Google and Facebook should pay us for using our secrets

The average worker in North Carolina makes less than $50,000 a year. The median pay at Google is about $200,000 a year; at Facebook it is $240,000. Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, is worth $76 billion. Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, is the 13th richest person in the world. Larry Page, the other founder, is worth $54 billion.

Silicon Valley businesses are producing millionaires on a daily basis while investing immeasurable sums on artificial intelligence, driver-less vehicles, drone delivery, and other technologies that will put millions of truck drivers, cashiers, teachers, stock brokers, and fighter pilots out of work. So, what is Mr. Zuckerberg’s solution for dealing with the growing class warfare that is erupting from the widening chasm between the haves and have-nots?

In his commencement speech at Harvard University, Zuckerberg proposed a universal basic income that guarantees everyone, regardless of whether they work or not, a paycheck. In other words, he wants the American taxpayers to pick up the tab for the dislocations he creates to compound his riches.

Tech company oligarchs have built their empires by capturing and exploiting the average person’s personal, private information, often without their knowledge or explicit consent. And certainly, without paying for it.

Since corporations are required to pay us for the use of our likeness for their commercial benefit, why don’t they have to pay us for using our most intimate secrets for their commercial benefit?

Tech behemoths tenaciously pursue monopolistic profits by purchasing any competitor that threatens to chip away at their control of the technology universe. Google’s parent Alphabet has made over 200 acquisitions including YouTube and Waze. Facebook has bought 69 companies including Instagram and What’s App.

A recent study by the International Monetary Fund places the blame for America’s growing income inequality at the feet of major corporations that have consolidated market power. Since the mid-1990s, market concentration has grown by 50 percent, according to a standard measure used in antitrust analysis, the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, shifting power away from workers to employers. The IMF believes this explains why wages have not risen commensurate with declines in unemployment or economic expansion.

I am all for technology and innovation. I was the first Tesla Model S owner in Chapel Hill. But there are profound externalities that accompany the shift to the information age. Currently a small group of highly educated people are reaping all the rewards, while the cost to the rest of society is soaring. Zuckerberg’s attitude is: “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine!”

Silicon Valley billionaires are an entitled breed. At Google, though the founders have sold 84 percent of their shares, they still control 56 percent of the votes. At Facebook, Zuckerberg controls a majority of the votes even though he owns only about one-fifth of the shares. These folks will take your money, but not your input or accountability, violating the central tenant of capitalism. The arrogance of the tech titans would make Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie and Vanderbilt blush.

Zuckerberg’s policy solution of raising taxes on everyone, to address problems caused by a few, is too blunt an instrument. If a small business owner is creating jobs, throwing them in the same bucket as the tech titans is not only bad economic policy, it is morally objectionable. We need a more surgical way to transition some of the wealth from technology companies back to the people most harmed by them. Making technology companies pay for information that belongs to us which they sell would be a step in the right direction.