I'm unfamiliar with the decision, but why split up a company like Microsoft in 1999, but leave Facebook and Google alone?
Microsoft was seen to be exploiting it's consumer OS market share to gain a monopoly in the browser market and the productivity software market, AIUI.
They used their monopoly position to force vendors to prevent Netscape from being bundled. Thats where they went too far.
Disclosure: IANAL
What about the breakup of Ma Bell?
"AT&T was, at the time, the sole provider of telephone service throughout most of the United States. Furthermore, most telephonic equipment in the United States was produced by its subsidiary, Western Electric. This vertical integration led AT&T to have almost total control over communication technology in the country, which led to the antitrust case, United States v. AT&T. The plaintiff in the court complaint asked the court to order AT&T to divest ownership of Western Electric"
i.e. AT&T used its network monopoly to maintain control over hardware manufacture.
But huge corporations like Google, Facebook and Amazon are using their scale and their positions to take over markets. They can easily take control of any market they want, for them it's just a matter of doing so in a way that doesn't upset regulators. Regulators are already the bottleneck for them.
It is against the law to acquire, or to perpetuate, a monopoly by any combination or conspiracy in restraint of trade.
Although you're quite right that the move into the browser market was a big part of the case against Microsoft, there were other pieces to that case. There was a whole bunch of work around APIs/ABIs and in particular, denying other parties access to secret or privileged APIs in order to cripple potential challengers to the existing OS market (e.g. Java/Sun).
(Notwithstanding that the Microsoft strategic work around the browser stuff was a very correct reading that the browser was destined to become the de facto OS.)
Yes, it's complicated and there's a whole century+ of interesting jurisprudence. But it's not sufficient to just declare it's OK to have a monopoly -- you can be at risk of antitrust suits even just 1. having a de facto monopoly and 2. doing the "normal" smart business things to hang onto it.
For further reading, start with https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...
Doesn't sound like you are far right at all then. I'm wondering if we're actually a good judge of our own political leaning. I think that I'm libertarian (little 'l'), but Facebook ad policy thinks I'm far left. Maybe Facebook knows me better than I do.
The test at https://www.politicalcompass.org/ works reasonably well.
> the authors demonstrate what I believe to be a staunch leftist
Sounds like somebody is biased here.
> "just because of how they worded this I have to say X because they are making an absolutionist statement on something I'm not absolutionist about".
That's how and why the test works. It need to extract the user's leaning by choosing between extremes.
Thought you were going to say "regulate privacy protections." Instead you went for breaking up monopolies. Impressive leap
Each of these services in isolation can know a great deal about you but being able to correlate the data makes it so much worse.
That's why I try to avoid putting all of my eggs in the same basket, I have an android phone but I use duckduckgo for search, my own server for email and firefox for browsing the web. If Mozilla, my server host or ddg decides to betray me (or gets hacked) at least they only have access to a slice of my life.
This is what I had been trying up until six or seven years ago. At that point it just got too complex to build and maintain.
With ISPs selling our location and traffic data, I think there's no engineering your way around the problem now. Perhaps the best we can do is damage mitigation.
I don't have any problem getting my emails accepted by gmail and friends.
The trick is to use an IP range that's not "fishy" (that basically precludes hosting email on your home connection, everybody expects spam from those and they're blacklisted everywhere). Then use DKIM, SMTPS, DMARC, SPF and be very careful not to allow any kind of open relay for spammers and you should be mostly fine, at least in my experience.
There are many websites online that offer to test your email setup for obvious flaws (open relay, missing headers etc...), for instance https://www.mail-tester.com/ and https://mxtoolbox.com/diagnostic.aspx . You should also check if some blacklists have your IP or domain blacklisted for some reason, and then request a delisting (after making sure that you're actually not sending spam because of a bad config): https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
It's definitely not plug-and-play but it's pretty interesting if you don't mind system admin. You also have a lot of flexibility if you want to filter and automate your emails in any way. I was also pleasantly surprised by the efficiency of spamassassin, properly trained there are very few false negatives and almost no false positives.
And prohibit ad-based monetization on services with >100M users.
On the other hand, prohibiting ad-based monetization schemes lowers the incentive to excessively track users.
Of course, you could say that everything is proportional to the number of users, but I suspect that's not how it works.
[1] https://adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/eus-general-dat...
And once you get big, you can't get any more revenue.
And I want to be king.
This is the right answer. Collecting, retaining, using, and selling all this crap should simply be illegal. For Google, for Amazon, for Target, for Visa. Any of 'em.
The more pragmatic libertarians ought even be on board with this, since even if they don't care about massive corporations having all this stuff, allowing its collection gives de facto access to it by the government, and you can't effectively opt out even if you take extreme measures like not communicating with anyone except over encrypted comms and not having any kind of cell phone—you are still in pictures others post to social media, for example, or mentioned in others' unencrypted messaging/email conversations, et c. Your only hope is to become a hermit, basically, which is unreasonable.
As for why monopolies aren't getting broken up, I'd say a combination of increased corporate control of government, and global trade necessitating ever larger companies to compete, because tariffs are 'evil'.