Stanford Center for Internet and Society

In “The Great Wall of Facebook,” Wired’s Fred Vogelstein contends that Facebook and Google are approaching a “full-blown battle over the future of the Internet.” Vogelstein’s assessment boils down to two predictions: (1) Facebook will lead and monopolize a fundamental shift to “a more personalized, humanized” web search, based entirely on information supplied by one’s social network; and (2) the vast amount of personal information supplied to Facebook by third parties and users themselves will (barring user revolt) yield massive profits through online brand advertising. A prediction that Facebook will gain some advantage over Google through its proprietary data would be hard to argue against. But Vogelstein’s particular vision of that general future—in which Google is conquered by a News Feed search based purely on users’ networks—runs into problems.