Britain’s plans to regulate online content have triggered an unsurprising furore about censorship. But that’s largely fine with the technology giants because it distracts attention from a bigger problem that goes to the heart of their business model.

The white paper on online harms, published last week, is an effort to curb the online spread of dangerous content, such as incitement to terrorism. It proposed substantial fines on both companies and executives who have breached a statutory duty of care that would be enforced by a new regulator. As if that wasn’t enough, the regulator will ensure the focus is on protecting users from harm not judging what is true or not.

It has produced an enormous outcry over free speech, including here, here and here. It’s important to discuss this. But let’s not get carried away. This is a white paper, not a bill, let alone an Act. It asks questions, as well as answers them — the paper includes a list of 18 of them to guide participants in the consultation, which ends in July. And there’s no reason why the result need undermine free expression. Amnesty International, for one, offers clear parameters for the legitimate restriction of speech.

Still, if social media giants are going to be forced to make difficult calls with stiff penalties for getting them wrong you’d expect a bit of outrage from Silicon Valley. Particularly if the UK precedent is then followed by governments elsewhere around the world.

Instead, it’s crickets all around. Facebook Inc. itself has asked for these sort of rules — Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg did so in a Washington Post column last month. They will make his job easier. Rather than being beholden to the court of public opinion about what is or isn’t acceptable content, his responsibility will be to uphold rules specified by the government.

They’ll also provide a very useful distraction from something that should be an important focus for lawmakers: these tech behemoths’ business models. They make almost all their money from advertising, and the question is whether their reach has become anticompetitive.

The companies have created a growth cycle where more user engagement generates more advertising revenue, which funds new products, which attract more users, stoking more engagement, and so on. As a digital ecosystem expands to ensnare billions of people, engagement becomes the lodestar for lifting revenue.

Unfortunately for society, polarising and untrue posts and videos are usually a surefire way of generating more engagement, as Buzz feed journalist Craig Silverman demonstrated back in 2016 when he coined the term fake news. Sites such as Facebook and YouTube, which is owned by Google, are therefore rewarded financially for hosting posts and videos that may attract viewers but may also cause harm. The link between engagement and revenue has helped them cement their dominance of the online advertising market.

Disentangling the relationship between engagement and revenue is a complex problem that doesn’t have an immediately obvious or proportionate solution. Until such a fix is found, the best stopgap is for governments to intervene to tackle harmful content.

The starting point for any conversation is a detailed look under the tech giant’s hood. But a heated debate on the practicalities of containing harmful online speech will unfortunately take precedence over a much-needed discussion about whether the companies should be subject to antitrust regulation.

Bloomberg

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