I know some authors who are tremendously upset by this practice because it infringes on their rights by creating “authority” pages about their characters without their input. In this way, they can earn advertising revenue by leveraging someone else’s intellectual property. As always, the law is lagging behind actual internet practices. It will be interesting to see whether Facebook eventually gets sued over this. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did–deep pockets.

But the like button is not evil.

Your analogy to PageRank is flawed – they are different scenarios and mechanics. PageRank is based on automated crawl, whereas “like” is user-initiated syndication. Pull vs. Push. PageRank has no need for user authentication – the “entity” is the page itself, which is already known by its URL. The “like” scenario necessitates an authenticated state to tie the action to a user. (Yes, it does not necessarily need to be Facebook authentication, but do I really need to be logged into Google to use Buzz, etc?)

Yes, the data then becomes Facebook’s to build “recommended lists” and “top pages” and all that. But last time I checked, Google wasn’t making any of its crawl or click data public either.

I empathize and agree with your sentiment that “identity is too important to be owned by one company.” But so are your search results.