Like Facebook, AT&T once dominated communications. The difference? It was regulated.

Facebook’s October 4 outages across its platforms and the company’s handling of it raise a far-reaching question: Should we simply rest content with a complete shutdown of service across four platforms, which underpin much of the planet’s economic and cultural interaction and one of which, WhatsApp, has become an essential and free substitute for phone calling and many other communications? Facebook’s reach conjures up comparisons to the “old” AT&T — the sprawling, vertically and horizontally integrated behemoth which, until its breakup in 1982, served US business and residential telephone customers across the nation. AT&T never suffered this kind of systemwide outage. The reason? The giant company was subject to rate-base regulation — regulators had to approve AT&T’s network investments, on which its rates were to be based — accompanied by significant public accountability standards. Yet when the Justice Department ordered the breakup of AT&T in 1982, a liberalized, deregulated system was set in stone. The current masters of the Internet clawed their way to dominance in this Wild West Internet environment, shorn of accountability to anyone or anything beyond their own profitability. The Facebook outages of October 2021 are a symptom of this withdrawal of public responsibility. Without genuine regulatory oversight from the government, companies like Facebook will remain free to chase the bottom line.

[Dan Schiller, emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the author of a forthcoming history of US telecommunications.]