For the reasons explained in http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf (yes, I'm one of the co-authors), I DO NOT believe that Facebook's social media "monopoly" is nearly as durable as it appears in our daily experience.
And I think that they themselves are aware of that.
The fact that Wall St misprices them gives them the money to buy potential competitors early. Which they have to do because they know very well that the barrier to entry to overthrow them is less than it appears to be. And indeed, the success of Tik Tok stands as a demonstration that their strategy of "buy every potential competitor for more than anyone else is willing to pay" is doomed to failure in the end.
The durability or lack thereof of monopolies is incidental to their harms and methods. The fact that one tax-shirking abusive anticompetitive monopoly replaces another with depressing regularity (IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, ...) isn't a sign of progress but of pathology. And old monopolies often prove impressively durable.
What's become clear to me in the decades since we first decried Microsoft's FUD, embrace-extend-extinguish, and unholy business practice methods is that every case of a monopoly I've encountered has 1) been describable as an extensive network (physical or virtual), where 2) that network structure is fundamental to its monopoly nature, with 3) a privately held central point of control.
If you can describe a firm in terms of nodes and links, and it holds key control points, you're looking at a very likely monopoly: transport (people, cargo, pipelenes, ...), energy, water, utilities, communications, information, standards & protocols, APIs, marketing relationships and contracts, logistics, retail and wholesale networks, knowledge, education and certification, finance, insurance (access, underwriting, risk), social networks, reputation and ratings systems, just for starters.
Understanding of these points are hugely distorted in large part through the direct and self-serving efforts of the Chicago School (Aaron Director, Milton Friedman, Robert Bork, Richard Posner, ...). It's only with recent revival in antitrust concerns, rejection of the Bork-Posner antitrust doctrine (in part by Posner himself), and work of people such as Lina Khan, Matt Stoller Tim Wu, Cry Doctorow, and Shoshana Zubboff, as well as the recognition of the intrinsic network-monopoly relationship, that this is beginning to change.
> The fact that Wall St misprices them gives them the money to buy potential competitors early.
Facebook produced nearly $70 billion in operating income for fiscal years 2017-2019. They don't require their stock to be priced to a high multiple to buy competitors and they haven't been using that approach to competition since Instagram (2012) & WhatsApp (2014) - because they know they can't.
They didn't require their stock to buy either Instagram or WhatsApp. Instagram only cost a billion dollars. As it turns out, using stock was a large mistake as it pertains to the owners of the company; the cash equivalent is ~1/10th as valuable as the shares used to buy Instagram turned out to be and Facebook will just keep piling up cash they can't spend. Facebook has been wildly profitable since fiscal 2009, when their profit margin hit 29%. They've had a giant pile of cash throughout much of their history, courtesy of considerable venture capital backing and reaching profitability 4-5 years after their founding.
> And indeed, the success of Tik Tok stands as a demonstration that their strategy of "buy every potential competitor for more than anyone else is willing to pay" is doomed to failure in the end.
That approach would work perfectly fine in fact, as it always does, were Facebook still allowed to buy a company like TikTok. They're not allowed to buy large competitors any longer due to government competition concerns. If they were, Pinterest would not be an independent entity at this point.
They could acquire Pinterest and shut them down. Then buy Snapchat and shut them down. Then buy Twitter and shut them down. One after another, trivially. It would dramatically bolster their monopoly position. Regulators would never allow it and everyone - without exception - knows it.
I think it's kind of naive to think that antitrust litigation will really fundamentally alter the balance of power with these companies. Remember, that initially Microsoft lost their antitrust lawsuit and was ordered to break up. On appeal MS managed to get the order to bifurcate the company overturned and the rest is history.
MS is bigger and worth more now than it was back during the antitrust lawsuit, although it also faces a lot more competition now and has no clear monopoly outside of perhaps business productivity software.
> MS is bigger and worth more now than it was back during the antitrust lawsuit
I'm pretty sure it changed their behavior for quite some time though. And wouldn't the relevant comparison be whether it outpaced the growth of the tech sector in the last 20 years rather than whether it's bigger than ever? Like if MS is 10x bigger now and the industry is 20x bigger then that would indicate to me that maybe they didn't choke out competition using monopoly power.
don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. The anti-trust lawsuit took a lot of wind out of microsoft sails and probably played it's part in helping to break its browser monopoly.
The breakup decision always seemed insane to me. You've decided this hyper-competitive company is a problem, so now you want two of them? (Yes, I understand the intent was to defeat some perceived synergies, but I'm not sure that's how it would have played out. I was--and am--an MSFT shareholder, and the prospect of being forced, I say forced to hold stock in two company's with Microsoft's DNA ... did not dismay me.)
I hate FB as much as any other HNer but honestly how could DOJ go after them for predatory acquisitions like WhatsApp when the price they paid was (at the time) one of the largest startup acquisition prices of all time?
It's going to be a disaster of a case that's for sure. Who is the protagonist? The customer already gets Facebook for free, and can opt out by simply not using it.
Smaller ad tech companies? Literal scammers! Facebook lied about video views - everyone lies about impressions. But 0% of Google and Facebook's competitors' inventory converts, because it's shit traffic, carefully disguised and evasive of efforts to avoid it.
I don't use Facebook, I have no dog in this race.What are they even talking about though? It's a dumb as nails case.
I have the exact opposite reading. A monopoly is perfectly positioned to make outlandish offers way over value for potential future competitors to kill or absorb them and maintain dominance. Make them an offer they can't refuse.
They are accusing FB of paying big/unrealistic premium to gain a monopoly position.
"One allegation often made against Facebook is that it has strategically sought to buy small potential rivals, often at a big premium."
An exaggerated example would be google buying firefox for $100 billion. It's a ridiculous price, but it helps google's monopoly.
You can grow a monopoly by intentionally underselling your competitor out of business. Or you can grow your monopoly by overpaying for your competitor and buying him out. Rockefeller and Standard Oil used both tactics to monopolize oil.
Because telecom is dramatically more difficult to solve and the regulators don't have the competence - or the legal standing - to implement a good outcome.
With Facebook you can order them to split off Instagram and WhatsApp. That's a very feasible thing to do technically, and could be accomplished within a year. It's straight-forward compared to dealing with telecom.
So you split Comcast into a dozen baby Comcasts. You just changed absolutely nothing (and plausibly made the situation worse for a lot of people, as some of those baby Comcasts will suck even worse over time) because it's a physical location problem, it's geographically limited competition (unless you redo the entire regulatory structure re telecom). Each baby Comcast will dominate their little territory and then the re-combination will begin again, as it did with AT&T and the baby bells. Regulate that outcome away? That's the part where the competence and legal standing is a huge problem. Make it so the pipes are forced open and lots of competitors can use them? Un huh. You would have to entirely remake the telecom industry in the US, get us entirely different Congress and regulators, and overall that isn't going to happen for a few dozen reasons that would require paragraphs to explain fully. You know it's not going to happen, I know it's not going to happen, everyone knows it's not going to happen. So what would going after telecom accomplish? Not much most likely.
There is a political rat race to control tech companies that gather the most data on all Americans. Facebook has few divisions compared to Amazon which has moved into everything from groceries to medical industry to self driving cars. However the entire internet is littered with facebook javascripts that are logging data on web usage.
Go after Apple next. They're the worst of the lot.
Apple is destroying the notion of computing freedom by locking up all their computing devices. You shouldn't be able to sell a computer or phone and prohibit what runs on it. These aren't game consoles sold at a loss with tons of competition - these are the gateways to digital lives and international business.
And what the hell business do any of these three companies have doing movie/tv production? (Four companies, if you count Amazon.) They wouldn't even allow studios to own theaters, and yet we allow these four monopolies to own payments infrastructure, communication, entertainment, devices.
What the fuck? Are we just going to let them soak up the entire economy?
It's absurd and it has to stop.
Break up all four. Microsoft is doing better than ever post-DOJ, and the intervention led to Apple, Google, and Facebook ascendency. (Microsoft had to pay Apple!) The intervention created wealth and opportunity. It required Microsoft to innovate more - and look where they are now!
Make Apple pay Epic and all the companies it hurts on the App Store. Don't let them have a say what you can and can't run on your device, how you install software, or how you make repairs or upgrades. And don't let them limit which browsers you can install, either!
Tell Google they can't do Chrome and AMP anymore, and threaten to pull AdSense into a separate company.
Make Facebook open up its chat protocol and provide rich data export and interoperability tools.
Split Amazon and AWS. Make them stop bundling services and selling their own products. Fine them for fakes.
My absolute dream would be for the DOJ to make Google and Apple collaborate on a cross-platform native app API and treat it as a first class citizen. Doubly so if web/WASM can make those API calls. Visiting Netflix.com should give me first-class native streaming, casting, and screen sharing.
Technology belongs to us, not the giants.
Edit: Apple enablers downvoting. Y'all need to rethink what's going on and have a serious change of heart. I'm not a heretic calling for more freedom and you're not in a puritanical sect defending a blameless entity. This company has trillions of dollars and they don't need you to defend them. You don't need this company to protect you and everyone else - don't blindly trust them while they erode the world around us.
> My absolute dream would be for the DOJ to make Google and Apple collaborate on a cross-platform native app API and treat it as a first class citizen.
No. This is exactly what they should not be doing, because it requires detailed ongoing precision regulatory work.
The government is not a scalpel, it's a sledgehammer. It can easily say that the same company can't make both third party app stores and operating systems, or both video search/recommendations and video hosting. It's a clear enough line, it isn't mired in technical details, you swing the sledgehammer at the fault line between the two markets and break them apart. Then you go home.
Game consoles shouldn't be special. If the NES and Genesis hadn't had their locks broken then we wouldn't have been graced with some of the greatest entries in their catalogue. Consumers won because anti-consumer digital locks were broken.
“My absolute dream would be for the DOJ to make Google and Apple collaborate on a cross-platform native app API and treat it as a first class citizen. Doubly so if web/WASM can make those API calls.”
You want a government mandated software platform?
Regardless of whether any of your criticisms have merit, putting the government in charge of API design seems like a questionable suggestion to say the least.
Also, all these breakups you are suggesting are anti-consumer. Your assumption is that somehow ‘competition’ would produce better products than we currently have, but history doesn’t support that idea.
Without vertical integration you just end up with inefficient consortia attempting to solve problems by committee and political jockeying.
That’s what enabled Apple to overtake WinTel in the first place.
The way to unseat Apple isn’t to use the government to force us back in time.
It’s to recognize the needs they aren’t satisfying and actually contribute to meeting them.
It's a comically bad idea to talk against Apple around here, but the guidelines are clear: don't talk about downvotes. If you have good points corrective votes will happen.
That being said, while Apple is strongly anti-consumer (in everything except for privacy), Facebook is orders of magnitude worse in more regards than merely celebrating choice. Definitely a great second contender, but the world would be genyinely better place without Facebook.
Why litigate in the case of Apple? There is so much competition, Apple is not a monopoly in any market by any stretch of the imagination.
There is a very easy solution to the problem, don't like the computer/phone? Buy a different one!
I totally agree its really stupid to go to such great lengths to lock down devices like they do, but at the same time it really doesn't hurt anyone because anyone who doesn't like it can just buy one of the million (vastly less expensive) alternatives.
Since when do you have a right to computing freedom? Why don’t you buy from Purism instead?
Sorry, but I can’t get behind such a draconian government takeover of private corporations. No one is forcing you to buy an iPhone.
Support free products with your wallet instead of demanding that a the government coerce a private entity to make your arbitrary wishes and desires real.
My assumption is that any US lawsuits against US tech companies are just song-and-dance to maintain US technological hegemony worldwide while also looking like we're doing something.
The problem is Apple actually makes quality products. I personal don’t buy Apple products anymore for the reasons you have listed, and am transitioning from my iPhone 7 to my newly purchased pine phone. However, from both the standpoint of an engineer and a consumer I’m continually impressed by the quality of the products Apple makes. Not as impressed as I was when I got my first Mac in 2007 bu despite conducting the same shady business practices that have landed others in hot water, as long as Apple makes quality products I doubt any antitrust “changes” will be more than symbolic in-practice.
I’m all for putting pressure on them with antitrust lawsuits but ultimately consumers are who will drive meaningful change
It comes down to power. Studios don't own theatres because they aren't powerful enough to lobby for that, but if were more profitable for studios and theatres to be vertically integrated (spoiler alert: it would), then you'd bet it'd happen. Maybe Disney will take the lead on that one.
Look, I don't like it either, but common people have statistically insignificant impact on whether or not legislation is passed.
> It required Microsoft to innovate more - and look where they are now!
Arguably things went seriously downhill with Windows 8 and culminated in the horror that is W10: ads everywhere, invasive tracking that can't be made to shut up for good, extremely ugly redesign.
Amazon being able to undercut the entire retail market while peddling counterfeits is abhorrent. It isn't even financially possible to compete with them given barriers to entry considering their retail operates at a loss while AWS subsidizes them.
The nature of the apple ecosystem is a boon to consumers, not a hinderance. I don't really give a #$!@$ about your profits as an iPhone developer. I care that google isn't sniffing all of my personal data, that I don't get viruses or phished, and that my phone just works.
Compare Apple to PCs. Windows is, has been, and always will be a security sh*tshow. Linux isn't interesting enough to scammers to be a security target yet, but it sure is ugly and chaotic. Apple just works for me.
By forcing Apple to be open, you're trying to both turn it into Linux by taking away the quality and usability of the apps available, and into Windows by .. making it a security shitshow.
Nobody has ever given me a real argument as to how Apple harms consumers in the iPhone. The only argument seems to be that app developers want a free ride. They want full access to do whatever they want, consumers be damned, without paying into the infrastructure which made their market available. (techno-libertarianism strikes again?)
> Go after Apple next. They're the worst of the lot.
Really?
Facebook has contributed to ethnic cleansing in places where Facebook has such a dominant position that it is practically synonymous with the Internet. Facebook’s responses to this have been slow and lack oversight, with Facebook themselves saying they failed.
How on earth can you arrive at the conclusion that Apple are the “worst of the lot” because they won’t let you run the software you want and they are getting involved in movie/tv production? Those are quite literally first world problems compared with the harm Facebook does.
> Make Apple pay Epic and all the companies it hurts on the App Store.
Don’t make me barf. This is stupid. I hate to be so, well, blunt, but you can’t be hurt by an App Store, maybe if you don’t like it you can create your own?
Apple (and they aren’t unique in this - Wal-Mart, Amazon, Steam, Epic, Nintendo, you name it) created a place for people to sell products. Without that creation, that market doesn’t exist. I’d you want to “punish” Apple then sure they can pay the developers and then all the developers can pay back all the profits they made on top of iOS.
Also for Amazon, Walmart, CVS, Costco... Disallow white label products. They just learn about products, copy, undercut then crush them due to distribution. Its anti-competition and demotivates new advances.
Should car manufacturers be forced to use interoperable wheels, lights and other proprietary components? Maybe so.
Take a basic 36V drill, companies such as Black and Decker and Dewalt use different methods to lock the battery onto the accessory. Should the government also mandate these are interoperable?
The list goes on - construction tools, consumer electronics, appliances, etc.
To what extent should the government force industries to do things?
By the way, I personally would love if the answer to the questions above were yes, but I wonder how successful the government would be in pursing these things.
Apple is pretty ridiculous for what they've been doing. The M1 is pretty cool but jesus christ not only did it take them 2 years to fess up going "sorry we got caught that our keyboards were trash..." but they KEPT SELLING THEM! For the cost of an Apple product, that's downright unacceptable. Those should've been recalled on the spot. But oh no, Apple cant have a recall. Gimme a break. They only care about their consumers with endless pockets.
It’s certainly not going to happen, but the most directly way to eliminate Facebook as a monopoly is to repeal section 230. Facebook cannot exist without it.
The simple fact that 40 states are getting involved just says Facebook is guilty until proven innocent at this point. They should've just kept out of conservative circles and let them exist. Now they're facing not only a conservative stacked supreme court, but several conservative states that are out for nothing but blood.
Facebook played it way too liberal here and now they're gonna get screwed.
[+] [-] btilly|5 years ago|reply
And I think that they themselves are aware of that.
The fact that Wall St misprices them gives them the money to buy potential competitors early. Which they have to do because they know very well that the barrier to entry to overthrow them is less than it appears to be. And indeed, the success of Tik Tok stands as a demonstration that their strategy of "buy every potential competitor for more than anyone else is willing to pay" is doomed to failure in the end.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|5 years ago|reply
What's become clear to me in the decades since we first decried Microsoft's FUD, embrace-extend-extinguish, and unholy business practice methods is that every case of a monopoly I've encountered has 1) been describable as an extensive network (physical or virtual), where 2) that network structure is fundamental to its monopoly nature, with 3) a privately held central point of control.
If you can describe a firm in terms of nodes and links, and it holds key control points, you're looking at a very likely monopoly: transport (people, cargo, pipelenes, ...), energy, water, utilities, communications, information, standards & protocols, APIs, marketing relationships and contracts, logistics, retail and wholesale networks, knowledge, education and certification, finance, insurance (access, underwriting, risk), social networks, reputation and ratings systems, just for starters.
Understanding of these points are hugely distorted in large part through the direct and self-serving efforts of the Chicago School (Aaron Director, Milton Friedman, Robert Bork, Richard Posner, ...). It's only with recent revival in antitrust concerns, rejection of the Bork-Posner antitrust doctrine (in part by Posner himself), and work of people such as Lina Khan, Matt Stoller Tim Wu, Cry Doctorow, and Shoshana Zubboff, as well as the recognition of the intrinsic network-monopoly relationship, that this is beginning to change.
That said, the Refutation is excellent.
[+] [-] adventured|5 years ago|reply
Facebook produced nearly $70 billion in operating income for fiscal years 2017-2019. They don't require their stock to be priced to a high multiple to buy competitors and they haven't been using that approach to competition since Instagram (2012) & WhatsApp (2014) - because they know they can't.
They didn't require their stock to buy either Instagram or WhatsApp. Instagram only cost a billion dollars. As it turns out, using stock was a large mistake as it pertains to the owners of the company; the cash equivalent is ~1/10th as valuable as the shares used to buy Instagram turned out to be and Facebook will just keep piling up cash they can't spend. Facebook has been wildly profitable since fiscal 2009, when their profit margin hit 29%. They've had a giant pile of cash throughout much of their history, courtesy of considerable venture capital backing and reaching profitability 4-5 years after their founding.
> And indeed, the success of Tik Tok stands as a demonstration that their strategy of "buy every potential competitor for more than anyone else is willing to pay" is doomed to failure in the end.
That approach would work perfectly fine in fact, as it always does, were Facebook still allowed to buy a company like TikTok. They're not allowed to buy large competitors any longer due to government competition concerns. If they were, Pinterest would not be an independent entity at this point.
They could acquire Pinterest and shut them down. Then buy Snapchat and shut them down. Then buy Twitter and shut them down. One after another, trivially. It would dramatically bolster their monopoly position. Regulators would never allow it and everyone - without exception - knows it.
[+] [-] woeirua|5 years ago|reply
MS is bigger and worth more now than it was back during the antitrust lawsuit, although it also faces a lot more competition now and has no clear monopoly outside of perhaps business productivity software.
[+] [-] furyofantares|5 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure it changed their behavior for quite some time though. And wouldn't the relevant comparison be whether it outpaced the growth of the tech sector in the last 20 years rather than whether it's bigger than ever? Like if MS is 10x bigger now and the industry is 20x bigger then that would indicate to me that maybe they didn't choke out competition using monopoly power.
[+] [-] Barrin92|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zanni|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r00fus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] georgeecollins|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] an_opabinia|5 years ago|reply
Smaller ad tech companies? Literal scammers! Facebook lied about video views - everyone lies about impressions. But 0% of Google and Facebook's competitors' inventory converts, because it's shit traffic, carefully disguised and evasive of efforts to avoid it.
I don't use Facebook, I have no dog in this race.What are they even talking about though? It's a dumb as nails case.
[+] [-] hnick|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disown|5 years ago|reply
"One allegation often made against Facebook is that it has strategically sought to buy small potential rivals, often at a big premium."
An exaggerated example would be google buying firefox for $100 billion. It's a ridiculous price, but it helps google's monopoly.
You can grow a monopoly by intentionally underselling your competitor out of business. Or you can grow your monopoly by overpaying for your competitor and buying him out. Rockefeller and Standard Oil used both tactics to monopolize oil.
[+] [-] julius_set|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|5 years ago|reply
With Facebook you can order them to split off Instagram and WhatsApp. That's a very feasible thing to do technically, and could be accomplished within a year. It's straight-forward compared to dealing with telecom.
So you split Comcast into a dozen baby Comcasts. You just changed absolutely nothing (and plausibly made the situation worse for a lot of people, as some of those baby Comcasts will suck even worse over time) because it's a physical location problem, it's geographically limited competition (unless you redo the entire regulatory structure re telecom). Each baby Comcast will dominate their little territory and then the re-combination will begin again, as it did with AT&T and the baby bells. Regulate that outcome away? That's the part where the competence and legal standing is a huge problem. Make it so the pipes are forced open and lots of competitors can use them? Un huh. You would have to entirely remake the telecom industry in the US, get us entirely different Congress and regulators, and overall that isn't going to happen for a few dozen reasons that would require paragraphs to explain fully. You know it's not going to happen, I know it's not going to happen, everyone knows it's not going to happen. So what would going after telecom accomplish? Not much most likely.
[+] [-] cecja|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] one2know|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bogwog|5 years ago|reply
Which is mildly annoying, but I think it's a good indicator of just how much people hate all of the tech giants.
Something is clearly very very wrong with the tech industry.
[+] [-] ngcc_hk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaimex2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] annadane|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exabrial|5 years ago|reply
Sue them all. This is stupid.
[+] [-] echelon|5 years ago|reply
Apple is destroying the notion of computing freedom by locking up all their computing devices. You shouldn't be able to sell a computer or phone and prohibit what runs on it. These aren't game consoles sold at a loss with tons of competition - these are the gateways to digital lives and international business.
And what the hell business do any of these three companies have doing movie/tv production? (Four companies, if you count Amazon.) They wouldn't even allow studios to own theaters, and yet we allow these four monopolies to own payments infrastructure, communication, entertainment, devices.
What the fuck? Are we just going to let them soak up the entire economy?
It's absurd and it has to stop.
Break up all four. Microsoft is doing better than ever post-DOJ, and the intervention led to Apple, Google, and Facebook ascendency. (Microsoft had to pay Apple!) The intervention created wealth and opportunity. It required Microsoft to innovate more - and look where they are now!
Make Apple pay Epic and all the companies it hurts on the App Store. Don't let them have a say what you can and can't run on your device, how you install software, or how you make repairs or upgrades. And don't let them limit which browsers you can install, either!
Tell Google they can't do Chrome and AMP anymore, and threaten to pull AdSense into a separate company.
Make Facebook open up its chat protocol and provide rich data export and interoperability tools.
Split Amazon and AWS. Make them stop bundling services and selling their own products. Fine them for fakes.
My absolute dream would be for the DOJ to make Google and Apple collaborate on a cross-platform native app API and treat it as a first class citizen. Doubly so if web/WASM can make those API calls. Visiting Netflix.com should give me first-class native streaming, casting, and screen sharing.
Technology belongs to us, not the giants.
Edit: Apple enablers downvoting. Y'all need to rethink what's going on and have a serious change of heart. I'm not a heretic calling for more freedom and you're not in a puritanical sect defending a blameless entity. This company has trillions of dollars and they don't need you to defend them. You don't need this company to protect you and everyone else - don't blindly trust them while they erode the world around us.
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|5 years ago|reply
No. This is exactly what they should not be doing, because it requires detailed ongoing precision regulatory work.
The government is not a scalpel, it's a sledgehammer. It can easily say that the same company can't make both third party app stores and operating systems, or both video search/recommendations and video hosting. It's a clear enough line, it isn't mired in technical details, you swing the sledgehammer at the fault line between the two markets and break them apart. Then you go home.
[+] [-] dleslie|5 years ago|reply
Game consoles shouldn't be special. If the NES and Genesis hadn't had their locks broken then we wouldn't have been graced with some of the greatest entries in their catalogue. Consumers won because anti-consumer digital locks were broken.
[+] [-] zepto|5 years ago|reply
You want a government mandated software platform?
Regardless of whether any of your criticisms have merit, putting the government in charge of API design seems like a questionable suggestion to say the least.
Also, all these breakups you are suggesting are anti-consumer. Your assumption is that somehow ‘competition’ would produce better products than we currently have, but history doesn’t support that idea.
Without vertical integration you just end up with inefficient consortia attempting to solve problems by committee and political jockeying.
That’s what enabled Apple to overtake WinTel in the first place.
The way to unseat Apple isn’t to use the government to force us back in time.
It’s to recognize the needs they aren’t satisfying and actually contribute to meeting them.
[+] [-] reaperducer|5 years ago|reply
You're probably being downvoted because you posted an off-topic rant. The topic is Facebook. Going all, "But what about Apple!" is deflection at best.
[+] [-] zamalek|5 years ago|reply
It's a comically bad idea to talk against Apple around here, but the guidelines are clear: don't talk about downvotes. If you have good points corrective votes will happen.
That being said, while Apple is strongly anti-consumer (in everything except for privacy), Facebook is orders of magnitude worse in more regards than merely celebrating choice. Definitely a great second contender, but the world would be genyinely better place without Facebook.
[+] [-] Dig1t|5 years ago|reply
There is a very easy solution to the problem, don't like the computer/phone? Buy a different one!
I totally agree its really stupid to go to such great lengths to lock down devices like they do, but at the same time it really doesn't hurt anyone because anyone who doesn't like it can just buy one of the million (vastly less expensive) alternatives.
[+] [-] xvector|5 years ago|reply
Sorry, but I can’t get behind such a draconian government takeover of private corporations. No one is forcing you to buy an iPhone.
Support free products with your wallet instead of demanding that a the government coerce a private entity to make your arbitrary wishes and desires real.
[+] [-] Lammy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rudolph9|5 years ago|reply
I’m all for putting pressure on them with antitrust lawsuits but ultimately consumers are who will drive meaningful change
[+] [-] Reedx|5 years ago|reply
Andrew Yang had a better idea. Put a VAT on big tech and use that to fund UBI.
https://www.yang2020.com/policies/value-added-tax/
[+] [-] JMTQp8lwXL|5 years ago|reply
Look, I don't like it either, but common people have statistically insignificant impact on whether or not legislation is passed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig&t=60
[+] [-] af16090|5 years ago|reply
The DOJ recently convinced a federal judge to terminate the consent decrees that prevented studios from owning theaters: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-court-terminates-para...
[+] [-] mschuster91|5 years ago|reply
Arguably things went seriously downhill with Windows 8 and culminated in the horror that is W10: ads everywhere, invasive tracking that can't be made to shut up for good, extremely ugly redesign.
[+] [-] 1270018080|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsjq|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrismcb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|5 years ago|reply
Looks that way. No leadership to stop it.
[+] [-] tabob|5 years ago|reply
Compare Apple to PCs. Windows is, has been, and always will be a security sh*tshow. Linux isn't interesting enough to scammers to be a security target yet, but it sure is ugly and chaotic. Apple just works for me.
By forcing Apple to be open, you're trying to both turn it into Linux by taking away the quality and usability of the apps available, and into Windows by .. making it a security shitshow.
Nobody has ever given me a real argument as to how Apple harms consumers in the iPhone. The only argument seems to be that app developers want a free ride. They want full access to do whatever they want, consumers be damned, without paying into the infrastructure which made their market available. (techno-libertarianism strikes again?)
[+] [-] JimDabell|5 years ago|reply
Really?
Facebook has contributed to ethnic cleansing in places where Facebook has such a dominant position that it is practically synonymous with the Internet. Facebook’s responses to this have been slow and lack oversight, with Facebook themselves saying they failed.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook...
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934
- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/07/facebook-...
How on earth can you arrive at the conclusion that Apple are the “worst of the lot” because they won’t let you run the software you want and they are getting involved in movie/tv production? Those are quite literally first world problems compared with the harm Facebook does.
[+] [-] butterisgood|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helloycombinat|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ericmay|5 years ago|reply
Don’t make me barf. This is stupid. I hate to be so, well, blunt, but you can’t be hurt by an App Store, maybe if you don’t like it you can create your own?
Apple (and they aren’t unique in this - Wal-Mart, Amazon, Steam, Epic, Nintendo, you name it) created a place for people to sell products. Without that creation, that market doesn’t exist. I’d you want to “punish” Apple then sure they can pay the developers and then all the developers can pay back all the profits they made on top of iOS.
[+] [-] danvoell|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newfeatureok|5 years ago|reply
Should car manufacturers be forced to use interoperable wheels, lights and other proprietary components? Maybe so.
Take a basic 36V drill, companies such as Black and Decker and Dewalt use different methods to lock the battery onto the accessory. Should the government also mandate these are interoperable?
The list goes on - construction tools, consumer electronics, appliances, etc.
To what extent should the government force industries to do things?
By the way, I personally would love if the answer to the questions above were yes, but I wonder how successful the government would be in pursing these things.
[+] [-] MeinBlutIstBlau|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austincheney|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MeinBlutIstBlau|5 years ago|reply
Facebook played it way too liberal here and now they're gonna get screwed.