The new tycoons

The giants of the internet have long said that they are not publishers but mere platforms — or couriers — of the new information age. Companies such as Google and Facebook insist that they’re the digital equivalent of the vans, newsagents and paperboys who distribute what other people publish. So they ought not to be held responsible for it. In the early years of the internet, their argument made sense. Most news and comment came from newspapers and magazines (like this one). But then social media arrived and restraint vanished.

Military-grade email encryption has emerged as standard, giving security to those who don’t want their email hacked, but also cover to criminal networks. The tech giants, worried by the demons they were nurturing, started to behave as publishers. They began moderating and sometimes banning content. Facebook started to editorialise its news feeds, tweaking ‘emotional content’ to see if it would make users happy or sad. They stopped being mere platforms. Which is partly why, this week, the chairman of media regulator Ofcom has said that Facebook and Google ought to be seen as publishers — and, presumably, regulated as such.

It’s sometimes said that Rupert Murdoch and his ilk are the last publishing tycoons. But a new and very different breed has emerged. Tech pioneers such as Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin never sought the awesome power they now wield. They set out with dreams about connecting billions of people for the common good, to connect and spread ideas, even democracy. But the web was always going to be no more (or less) moral (or vicious) than the people who used it. Jihadis and drugs traffickers have thrived from the new network. Anyone who is seriously interested in the latest magazine from Isis can find it, via Google, in a couple of minutes.