation and corporate benevolence, such a development could begin to invite scrutiny from the world’s antitrust enforcers.
The closer Facebook gets to achieving its vision of providing a universal identity system for everyone on the Internet, the more likely it is to attract government attention. Facebook could have more data about citizens than governments do. Canada’s national privacy commissioner spent a year examining Facebook privacy policies before negotiating a number of changes announced in August 2009. It was telling that the inquiry emerged from Canada. A larger percentage of Canada’s online population is on Facebook—42 percent—than in any other major developed country, according to The Facebook Global Monitor.
In the extreme view, Facebook could take over key functions from governments. Says Yuri Milner, the company’s big Russian investor: “Facebook Connect is basically your passport—your online passport. The government issues passports. Now you have somebody else worldwide who is issuing passports for people. That is competitive, there’s no doubt about it. But who says issuing passports is government’s job? This will be global citizenship.”
Privacy and identity experts are certain such a transition cannot happen smoothly. Says John Clippinger, an official at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard and author of A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity: “Facebook is coming up against a crucial civic and legal and national security infrastructure. The identity system is a building block of our civil liberties. Sure, creating social graphs can be a new way of authenticating people. But should Facebook own it? And have no restrictions over it? It is an Orwellian power play. Facebook is trying to control a very fundamental resource and right.”
Such views could suggest a rocky road ahead for Facebook. One thing is clear: if Zuckerberg is going to play the role of statesman, he is going to have to spend a lot of time in coming years explaining himself.
As Facebook approaches a membership number in the billions, the need to successfully navigate the shoals of regulation will undoubtedly become a more pressing concern. I asked Thiel about the risk of government intervention. “Facebook will have the maximum amount of legal and political leeway in a world where it’s seen as friendly and not threatening,” he replied. “I think it isn’t threatening, It’s not really displacing anybody. I see it as a very hopeful sign that the company has made as much progress as it has, and has received as little resistance as it has. We’re at 175 million people [this was February 2009] and no lobbyists in Congress are arguing for Facebook to be shut down.”
True enough. But the scrutiny is certainly increasing. For instance, John Borthwick, a prominent New York–based technology investor (he owns a piece of Twitter, among other companies), thinks that in late 2008 Facebook deliberately reset controls that determine whether users receive email notifications of new activity inside the service. Facebook says the resetting was accidental, the result of a technical glitch. But in the process, Borthwick notes, it was able to resume sending all users email notifications about things like messages they’d received. Though he has no proof, he thinks it was a deliberate effort to draw people back into the service in order to increase activity and page views.
Some things Facebook plans will almost certainly create strong outside reaction. For instance, Facebook “credits” could begin to function as a virtual currency, and a transnational one at that. “The currency becomes a way to monetize connections between users,” says Facebook’s Dan Rose, responsible for monetization. People could use it to transfer money between one another. Since this new mechanism for purchases is identity-based, it might help reduce credit card fraud. And it could enable new conveniences. For instance, you could buy a friend a present online without knowing their address. Just select the present and tell the retailer the name of the friend. The two companies’ systems could work out the rest for you, with payment drawn from your Facebook credits. A universal online payment system for hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide might be a huge convenience. It could also trump national boundaries and enable Facebook to begin operating as a truly global economy. But don’t be surprised when banks and others begin asking if that should be a role for Facebook.
Zuckerberg professes a deep desire to make sure that Facebook remains a benign force on the Net and in society. “You need to be good in order to get people’s trust,” he says. “In the past people just didn’t expect goodness from companies. I think that’s changing now.”
“I often say inside the company that my goal was never to just create a company,” Zuckerberg explains, staring at me intently as we sit alone in a conference room. “A lot of people misinterpret that, as if I don’t care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to me is not being just that—building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.” His stare is a bit unnerving, but he is concentrating. He continues.
“The question I ask myself like almost every day is ‘Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?’” he says with uncharacteristic expansiveness. “Because if not, we’ve built this company to a good enough point that I don’t have to be doing this, or anything else. That’s the argument a lot of people have given me for why we should have sold the company in the past. Then we could just go hang out. So then you face this question of what’s important to you. Unless I feel like I’m working on the most”—he lingers on these words for emphasis—“important problem that I can help with, then I’m not going to feel good about how I’m spending my time. And that’s what this company is.”
In the end Mark Zuckerberg’s vision is to empower the individual. For him, the most important thing that Facebook can do is to give people tools that enable them to more efficiently communicate and thrive in a world in which more and more information surrounds us all no matter what we do. He wants to help keep individuals from being overwhelmed as large institutions both in business and government gain ever more vast computational and information resources.
His subordinates have mostly come to endorse this way of thinking. “What is the key reason we are at this point, with all this success?” asks Kevin Colleran, Facebook’s longest-serving advertising sales executive and a good friend of Zuckerberg. “The key reason is that Mark is not motivated by money.” Chris Cox, the vice president of product and who works alongside Zuckerberg almost daily, says, “Mark would rather see our business fail in an attempt to do what is right and to do something great and meaningful, than be a big, lame company.” A watchword over the years at Facebook has been “Don’t be lame.” Cox says it means don’t do something just to make more money or because everybody is telling you to. It is Facebook’s counterpoint to Google’s motto ‘Don’t be evil.’”
Though Facebook is filling out with executives of all ages, people in their twenties still constitute a critical mass. They understand how Zuckerberg thinks because they are much like him. They take the impact of their work with profound seriousness, even as they seem to spend much of the day wiggling erratically around the vast office on two-wheeled RipStick skateboards. Many naturally gravitat
ed to Facebook after developing deep convictions about the social implications of a service they used daily. When I’m in their offices I often feel this could be the smartest bunch of young people on the planet today. The average age of the 1,400 employees is thirty-one.
The company moved in May 2009 from a hodge-podge of rented offices scattered across downtown Palo Alto into a big 135,000-square-foot former manufacturing plant a few miles across town. The office was deliberately picked for its funky undecorated quality—Zuckerberg and Sandberg didn’t want to move into fancy digs like the ones occupied by Google or Yahoo. They talked about the perils of the “you have arrived” corporate office. Their view was that it could lead employees to become complacent. But even the new office was quickly filled and the company rented another even bigger industrial building nearby for further expansion.
Facebook has shown a peculiar durability. Ever since it began, critics have predicted it was at risk of losing its “coolness” and would soon begin to decline: “If it lets in Harvard staff…If it goes beyond Harvard…If it includes colleges outside the Ivy League…If high school kids can join…If adults are allowed…everyone else will leave.” The “end of Facebook” article has become a cliché.
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