Barack Obama isn’t happy with Facebook and Google, either

Google and Facebook aren’t just incredibly profitable tech companies — they are “public goods” with a responsibility to serve the public, says former President Barack Obama. “I do think the large platforms — Google and Facebook being the most obvious, Twitter and others as well, are part of that ecosystem — have to have a conversation about their business model that recognizes they are a public good as well as a commercial enterprise,” the former president said at MIT’s Sloan Sports Conference. “They’re not just an invisible platform, they’re shaping our culture in powerful ways.”

Obama described Facebook and Google as a duopoly. He also said they were contributing to a fractured media environment that allowed users to construct alternate realities, without a common set of facts. “We have to have a serious conversation about, what are the business models, the algorithms, the mechanisms, whereby we can create more of a common conversation,” he said. “And that can not just be a commercially driven conversation."