Trust busting can seem like it’s anti free market, but when a company has a monopoly on a network it stops functioning as a company and basically becomes a government. The problem with Facebook/Amazon/Google is that they have a monopoly on a specific information network, for Facebook the social graph, internet discoverability for Google, and online shopping for Amazon. It’s similar to if a single company owned the road systems or the internet, since the structure of these networks means that competitors can’t exist, there can only be one network for it to have value, so the first company to build it will have a monopoly and be able to indefinitely milk it for a profit.
The same thing happened with railroad barons in the 1800s and also in other areas of the economy, and the trust busting response the government took seems to have worked well to bring back a fair market. Government should keep the information networks predictable and accessible.
I know this is the inevitable and cliche pushback, but it never seems to be grappled with so it remains worth pointing out: none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies. There are lots of social networks (Twitter and TikTok are extremely successful, among others), lots of ways to search the internet, and lots of ways to shop online. The analogy with the railroads simply is not apt, their monopoly was so powerful because there was often no other way to get from point A to point B, so they had complete leverage. This is not the case for any of these companies you listed, there is a lot of competition in all these markets.
But I also think there are major issues with the current configuration of the tech industry! They just aren't because of monopolies. It is not helpful to misdiagnose a real problem. It is not helpful to have only a hammer and call every problem a nail.
Well, duh. "Free market" does not mean "unregulated market". It requires that the market be free from monopolies and that all agents have complete information. Regulation and trust-busting are, in practice, required to bring about a free market.
Co-opting the term "free market" was a fantastically successful bit of propaganda.
An associated component to trust-busting should be foreign trust blocking.
Given the way the world works, if the US breaks Facebook up, (insert here) government-supported competitor takes its place.
Part of creating a fair, diverse playing field is ensuring international competition is playing by the same rules in the internal market (because you have no jurisdiction to prosecute them as a monopoly in their home country).
Which isn't an argument for not breaking Facebook up. But is an argument that if you break Facebook up, you should probably impose substantial limitations on ByteDance and Tencent as they operate in the US.
What I want addressed is how we can bust these companies without making the experience worse for consumers or making things less efficient.
A railroad that'd require a toll every mile because you split one company into hundreds wouldn't be viable. If I had to visit multiple web pages to get the same result as a google search, that'd also be bad.
Amazon online shopping has a "monopoly" almost purely because the monopoliness makes it much easier and lower friction than trying to find an online store that is 1) somewhat trustworthy 2) consistent UI 3) ships in a reasonable time 4) isn't going to disappear (and importantly, already has my shipping and payment information). I regularly buy stuff online from elsewhere, but I use Amazon more often because it reduces the cognitive load by centralizing/standardizing everything.
Not just shopping, but also AWS. It is functionally impossible to use the internet and not patron Amazon because of the ubiquity of AWS. It's not a monopoly because there are technically competitors, but the sheer scope of AWS reach makes consumer choice a practical impossibility.
I do nearly all of my internet shopping away from Amazon, only resorting to it when there's no other choice. But nearly every website I visit is powered by AWS at some level, either directly (the site itself) or indirectly (one of the site's service providers). To my mind, this is something new(ish) that is monopoly-adjacent and needs to be taken a bit more seriously. Telling people not to use the internet, or to deeply audit every service they patron, is not a practical solution at all, even for technical users, nevermind the average non-technical user.
A social network is a natural monopoly due to the network effect. It wouldn't make any sense to split it up. Regulating it like any other natural monopoly could make sense.
Amazon is certainly not an online shopping monopoly. It's just a superior service. I can get a similar online shopping experience from Wal Mart and many others. If Amazon can offer us such good service through having its own big network of warehouses, drivers, etc. that's impossible with a bunch of smaller companies then I say let them be as big as they are so long as they don't egregiously abuse it.
> The problem with Facebook/Amazon/Google is that they have a monopoly on a specific information network, for Facebook the social graph, internet discoverability for Google, and online shopping for Amazon.
None of these things are a natural monopoly.
Facebook only stays relevant by buying its competitors. You don't even need to break them up, just disable acquisitions. Then Instagram would be separate, WhatsApp would be separate. You don't even have to break them apart, just wait for the next one and don't let them buy it.
Google is the biggest search engine but search isn't a natural monopoly. Their dominant position comes from all the vertical integration. Google owns YouTube and YouTube is featured prominently in Google Search results. To get Android/Google Play, OEMs have to use Google as their default search engine. To fix this you don't have to regulate the search results, just separate the search engine from the other companies, and stop allowing them to buy competing ad networks.
Amazon doesn't really even have a dominant market position. They're not a railroad, they're Internet Walmart. They're just the biggest player in a highly competitive market. They have no capacity to significantly raise prices or people would immediately switch to any of their hundreds of competitors. Most of the complaints are from competitors butthurt that Amazon is keeping everyone's margins slim -- but that's what they're supposed to be doing.
A railroad is a natural monopoly. You can't really break up a natural monopoly, so you have to regulate it, which is terrible.
None of this tech stuff is like that. The problems here come from consolidation through mergers and vertical integration. They're unnatural monopolies with clear lines across which they can be broken up without long-term regulation. Just stop letting them buy their competitors.
The problem I have with "The Free Market" is that it is a platonic ideal. Going a step further, the whole concept of a Free Market was developed before the advent of the Network Effect and the kind of economy we have today. As such, I think defenders of the Free Market do not have adequate tools to address the kind of "monopoly" that Facebook/Apple/Google enjoy today because of their business models. Free Market competition works great on a small to medium scale. The idea that you have some competitive advantage and can capitalize on that works wonderfully, but not for things like social media and companies with a market cap of over a trillion dollars.
We really need a funded and functioning SEC and FTC. They have failed us in the 21st century. However, breaking things up won't be a panacea. It worked in the past but even spinning out Instagram won't open up much space for an Instagram competitor given the existing network effects. To fix some of these issues, I think we need a tax on digital advertising revenue. Right now it is way too profitable to just create click-bait and rake in the money.
Building another Facebook isn’t hard, but the network effect makes it almost impossible. Then they have their acquisition team to ensure that anything that does make it through doesn’t last long. The idea that they’re out there competing on their own merits is silly.
I think that’s one of the big differences - they have a monopoly on the means of production (the userbase), which is less ephemeral than say owning all the steel plants and mines.
One of the issues that I have with your analogy is that the monopolies you mentioned (roads, internet, rail) all have substantial physical assets that are tied to their monopoly power. For example, even without factoring in the cost of land, it can cost up to $700k per mile of rail track. These kinds of upfront costs are one of the major moats they have to keeping outside competitors from emerging. I'm not sure the digital-era monopolies discussed have this same type of barrier to entry.
The internet example is a more interesting analogy to me because it seems to align more with a utility, which we're okay with having monopolies existing, albeit regulated, because of the greater efficiencies.
So are social networks, online shopping, or search public goods? If so, should they be regulated because we think there is an advantage to having a monopoly in this space? If not, what are their barriers of entry that stifle competition?
I don't necessarily don't think they shouldn't be broken up, but I'm trying to understand whether/how they fit into previous paradigms or if the monopoly paradigm is fundamentally different in this digital era.
The only way these companies can generate sufficient revenues is through advertising. It really does not matter what moonshot projects they are working on. There is not enough willingness to pay for that "work" to sustain a business.
The internet has value besides being a vector for advertising. This is more or less what the parent comment is suggesting.
Who pays the cost of supporting the internet. Internet subscribers. We finance (a) the delivery of advertising, (b) creation metadata about our usage (e.g., empty POST requests, beacons, various forms of telemtry, etc.) and (c) uploading our data to their computers.
Sigh, another day, another blame of Facebook for destroying Snap.
Fundamentally, products are always gonna get copied. Google tried to do it to Facebook, back when FB was the size that Snap was at the time, how well did that work?
Fundamentally, while competing with a megacorp sucks monkey balls, Snap shot themselves in the foot with their boneheaded product strategy.
They literally didn't invest in their Android app because they wanted to be exclusive. Given that the vast majority of countries are majority Android, this gave FB the space to clone their product and put it in front of hundreds of millions of users who'd never seen the concept before.
Ultimately, while I do agree with most of the articles points (breaking up the internet behemoths would probably be a good idea), I really dislike the Snap analogy, as they could easily have beaten FB to the punch if they'd had an effective growth strategy.
>They literally didn't invest in their Android app because they wanted to be exclusive
Mind blown, I had no idea Snapchat was iOS exclusive. I was thinking just yesterday about how Clubhouse's strategy may (who knows really) have backfired, it seems to me by betting on FOMO-manufacturing they just gave time for others (like Twitter Spaces) to catch up before they filled a niche.
As Wu and others have rightly pointed out, the straightforward Chicago School standard overlooks, among other things, the stifling effect monopolies can have on innovation. As a case in point: when AT&T was broken up in 1984, a torrent of new products came on the market, everything from the first answering machines to early ISPs.
This is a oversimplification and wrong.
AT&T was controlled by the government until 1984 and only because of this we were able to got technical innovations like UNIX, The C Programming Language and reusable open-source software. This formed not only the foundation of Linux and C but also later the Internet. And all of this happened because AT&T was actually controlled instead of split up. They were not allowed to enter new markets and therefore we benefit all. What happened next? UNIX-Wars, Lawsuits and disastrous situation which enabled especially Microsoft.
The lesson learned here is that - just mere splitting up - doesn't fix anything. The government subsequently did actually nothing against Microsoft and it's contracts with PC-Manufacturers. What I cannot say is whether the government still doesn't understand what software is and it's influence?Especially mass gravitation through user. Or if just no market regulation happens since the 1980ies.
I wonder how Personal-Computers and the handling of source-code would've been evolved if BSD and SysV were have been better friends? The appreciation of source code availability? And maybe an simple option at the store which sold that IBM-PCs with the 386 processors. If you got that "UNIX" thing on our PC with the source - you would probably wondered a lot that the spreadsheet application doesn't came with the source...especially when you pay for it.
The problem with these types of articles is that it doesn't contain a single actionable step on how one would go about breaking up these monopolies. It's a lot of "well, we did it with the electrical providers and telephone providers so we should do it with google."
Well, you can take a national utility and split it across geographic regions so local calls or electricity bills go into the pockets of the region you are in, and calls between two regions go into the pockets of both according to whatever long distance agreement is in place. That's at least workable. Or you break up an Oil Company that has 500 wells/concessions, into 5 groups of 100 wells/concessions. Or a railroad with a nationwide network, split up into 5 regional networks. That could work, too. That's what we did in the past to break up monopolies.
Now how would that work with google search? Prevent people in region A from loading a website in region B? Is that what we want? crickets
Sure there is low hanging fruit in terms of divesting -- e.g. no reason to keep a video monopoly like youtube with a search monopoly. I'm all for it. But now you just have two monopolies, and have not solved the problem of lack of competition in either video or search, which is ostensibly what you use to justfy these actions.
In fact the consumer pains with long distance in the wake of the ATT breakup is the reason why the law has changed on anti-trust. Now you must show consumer harm to pass constitutional muster and your proposal has to show consumer benefit. A proposal to break off youtube from google is going to have a hard time passing this test.
So yes, we, get it, we solved the problem of anti-trusts in the past, we don't like google, so We Must Do Something. Except those old anti-trust strategies just wont work against monopolies that have no geographic dimension. That no one is willing to touch that explains why we have a deluge of pleas, none of which contain a single workable proposal.
I wrote this [1] four years ago. It shows how to break up FAANG by making their biggest asset, their data, transparent and regulated. And you would get a check from it.
Imagine your consuming history on Amazon in a company by itself, you own dividend-paying shares, and if you don't like their policies, you can take the data elsewhere, or keep it private.
Anyone who wants to use it, including "Amazon" itself, has to pay Amazon Data for it, and they can only use it for approved purposes, all public.
The history of the Internet in FAANG becomes a regulated asset, like a power plant. The "free market" would make much better use of all this data than FAANG itself does now. They are bloated bureaucracies who don't even realize what they have.
Would FAANG scream? Sure, but they would own massive (but not controlling) shares of the FAANG Data companies, so as Larry Page says in my "interview" it works out well for them, too.
Being anti-facebook & anti-google is popular in media circles because they are direct competitors in the advertising space that are eating their lunch. The fact the author does not include amazon, apple or microsoft is telling on it's own. "Cui bono" is something you should always apply to whatever you read.
I'd really prefer lawyers and congress to focus on breaking up monopolies in the health care system, where the government requires certificate of need and through licensing allows cartels to control the supply of labor to ensure high salaries. You know, actually abusing their monopoly position.
I was just thinking last night about what I'd coin as "Apple Driven Development". If you look at the wave of tech business trends in the past 15 years they're largely driven by what Apple allowed to happen on the iPhone. It started with the launch of the iPhone, which forced a lot of businesses to move from an open web to mobile apps, then we got a wave of social apps that aimed for growth and ignored revenue because there was no easy way to charge users money, then at some point Tim Cook figured out that subscriptions are the ultimate business model and apple nudged the whole industry over to subscriptions, now apple is deciding that targeted advertising is bad and is in the process of killing the whole industry.
They get to do all of it because they managed to capture the upper class of consumers.
I dunno I find the idea of trust-busting pretty sexy. I remember learning about how we broke up a lot of the oil and rail conglomerates in the early 1900s as a high schooler and I thought it was so cool that government could step in and prevent really bad things that would otherwise never be prevented with unregulated capitalism. In today's climate for whatever reason the break-in-case-of-emergency glass around trust-busting seems to be unbreakable, which is sad I think. I don't get how we got here, but I bet it's a long paragraph with the words "lobbyist" and "corporate political donations" appearing numerous times.
For starters, it would create a more level playing field to allow alternative products by companies with different values to flourish, rather than having them acquired before having a chance to become competitive.
Look at WhatsApp, founded by an idealistic person whose product was shaped by his experience living under an oppressive government and who succeeded wildly under those values. But no one is going to turn down 14 billion dollars, so it gets absorbed and starts to slowly adopt the same scummy values of Facebook. That purchase clearly shouldn’t have been approved.
You can do that by mass censorship. We already have massive squads of minimum wage people combing through every post on the web in order to delete things, so just pull that into a regulatory agency instead of letting social networks regulate themselves. We could call it the Department of Truth. If you want to scrub the internet, it's actually pretty easy. Put literal cops on every message board, make every board record ips and block VPNs, watch every tor node, root every phone.
The only hard part is getting a majority of people to think that's a good idea, or at least to stay silent about it. If you look at history, though, it's actually not so hard. It'll probably happen eventually, although depending on your belief system, you might be upset at the administration that ends up with those abilities.
This isn't about that, it's about allowing more room for competitors in the market. If there's any relation, it would be that facebook wouldn't be able to by itself dictate acceptable speech (against its will, of course; if facebook had its way, it would only censor posts about facebook.)
What if we just want to break up Facebook for our enjoyment? It's legal to do so and we can do it. I can't remember where I heard that argument. I think it was some tech CEO (or maybe all of them).
> How does breaking up Facebook help fight misinformation, polarization, engagement baiting, objectionable content, etc?
> How does breaking up Facebook help fight misinformation, polarization, engagement baiting, objectionable content, etc?
It reduces the influence that a monolithic Facebook can bring to bear against its critics in Congress.
It also puts existential risk on the table. Fining Facebook out of existence is, presently, political suicide. Not only does it hit a massive slice of the electorate, it leaves them with no alternative.
Shutting down one of several social media platforms, on the other hand, where user data is given a chance to migrate prior to the servers being turned off (but after shareholders have been wiped out), isn't out of the question.
my guess would be that it will allows other companies that offer competing services to compete against facebook's comparable service while not having to compete against all of facebook's services. Then the market can decide which features it prefers in each service, presumably not the ones listed in the op.
Apple and Google completely control their app stores on their respective platforms.
That means that reaching mobile users means dealing with either both of those two, or (if you want to brave the PWA nightmare, especially on Apple), telco gatekeepers to send notifications to your users (note the new 10DLC requirements and massive fines/fees if you simply want to send SMS notifications to your users)
These are absolutely trusts. They are cartels that control access to their networks.
Not that G/FB controlling most of the ad space isn't concerning, but G/Apple are actually the ones that are the gatekeepers for any other apps that would present mobile ad alternatives.
You want to do something new and interesting in the ad space -- or in any mobile space? Nope. You can't, unless both Google and Apple approve your app.
Google and Apple are killing innovation through their arbitrary, capricious, and selectively enforced app store "guidelines", and their excessive tax on any purchase, regardless of the purpose.
Just get rid of arbitrary bundling - you don't get to bundle shit without an option to unbundle. Meaning you don't get to bundle my TV show with your garbage ads in the middle.
You don't get to bundle a friend list with a news feed with a messaging service, without an option for me to only consume one part of it, or a combination of my own choosing.
You don't get to bundle your political opinion in my search algorithm the same way you don't get to bundle surprise ingredients into my cookies. You get to provide the search service, you get to provide cookies, you don't get to provide magic cookies I don't understand or can make on my own with a bit of effort.
Your service is efficiency at scale, not arbitrary shit bundled with everything because of a power imbalance.
I don't buy this 'against bigness' argument at all, similar to the 'surveillance capitalism' critiques of Zuboff that are so popular. The central thesis is just plain wrong. Large tech firms aren't (most of the time) rent-seekers. They're competitive and innovative, and centralization is not prohibiting innovation, it's enabling it because in our information-based systems the limit to how large an effective institution can be has gone up. Aggregation of data improves efficiency. We have enabled a much larger degree of planning.
Arguing for trust-busting to solve our problems to me sounds like arguing for a return to artisanal-craftsmanship when faced with the negative effects of modern capitalism. The issues may be identified correctly, the solution is anachronistic and going into the wrong direction.
Instead of attempting to returning to some anarchy of an idealized free-market and opposing large corporations and government, which effectively just means you're going to be sidelined and irrelevant, the goal needs to be to figure out how these big tech mega-structures can be aligned with the interests of the public.
Google isn't a robber baron, the analogies just fail. The only thing they're robbing are other industry oligarchs while users get everything for free.
Instead of trust busting these companies, the libertarian answer to them would be to invalidate their patents.
Google partially remains a search monopoly because of its search patents - of which it has many. If the state invalidates its patents and then moves out of the way, other competitors will naturally become successful.
There is no need to break up companies. Just take away some of their state-imposed advantages like patents.
Traditional anti-trust methods would only go so far with big techs because while monopolies in the past are driven by economies of scale (and lobbying and other illegal stuffs, of course), big techs’ monopolies are mainly driven by strong positive feedback loops (search results quality for Google and network effect for Facebook). If Google and Facebook were to play it 100% fair, I doubt they would be smaller than 75% of their current size.
I don't see how trust busting actually solves the problems people care about.
2+ competing Facebook's have a lot more deniability, they have less budget to pay for things like moderating or anti-fake-news and they have all the more incentive to engage in exactly the sort of clickbait we want to escape.
I am concerned that "we have to do something and this is something"...
It happened to AT&T during the 1980s. Got split up into Baby Bells. My father worked for AT&T and was forced into early retirement after teaching new employees how to do his job as an installer.
Then the DOJ set sights on Microsoft, but they avoided it.
I wonder what Teddy Roosevelt would think about Google, Twitter, Amazon, Google having so much money and power?
That’s your clue right there. “Break up google” is an aesthetic argument with no sound legal or ethical basis, promoted by people who aesthetically prefer Apple and therefore give that company a free pass.
[+] [-] camjohnson26|4 years ago|reply
The same thing happened with railroad barons in the 1800s and also in other areas of the economy, and the trust busting response the government took seems to have worked well to bring back a fair market. Government should keep the information networks predictable and accessible.
This is a core theme in George Gilder’s controversial but imho extremely insightful book Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World: https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Power-Information-Capitalis...
[+] [-] sanderjd|4 years ago|reply
But I also think there are major issues with the current configuration of the tech industry! They just aren't because of monopolies. It is not helpful to misdiagnose a real problem. It is not helpful to have only a hammer and call every problem a nail.
[+] [-] adfrhgeaq5hy|4 years ago|reply
Co-opting the term "free market" was a fantastically successful bit of propaganda.
[+] [-] ethbr0|4 years ago|reply
Given the way the world works, if the US breaks Facebook up, (insert here) government-supported competitor takes its place.
Part of creating a fair, diverse playing field is ensuring international competition is playing by the same rules in the internal market (because you have no jurisdiction to prosecute them as a monopoly in their home country).
Which isn't an argument for not breaking Facebook up. But is an argument that if you break Facebook up, you should probably impose substantial limitations on ByteDance and Tencent as they operate in the US.
[+] [-] Robotbeat|4 years ago|reply
A railroad that'd require a toll every mile because you split one company into hundreds wouldn't be viable. If I had to visit multiple web pages to get the same result as a google search, that'd also be bad.
Amazon online shopping has a "monopoly" almost purely because the monopoliness makes it much easier and lower friction than trying to find an online store that is 1) somewhat trustworthy 2) consistent UI 3) ships in a reasonable time 4) isn't going to disappear (and importantly, already has my shipping and payment information). I regularly buy stuff online from elsewhere, but I use Amazon more often because it reduces the cognitive load by centralizing/standardizing everything.
[+] [-] sli|4 years ago|reply
Not just shopping, but also AWS. It is functionally impossible to use the internet and not patron Amazon because of the ubiquity of AWS. It's not a monopoly because there are technically competitors, but the sheer scope of AWS reach makes consumer choice a practical impossibility.
I do nearly all of my internet shopping away from Amazon, only resorting to it when there's no other choice. But nearly every website I visit is powered by AWS at some level, either directly (the site itself) or indirectly (one of the site's service providers). To my mind, this is something new(ish) that is monopoly-adjacent and needs to be taken a bit more seriously. Telling people not to use the internet, or to deeply audit every service they patron, is not a practical solution at all, even for technical users, nevermind the average non-technical user.
[+] [-] jimmaswell|4 years ago|reply
Amazon is certainly not an online shopping monopoly. It's just a superior service. I can get a similar online shopping experience from Wal Mart and many others. If Amazon can offer us such good service through having its own big network of warehouses, drivers, etc. that's impossible with a bunch of smaller companies then I say let them be as big as they are so long as they don't egregiously abuse it.
[+] [-] deltree7|4 years ago|reply
But hey, since we are in pitch-fork mode, we can simply make up stuff to our fellow-brainwashed posters. How is this different from Q?
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|4 years ago|reply
None of these things are a natural monopoly.
Facebook only stays relevant by buying its competitors. You don't even need to break them up, just disable acquisitions. Then Instagram would be separate, WhatsApp would be separate. You don't even have to break them apart, just wait for the next one and don't let them buy it.
Google is the biggest search engine but search isn't a natural monopoly. Their dominant position comes from all the vertical integration. Google owns YouTube and YouTube is featured prominently in Google Search results. To get Android/Google Play, OEMs have to use Google as their default search engine. To fix this you don't have to regulate the search results, just separate the search engine from the other companies, and stop allowing them to buy competing ad networks.
Amazon doesn't really even have a dominant market position. They're not a railroad, they're Internet Walmart. They're just the biggest player in a highly competitive market. They have no capacity to significantly raise prices or people would immediately switch to any of their hundreds of competitors. Most of the complaints are from competitors butthurt that Amazon is keeping everyone's margins slim -- but that's what they're supposed to be doing.
A railroad is a natural monopoly. You can't really break up a natural monopoly, so you have to regulate it, which is terrible.
None of this tech stuff is like that. The problems here come from consolidation through mergers and vertical integration. They're unnatural monopolies with clear lines across which they can be broken up without long-term regulation. Just stop letting them buy their competitors.
[+] [-] jeremydeanlakey|4 years ago|reply
A monopoly functions like a government.
Or inverted: a government functions like a monopoly.
I find both angles interesting.
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rndmind|4 years ago|reply
Free markets only exist because of regulation.
It's regulation that allows actors to participate in good faith, and not get smoked by the huge whales and owners of exchanges, etc.
[+] [-] snarf21|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taurath|4 years ago|reply
I think that’s one of the big differences - they have a monopoly on the means of production (the userbase), which is less ephemeral than say owning all the steel plants and mines.
[+] [-] bumby|4 years ago|reply
The internet example is a more interesting analogy to me because it seems to align more with a utility, which we're okay with having monopolies existing, albeit regulated, because of the greater efficiencies.
So are social networks, online shopping, or search public goods? If so, should they be regulated because we think there is an advantage to having a monopoly in this space? If not, what are their barriers of entry that stifle competition?
I don't necessarily don't think they shouldn't be broken up, but I'm trying to understand whether/how they fit into previous paradigms or if the monopoly paradigm is fundamentally different in this digital era.
[+] [-] dontblink|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|4 years ago|reply
The internet has value besides being a vector for advertising. This is more or less what the parent comment is suggesting.
Who pays the cost of supporting the internet. Internet subscribers. We finance (a) the delivery of advertising, (b) creation metadata about our usage (e.g., empty POST requests, beacons, various forms of telemtry, etc.) and (c) uploading our data to their computers.
[+] [-] disgruntledphd2|4 years ago|reply
Fundamentally, products are always gonna get copied. Google tried to do it to Facebook, back when FB was the size that Snap was at the time, how well did that work?
Fundamentally, while competing with a megacorp sucks monkey balls, Snap shot themselves in the foot with their boneheaded product strategy.
They literally didn't invest in their Android app because they wanted to be exclusive. Given that the vast majority of countries are majority Android, this gave FB the space to clone their product and put it in front of hundreds of millions of users who'd never seen the concept before.
Ultimately, while I do agree with most of the articles points (breaking up the internet behemoths would probably be a good idea), I really dislike the Snap analogy, as they could easily have beaten FB to the punch if they'd had an effective growth strategy.
[+] [-] BbzzbB|4 years ago|reply
Mind blown, I had no idea Snapchat was iOS exclusive. I was thinking just yesterday about how Clubhouse's strategy may (who knows really) have backfired, it seems to me by betting on FOMO-manufacturing they just gave time for others (like Twitter Spaces) to catch up before they filled a niche.
[+] [-] ho_schi|4 years ago|reply
This is a oversimplification and wrong. AT&T was controlled by the government until 1984 and only because of this we were able to got technical innovations like UNIX, The C Programming Language and reusable open-source software. This formed not only the foundation of Linux and C but also later the Internet. And all of this happened because AT&T was actually controlled instead of split up. They were not allowed to enter new markets and therefore we benefit all. What happened next? UNIX-Wars, Lawsuits and disastrous situation which enabled especially Microsoft.
The lesson learned here is that - just mere splitting up - doesn't fix anything. The government subsequently did actually nothing against Microsoft and it's contracts with PC-Manufacturers. What I cannot say is whether the government still doesn't understand what software is and it's influence?Especially mass gravitation through user. Or if just no market regulation happens since the 1980ies.
I wonder how Personal-Computers and the handling of source-code would've been evolved if BSD and SysV were have been better friends? The appreciation of source code availability? And maybe an simple option at the store which sold that IBM-PCs with the 386 processors. If you got that "UNIX" thing on our PC with the source - you would probably wondered a lot that the spreadsheet application doesn't came with the source...especially when you pay for it.
[+] [-] rsj_hn|4 years ago|reply
Well, you can take a national utility and split it across geographic regions so local calls or electricity bills go into the pockets of the region you are in, and calls between two regions go into the pockets of both according to whatever long distance agreement is in place. That's at least workable. Or you break up an Oil Company that has 500 wells/concessions, into 5 groups of 100 wells/concessions. Or a railroad with a nationwide network, split up into 5 regional networks. That could work, too. That's what we did in the past to break up monopolies.
Now how would that work with google search? Prevent people in region A from loading a website in region B? Is that what we want? crickets
Sure there is low hanging fruit in terms of divesting -- e.g. no reason to keep a video monopoly like youtube with a search monopoly. I'm all for it. But now you just have two monopolies, and have not solved the problem of lack of competition in either video or search, which is ostensibly what you use to justfy these actions.
In fact the consumer pains with long distance in the wake of the ATT breakup is the reason why the law has changed on anti-trust. Now you must show consumer harm to pass constitutional muster and your proposal has to show consumer benefit. A proposal to break off youtube from google is going to have a hard time passing this test.
So yes, we, get it, we solved the problem of anti-trusts in the past, we don't like google, so We Must Do Something. Except those old anti-trust strategies just wont work against monopolies that have no geographic dimension. That no one is willing to touch that explains why we have a deluge of pleas, none of which contain a single workable proposal.
[+] [-] gajeam|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlbertCory|4 years ago|reply
Imagine your consuming history on Amazon in a company by itself, you own dividend-paying shares, and if you don't like their policies, you can take the data elsewhere, or keep it private.
Anyone who wants to use it, including "Amazon" itself, has to pay Amazon Data for it, and they can only use it for approved purposes, all public.
The history of the Internet in FAANG becomes a regulated asset, like a power plant. The "free market" would make much better use of all this data than FAANG itself does now. They are bloated bureaucracies who don't even realize what they have.
Would FAANG scream? Sure, but they would own massive (but not controlling) shares of the FAANG Data companies, so as Larry Page says in my "interview" it works out well for them, too.
[1] https://issuu.com/stanfordchaparral/docs/parody_119_3-4/17
[+] [-] novok|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dantheman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m_ke|4 years ago|reply
They get to do all of it because they managed to capture the upper class of consumers.
[+] [-] sam0x17|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tqi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p49k|4 years ago|reply
Look at WhatsApp, founded by an idealistic person whose product was shaped by his experience living under an oppressive government and who succeeded wildly under those values. But no one is going to turn down 14 billion dollars, so it gets absorbed and starts to slowly adopt the same scummy values of Facebook. That purchase clearly shouldn’t have been approved.
[+] [-] pessimizer|4 years ago|reply
The only hard part is getting a majority of people to think that's a good idea, or at least to stay silent about it. If you look at history, though, it's actually not so hard. It'll probably happen eventually, although depending on your belief system, you might be upset at the administration that ends up with those abilities.
This isn't about that, it's about allowing more room for competitors in the market. If there's any relation, it would be that facebook wouldn't be able to by itself dictate acceptable speech (against its will, of course; if facebook had its way, it would only censor posts about facebook.)
[+] [-] bperson|4 years ago|reply
> How does breaking up Facebook help fight misinformation, polarization, engagement baiting, objectionable content, etc?
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|4 years ago|reply
It reduces the influence that a monolithic Facebook can bring to bear against its critics in Congress.
It also puts existential risk on the table. Fining Facebook out of existence is, presently, political suicide. Not only does it hit a massive slice of the electorate, it leaves them with no alternative.
Shutting down one of several social media platforms, on the other hand, where user data is given a chance to migrate prior to the servers being turned off (but after shareholders have been wiped out), isn't out of the question.
[+] [-] spywaregorilla|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leecarraher|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keewee7|4 years ago|reply
Generation Z is almost entirely on TikTok so Facebook/Instagram doesn't have a monopoly on them.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] truffdog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analyte123|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] throwawayapples|4 years ago|reply
Apple and Google completely control their app stores on their respective platforms.
That means that reaching mobile users means dealing with either both of those two, or (if you want to brave the PWA nightmare, especially on Apple), telco gatekeepers to send notifications to your users (note the new 10DLC requirements and massive fines/fees if you simply want to send SMS notifications to your users)
These are absolutely trusts. They are cartels that control access to their networks.
Not that G/FB controlling most of the ad space isn't concerning, but G/Apple are actually the ones that are the gatekeepers for any other apps that would present mobile ad alternatives.
You want to do something new and interesting in the ad space -- or in any mobile space? Nope. You can't, unless both Google and Apple approve your app.
Google and Apple are killing innovation through their arbitrary, capricious, and selectively enforced app store "guidelines", and their excessive tax on any purchase, regardless of the purpose.
[+] [-] alexashka|4 years ago|reply
You don't get to bundle a friend list with a news feed with a messaging service, without an option for me to only consume one part of it, or a combination of my own choosing.
You don't get to bundle your political opinion in my search algorithm the same way you don't get to bundle surprise ingredients into my cookies. You get to provide the search service, you get to provide cookies, you don't get to provide magic cookies I don't understand or can make on my own with a bit of effort.
Your service is efficiency at scale, not arbitrary shit bundled with everything because of a power imbalance.
[+] [-] Barrin92|4 years ago|reply
Arguing for trust-busting to solve our problems to me sounds like arguing for a return to artisanal-craftsmanship when faced with the negative effects of modern capitalism. The issues may be identified correctly, the solution is anachronistic and going into the wrong direction.
Instead of attempting to returning to some anarchy of an idealized free-market and opposing large corporations and government, which effectively just means you're going to be sidelined and irrelevant, the goal needs to be to figure out how these big tech mega-structures can be aligned with the interests of the public.
Google isn't a robber baron, the analogies just fail. The only thing they're robbing are other industry oligarchs while users get everything for free.
[+] [-] smooth_remmy|4 years ago|reply
Google partially remains a search monopoly because of its search patents - of which it has many. If the state invalidates its patents and then moves out of the way, other competitors will naturally become successful.
There is no need to break up companies. Just take away some of their state-imposed advantages like patents.
[+] [-] consumer451|4 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/bH9TqJtMmT8
Or audio with full transcript:
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/10/21/69-c...
[+] [-] wishawa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LatteLazy|4 years ago|reply
2+ competing Facebook's have a lot more deniability, they have less budget to pay for things like moderating or anti-fake-news and they have all the more incentive to engage in exactly the sort of clickbait we want to escape.
I am concerned that "we have to do something and this is something"...
[+] [-] orionblastar|4 years ago|reply
Then the DOJ set sights on Microsoft, but they avoided it.
I wonder what Teddy Roosevelt would think about Google, Twitter, Amazon, Google having so much money and power?
[+] [-] smoldesu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dontblink|4 years ago|reply