By Mark Rhoads -
In 2012, Facebook filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission that said about 8.7 percent or 83 million of 955 million users that year were fake or duplicate accounts. A fake account can be innocent and not always used for sinister purposes. But the sinister uses of fake accounts on social media are helping terrorists and other hate mongers around the world. The Facebook security officer, Joe Sullivan, told CNN that the duplicate and fake accounts. "Are a mixture of innocent and malicious, and Facebook has divvied them up into three categories: duplicate accounts, misclassified accounts and "undesirable" accounts."
There was a model back in the 1950s for people who wanted privacy to pay a premium for dedicated private land telephone lines. In the 1940s, party lines were common in most urban areas served by local telephone service and that meant that a neighbor could listen to your conversation with others and you might not know someone was listening in. But for a premium, you could pay more to have a private line. Over time, dedicated private lines became the norm and the party lines disappeared because people voted with their money for privacy and security.
The time may be right very soon for a premium internet where much tougher rules can be imposed to guard against fake identieties, hacking, violations of privacy, financial scams, and other bad problems of the anonymous internet and its social media components. Rather than try to make the existing internet a regulated public utility or impose global regulations on the existing internet and existing social media networks, a new premium and private network with a new infrastructure outside of government regulation could enforce individual and corporate contracts with a provider that would impose individual responsibilities on customers. The original internet of the 1960s and 1970s was primarily designed to be a backup communications network for American defense. But then it evolved into a commercial platform for peer to peer email and commercial, information, and entertainment applications. The inventions of graphical interface and the World Wide Web in the early 1990s were the birth of a new medium. But like the early frontier towns of the American west, the new medium was hampered by a wild and lawless culture. But we now know the dangers of that new medium and the time might be right for a new premium alternative to that medium with a membership fee high enough to pay for big improvements in the security many people want.
