The constant refrain in travel over the last five years has involved Facebook and Google’s role in not just travel inspiration and discovery but their emerging role disintermediating established players if they don’t pay up for advertising.
The reality, though, represents an existential threat for travel companies. With the two tech giants owning the top of the funnel and essentially spying on potential travelers, the calculus surrounding working with the biggest businesses in the world needs to change.
“If you’re not worried about it, you’re not paying attention; you should be,” said Roger McNamee, co-founder of Elevation Partners, early Facebook investor, and former mentor to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Skift Tech Forum 2019 in San Francisco, Calif. “They have one [modus operandi], you do the work and they take the profit. They’re going to run over Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan like they’re not even there. We have to use what power we have left to stop that or you will be working for them on their terms.”
McNamee, who has embarked on a three-year speaking tour pushing back on Facebook’s influence in both politics and business, sees Facebook as not only a pernicious and self-interested player in global affairs but a company exploiting loopholes in global law to assert its influence.
“They are undermining globalization, free trade, and the prosperity that has been so important to the last 70 years,” said McNamee. “Maybe the thing that comes after will be OK, but its not because they have a plan… Facebook is more about disruption than optimizing what comes after.”
He singled out both Facebook’s use of behavioral data and Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs division, which recently released a variety of reports detailing its intention to turn Toronto’s waterfront district into a testbed for data-based exploitation of not just visitors but locals.
“They are basically doing a full conversion of a democratic system into an algorithmic system,” said McNamee. “Maybe the people of Toronto are going to be happy about that, but until two months ago people didn’t know [about it].”
The business model of Google’s Waze, which lets companies pay for foot traffic, is just one manifestation of Silicon Valley’s fixation on driving revenue through data-based manipulation of city life instead of usefulness for users.
Facebook couches its business moves in public health terms, he said, pretending that its motivation is the public good instead of profit. The introduction last week of Facebook’s cryptocurrency Libra is just the latest example of the company’s willingness to undermine global institutions while building another revenue stream for Facebook.