"That’s a lot of control, as Facebook has implicitly conceded by creating this court. But the court alone cannot close the chasm of accountability that renders Facebook’s preeminence so unsettling. Democracy, at least in theory, allows us to change things we do not like. We can vote out legislators who pass policy we disagree with, or who fail to pass policy at all. We cannot vote out Facebook. We can only quit it.
But can we really? Facebook has grown so large and,
in many countries, essential that deleting an account seems to many
like an impossibility. Facebook isn’t even just Facebook anymore: It is
Instagram and WhatsApp, too. To people in many less developed countries,
it is the Internet. Many users may feel more like citizens than
customers, in that they cannot just quit. But they are not being
governed with their consent.
No court — or oversight board — can change that."
