Working in tech (not companies listed), I get somewhat irked at the recent barrage of "regulate/break them up" articles I keep seeing about tech companies.
Not being a big fan of regulation in general, but if you're going to regulate, should these companies be at the top of your list? There are plenty of wrongs being committed by a variety of companies and industries right now. Not saying these companies are as holier than thou than they preach to be, but they are all innovative and good companies. While they have practices that merit examination, so do many other companies that have histories of being far less transparent and far less proactive about change.
I don't mean to say the world of tech doesn't need a fair amount of reflection and self reflection, but this recent bandwagoning of "regulate tech!" seems reactionary and hype driven as opposed to more well intentioned. This guy was even mentioning his book... The media has covered tech in the last year in a "if it bleeds it leads" capacity that I think undercuts many of the valid points being raised. Idk, I could be wrong, but that's my two cents
> if you're going to regulate, should these companies be at the top of your list
Yes. Two of them (Google and Facebook) basically control a huge fraction of the information people are exposed to on a daily basis, either directly on indirectly. They're so dominant and aloof, that they can make or break businesses without even realizing it or caring. Their control over information flow also has important civil society implications.
Amazon could conceivably control most American retail activity in the future, though it has a few retail titans that could conceivably stand up to it if they get their acts together [1]. At best, we seem to be headed towards a retail oligopoly.
Personally, I'm much less worried about Apple, its control is much less pervasive. Though I wish there were more alternatives to it other than Android.
The argument for breaking up these companies is not based on punishing them for wrongs. Instead, it’s based on the idea that they have so much manifest power that their natural order of business inherently has the effect of “abuse of monopoly (monopsony) power”, regardless of any ‘unfair intent’.
Take Google as an example: they provide a large number of incredibly valuable services to the public (in my opinion). The cost for those services is a vast centralized surveillance system that cannot be reasonably avoided by basically anyone taking part in the first world economy. If Google we’re less hegemonic, then there would be at least a chance for alternatives that don’t either knock you out of contemporary society or simply change the nameplate on the panopticon to exist.
An exception that proves the rule here is DuckDuckGo: it’s a scrappy, functional search engine that lets people opt out of part of Google’s oversight —- except that it doesn’t; the remainder of Google is still in so many aspects that it can effectively bypass the loss of personal data that goes to search. If YouTube, Gmail, and AdSense were also separate blocks, though...
Exactly. Wouldn't say, Monsanto or BP be considered far more evil and manipulative? What about those opioids pharmas that have literally destroyed small-town America through outright fraud/malfeasance?
Yeah, tech companies aint goody two-shoes, but there are bigger fish that need frying.
No. No. No other company on the planet knows where billions of people exactly are and what they're doing at a given point or can predict their behavior. Not Coca Cola or Monsanto or any of them. There are very, very specific reason why people on HN are complaining about big tech now. We're mainly well-educated and have read a lot of sci-fi written by well-educated people.
It comes off as insincere to me. The rapid rise in anti-tech sentiments really seems like someone with an agenda is targeting tech companies, rather than a genuine response to perceived wrongs.
It seems that entrenched media companies and other businesses that are most threatened by Facebook, Google, and Amazon are the ones who are the quickest to jump on the bandwagon and publish anything they can against big tech.
I think there are valid concerns to be had about big tech companies and the data and influence they have, but a genuine response is to consider the best way to deal with those concerns. Aggressively pushing for the breakup or destruction of their business is an indicator of other motives.
Okay, so we should regulate all those other companies and industries too? Is that your point?
Maybe that self-reflection should include why people are so eager to dump on tech companies? I've been saying this on HN and other mediums for a while, but the backlash against silicon valley has just begun and will continue to grow. People are starting to discover just how many facets of their lives are controlled by opaque black boxes owned by large tech companies and any time something goes wrong (fake news, twitter bots, crypto scams, data breaches) they will lash out at whatever is most visible precisely because they are being kept in the dark about what's going on behind the scenes. A corollary of this is if companies continue to claim that they have revolutionary AI that can rival human intuition when they're really just doing fancy linear regression behind the scenes (insert whatever outlandish tech marketing claim that usually just means simple database read/writes here) they will be targeted if that linear regression results in predictable downsides since the people have been sold a bill of goods that implies more control than what is really possible.
But even besides the public perception problem, there's the issue of the inherent winner-take-all business models rampant within tech and SV. The publishing/VC model inherently promotes monopolies and anti-competitive behavior, and the natural network effects in many technologies only exacerbate this. Ignoring this just because other companies do bad stuff and tech gets a bad rap isn't going to change the fact that many tech companies have scary control over not only entire industries but also entire segments of the world's population. Since we both work in tech we can be honest here, the end goal of almost any tech company is the collection and protection of user data. Whether the data is your product itself or if the data allows you to create a product doesn't matter, this hoarding and collection of user data will inevitably come under scrutiny. At this point you have to ask yourself if people will look favorably on this. Are we doing our best as an industry to stay above reproach? Are we doing our best as engineers to use this data without hint of ethical quandaries? I can assure you if we don't ask these questions ourselves now people with less knowledge and less context will ask them later, and eventually people who are just as clueless as the general public, but with more power will ask them. And this doesn't just apply to user data, it applies to many other facets of the industry as well. Are we really comfortable with a single entity that's legally controlled by a single person hosting so much of the "distributed" internet (Amazon, Bezos, AWS)? Are we really comfortable with a single company legally controlled by a single person controlling the communication platforms of such a large percentage of the global population (Facebook, Zuckerberg, Whatsapp/Instagram/FbMessenger)? The refusal to see any kind of downside to those questions is itself intertwined with the poor public perception, and we would do well to begin to answer those questions ourselves, even if they have hard answers, then let others answer them for us.
In the end you can complain about a bandwagon campaign all you want, and you can be right about it until the cows come home, but it won't make any difference if we can't convince the general public. And to do that I think we need to deeply re-examine some long held beliefs and givens that almost all of us hold, and we need to dramatically improve how we communicate and interact with those who rely on our work to go about their day to day lives.
Every time I see an article about this, I look for something to explain why Apple is lumped in with Facebook and Google - something beyond 'they make the piece of glass you look at facebook or google on', and I can't really find it.
This time around, the author points to an incorrect profit margin (he claims a profit margin of over 250% for an iPhone, which is nearly an order of magnitude too high), and one time that a Spotify update was rejected. Not exactly compelling...
This article has a lot of economical misconceptions.
To name just one of the most blatant: the author complains about wages not growing enough, but also that tech giants are "less efficient" in job creation, having more market value per employee, and requiring less employees to generate the same revenue and profit.
How the heck is a company supposed to pay more it's employees without being able to make more money per employee? And if it's making more money per employee, then obviously they will have more market value per employee. This is not a company being inefficient at "creating jobs" but actually being efficient at creating high quality jobs with wages that keep growing over time.
That's just basic math and economics, but seems to be beyond the understanding of the author.
All the part about the economic impact of the big four is quite nonsensical, and reads like the proverbial rant of light bulb makers that they can't compete with a free source of light like the sun.
As with most of the current zeitgeist the idea of the article seems to be that success is the problem. The problem with the big four is not that they exist, but why there aren't more of them? Why not the big 100 or 1000?
What's hindering other companies from being as successful in generating profits and high-paying jobs?
Maybe the big four are doing a lot of evil things to prevent others from joining the club. Maybe the government is also to blame. Maybe both big government and big companies are together in this (anyone knows the meaning of the word "lobbyist"?).
If you keep asking the wrong questions and ignoring basic economic reality you'll never get to know the answer.
Not so. The author praises economic efficiency, but understands its downsides and thinks some of the transition costs could be paid by four companies that are actually evading taxes other companies pay.
There aren't more of them for the reasons given in the article - they've been allowed to extend their monopolies so freely that now investors won't touch possible competitors 'cause they know they're already crushed. Extending a monopoly (actually, it's market power, not monopoly that matters) is illegal. But the U.S. decided these were their thugs, so they wouldn't touch them - just let them extinguish a competitive marketplace in area after area as they metastasized. That's how the U.S. has violated the principles of free trade and abused its economic partners, for decades. Now, the domestic cost to the U.S. itself is becoming clearer.
I think there should be disincentives for any company to grow beyond a certain size. Huge companies provide a short-term benefit to the consumer but in the ling run they cause a lot of damage to innovation and the economy.
This idea somewhat pre-empts the possibility of achieving certain economies of scale. If a large company can achieve great economies of scale and pass that on to a consumer, who benefits from the onerous regulation that costs the tax payer money to enforce as well as money to pay for the increased cost of the good?
Anti-trust in the U.S. has not been super strongly enforced in recent decades (perhaps since the Ma Bell breakup and Glass Steagall before it was repealed?). But if the consumer is not being harmed, why get in the way of a company that has truly earned market dominance?
I think I like the spirit of your idea but I'm not so sure about the execution. What is the certain size? Who determines that? Will it be updated frequently enough to handle changing times / technology trends?
The "big 4" should be disrupted by the market, not the government. Of those firms listed, only Amazon seems to be in a position of solid, lasting strength.
Don't believe it? Remember Microsoft? They used to dominate our industry and crush innovation. Their tactics made Uber's seem soft and fuzzy. Sure the government gave them a knock but that didn't slow them down. Do you know what did? Apple and iOS. They missed the boat on mobile and now they're still valuable but not an existential threat to the industry.
It's really hard for a tech company to dominate over the decades. Apple has been near death multiple times in the past and while they have a ton of money, they aren't exactly innovating anymore. It will happen again, it's in their DNA.
Facebook is just Myspace 2.0 that was smart enough to snatch up Instagram (starting to show its age), and Whatsapp. Acquisitions != innovation.
None of these companies are threats to technological progress in the long term. Something new will show up a that disrupts their entire model. It's happened with every boom cycle in tech history.
The trick is to look for the next big thing and ride the wave and not look to the single most regressive institution in existence (the government) to come help you.
I think you're absolutely underestimating the consequences of the various antitrust rulings Microsoft had to submit to, especially in the European Union.
Even if Microsoft was no longer a monopoly (which, by the way, is entirely incorrect), you can't always hope for a new emerging market to break up a monopoly. The hold that Google has on digitized data is nearly unassailable at this point.
And google (.... or alphabet)? Between their domination of mobile OS and search engines, I think they have equal lasting strength as Amazon. Plus their communication tools aren't exactly uncommon either, albeit replaceable.
Microsoft is still huge though. Sure they've lost server share to Linux (which they're embracing in some ways now) and desktop share to Apple, but they're still massive.
The trouble is, how do you compete with Google, now, today. We use to have Lycos, Hotbot, Yahoo, Dogpile ... Duckduckgo is far from even approaching Google's share.
I don't think the future is the free market. The future is developers making distributed platforms that everyone can support. The next YouTube won't be centralized. The next search won't have removable results, because they'll be cached among all the computers that contribute to that search.
Meanwhile, in the affordable consumer desktop world, Windows is still king. Wanna game on a PC? Windows. What OS dominates professional workstations in offices? Windows.
Windows proficiency is still considered the standard for computer literacy. Your toy phone can do things, but thats nothing compared to a laptop or desktop.
And theyre making a move on the cloud too, leveraging their dominance in productivity suites. It has been more effective than many here guessed, with FLOSS like LibreOffice competing in the same space.
And they still have those same business practices.
Microsoft absolutely did get slowed down by the government. Badly. It would have been illegal for them to integrate the way Apple did with MacOS, long before iOS rolled around.
The role of the government is to correct for market failure. A company that has the power to be a gatekeeper (for other companies) to the industry (and uses it) is too big.
> Article criticizing Facebook’s dominance has a link to share on Facebook. Be the change you want to see?
I'm sure article-author Scott Galloway, NYU Professor of Marketing, has the authority to change Esquire's social media strategy, on account of writing an article for it.
Google is the worst of these right now IMO, only because fbook has agreed to change some things recently.
I am looking for a group of people to start a competing search portal to take about 20% of the google search and do it better. I've been watching the big G slide into more and more censorship and it's looking like it's going the direction of "wacky safe".
If anyone can help make a more mature portal for search, please contact me. The time is right for this disruption.
The disruption of fbook is so easy that I'm not too worried about it, when it happens it will be swift.
Eventually google will just be the new yellow pages, with a bunch of unregulated tv channels (unless youtube is split off from it)
If you haven't already but are feeling tempted, save yourself some time and don't bother reading this article. It's pure unthinking big-company-hate without any substance.
Well, I guess the gimmick -- that each of these large tech companies corresponds to a bodily region and appeals to us for a related reason -- is nice, but even that doesn't really make much sense.
I don't want to begrudge Scott Galloway his living... If this is what it takes to get a publication like Esquire to pay then I guess this is what it takes. I just seems like the guy should be able to make a living in some non-embarrassing way.
An e-commerce site, glossy UIs, friend connector, and a searching utility...honestly our tech "giants" are just the the last guys standing from the Internet boom of the nineties
I think our "anti-trust" principles are due a major reform, booth theoretical and legal.
There is more to take into account than "trusts" or (in most cases) monopolies. We're not dealing with trains and resource transport anymore. Barriers to entry and societally harmful consequences of scale work totally differently.
Google & FB have absolute control of online advertising (in most markets), and significant control of online media. Their decisions vis-a-vis surveilance deterrmine the level of privacy most people have. If Youtube demonetizes certain content (for immodesty, politcal views, etc.), then these are the standards of the internet. If Google and FB agree that an article is important (via whatever employees, users, algorithims or combination make the "decision"), then it is. If they agree a position is propogandist or dangerous & should be silenced, then it is. Youtube's fair use implementation is what fair use is in normative practice.
That is just a lot of power. It's unchecked, and IMO scary.
This is not about good and evil. It's not a trial of Alphabet & FB. I'm not accusing them of wanting to censor media^. Not accusing them of being worse than others. Their size itself is a problem,
^Ad-surveilance though, that is probably worth $100bn pa to them, maybe more. Here their interests are pathological, imo. Completely at odds with their users' interests
Meanwhile, These companies (again particularly Google & FB) just take up a lot of "space," and are not always gret custodians of the territory they occupy.
Lets play what-if. What if Tinder dissappeared today. I see a decent chance that something will take its place by tomorrow. I wouldn't be surprised if it's something better. Tinder isn't hard to make. What's hard to do is draw the network, which is where the value of Tinder is. Full credit to Tinder for the concept and implementation but that does not guarantee that they are the best custodians of that space.
Giants have more moat than Tinder. FB have over half the population logging in daily and subscribed to IMs/notifications. .
Google controls my phone, my browser, my TV... It controls the network of advertisers, the eyeballs, the app store, the user profiling data.... Good luck competing with youtube.
Youtube is important. It is online video, which may be the most important media channel in the world.
The WWW (culturally and technically) gives users a platform to be their own media, have their own show, expand and free and democratize media. IMO, podcasting is an interesting space. It's very decentralized and free, running on bare metal protocols, more or less. They negotiate directly with advertisers and deliver directly to users. The stuff that succeeds seems to be much better quality. Spam doesn't exist. Clickbait is minimal.
Video though.. video goes through Google & FB. If FB decide that 30s videos are the s--t, that's what people see. If youtube decides that original content is less valuable than random mashups of content (bordering on spam, imo), then they are. If youtube's comment section sucks, then online discussions of videos suck. If Google decides that the platform/content revenue split is 50-50, then it is. If they think science is boring, it is.
(Personally, I think Youtube is mismanaged, and that is a big let down. You can probably tell.)
But if Youtube disappears tomorrow... We'd still have online video. New platforms would appear. Competition would (for a time) take place. The internet would be better off.
I've got no idea how these (half baked) ideas sould be implmented into regulation, to pre-empt the comment. Obviously, it's tricky.
But, I don't think this can be improved via the normal antitrust concepts. the problem isn't price fixing or "artificial" barriers to entry. The problem is a lack creative destruction and an accumulation of power.
The big issue is that the companies have absolute power over facilities that should be mankind's possession and thus managed with explicit laws and a justice-like system offering due process.
Google is managing mankind's search engine with a secret algorithm and they can arbitrarily decide your site's presence or position in search queries with no recourse (granted, it's hard to define a fair way to do this, but still).
Facebook is managing mankind's person-to-person communication system and you have no recourse if you are banned, if your content is removed, or if you are trying to publicize some content and the newsfeed algorithms are unfavorable to you.
Amazon is managing mankind's delivery system and you have no recourse if they refuse to carry your products.
[Apple is less of a problem because they are merely monopolizing iOS devices, and there's an easy fix in terms of forcing them to open source iOS and license any related patents, so that iOS apps can be made to run on Android devices]
Reddit is another huge problem as they manage (and especially allow random moderators to manage) mankind's discussion forums with no regard to free speech, with arbitrary bans and no enforced transparency.
One option is to enforce competition: this could be done for Google by only allowing them to operate their search engine for up to a few consecutive hours per day, can be done for Amazon by allowing them to operate only a few days per month, for Facebook by forcing them to federate their social graph, so that people can host their accounts on any service and still have the same interaction and for Reddit to also federate their forums like Usenet is federated.
The other option is to be force them to manage all these facilities in the public interest, with explicit and published rules of operation (e.g. Google and Facebook must publish their ranking algorithms) and with all protections like free speech applying, according to well-defined rules and providing due process for any decisions that are adverse to anyone.
Obviously these should be as much as possible be general laws, like extending free speech to apply private spaces as well, forcing to put any software that can generate lock-in (e.g. because it implements a proprietary widely used API or manages a proprietary widely used file format) in the public domain and forcing to federate any service that benefits from network effects.
[+] [-] wpasc|8 years ago|reply
Not being a big fan of regulation in general, but if you're going to regulate, should these companies be at the top of your list? There are plenty of wrongs being committed by a variety of companies and industries right now. Not saying these companies are as holier than thou than they preach to be, but they are all innovative and good companies. While they have practices that merit examination, so do many other companies that have histories of being far less transparent and far less proactive about change.
I don't mean to say the world of tech doesn't need a fair amount of reflection and self reflection, but this recent bandwagoning of "regulate tech!" seems reactionary and hype driven as opposed to more well intentioned. This guy was even mentioning his book... The media has covered tech in the last year in a "if it bleeds it leads" capacity that I think undercuts many of the valid points being raised. Idk, I could be wrong, but that's my two cents
[+] [-] Slansitartop|8 years ago|reply
Yes. Two of them (Google and Facebook) basically control a huge fraction of the information people are exposed to on a daily basis, either directly on indirectly. They're so dominant and aloof, that they can make or break businesses without even realizing it or caring. Their control over information flow also has important civil society implications.
Amazon could conceivably control most American retail activity in the future, though it has a few retail titans that could conceivably stand up to it if they get their acts together [1]. At best, we seem to be headed towards a retail oligopoly.
Personally, I'm much less worried about Apple, its control is much less pervasive. Though I wish there were more alternatives to it other than Android.
[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/01/01/amazon-is-...
[+] [-] c256|8 years ago|reply
Take Google as an example: they provide a large number of incredibly valuable services to the public (in my opinion). The cost for those services is a vast centralized surveillance system that cannot be reasonably avoided by basically anyone taking part in the first world economy. If Google we’re less hegemonic, then there would be at least a chance for alternatives that don’t either knock you out of contemporary society or simply change the nameplate on the panopticon to exist.
An exception that proves the rule here is DuckDuckGo: it’s a scrappy, functional search engine that lets people opt out of part of Google’s oversight —- except that it doesn’t; the remainder of Google is still in so many aspects that it can effectively bypass the loss of personal data that goes to search. If YouTube, Gmail, and AdSense were also separate blocks, though...
[+] [-] r00fus|8 years ago|reply
Yeah, tech companies aint goody two-shoes, but there are bigger fish that need frying.
[+] [-] librexpr|8 years ago|reply
It's not one or the other.
[+] [-] aje403|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pythonaut_16|8 years ago|reply
It seems that entrenched media companies and other businesses that are most threatened by Facebook, Google, and Amazon are the ones who are the quickest to jump on the bandwagon and publish anything they can against big tech.
I think there are valid concerns to be had about big tech companies and the data and influence they have, but a genuine response is to consider the best way to deal with those concerns. Aggressively pushing for the breakup or destruction of their business is an indicator of other motives.
[+] [-] amelius|8 years ago|reply
Yes. Ironically, these companies are doing the regulation now. And they control an increasing share of the real economy.
[+] [-] pdeuchler|8 years ago|reply
Maybe that self-reflection should include why people are so eager to dump on tech companies? I've been saying this on HN and other mediums for a while, but the backlash against silicon valley has just begun and will continue to grow. People are starting to discover just how many facets of their lives are controlled by opaque black boxes owned by large tech companies and any time something goes wrong (fake news, twitter bots, crypto scams, data breaches) they will lash out at whatever is most visible precisely because they are being kept in the dark about what's going on behind the scenes. A corollary of this is if companies continue to claim that they have revolutionary AI that can rival human intuition when they're really just doing fancy linear regression behind the scenes (insert whatever outlandish tech marketing claim that usually just means simple database read/writes here) they will be targeted if that linear regression results in predictable downsides since the people have been sold a bill of goods that implies more control than what is really possible.
But even besides the public perception problem, there's the issue of the inherent winner-take-all business models rampant within tech and SV. The publishing/VC model inherently promotes monopolies and anti-competitive behavior, and the natural network effects in many technologies only exacerbate this. Ignoring this just because other companies do bad stuff and tech gets a bad rap isn't going to change the fact that many tech companies have scary control over not only entire industries but also entire segments of the world's population. Since we both work in tech we can be honest here, the end goal of almost any tech company is the collection and protection of user data. Whether the data is your product itself or if the data allows you to create a product doesn't matter, this hoarding and collection of user data will inevitably come under scrutiny. At this point you have to ask yourself if people will look favorably on this. Are we doing our best as an industry to stay above reproach? Are we doing our best as engineers to use this data without hint of ethical quandaries? I can assure you if we don't ask these questions ourselves now people with less knowledge and less context will ask them later, and eventually people who are just as clueless as the general public, but with more power will ask them. And this doesn't just apply to user data, it applies to many other facets of the industry as well. Are we really comfortable with a single entity that's legally controlled by a single person hosting so much of the "distributed" internet (Amazon, Bezos, AWS)? Are we really comfortable with a single company legally controlled by a single person controlling the communication platforms of such a large percentage of the global population (Facebook, Zuckerberg, Whatsapp/Instagram/FbMessenger)? The refusal to see any kind of downside to those questions is itself intertwined with the poor public perception, and we would do well to begin to answer those questions ourselves, even if they have hard answers, then let others answer them for us.
In the end you can complain about a bandwagon campaign all you want, and you can be right about it until the cows come home, but it won't make any difference if we can't convince the general public. And to do that I think we need to deeply re-examine some long held beliefs and givens that almost all of us hold, and we need to dramatically improve how we communicate and interact with those who rely on our work to go about their day to day lives.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] djrogers|8 years ago|reply
This time around, the author points to an incorrect profit margin (he claims a profit margin of over 250% for an iPhone, which is nearly an order of magnitude too high), and one time that a Spotify update was rejected. Not exactly compelling...
[+] [-] lnino|8 years ago|reply
To name just one of the most blatant: the author complains about wages not growing enough, but also that tech giants are "less efficient" in job creation, having more market value per employee, and requiring less employees to generate the same revenue and profit.
How the heck is a company supposed to pay more it's employees without being able to make more money per employee? And if it's making more money per employee, then obviously they will have more market value per employee. This is not a company being inefficient at "creating jobs" but actually being efficient at creating high quality jobs with wages that keep growing over time.
That's just basic math and economics, but seems to be beyond the understanding of the author.
All the part about the economic impact of the big four is quite nonsensical, and reads like the proverbial rant of light bulb makers that they can't compete with a free source of light like the sun.
As with most of the current zeitgeist the idea of the article seems to be that success is the problem. The problem with the big four is not that they exist, but why there aren't more of them? Why not the big 100 or 1000? What's hindering other companies from being as successful in generating profits and high-paying jobs? Maybe the big four are doing a lot of evil things to prevent others from joining the club. Maybe the government is also to blame. Maybe both big government and big companies are together in this (anyone knows the meaning of the word "lobbyist"?).
If you keep asking the wrong questions and ignoring basic economic reality you'll never get to know the answer.
[+] [-] pedro_hab|8 years ago|reply
Last time I check none of these had reach $ 1T value, compared to the US government that expends $ 3T a year.
No one of those same people seem to be concerned with the harms of the a government expending so much money.
[+] [-] Nomentatus|8 years ago|reply
There aren't more of them for the reasons given in the article - they've been allowed to extend their monopolies so freely that now investors won't touch possible competitors 'cause they know they're already crushed. Extending a monopoly (actually, it's market power, not monopoly that matters) is illegal. But the U.S. decided these were their thugs, so they wouldn't touch them - just let them extinguish a competitive marketplace in area after area as they metastasized. That's how the U.S. has violated the principles of free trade and abused its economic partners, for decades. Now, the domestic cost to the U.S. itself is becoming clearer.
[+] [-] maxxxxx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r00fus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpasc|8 years ago|reply
Anti-trust in the U.S. has not been super strongly enforced in recent decades (perhaps since the Ma Bell breakup and Glass Steagall before it was repealed?). But if the consumer is not being harmed, why get in the way of a company that has truly earned market dominance?
[+] [-] BinaryIdiot|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malvosenior|8 years ago|reply
Don't believe it? Remember Microsoft? They used to dominate our industry and crush innovation. Their tactics made Uber's seem soft and fuzzy. Sure the government gave them a knock but that didn't slow them down. Do you know what did? Apple and iOS. They missed the boat on mobile and now they're still valuable but not an existential threat to the industry.
It's really hard for a tech company to dominate over the decades. Apple has been near death multiple times in the past and while they have a ton of money, they aren't exactly innovating anymore. It will happen again, it's in their DNA.
Facebook is just Myspace 2.0 that was smart enough to snatch up Instagram (starting to show its age), and Whatsapp. Acquisitions != innovation.
None of these companies are threats to technological progress in the long term. Something new will show up a that disrupts their entire model. It's happened with every boom cycle in tech history.
The trick is to look for the next big thing and ride the wave and not look to the single most regressive institution in existence (the government) to come help you.
[+] [-] pmilot|8 years ago|reply
Even if Microsoft was no longer a monopoly (which, by the way, is entirely incorrect), you can't always hope for a new emerging market to break up a monopoly. The hold that Google has on digitized data is nearly unassailable at this point.
[+] [-] my_usernam3|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djsumdog|8 years ago|reply
The trouble is, how do you compete with Google, now, today. We use to have Lycos, Hotbot, Yahoo, Dogpile ... Duckduckgo is far from even approaching Google's share.
I don't think the future is the free market. The future is developers making distributed platforms that everyone can support. The next YouTube won't be centralized. The next search won't have removable results, because they'll be cached among all the computers that contribute to that search.
[+] [-] PatchMonkey|8 years ago|reply
Windows proficiency is still considered the standard for computer literacy. Your toy phone can do things, but thats nothing compared to a laptop or desktop.
And theyre making a move on the cloud too, leveraging their dominance in productivity suites. It has been more effective than many here guessed, with FLOSS like LibreOffice competing in the same space.
And they still have those same business practices.
[+] [-] jowiar|8 years ago|reply
The role of the government is to correct for market failure. A company that has the power to be a gatekeeper (for other companies) to the industry (and uses it) is too big.
[+] [-] maxxxxx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmurf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryandrake|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Slansitartop|8 years ago|reply
I'm sure article-author Scott Galloway, NYU Professor of Marketing, has the authority to change Esquire's social media strategy, on account of writing an article for it.
[+] [-] pmilot|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neon_electro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rapnie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neo4sure|8 years ago|reply
Global warming is threatening the entire world no articles about disrupting the energy industry.
Give me break.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] stevenicr|8 years ago|reply
I am looking for a group of people to start a competing search portal to take about 20% of the google search and do it better. I've been watching the big G slide into more and more censorship and it's looking like it's going the direction of "wacky safe".
If anyone can help make a more mature portal for search, please contact me. The time is right for this disruption.
The disruption of fbook is so easy that I'm not too worried about it, when it happens it will be swift.
Eventually google will just be the new yellow pages, with a bunch of unregulated tv channels (unless youtube is split off from it)
[+] [-] jmull|8 years ago|reply
If you haven't already but are feeling tempted, save yourself some time and don't bother reading this article. It's pure unthinking big-company-hate without any substance.
Well, I guess the gimmick -- that each of these large tech companies corresponds to a bodily region and appeals to us for a related reason -- is nice, but even that doesn't really make much sense.
I don't want to begrudge Scott Galloway his living... If this is what it takes to get a publication like Esquire to pay then I guess this is what it takes. I just seems like the guy should be able to make a living in some non-embarrassing way.
[+] [-] preordained|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|8 years ago|reply
There is more to take into account than "trusts" or (in most cases) monopolies. We're not dealing with trains and resource transport anymore. Barriers to entry and societally harmful consequences of scale work totally differently.
Google & FB have absolute control of online advertising (in most markets), and significant control of online media. Their decisions vis-a-vis surveilance deterrmine the level of privacy most people have. If Youtube demonetizes certain content (for immodesty, politcal views, etc.), then these are the standards of the internet. If Google and FB agree that an article is important (via whatever employees, users, algorithims or combination make the "decision"), then it is. If they agree a position is propogandist or dangerous & should be silenced, then it is. Youtube's fair use implementation is what fair use is in normative practice.
That is just a lot of power. It's unchecked, and IMO scary.
This is not about good and evil. It's not a trial of Alphabet & FB. I'm not accusing them of wanting to censor media^. Not accusing them of being worse than others. Their size itself is a problem,
^Ad-surveilance though, that is probably worth $100bn pa to them, maybe more. Here their interests are pathological, imo. Completely at odds with their users' interests
Meanwhile, These companies (again particularly Google & FB) just take up a lot of "space," and are not always gret custodians of the territory they occupy.
Lets play what-if. What if Tinder dissappeared today. I see a decent chance that something will take its place by tomorrow. I wouldn't be surprised if it's something better. Tinder isn't hard to make. What's hard to do is draw the network, which is where the value of Tinder is. Full credit to Tinder for the concept and implementation but that does not guarantee that they are the best custodians of that space.
Giants have more moat than Tinder. FB have over half the population logging in daily and subscribed to IMs/notifications. .
Google controls my phone, my browser, my TV... It controls the network of advertisers, the eyeballs, the app store, the user profiling data.... Good luck competing with youtube.
Youtube is important. It is online video, which may be the most important media channel in the world.
The WWW (culturally and technically) gives users a platform to be their own media, have their own show, expand and free and democratize media. IMO, podcasting is an interesting space. It's very decentralized and free, running on bare metal protocols, more or less. They negotiate directly with advertisers and deliver directly to users. The stuff that succeeds seems to be much better quality. Spam doesn't exist. Clickbait is minimal.
Video though.. video goes through Google & FB. If FB decide that 30s videos are the s--t, that's what people see. If youtube decides that original content is less valuable than random mashups of content (bordering on spam, imo), then they are. If youtube's comment section sucks, then online discussions of videos suck. If Google decides that the platform/content revenue split is 50-50, then it is. If they think science is boring, it is.
(Personally, I think Youtube is mismanaged, and that is a big let down. You can probably tell.)
But if Youtube disappears tomorrow... We'd still have online video. New platforms would appear. Competition would (for a time) take place. The internet would be better off.
I've got no idea how these (half baked) ideas sould be implmented into regulation, to pre-empt the comment. Obviously, it's tricky.
But, I don't think this can be improved via the normal antitrust concepts. the problem isn't price fixing or "artificial" barriers to entry. The problem is a lack creative destruction and an accumulation of power.
[+] [-] siliconviking|8 years ago|reply
Don't regulate! Come up with something better.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] devit|8 years ago|reply
Google is managing mankind's search engine with a secret algorithm and they can arbitrarily decide your site's presence or position in search queries with no recourse (granted, it's hard to define a fair way to do this, but still).
Facebook is managing mankind's person-to-person communication system and you have no recourse if you are banned, if your content is removed, or if you are trying to publicize some content and the newsfeed algorithms are unfavorable to you.
Amazon is managing mankind's delivery system and you have no recourse if they refuse to carry your products.
[Apple is less of a problem because they are merely monopolizing iOS devices, and there's an easy fix in terms of forcing them to open source iOS and license any related patents, so that iOS apps can be made to run on Android devices]
Reddit is another huge problem as they manage (and especially allow random moderators to manage) mankind's discussion forums with no regard to free speech, with arbitrary bans and no enforced transparency.
One option is to enforce competition: this could be done for Google by only allowing them to operate their search engine for up to a few consecutive hours per day, can be done for Amazon by allowing them to operate only a few days per month, for Facebook by forcing them to federate their social graph, so that people can host their accounts on any service and still have the same interaction and for Reddit to also federate their forums like Usenet is federated.
The other option is to be force them to manage all these facilities in the public interest, with explicit and published rules of operation (e.g. Google and Facebook must publish their ranking algorithms) and with all protections like free speech applying, according to well-defined rules and providing due process for any decisions that are adverse to anyone.
Obviously these should be as much as possible be general laws, like extending free speech to apply private spaces as well, forcing to put any software that can generate lock-in (e.g. because it implements a proprietary widely used API or manages a proprietary widely used file format) in the public domain and forcing to federate any service that benefits from network effects.