The city of New York has complained of the same thing – in April last year it released a study showing that Airbnb was having a significant impact on rental prices, in some neighbourhoods jacking up prices by more than 21 per cent – and warned that the sharing economy is contributing to homelessness.

Left unchecked by regulators, the utopian ideals of Airbnb – that a simple app can be used for urban infill, making more efficient use of dwellings that have already been built – might have the opposite effect, that of hollowing out cities. Or, at least, the cities that tourists want to visit.

Meanwhile, Uber's techtopian ideal – that a simple app can be making more efficient use of automobiles that have already been built – comes at a high cost for some city dwellers, too.

After protests by taxi drivers – who complained amongst other things that their fares are tightly regulated by the city, while Uber is free to jack up prices willy nilly, whenever there's a football game – the city of Barcelona tried to level the playing field, introducing rules and regulations which it hoped would see less money flowing to the San Francisco-based technology company. (San Francisco is another city that has been hollowed out by the tech sector, but for other reasons.)

It could regulate Uber, the Catalan government reasoned, because European courts had already ruled that Uber was a transport service, and not the special case that Uber said it was.

In January, Uber spat the dummy and departed the city.

Which brings us to Facebook, which following the impassioned speech of New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern is facing the very real possibility that it, too, might be regulated the way its real-world competitors are regulated, and not with the special "safe harbour" treatment which technology libertarians have argued for since the heady days of the first dotcom boom.


One might have hoped that Facebook saw the era of technology libertarianism was drawing to a close in 2014, in fact, when it changed its motto from "Move Fast And Break Things" to "Move Fast With Stable Infra".

But, as the events in Christchurch have reminded us, Facebook has continued to move fast and break many things in the years since then, including referenda and elections and privacy law and including its unwritten pact with humanity that you shouldn't be giving extremists any sort of platform, much less a live broadcast platform which lets them make "real effort" Facebook posts that amount to public executions.

And, so much for "stable infra", just last week it was revealed that Facebook has been storing user passwords in plain text, allowing some 20,000 staff at Facebook to access "hundreds of millions" of user accounts that are supposed to be private.

As far as infra(structural) no-nos go, using plain-text passwords is a pretty big and basic one. It would be hugely embarrassing for any other company, though not so much for Facebook, which has sunk so much lower so many times that it must be impossible to embarrass by now.

After several years of giving lip service to good corporate citizenship, to keeping user accounts private and to not being a platform to trolls and extremists, it appears that Facebook still can't escape its libertarian roots. Its penchant for breaking things in the name of innovation just keeps spilling out into the world.

(Though there are those who would argue that libertarianism was all just lip service in the first place, and that the goal of Facebook and companies like it has never been the betterment of humanity through universal connectedness. Rather, the goal has been a centralisation of wealth and data that is unprecedented in the history of humanity. Libertarianism hasn't been the goal so much as the guise.)

The trouble is, how do you get the genie back into the bottle, now that it has turned out to be an evil genie, now that it has turned out that not all innovation is progress?

If Jacinda Ardern is right, and these platforms "are a publisher, not just the postman", how do you start to treat them that way?


If Airbnb is really a hotel company, how on earth do you regulate it, so it's no longer forcing renters out of the areas where people want to visit? Do you cap the number of Airbnb properties in a neighbourhood? In a street?

If Uber is rally a transport company, how do you regulate it, without forcing drivers back to the bad old days of pretending they're just picking up their friends, and without encouraging Uber to revisit the evil deeds of its past, such as when it created a ghost Uber network to avoid picking up regulators?

And if Facebook is a publishing company, how on earth do you deal with copyright law? With defamation law? With hate speech and trolling? The only tools capable of dealing with such content, based around artificial intelligence (thus, more tech utopianism, not less) are years away from being capable, if not decades.

But of course, Ahern is right. Airbnb and Uber and Facebook are all of those things regulators say they are. They don't only exist in cyberspace, but in the real world, and their actions and inactions have real-world consequences, just like the companies they compete with.

The easy stage, which we are going through in the wake of Christchurch, is the realisation that these platforms must be regulated, that there must be a reckoning, a levelling of the playing field.

The hard stage is yet to come.

How?