I have said in various settings that I think we should nationalize Facebook, but I don’t know that I have done much to set out the argument, or explained that I mean it more or less sincerely (although I was also kind of making a jokey catchphrase out of it).

The issue is that something like Facebook probably needs to exist, but the stupid hand of the market will inevitably kind of wreck instantiations of it that are run for profit, because if you charge users for the service (which in general seems like the right way to provide a lot of services) you almost certainly won’t get a critical mass of users, whereas if you don’t charge users for the service, you will have to either go out of business or make users the product and advertisers the secret real customers, which leads to unpleasantness.

But if we recognize some kind of social network as a public good, it should follow that the obvious right move is to establish a taxpayer-funded independent Social Network Administration along the lines of the NTSB or NOAA.