Net giants 'must pay for news' from which they make billions

2016 has been a year of surprises and painful lessons that have taught us we must proactively defend what we value or face losing it in spectacular fashion. In 2017, Twitter’s future might matter more than you might think—and it hinges on keeping it in the hands (or, should we say, thumbs) of the public.

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Twitter’s absence from US president-elect Donald Trump Dec 16’s meeting with top tech executives raised quite a few eyebrows. Despite using the social-media platform to regular and devastating effect throughout his campaign, Trump’s choice to not have Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sitting at the table with the tech big kids draws the importance of the company into question. The Trump team defended their decision to exclude them by saying the platform—which claims 317 million monthly active users, though that figure is not entirely clear-cut—was “too small.” (There’s also a rumor Trump froze Twitter out in retribution over rejecting a custom emoji he wanted to run during the campaign.)

Sure enough, judging by criteria such as market cap ($13 billion compared to Amazon’s $363 or Apple’s $618), number of employees (a workforce less than a hundredth of the size of IBM’s), and revenue (they’re still operating at a net loss), Twitter seems to come up short compared to the other tech giants. But it holds some serious soft economic power: Recently, Trump wiped out billions of dollars in Lockheed Martin’s stock value with a single tweet.

Twitter might yet find ways of making money from its substantial user base and the huge amount of content and data it generates. But the network’s true calling arguably resides in giving people a voice who would otherwise have been ignored. In that context, it makes a lot more sense to think of Twitter as a public service rather than a dividends cash cow. Yet the constant pressure it’s under to monetize leaves it vulnerable to a takeover, which could question its future integrity and neutrality.

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 It makes a lot more sense to think of Twitter as a public service rather than a dividends cash cow. Twitter’s potential suitors—which include Disney, Salesforce, Alphabet, and Microsoft—continually frame the company in terms of commercial viability (or lack thereof) instead of its reach and influence as a media platform. For example, News Corp has been touted as a potential buyer, although they’ve officially denied it so far. If that did turn out to be true, what are the implications of its founder and executive chairman, Rupert Murdoch, openly endorsing Trump? In fact, there’s nothing to really stop Trump’s own company putting in their own bid, should they wish to.

Regardless of how much money the company does or doesn’t make, there are still millions of people who use and need Twitter. But if not through cash, how do we assign value to a platform through which the Pope (@Pontifex) chooses to ponder the rapidly declining state of our planet, and which allows little girls in Syria to reach JK Rowling? What price should we put on a tool that journalists, both professional and citizen, have come to rely on to source and disseminate news? If Twitter’s neutrality was to be jeopardized by a third-party purchase, we’d lose all that and so much more.

Over the past ten years, Twitter has become an essential service in global society—and as such, its future should be protected. But how?

There are interesting precedents for sponsoring media organizations and information platforms through various forms of public ownership, and these solutions could very well be adapted to Twitter. Here are three possible alternatives:

Shareholder cooperatives
What if Twitter’s users were to mobilize and take matters into their own hands? After all, Twitter is a publicly traded company, and since its 2013 IPO, anybody can buy shares. While there is a group of key stakeholders who own large portions of the platform, if enough individuals decided to invest and collectively organize, it could make a big difference to its future direction.

Nathan Schneider from the University of Colorado Boulder set out how that might work in a recent Guardian article, making the case that, much like the Green Bay Packers NFL team, Twitter should be run by (and for) its fans. There is now an (appropriately hashtagged) #wearetwitter campaign and petition urging Twitter to work with users to find a way for them to buy it and turn it into a cooperatively owned platform.

source: AFP