Market Failure [1] is the definition in economics for this situation.
There is a non-price, non-market mechanism imposing a cost upon us. Just like if your neighbour at the restaurant lights up a cigarette and you hate that and it spoils your meal. You can't very well "give up smoking" to fix that. Just like any public good - eg national defence, it can't be done by a free market alone and so never is. Just like if a factory opens and pollutes a river killing all the fish, the fisherman can't stop transacting with the factory to get their livelihoods back. Just like any natural monopoly - eg piped drinking water supply and distribution to buildings in a city which is heavily regulated everywhere on earth, (often really badly, sure) because you can't change providers at will and you can't do a startup and get into that market. Proprety rights and enforcement - we don't do private courts and police as a rule and laws are not supposed to be for sale to the highest bidder.
Facebook have my data, they use it, without my consent and I have no way of taking my business elsewhere to remedy that. This is one of the many costs facebook impose on all of us. These are costs that not all of us feel we want to bare or feel there is a benefit from it. Us stopping using facebook does not fix that cost, we continue to incur it. That meets the textbook definition of "market failure".
Just by the by, this is not simply "my claim", this is the normal, definition of market failure in any economics textbook and regardless of political leaning. Whether you think that this market failure is an important one or not certainly can be debated. Eg it's market failure if I don't like the color my neigbor paints their front door - the response to which is usually "so what, get over it." You can, and facebook do, make that kind of argument here. Facebook PR will avoid "market failure" as it sounds somehow worse than a technical description of the situation to much of the public, as it does perhas to yourself. But there's not much doubt about it (at least as far as I'm aware), that it meets that usual, and well understood defininition among ecomomists.
> Just like if your neighbour at the restaurant lights up a cigarette and you hate that and it spoils your meal. You can't very well "give up smoking" to fix that.
But you can go to another restaurant that doesn't allow smoking. If enough people don't like having smokers around that those restaurants goes out of business, then eventually you will see a shift in the market of available restaurants with non-smoking sections.
It still doesn't make sense, because the remote worker pool is global. If that were supposed to make sense then we would all be getting paid third world rates and cost of living would still have nothing to do with it.
then we would all be getting paid third world rates
That’s the end goal of large corporations, yes. Why are we so eager to help them? Developers already undermine their own value by crowing to everyone who will listen “anyone can be a developer and do what we do”.
What do you think your boss thinks when he or she hears you say all these things?
Not just large corporations, also small ones. I think it's a good thing - paying high wages in countries that need it most.
> their own value by crowing to everyone who will listen “anyone can be a developer and do what we do
I sincerely doubt developers believe that, or at least not experienced developers. Software is cutthroat: anything that can be automated is already automated. People who can't work beyond that are useless.
Well being onsite adds value to buyers. If you dont think so, the only way to proce that is by starting your own company with remote-only. Remote devs are cheap so you should be rich very quickly, if they provide the same value as locals.
