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tmotwu
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4 years ago
I am not exactly sure what you are trying to prove here. As far as I am concerned, Google and Facebook have not been broken up into pieces of YouTube and Instagram yet. How does this in any way demonstrate what would happen if we broke up big tech? Sounds like further evidence they need to be released from their mismanagement.
aerosmile|4 years ago
> I cannot see how YouTube or Instagram could suffer or lose market share.
The references I shared make it very clear that Instagram is losing market share. Not sure why those dots were difficult to connect.
Moving on to your next point:
> Sounds like further evidence they need to be released from their mismanagement.
It's interesting you said that. Obviously a lot of people are in favor of breaking up Facebook from Instagram, but my guess was that it was always for antitrust concerns. More recently, I started to sense that an additional flavor has entered this conversation recently, something like "Facebook and Instagram would be better products if they were run by independent companies." I think what people don't realize is how much effort went into building the world's most sophisticated ad targeting platform, and how convenient it was for Instagram to benefit from Facebook's resources. Not to mention the shared spam/adult/community moderation, shared hosting, etc, etc. Breaking up those apps into separate companies would definitely increase their cost of operation and would slow down their rate of development.
tmotwu|4 years ago
I said that in the context of breaking up G/FB. Why isolate that sentence for no apparent reason? It was a very short comment.
> It's interesting you said that. Obviously a lot of people are in favor of breaking up Facebook from Instagram, but my guess was that it was always for antitrust concerns. More recently, I started to sense that an additional flavor has entered this conversation recently, something like "Facebook and Instagram would be better products if they were run by independent companies."
There is no additional flavor. Ask yourself why we bother about antitrust. It is to raise the level of competition. Do you believe innovation is best nurtured in a competitive environment? Literally, the title of the bill consists the words a "stronger online economy", for "innovation".
Pooling all your resources into ads targeting because you are comfortably sitting in a dominant position is exactly the problem. YouTube and Instagram with independent leadership would have the flexibility to focus on their market -- image/video media. That is why TikTok and Snapchat were able to catch Instagram with their pants down -- Facebook had no idea alternative forms media (and did not care) was possible and were simply focused on milking their existing platform. Better ads targeting does not bring in users, and market share is driven by users, not ads. Why does it matter if it increases their cost of operation and slows down their rate of development if the majority of their development is focused on ads targeting - an ineffective user growth strategy? The blame lies on nobody but Facebook or Google if their products have been losing marketshare in 2021.