Dear Mr Zuckerberg

Facebook is a wonderful thing.  It facilitates a kind of communication between people that was never previously possible.  It enables brilliant things.  So thank you, Mr Zuckerberg, for that.  And thank you also for your kind offer to give 99% of your shares away.  As far as I understand it, that's equivalent to about $45bn, so it's a big deal.

But I have a suggestion: I think you'd be doing a far bigger, better thing for society if you didn't use these shares to set yourself up a foundation; but instead gave them to the users of Facebook.

Here's why.

The thing is, all of the value in Facebook right now is owned by people whose primary interest is in financial return: those of you who created it, the VCs, and the shareholders who invested after IPO.

That creates a big problem.  Because Facebook - an organisation which has reams of data on all of us - is only accountable to that tiny number of people.

As a result, the biggest imperative on the company is to find ways to monetise us, the users, through our data.  Your biggest need is to find ever more pervasive and effective ways to sell to us.  Your systemic priority is to exploit us for money.  I'm pretty sure you didn't mean it to happen like that, but it's just how it is.

What you're offering to do right now is to give quite a lot of the money that you earn by exploiting us back to help towards solving some big problems, in ways that you choose.  That's nice, and I'm sure it'll do some good.  

But actually if you gave us your ownership stake in Facebook, you'd be giving us something way more valuable.  

You'd be making Facebook accountable to the people who use it, not just the people who own it.

You'd be making clear that the internet is about democracy and participation, not just about flogging stuff to people.  

And as a result, you'd be making a statement that today all of us have agency and power to prevent and solve big social problems - not just people who happen to have money.

There might need to be some work done to figure out how exactly it would work, but you wouldn't be the first.  Etsy just sold a whole load of their stock to their community before they floated.  Kickstarter have just become a Benefit Corporation, so they have to hold their social purpose higher than profit in their objectives.  And when it comes to the legal structures and governance processes, there are some very good experts in cooperative business and governance models around who I'm sure would be only too happy to help. 

In fact, I'd go so far as to say it might be good for business - if anyone is going to help you diversify the Facebook business model beyond your current dependence on ad revenues, it's us, the users.

But I know your real motivation is to make a better world.  

So maybe think of this as a 21st century version of teaching a man to fish so he can feed himself forever, instead of just giving him a fish so he can eat today.