Facebook’s huge new deal with nine media giants has positioned it as the ultimate middleman of the internet

Facebook once exhorted software developers to “move fast and break things”. The phrase captured the social network’s hacker-inspired ethos: innovate, disrupt, leave others to pick up the pieces.

Just over a year ago, its founder Mark Zuckerberg jokingly unveiled what he said was the new company motto: “Move fast with stable infra[structure]”. It reflects a company at a very different stage of its development.

Facebook has, at great speed, broken the traditional content ...