Don’t regulate Facebook

[Commentary] The problems at Facebook and others, real and perceived, at Google, Amazon and Apple have led to an easy consensus: The large technology companies should be regulated. Such an outcome would be a bad mistake — bad for the companies, of course, but also bad for us, their users, and bad for the country. I do not pretend to be unbiased in writing this. While I am about as tech-savvy as your average 72-year-old , I met Mark Zuckerberg when he was 20, and spent six years on Facebook’s board. As publisher and later chairman of The Post, I watched the rise of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, sometimes with hope, sometimes with awe and sometimes with horror for what it meant to The Post’s business. The most important control over Facebook — greater than anything governments could come up with — is the ability of its users to quit.

[Donald E. Graham, chairman of Graham Holdings Company, was publisher of The Washington Post from 1979 to 2001.]