The predominant way of interpreting Facebook’s billion-dollar purchase of Instagram, in light of the social-networking giant's forthcoming IPO, is that Mark Zuckerberg had to pick up the photo-sharing app to boost his company’s mobile engagement. That would allow him to guard the mobile flank against incursions from Google, Twitter, and whatever other social-media tools might next arise.

That may be true – and it may even be the way Zuck thought about the deal when he swallowed hard and ponied up the purchase price. But that way of analyzing Facebook’s pickup, and the pickup of dozens of other startups, not just by Facebook but by Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and others, is probably not telling the whole story. Here’s a different theory, one that better describes the tech world that we, the users of the Internet, now inhabit: Instagram may have had millions of us as its users, but it was really built for just one customer: Facebook.

Silicon Valley, for too long, has confused the issue of what it means to be a user of a website, service or app, and what it means to be a customer of the app. Intuitively, you’d think they would be one and the same: The person using the app is the person consuming the app. But increasingly, apps are being made to grab the attention of the hegemonic companies in tech. Whatever it takes to get bought.

Sure, startup CEOs are careful to refer to their user bases as just that – users – but even when money changes hands, those users are cattle to be herded toward a cell on a venture capitalist’s spreadsheet, to help the VC decide whether to fund another pivot, engineering acquisition, rack of servers, whatever. Users are just another dart, basically, that startups have to hurl at the bull's-eye and ensure success.

A colleague of mine tells a story: You can tell when a tractor was made to be purchased by a farmer, and you can tell when a tractor was made to be purchased by a corporation to be used by its employees. Tractors whose users are also the customers come equipped with every convenience, from a satellite radio to Wi-Fi to all the cupholders a farmer could dream of. They drive well, and their controls are intuitive, because that’s what the average tractor driver wants, and what the tractor competition provides. Tractors bought by companies, for earthmoving, rock breaking and the like, come equipped with nothing but a hard seat and a prayer. Employees – mere users – don’t get any say on the amenities, or lack thereof.

Those in the tech world who gawked at Instagram’s spartan app suite – no Android app (until recently), a barebones website, all of its focus deployed toward speed and social – were, in retrospect, mistaken in believing the company's goals were to grow as fast as possible, period. Instagram was only after one thing: to grow as fast as possible on mobile. The iPhone, more than any other platform, owns the mobile app universe. And so rather than waste its energy, Instagram aimed at the beating heart of the mobile world and hit it right between the arteries, with its incredibly popular iPhone app.

Facebook, as Paul Ford recently argued in New York magazine, has something like a gigantic, impossible video camera recording what everyone is doing on the Web every moment of the day, every day. It could likely see, with its magic data video camera, more and more and more and more Instagram usage showing up across the Internet, on iPhones. Then Instagram released its Android app, getting 5 million downloads in six days. Instagram was for real, and no company was in a better position to know that faster than Facebook. What Instagram was selling, in other words, was a huge amount of Facebook engagement. That’s basically valuable to just one customer in the entire world. Yep. Zuck.

It's easy to believe that Facebook can stay in control of the Web in perpetuity by acquiring tech's prettiest young things. But remember that a decade ago, Google looked like the substrate of the Internet. Nearly everything about the way we surfed flowed through Google. Now, not so much. While Google is far from toppled, a tectonic shift has created new land masses in the ocean, where previously there was only misty horizon. Where Ford sees Facebook’s dominance, I wonder if the same kind of shift might not undermine Zuck’s company in a decade’s time, and whether it will come from some competitor that does not yet exist – or at least not in the way that Facebook would perceive as a threat.

This company will probably emulate Google’s promise to “do no evil” and fulfill Mark Zuckerberg’s pledge to make Facebook not just a company but “a mission.” We keep making the “end of history” mistake on the Internet – that everything today is the last thing of its kind that will ever be invented or even needed. It’s a strange affliction, given that the Internet is basically creative destruction writ large. The next bedrock of the Internet might indeed be a startup brewing in some college kid’s mind right now, but if I had to pick one company that was doing all of these things right now, it would be Apple.

When Apple disrupts an industry, as it did with music, and is poised to do with television, it’s with the intent of bringing its customers new value and making new customers out of people who want to use its products. When Apple made a product, at least during the Steve Jobs era, it was with the intent of giving customers something they would want and use. Apple didn’t have much trouble identifying either its ideal user or its intended customer – both were the turtlenecked guy in the CEO seat, who would gladly let everyone in the company know if they had failed to live up to the expectations that come from either of those overlapping roles.

The way social-media companies conduct themselves today has little to do with value creation for the millions of people who sign into their products every day – because those people are not the customers. They’re just part of the product. That has been the strength on which startups make their billions, but when startups don’t bother to make their users into customers, that strength can quickly become a weakness as competition and innovation give users options to change habits. See, for example, the Yahoo to Google to Facebook example, or the AOL to Hotmail to Gmail example.

Next time a new app has the tech ecosystem all aflutter and you, the user, find yourself inevitably presented with a pop-up prompt to authorize or deny access to your account (as with the newspaper social reader apps that took Facebook by storm but are now tanking, thanks to their creepy behavior), it might be worth taking a second to figure out if you-the-user are also you-the-customer, before you click either one of those buttons.

PHOTO: A photo illustration shows the applications Facebook and Instagram on the screen of an iPhone in Zagreb, April 9, 2012. REUTERS/Antonio Bronic

That context is here. It’s come, in part, because of the cunningly simple social and curatorial tools that media companies like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Pinterest give away to their users. But making sense of our social world is only possible with the the tools and technology behind what we call Big Data. The massive information collections spawned by our digital world are too big to address directly, so smart scientists have used fast computers to carve the data into real knowledge. This is how Big Data is already changing the way the world works.

But Big Data is young; though there are hundreds of accessible data sets already, there are still many more chaotic stores of information its tools can tame. Take, for example, social media: Yesterday, social media API company Gnip announced that it is providing customers with all of Tumblr’s data, what in techspeak is called the firehose. What Gnip and competitors like DataSift are providing to customers are Social Big Data firehoses that can be perfectly filtered into gently babbling brooks lined with digital gold nuggets. When the tech media wonder out loud how social companies will ever make a buck – sifting the gold out of their user-generated content is a huge piece of the puzzle.

At Gnip, Tumblr joins Twitter, WordPress, Disqus and the Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo as the latest tree in a forest of Social Big Data accessible via API. A well-written API can transform a jumble of numbers into a perfectly organized multiplication table – on the order of millions or even billions of complex data pieces. (See this recent Economist visualization of the data record of a single tweet for more context.)

The data pieces are valuable, but not solely because they help advertisers sell more widgets: In an email, Gnip Chief Operating Officer Chris Moody explained one of the coolest uses of data his company has enabled may have actually helped firefighters do their job better: “During the 4 Mile Canyon Fire in Boulder in 2010, [Gnip customer] VisionLink was able to provide fire crews and managers a realtime view into what was happening on the ground by layering geo-tagged Tweets and Flickr images onto a Google map of the area.”

It’s not just maps, photos and geo locations that number crunchers crave. Tumblr, after all, is a blog network full of cat photos, animated GIFs and other tomfoolery. Yet last year its already booming traffic grew an additional 300 percent. As the Web comic XKCD noted a day before Gnip’s announcement, the proper noun “Tumblr” is perhaps six months away from surpassing “blogging” in online searches, much the way “Google” became synonymous with the verb “search” a decade earlier. Tumblr users know that the site’s tools are heavily oriented toward sharing and signaling, as opposed to pure content creation. On Tumblr, users can of course write posts and upload photos, but they can also follow other users, “heart” each others’ posts and reblog posts they want to share with their own followers – and each action takes little more than one click. All these actions are trackable, all of them indicate some sort of sentiment or preference and all of them are discrete chunks of data in Tumblr’s massive data store – now joining the 90 billion pieces of social data Gnip is already delivering on a monthly basis.

If all of this sounds like a grand plot to aggregate, sift and derive insight into social behavior from all sorts of data that unsuspecting users unwittingly upload – well, it is. But those are the trade-offs that users agree to when they sign up with social-media websites, right when they check that box agreeing to the terms of service.

And it’s not just marketers and advertisers who pore over the data – the Guardian bought a slice of real-time social media from DataSift to help inform its coverage of the 2011 London riots. Joining journalists who want to understand social media with the help of big data are governments, NGOs, charities and non-profits, among all sorts of other organizations. For the first time ever, all these groups can access the data that can help them answer questions they’ve been asking for decades. In industry, science and government, many data pools have been available for several years now.

In a way, social media, despite being cutting-edge, was behind the curve. It had to grow up a little more, out of niche status, before its data set was big enough to provide meaningful insight into the way we live online. It looks as if that day is just about here. (Interestingly, Facebook, oft-criticized for privacy lapses, remains a mostly dark data pool; the company will slice and dice user data for advertisers and app makers but keeps its firehose closely guarded.)

So, yes, to adapt an old Internet meme, All your Tumblr (and much of your other social history) are belong to Big Data. But that’s not necessarily bad, if all the power of social media belongs to all of us. Whether that’s a worthwhile trade-off all depends on how we use that power, and what we finally do with all that data.

PHOTO: A Massachusetts firefighter hauls a firehose into position. REUTERS/Jim Bourg

Actually, scratch part of that last sentence, because less ink has been spilled, at least according to the results of a recent report by LinkedIn. The media business has been in overdrive, especially during this 2012 election season, but it’s now pushing pixels, not paper.

According to the data studied by LinkedIn, the professional social network, the newspaper industry experienced a 28.4 percent shrink rate between 2007 and 2011. The death of newspapers is not exactly a new phenomenon, so I’ll spare you yet another detailed recap of the print and economic climate that led to this broadsheet apocalypse.

But contrast newspapers’ huge drop with the gain experienced in the second-fastest-growing industry, according to the same LinkedIn data: online publishing. New-media companies posted a staggering 24.3 percent gain, coming in only behind the “Internet” overall. Look at the chart below and compare the green online publishing dot with the red newspaper dot.

In other words, reports of the media’s death are premature, at best. But more important, it’s unfair for any old-media advocate to say that the revenue model for media (or any industry moving toward digital) is broken. Yes, the companies and publications that power media look quite different than they used to, but these news organizations are still reporting the news.

And that truism is at the crux of why newspapers are in a bad spot. They have been trapped in a terrible mindset that they are in the business of selling newspapers. The leap from paper to digital may be vast, but to newspaper publishers, it seemed like vaulting to a different business entirely, one they were loathe to get into. No matter what kind of lip service newspapers paid to the digital transformation, the most prominent paywall model out there, that of the New York Times, still protects print subscriptions with a tiered digital pricing strategy – one so annoying that it motivated its former digital design director to complain publicly about the entire signup process.

The lesson online media companies have taken from newspapers’ slow, public death is to move beyond the idea of selling the product. Online sites are selling their audience. It’s a simple twist of the equation, but one that changes everything about how a media company is run. A CEO who has realized that her audience – her customers – is the most important thing the company has will stop at nothing to give those customers what they want. Anything to make them feel as if they’re getting value from the company. And although she’ll monetize their aggregate value with advertisers and marketers, she’ll also protect them from underhanded sales pitches or confusing pricing strategies that infuriate the web-savvy.

All this means that the information an audience wants is now a company’s most important asset and the one that needs the most investment and care. In other words, the fear that the online media represent the death knell of serious reporting is 180 degrees from reality. Online media companies (including my own, though it falls into a different LinkedIn industry category) have been investing serious cash in upgrading the quality of their reporting and have made no secret of gunning for their print counterparts when it comes to journalism awards, including the granddaddy of them all, the Pulitzer.

What has changed about journalism in the digital era is the near-instant feedback the best-of-breed companies have regarding whether their audience is actually paying attention. All online media companies invest in real-time analytics; the best online media companies crunch the hell out of the numbers to understand their audience. Some print nostalgics treat the mere existence of this data as a mortal sin that eventually warps all journalists into pageview chasing producers of bikini slideshows.

But when reporters do groundbreaking journalism, they get email and comments from readers and interested parties. When their work is very good it often becomes the basis for documentaries or books. Newspapers have benefited from this halo effect for years – they just haven’t quantified it. Leave it to an industry of sentence writers to be afraid of attaching numbers to their feedback.

These numbers provide the sharp picture that marketing and circulation departments have been after for years. But because they have often been lower than anticipated, especially before mass quantities of Americans came online, they scared publishers into girding their print products at the expense of the digital innovations. Meanwhile Yelp, Facebook, Google and, yes, LinkedIn had room to grow into multibillion-dollar forces of online media and advertising.

In a different world, the two dots at the top and bottom of the LinkedIn chart wouldn’t exist. Instead you’d see one dot in the middle, as newspapers shifted more resources and employees toward their digital efforts. But companies don’t often work that way – they get caught in the Valley of Death – the one Harvard business professor and Silicon Valley guru Clayton Christensen has written about in countless books and articles. Instead of innovating for the next business cycle, these companies die crossing the Valley, wringing every last drop of cash out of the last cycle, leaving holes in the economy that startups try to fill. And there’s just no reason to think newspapers as they exist today can reverse course or buck that trend.

But what we don’t know: How many of Foxconn’s nearly 100,000 employees will harm themselves, intentionally or inadvertently -- or their families or loved ones -- in the manufacture of it? And will the developed world ever acknowledge the dark side of these truly transformative technologies, like the iPad, or will we continue to tell ourselves fables to explain away the havoc our addictions wreak on the developing world? Is a device really magic if to pull a rabbit out of a hat, you have to kill a disappearing dove?

Those of us who have been technology journalists have long been subjected to the cult of Steve Jobs’s Apple, and those of us who are fans of technology are mostly well aware of the stark elegance and extreme usability -- even the words seem inadequate -- that come with using, let alone experiencing, Apple products. But the rumblings about Apple’s manufacturing processes started years ago, and the recent New York Times series on the ignobility of Foxconn as an employer blew a hole in the side of that particular ship of willful ignorance. Few Apple consumers can claim not to understand the human sacrifice behind their glowing screens -- the death, diseases, exhaustion, mental and emotional stress, and superhuman expectations placed upon the workers who bring these magic devices to life. It’s not just in the papers -- Mike Daisey’s This American Life podcast exposé on Foxconn and Apple is a mere click away, and most mainstream media have given at least passing coverage to the working conditions reflected in the Gorilla Glass on our devices.

Update, 3/16/2012: Mike Daisey's account of working conditions at Foxconn for This American Life has been retracted by the radio show. Other reporting linked to here describing similar episodes and working conditions has not been retracted as of this update.

To be sure, Apple isn’t the first company to exploit a developing society’s cheap labor. That’s a tradition that proudly goes back hundreds of years, arguably to the first triangle trades, or perhaps to Roman times. Maybe things have come full circle for China, and this is just another version of Marco Polo and the Silk Road. But there’s something insidious about a near-perfect system where the only factor beyond design is the human one. (Especially when those humans decide to jump off buildings.)

Apple has given more than lip service to the problem, and worker suicides appear to be down. But when will American consumers care how their iPads are built? When will they be told how many human hands had to touch the elegant machine, including the last pair that wiped off all the fingerprints with powerful solvents, and how many yuans were put in those hands at the end of the workweek? With technology taking an ever greater place in our culture and our society, when do we consumers begin to demand ethical technology, the way some of us now demand ethical meat and ethical investing?

The apps that run on these devices -- not just iPhones and iPads, but Kindle Fires and Samsung Galaxy Tabs -- enable social connection and sharing as never before. Communication across time, distance and borders has become free, or just pennies a minute. But few, if any, apps enable any sort of social organizing around things more important than discounted lunches or happy hours. In fact Groupon founder Andrew Mason famously abandoned his social-change startup to focus on the far more popular idea of building a coupon site. We like -- love -- the social tooling our devices allow us, as long as they cater to our essential selfishness as consumers.

We’re not alone in this. Chinese car purchases are booming as hundreds of millions of citizens there race to join the global middle class. Somewhere along the way, the West decided it was time to start passing on to emerging economies, especially ones with huge populations, the same warnings about global warming and resource depletion that we have been hearing for years. But why would any Chinese deny herself the chance at a new car, the very symbol of economic freedom around the world? And by what rationale would a Westerner, even an eco-conscious one, dare to presume he has the right to request such a sacrifice? (The irony is that the car as status symbol is getting to be out of date thanks to all the iPads the Chinese have made for the West.)

If the U.S., after decades of geopolitical havoc, still can’t develop an energy policy less reliant on conflict-zone oil, we don’t stand a chance of improving conditions for Chinese workers in technology factories, no matter what sanctions or misplaced scolding we dare levy on China. Nor does the conventional wisdom say that that is the right place for government to be interceding. But what if that’s wrong? If Foxconn were forced to pay workers more, increasing the cost of production and lowering Apple’s profit margins, wouldn’t that reopen technology manufacturing jobs to U.S. workers, the ones that Steve Jobs told Barack Obama were “gone,” never to return? Might U.S. consumers accept a higher price for their magic devices, if that price also put some money back in domestic workers’ pockets?

There are a lot of questions in this column because there are a lot of questions around ethical technology. It’s a subject to which few of us have devoted serious thought, and yet the knock-on effects could reshape the global economy, just as globalization has over the last two decades.

Here’s where I admit I have definitely researched this column and others on my iPhone -- and only then because I didn’t have my iPad handy. And though I have a feeling that neither device will be my last, I’m skipping this newest Apple generation. I hope the next time Tim Cook takes the California stage with a device that would make Steve Jobs proud, he tells us something about the status of Apple’s 100,000 subcontractors in China. That would make the rest of us a little prouder, too.

UPDATE 8:18 p.m.: Apple provided the following comment to Reuters about its and its contractors' labor practices: "Every year Apple inspects more factories, going deeper into the supply chain and raising the bar for our suppliers. In 2011 we conducted 229 audits at supplier facilities around the world and reported their progress on Apple.com." There is also a third-party audit being conducted of their supply chain.

PHOTO: Local and mainland Chinese university students, in the role of Foxconn workers, lie on the floor as they act out being chemically poisoned during a street drama in Hong Kong, May 7, 2011. REUTERS/Bobby Yip

Like many people, I woke up yesterday and reached for my iPad for my morning hit of news, entertainment and information, so I could start my day. (And like many, I’m embarrassed to admit it.) Padding to the front door to get a newspaper still sounds more respectable, but my iPad gives me a far more current, rich and satisfying media experience than a still-warm printed Times could ever produce.

Except, lately, it doesn’t. Yesterday morning, I saw the exciting news that Bill Simmons, ESPN’s most popular, profane and controversial writer, had secured an interview with President Obama. Simmons published his interview in podcast, text and video form on Grantland, a longform sports journalism website he founded last year under the ESPN umbrella. I clicked over to the story from my Twitter feed and saw three YouTube excerpts of Simmons with Obama. And that’s all I saw. When I hit play on the videos, I discovered ESPN had set them to be “unavailable” on mobile devices.

Moving on, I tried to read a New York Post headline that also found its way into my Twitter feed. But when I tapped in, the Post webpage that loaded was not the story I wanted to read. Instead it was a notice, which I took as an admonition, that to read New York Post content on an iPad, I would have to download the app, which retails for $1.99.

I want to make it clear that I’m not against paying for content. But what I’ve just described aren’t paywalls, where publications warn users that they won’t be able to consume content for free.

The situations I’m describing are blanket denials of content because of a choice I made about which device to use. With these tactics, media companies aren’t creating content paywalls, they’re creating content ghettos. Big Media, set my content free! Stop messing with the user experience to deny readers their content simply because you can detect what platform they’re on. And stop punishing users who are investing in the latest devices to consume your output. In other words, grant my hyper-advanced iOS device or my friend’s fancy new Android phone just as much access to the Web as my mother’s four-year-old Windows XP PC. Which one of us do you think wants to watch Simmons talk crossover dribbles with the Commander-in-Chief?

Why is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp -- which, remember, created The Daily, an iPad-only newspaper -- punishing Post readers who use iPads and who expect their Web browser on that device to be no different than the browser on their computer, as Apple so painstakingly designed Mobile Safari to be? Why have ESPN and Disney, parents to Grantland, decided to use a setting in YouTube to deny themselves video traffic to their biggest story ever -- an interview with a sitting president of the United States?

A spokesperson told me the mobile block on the videos was inadvertent and that the company is “aggressive” about getting its content onto as many screens as possible. Unfortunately for ESPN, someone did set the block, denying itself mobile video traffic during the first 24 hours. The spokesperson had to admit, however, that sometimes rights restrictions, like those in their deals with sports leagues, limit where and when they can show highlights, games, etc. (Interestingly, in 2008 ESPN denied Simmons the opportunity to interview candidate Obama, so by at least one measure -- getting an interview at all -- things have actually improved.)

Time Warner is the company that perhaps best exhibits the split personality of the content industry. Time Warner, and much of the rest of the media, wants to make a splash in the digital world with one toe while protecting its profit streams with every other usable extremity. Its CEO, Jeff Bewkes, has long been promoting a “Content Everywhere” initiative, which allows paying cable-television subscribers access to shows via all their digital devices. Yet the company’s Time Inc. division has recently started posting online-only excerpts of its Time and Fortune magazine articles, directing readers to subscribe in print or via iPad. I’m sure this cannibalizing of print content sounds like a grand idea in an executive suite, especially one full of TV execs, but it’s extraordinarily frustrating online.

Time Inc. wants to turn back the clock on giving away its print content for free, but runs excerpts of its stories online to try to reap the attendant traffic, SEO and link rewards. Between decades of magazines at the dentist’s office and years of free content online, print readers are simply accustomed to the advertising-supported free or near-free model.

Yesterday Fortune released an excerpt of “Inside Facebook,” a feature from its latest issue. You can read teases of it in media outlets like the Huffington Post and others. At Fortune, online readers won’t get the full article for at least several months, if ever, unless they pony up $1.99 to buy the Kindle version or pay to read it via the magazine’s iPad app. Unfortunately for Fortune, the Internet is all-seeing. Online discussion about this article on the hottest company in tech appears to be stifled at best, probably because readers who would link to and discuss the juiciest parts can’t; they’re just not online, making this exercise the worst of both worlds. It’s easy to predict that social-media shares will eventually suffer as users find they can’t easily read stories or consume video on mobile devices.

(Having executed previous attempts at this strategy for Fortune, including with the article-turned-ebook-turned-book “Inside Apple,” I can confirm that the profit on a successful Kindle edition is, at least for Fortune, minuscule at best, due to a variety of factors including Amazon’s commission structure and the relative interest in a given article. Meanwhile, an article that does not find a paying audience online actually creates a significant loss in time, effort, pageviews and overhead.)

As a heavy Internet user and media consumer, I can’t help but think back to the recent Net neutrality battle that pitted ISPs, which wanted the power to throttle their networks, against content providers, which stoked fears in the tech world and the halls of the FCC that the Internet would go from Autobahn to limited-access toll road and that only those sites that could afford to pay more would be able to guarantee speed and availability to their users, stratifying the open network.

As it turns out, the recent anti-usability, nonsensical ways in which Big Media and Big Tech have restricted access to content has proved that both sides have been against Net neutrality all along. After all, Disney’s ESPN (however inadvertently) used a feature provided in Google’s YouTube to block its interview with the president from appearing online. It seems that what the industry has really been after -- and perhaps has finally won -- is the power to be non-neutral on its own terms.

Sadly, most of the rest of the world has come to accept censorship as a necessary evil. Although I recently argued that Twitter’s censorship policy at least had the benefit of transparency, it’s still an unfortunate cost of doing global business for a company born and bred with the freedoms of the United States, and founded by tech pioneers whose opportunities and creativity stem directly from our Constitution. Yet by the standards of dictatorial regimes, Internet users in countries like China, Syria and Iran should consider themselves lucky if Twitter’s relatively modest censorship program actually keeps those countries’ governments from shutting down the service. As we are seeing around the world, chances are, unfortunately, it won’t.

Consider the freedoms — or lack thereof — Internet users have in Iran. Since this past week, some 30 million Iranian users have been without Internet service thanks to that country’s blocking of the SSL protocol, right at the time of its parliamentary elections. SSL is what turns “http” — the basic way we access the Web — into “https”, which Gmail, your bank, your credit card company and thousands of other services use to secure data. SSL provides data encryption so that only each end point — your browser and the Web server you’re logging into — can decrypt and access the data contained therein.

By blocking SSL, Iran has crippled Tor, a program that enables Internet users to anonymize not just their content but their physical location as well. Tor is a very common workaround for users in totalitarian regimes to access Twitter, Gmail, Facebook and other services. It’s hard to come up with an apt analogy for Iran’s unprecedented blockage — it’s not just that the letters you send are read by the Post Office and photocopied for their records, it’s that the Post Roads themselves have been closed off, so you can’t even send a letter in the first place. That’s the net effect of blocking SSL in Iran.

The hacking group Anonymous has brought down all kinds of websites in protest, mostly over copyright, in the U.S. and Europe. I don’t advocate their targeting any country’s servers for retribution, but where is the outrage or public demonstration or media attention over the denials of Iranians’ basic freedoms to communicate, via the Internet?

Unfortunately, it’s still too easy for Internet companies and even the Internet’s founding fathers to dismiss the importance of the tools they created in fostering free and open public dialogue, especially in places like Iran. Recently, legendary engineer and Google Vice-President Vint Cerf published a New York Times op-ed entitled “Internet Access is Not a Human Right,” where he wrote: “Internet access is always just a tool for obtaining something else more important.” How wrong he is. Cerf’s line of thinking eviscerates the Internet — the wonder of the modern world he helped build. Cerf argues that humans have the right to “lead healthy, meaningful lives,” including having “freedom from torture or freedom of conscience.” Yet, we live in the 21st century: It’s hard to see how, among people whose economies are developed enough to afford them communication devices, Cerf would excuse governments that curtail their citizens’ freedom and right to use the ultimate communications tool — the global network of the Internet. In fact, in underdeveloped parts of the world, the cost to have a cell phone that connects to the Web can be quite affordable.

I’m not arguing semantics here — if our society excludes the Internet from the fundamental rights of human communication, we also excuse totalitarian regimes like Iran’s from any repercussions when it comes to blocking that avenue of human contact. It’s a dangerous compromise to make in a world that only gets more digital with each passing day. And it also conveniently excuses the free world from having to do much of anything about it. We wouldn’t forgive Iran if it threw 30 million citizens into solitary confinement — so why would we ignore it when the Iranian government effectively cuts the entire population off from the outside world, to stifle their voices during a critical electoral cycle?

The U.S. and the free world have often engaged in global humanitarian missions in cases of genocide, famine and natural disaster. At what point will the deprivation of freedom of communication warrant such an intervention? The U.S. is already on guard itself against hacking attempts from Russia and China — intrusions by both rogue and government-sponsored actors — so how long will we tolerate countries’ depriving their citizens of Internet access?

It’s a tricky question, with no easy answer. However, contemplating it may prepare us for the possibility that the world’s first cyber-war could be fought not to cut off a country’s Internet hookup, but to restore it. After all, the Obama administration’s State Department petitioned Twitter to stay online during one recent Iranian uprising and has used the service to communicate with citizens there during another. Iran has now essentially shut down Twitter with its SSL blocking. Will the U.S. respond? If we do, we will set a precedent that calls into question the rights of any government to silence its citizens on a global communications network, putting us into thorny conflicts with China and other 21st century frenemies. But if we don’t, we are condoning the silencing of dissent and turning our backs on a century-long pledge to foster democracy wherever it might flourish — even if it’s online.

Photo: Technicians monitor data flow in the control room of an internet service provider in Tehran. Picture taken February 15, 2011. REUTERS/Caren Firouz

Think right now about your home bookshelf. If yours looks like mine, it contains odds and ends, comic books you’ve saved for years, books mailed to you or bought on a street corner, your own collection of dog-eared titles, some old yearbooks. Now think about the privacy of your own home and the few legal ways in which that privacy can be violated: an emergency response, a crime, a public health crisis. Imagine if once a year you had to open your door to a copyright agent who could scan your library for content that you have not paid for, add up your violations, and send you a bill. Imagine if the agent came by once a week, or even once a day. Imagine that the agent found a picture of the nerdy kid from high school in your yearbook and explained that that kid copyrighted his likeness, so you’ll have to either pay up or destroy his high school photo.

This is the world that content companies want to create. Legislation they have proposed in the U.S. and around the world — SOPA, PIPA and ACTA — would open the Internet’s house to any agent.

Artists and big companies often warn us of the opposite of this problem — the idea that the Internet is a lawless space where content is pirated, stolen and shared recklessly, costing them billions of dollars in lost revenue and shrinking the incentives for artists to produce new works. After all, if they can’t be paid fairly for them, why bother?

But not being able to monetize media doesn’t mean you have to obsessively limit it. As the content companies see it, the bookshelf described above is the data stream heading into your house, and they, specifically those who create music and video, are demanding that governments consent, more or less, to let them tap the wires. SOPA and PIPA are currently on hold, but ACTA, whose provisions are almost as enveloping, is taking root all over Europe, though not without protests.

Amazingly, governments around the world, including the Obama administration, resisted making ACTA’s text public. American politicians said the provisions the U.S. was agreeing to enforce were “national security secrets.” Ironic, then, that the Internet should be open for inspection, but the inspectors’ marching orders shouldn’t.

When the text was eventually leaked, reportedly by EU officials, the measures didn’t quite allow copyright agents to search your house, but they weren’t too far off. One particularly draconian provision allows for border searches of iPods and other electronic devices — not for terrorism prevention, but for theft of intellectual property. I suppose this means that if you were planning on partying to Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album or Girl Talk’s All Day on your Cancun vacation, you had better burn it to a CD and stuff it into your underwear, lest the Border Patrol decide to take your Genius Mode for a whirl.

According to a recent study on SOPA, 52 percent of Americans support penalties of some sort for illegal downloading, but only 36 percent support the provisions for enforcing copyright protection that SOPA allowed. If there were clearer proof that Americans, and indeed people around the world, could be convinced to pay for content if the system were fair, friendly and flexible, Apple or Amazon would have already created it. Which, actually, maybe they have.

Among the serious issues lawmakers and content providers should tackle is fair use. The copyright enforcement systems proposed in recent laws nearly make it a crime even to listen to music that hasn’t been paid for. One thing the music business must do is stop squeezing startups that become successful. As Spotify has accelerated its growth, its royalty payments to the recording industry have, by one measure, eclipsed those of terrestrial radio. If Neil Young is right and piracy is the new radio, music labels should be hoisting the Jolly Roger, not tearing it down.

If the music industry would focus its attention on creating a clearinghouse that allowed for affordable music sharing and discovery through digital tools, it could still save itself. The book publishing industry, which had to wait for the invention of e-ink to get serious about digital, is arguably further along. It at least has begun supporting limited “lending” of books and has even enabled social bookmarking and other similar features. At the same time, the book industry has won some battles against Amazon, regaining its right to set the price of its content in Amazon’s Kindle store.

During a recent panel discussion on copyright, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian talked about the need for the content industry’s scarcity-based pricing model to be superseded by something more attuned to our digital times — something that makes sense not just for businesses but for artists and consumers too. The problem is, the models the industry has proposed far too often resemble the type of intrusive interrogations by state agents one would expect to find in a totalitarian state rather than an open society.

Content creators and artists openly worry about the power of the Internet to rob them of compensation — which, for many, is their incentive to keep creating. What they ought to worry about are the incentives their proposed laws are creating — incentives not only for artists but also for consumers and distribution networks — to abandon altogether their high-walled, authoritarian compensation and copyright enforcement models. Where one castle crumbles, a thousand wildflowers may bloom.

PHOTO: Protesters opposed to anti-piracy legislation gather to demonstrate against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) being considered by Congress, at City Hall in San Francisco, January 18, 2012. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

And yet people keep fretting about losing what’s already gone. This week, like most others of the past decade, has brought fresh new outrages for privacy advocates. Google, which a few weeks ago changed its privacy policy to allow the company to share your personal data across as many as 60 of its products, was again castigated this week for the changes. Except this time, the shouts came in the form of a lawsuit. The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the FTC to compel it to block Google’s changes, saying they violated a privacy agreement Google signed less than a year ago.

Elsewhere, social photography app Path was caught storing users’ entire iPhone address books on their servers and have issued a red-faced apology. (The lesser-known app Hipster committed the same sin and also offered a mea culpa.) And Facebook’s IPO has brought fresh concerns that Mark Zuckerberg will find creative new ways to leverage user data into ever more desirable revenue-generating products.

This is the way we’re private now. It’s ludicrous for anyone who loves the Internet to expect otherwise. How else are these services supposed to exist — let alone make any money? Theft or misuse of private user data is a crime, certainly. But no social web app — not one — can work without intense analytics performed on the huge data sets that users provide to them voluntarily (you did read the terms of service agreement…right?).

And the issue compounds when people connect one site to another. By linking their Twitter to their Facebook to their Google+ to their Foursquare to their Zynga to their Instagram to their iOS, users are consolidating their lives, and in the process making them more attractive to marketers. While Facebook, Twitter and other services have made attempts to warn users about hitting the “connect” button, many of us hit that button with reckless abandon, without a thought of who’s slavering on the other side.

The reason social media and digital information companies want that data is because of what we refuse to give them: money. No one wants to pay for the privilege of chatting with their friends or using a coupon, and to this day, no one has to: Go ahead, ring their doorbell or pick up the free coupon book from your front stoop. But if you want to chat using Facebook or Gmail, or you want to buy a groupon for an 80 percent-off Botox service, you will have to tell those companies who you are. And those companies will use that information to tailor their offerings to you, increasing your value as a user and a customer. They will slice their data sets into a million different pieces and show those pieces to people — advertisers — who will pay them money for the privilege of using their service. They’ll use it to get to you.

This is an update on an old media model. Magazines and newspapers for decades could only guess at the readership of their product and the demographic of their customers. But now social and new media demand to — and can — know exactly who you are before they agree to let you use their free services. Even email newsletter services like the increasingly hot Thrillist – which might innocuously start you on their service by asking only for your simple email address — deploy click trackers, pixel trackers and other online data-gathering techniques to start to put together a picture of you as a user, both individually and in aggregate. A deceased magazine like Spy could only dream of that kind of intel.

Without such strategies, social web companies like these couldn’t exist. Every user has a choice when it comes to privacy, sure. But the second people sign up for Gmail, Facebook, Mint or Gilt Group, they have reaffirmed their willingness to be a mouse that the cats will chase. And these cats need mice. Otherwise they will starve. So they do their best to hide their intentions. Indeed, as a longtime and well-known advocate for the transformative power of technology recently told me, true believers like Mark Zuckerberg actively stake out radical positions on privacy, then talk about them as if they were natural or normal. It’s not too much different from the political process, where the best way to effect a shift in society is to present it as if it were a fait accompli and then expend energy actually moving the levers of power toward the shift rather than wasting time arguing with people about the implications.

That’s what the last five years have been about. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, wanted a collection of all our Facebook actions called an Open Graph to be part of our lives. Now, lo and behold, it is.

Today, we straddle two extremes — the offline and the online. Each comes with its own expectations and realities of what privacy is. Offline, your thoughts and actions are your own. Online, sharing one thing leads to a spiral effect where you are soon sharing everything. Offline gives us privacy, that near-mystical quality of ownership that we covet. Online gives us the extreme power of social tools, allowing us to glide around the formerly linear data of our existence. Want your private Rolodex? Fine. Want your location-aware, instant-coupon, friend-tagging iPhone app? That’s fine too. But on the Internet, you don’t get to have both. There is no longer any middle ground. As in politics, the Internet has become a place for extremists.

Photo: People wear masks during the “Freiheit Statt Angst” (Freedom instead of Fear) protest calling for the protection of digital data privacy in Berlin, September 10, 2011. The masks were handed out by the organizers who asked participants of the rally to wear them for the media to symbolise what call the individual’s right to remain anonymous on the internet. REUTERS/Thomas Peter

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his letter to investors announcing the IPO of his already hugely successful and profitable company. “It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”

Facebook has succeeded wildly, despite internal admonitions that its “journey” is only 1 percent finished. Journalists have latched onto Zuckerberg’s statement that Facebook wants to “rewire” the way the world works. In a world of thousands of self-anointed “social media experts,” only Zuckerberg can claim to have basically invented what the world thinks of as social media. He has etched himself into the timeline of human innovation.

Pity then, that Zuckerberg hasn’t turned his talents or attention toward Facebook’s financial underpinnings. After all, an IPO? How ho-hum can he get? If Mark really wants to accomplish his social mission with Facebook, he should share the company’s ownership with the people who helped him create it. Not just his Harvard contemporaries. Not just the programmers. Not even just the venture capitalists.

I’m talking about us. All of us. The users. Facebook should be a user-owned, user-managed company, run for the benefit of users. For the Facebook, by the Facebook. The company should be a cooperative.

Before I explain further, let me lay out the case in four simple points:

1. Facebook won’t necessarily get rich as a public company. LinkedIn, the grown-up social network, IPO’d last year, but is now down from its initial price after having had a big pop on its first days of trading. Zynga and Groupon, meanwhile, lost ground on their IPO prices as soon as they hit the markets. Tech journalism might work itself into a froth over a company’s earnings potential, but the broader market is still confused as to how to price these companies.

2. Distractions. Every story from now on is going to be less and less about Facebook’s incredible technology and more about how its stock is doing. Facebook’s social mission will be obscured by its profit motive.

3. Who’s being rewarded here? The whole point of an initial public offering is for a company to raise money by selling shares in the open market. An important secondary point is that the IPO provides liquidity to existing shareholders, making it far easier for them to trade and take profits (and losses) on what they own. Big banks underwrite IPOs — they go get the high-rolling, qualified investors and get them to commit millions of dollars to buy into the offering, collecting copious fees for themselves in the process, not to mention getting first crack at shares for their own products and funds. In short, everyone in an IPO process gets their beak wet except for the people who give the company its profits — its users. That might be fine for a car company, an iPhone company, or even a search engine company, but social media exists to connect users to companies and each other in unprecedented and previously impossible ways. Shouldn’t finance be one of them? That leads to…

4. Why not share the company itself? It’s fine to talk about technology’s power to change the world if you’re the one who’s going to profit from it. But this isn’t really a change: In fact it looks like a highly conventional way to run what everyone says is supposed to be a very transformative company. Facebook needed a gestation period, and its incredible growth in that period made it very special. The moment its IPO is over, it becomes one of a herd.

That’s why it should become a nearly one-of-a-kind company for the technology sector: a co-op. Invented in England in the 1840s, the co-op is a company organizational structure where membership is voluntary but members have democratic control and economic participation and in turn are supposed to act with concern for their community — in this case Facebook. Businesses of all kinds — for-profit and otherwise — are run through the co-op model, or variations of it.

• There is the Park Slope Food Coop, a crunchy place where 16,000 members (disclosure: I am one of them) buy groceries at just enough of a markup over wholesale to cover expenses (about 17 percent, making many items far cheaper than in other stores). They also run and staff the store, with the help of just a few paid employees.
• There is the San Remo, one of the most luxurious apartment buildings in Manhattan, where prices are in the tens of millions for a single apartment, and as in thousands of other co-op buildings, residents share the cost of maintenance and retain control over key property decisions.
• Then there is banking and insurance company USAA and mutual fund firm Vanguard, models for highly sophisticated financial services businesses that are run according to co-op principles and are highly successful and respected businesses.

But all of the businesses above use the co-op model’s social nature as secondary to their main business. For Facebook, social is the business.

Facebook wouldn’t be forgoing its fundraising if it abandoned its IPO and became a co-op. When I joined the Park Slope Coop, I had to pay a $25 membership fee and a $100 investment, the latter of which is refundable should I ever leave. In Facebook’s virtual community, its 845 million users could easily pay a small sum — say $5 in the U.S. and some locally adjusted equivalent in other countries — to become an owner. Some of that money would be used to buy out existing stock owners and set up the new management model — it would still have Zuckerberg as CEO with a management team, but with the same one vote that every other member has. Over time, if Facebook’s owners keep the cost of becoming a member as low as possible without in any way starving the site for cash, Facebook could even become the world’s first trillion-dollar company — just in a way no one has ever previously imagined.

Users who invested would earn the right to help govern the company. If it sounds unwieldy to let hundreds of millions of users govern a site, well, it may be at first. But as Zuckerberg himself will attest, his engineers are hard at work helping users connect to each other in ways previously impossible. Facebook already offers voting tools, organization pages, recommendation links, polling, etc. With the help of a management team and committee structure, it would be pretty easy to let members assign themselves to committees and shape Facebook into the community they want it to be. Besides, if there’s one person in the world not allowed to use the excuse that this undertaking would be too technically complex, it’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg may chafe at the idea that hundreds of millions of users are suddenly in control of his company, but think of a sample proposal. Say a user wants Facebook to give 10 percent of its income to charity.

1. She creates a new page and persuades her friends to follow it. The page holds the pro and con discussions of the proposal.
2. After hitting a certain threshold of followers, the page makes the Revenue Committee agenda, where a subcommittee is assigned to study its feasibility and write a summary about the proposal’s impact on Facebook, including how it would affect the bottom line.
3. The committee then votes on the summary — if it’s approved, it goes into a general Facebook meeting, where the entire user base gets to vote. The beauty of this is twofold. First, only the best ideas percolate to the top; propose anything crazy, and it’s simply going to languish. Second, with Facebook’s technology, there need not be a formal meeting time — the proposal exists just like any new Facebook alert. If a user feels strongly about a proposal, he can even buy a targeted demographic ad!

As the site’s leader, the famously controlling Zuckerberg would still retain quite a large chunk of control in that he’d have to implement the strategy and actually make it work, and one would think that if he explained why a given proposal wasn’t a great idea, his words would carry great weight.

But ultimately the site would belong to the users, not a tiny management team. When Zuckerberg eventually decides to hang up his keyboard and retire, the company would not face the cult of personality problems that Apple did during Steve Jobs’s protracted illness — it would simply persevere.

In the meantime, Facebook would have plenty of capital to pay its engineers, thanks to its owners’ contributions. In good years, it could return dividends to members or explain to them that it was better to bank the money for future investment or rainy-day funds. In tough times, it could first ask members for low-interest loans before turning to the capital markets, perhaps using a Kickstarter-like platform to fund specific initiatives in the company. In other words, this is a model compatible with capitalism and competition, not a replacement for those things. The whole system fits almost perfectly with Zuckerberg’s investor letter saying that Facebook doesn’t “build services to make money; [it makes] money to build better services.”

Facebook will probably never be governed this way. Too many early investors simply stand to get too rich. But if Facebook is not to be a co-op, that means social networking — and all of the truly incredible tools, culture, community and change that its visionaries claim will change the way the world is wired — will really just reinforce the highly stratified and imperfect way the world works today.

Mark, put your money where your mouth is; after all, you already have more of it than you will ever need. If Facebook was truly built to change the way people relate to their world, that change should begin with how people relate to Facebook.

PHOTO: An employee works on a computer at the new headquarters of Facebook in Menlo Park, California, January 11, 2012. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

Here’s the thing: Like Twitter itself, it’s time for the Internet, and its chirping classes, to grow up. Twitter’s policy and its transparency pledge with the censorship watchdog Chilling Effects is the most thoughtful, honest and realistic policy to come out of a technology company in a long time. Even an unsympathetic reading of the new censorship policy bears that out.

To understand why, let’s unpack the policy a bit: First, Twitter has strongly implied it will not remove content under this policy. If that doesn’t sound like a crucial distinction from outright censorship, it is. Taking the new policy with existing ones, the only time Twitter says it will ever remove a tweet altogether is in response to a DMCA request. The DMCA may have its own flaws, but it is a form of censorship that lives separately from the process Twitter has outlined in this recent announcement. Where the DMCA process demands a deletion of copyright-infringing content, Twitter’s censorship policy promises no such takedown: it promises instead only to withhold censored content from the country where the content has been censored. Nothing else.

To be sure, that’s censorship of a kind, but compared to the industry censorship even Americans have long lived with — take the Motion Picture Association of America, which still censors films based on dubious standards of taste and morality — it’s positively enlightened. And it never permanently destroys or pre-empts content, the way the MPAA does.

Further, for a country to censor content, it has to make a “valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity” to Twitter, which will then decide what to do with the request. Twitter will also make an effort to notify users whose content is censored about what happened and why, and even give them a method to challenge the request. According to Twitter’s post, a record of the action will also be filed to the Chilling Effects website. The end result of a successful request is that the tweet or user in question is replaced by a gray box that notifies other readers inside the censoring country that the Tweet has been censored:

They’re gray boxes of shame alright, but not for the user, or for Twitter. It’s instead a bright signal to a country’s online citizens that their government is limiting their free speech. While the Egypt uprisings were powerful and in some part powered by Twitter, I can easily imagine a world where a censored tweet becomes the ultimate protest symbol; one that unfortunately deprives the protesters of content, but sends the message to protesters that their worst fears are right, and they ought not give up their fight.

The press organization Reporters Without Borders has sent a letter of protest to Twitter chairman Jack Dorsey, which is surprising considering the power of the gift that Dorsey has just given them. While some reporters get themselves on the ground to report from say, Syria, nothing can stop others in the U.S. or any other country from following the tweets of Syrian protesters, even if the Syrian government requests and is granted censorship of tweets within that country.

That’s the second important note: Twitter has made no mention of disabling users’ ability to tweet or of deleting a user because their tweets have been censored. Syria or some other country may choose to take down its communications grid or try to block access to Twitter, but short of such an action, it can’t stop tweets from reaching the outside world under this policy. In fact Twitter has strengthened its case to remain online in countries where free speech is threatened, possibly providing protesters with a valuable tool that would otherwise have been preemptively shut down.

If a government does engage in a cat-and-mouse game of blocking access, remember that nowhere else is the playing field more level between authorities and insurgents than online. Workarounds for Twitter blocks already exist, such as proxy servers that spoof the identity of users and their country of origin, and alternative access points (APIs) to reach the Twitter service.

Finally, reputation matters. Twitter has engendered much goodwill in the tech and international communities by its sterling behavior in both worlds. This is the company that put off a server upgrade to keep the tweets flowing from the Iran uprising in 2009, at the request of the U.S. State Department. It’s a company that’s managed to play by the rules while also leveling the playing field of communication as no other service has since Alexander Bell’s telephone. There’s nothing about this announcement that smacks of any change in policy or attitude; rather it seems like an honest attempt to abide by country-specific rules of law, while also exposing the power of those laws to citizens in countries where freedoms have been abridged. (Forbes as an example, mentions it is illegal to insult a French bureaucrat. One can imagine the uprising in France if the government tried to censor a Tweet insulting Sarkozy or one of his ministers, which would presumably lead to a rapid re-writing of that law.)

As long as no country can ever make a claim to censor a tweet on a worldwide basis, that tweet will exist somewhere on Twitter’s servers, and someone will be able to see it. By laying down clear rules for country-specific censorship, Twitter has implicitly stated that no government, company or individual has the power to eradicate a tweet it doesn’t like from the face the Earth. Twitter has laid down the rules by which it will hold countries accountable, and by which it will hold itself accountable, at least when it comes to censorship.

They are so fair as to be without precedent, and if they are violated, the world presumably will be able to see the hypocrisy in an instant. That’s a maturity that many — governments, corporations, and yes, sniping tweeters — have rarely shown when it comes to censorship or privacy policies. (Hello, SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, DMCA, Facebook and the rest!)

Besides, if Twitter were as evil as its critics would have us believe, would we be able to see the results of the ongoing #TwitterBlackout? If we are living in a world where corporations have more power than government, I’ll take that level of transparency from a new media company, every day.