Tom Slee linked this danah boyd post which posits that Facebook is a “social utility,” and hence is likely to end up being regulated like a power company or a cable provider. Slee hopefully predicts that in 2012, “boyd’s view that ‘Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated’ will become mainstream.”

This would definitely be a step in the right direction, and until recently I would have completely endorsed the sentiment, since I’ve thought this way about big Internet companies for a long time. Even before Facebook, it always seemed to me that Google’s search engine, for example, was an immensely important and valuable social utility, and one that’s too important to be left in the hands of a single private sector company. So my suggestion, only a bit joking, would be that we ought to nationalize Google and Facebook.

But I’ve started to wonder if this is the best way of characterizing what Facebook is, and what it does. Is it a company that delivers a necessary good to its customers, or is it an intermediary that facilitates transactions between its customers? Or to put it another way: is Facebook more like a utility, or is it more like a bank?