Re: <nettime> Handoko Suwono: Facebook paves its way to IPO

[Florian Cramer <fc-nettime@pleintekst.nl>]

On Friday, December 04 2009, 01:04 (-0800), Michael H Goldhaber wrote:

> In other words, because the Facebook service is free for users, we are  
> working for the company. But if users paid for the service, as say  
> with telephone service,  we would not be working for the company? 

'We' could pay the company to work for 'us' instead of having others -
advertisers, likely intelligence agencies [1] - pay it to work for
them. Online journalism has the same issue.

Florian

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook :
"the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture
capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel. There are only three
board members on Facebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and a third
investor called Jim Breyer from a venture capital firm called
AccelPartners [...]  who put $12.7m into Facebook in April 2005. On the
board of such US giants as Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment, he is also
a former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).
[...] Facebook's most recent round of funding was led by a company
called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of
Greylock's senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman
of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What's In-Q-Tel?
Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the
venture-capital wing of the CIA. [...] In-Q-Tel's first chairman was
Gilman Louie, who served on the board of the NVCA with Breyer. Another
key figure in the In-Q-Tel team is Anita K Jones, former director of
defence research and engineering for the US department of defence, and -
with Breyer - board member of BBN Technologies."

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