Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

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If the companies are merely facilitators and marketplaces, they should treat everything and everyone using them exactly the same.

That's a really interesting proposition and one that I think bears looking at.

Facebook and Google are effectively trying to become privately owned utilities, aka natural monopolies, for access to the internet. Facebook with their internet.org and google with googlefiber. So there is a case to make there for those companies being looked at like utilities.

However I'm not sure how Amazon fits that narrative. Amazon Marketplace is a tiny chunk of their sales revenue, despite it becoming the largest part of their fulfillment. AWS isn't infrastructure in the same way as facebook and google are trying to do.

I think it's too far a reach politically - they can't even get ISP's classified as utilities.

I think the major problem here is that because these companies don't need to operate from a fixed location in the same way a steel mill, power plant etc... would that there isn't really that many ways that the government can muscle them. They feel the pressure and they just pick up and move (legally first) or shift workers around. So regulators don't have a framework for how to muscle these companies in the same way as old industry.

I dunno for the other cases, but Facebook could be forced to have an standard protocol, an imposition justified because data and connections (friends) belong to the user not the company.

Something like how a phone number is portable between mobile cos.

With a standard protocol/API a Facebook user could move to another social network provider without losing the data or the connections.

Who would define and evolve this standard protocol? What happens when FB wants to implement a feature that the protocol doesn't support?

We have had the same problems with HTML and browsers, and you can apply the same solutions.

I think you have the cause and effect inversed.

The standardization of HTML was a cause of the reduction of power by the monopolist, not an effect. Microsoft only started playing ball when their marketshare had been dropping for a while.

If you force Facebook into a standards group, they'll delay as much as they can (question the legitimacy of certain members, criticize the methodology, etc), and then they'll veto anything except a protocol that is both hard to implement for small players but also very limited, and then they'll have plausibly deniable "bugs" in the implementation.

The solutions for browsers didn't involve government regulation. "Applying the same solution" here means "doing nothing and hoping for things to get better".

Govmnt just imposes the existence of a common protocol for social networks. The justification is to ensure a free market and competition in the social network service.

The protocol itself can be designed as other market standard protocols are defined, no gvmt intervention required there.

It also applies to basic messaging.

Question: It's bad or good that you can send text msgs between different carriers and phone brands?

Hasn't Google Fiber stopped expanding? Many people in America are still stuck with Frontier, Century Link, etc.

And ironically, if anything Google Fiber didn't create a monopoly for Google; it pushed other ISPs to increase their quality of service for consumers. I say this as someone who recently was able to get fiber-to-the-home from CenturyLink.

They have, although municipal fiber deploys continue unabated:

https://muninetworks.org/communitymap

They move a little bit, or pretend to, when an ISP annoys them.

Does classifying them as utilities simply lock them in? There's no special recognition given to them currently, they are just big business that can get beat by other businesses. If you make them a utility, you're giving them recognition and connecting the to government in ways specific to them. Maybe they would have been beaten given a couple decades, but with the above scenario you've simply ensured they'll be around for 80 years and we have to deal with their boring and uninnovative products.

My perhaps naive belief is the only thing stopping these companies is outside ambition and will. Is this overthinking the utility thing? It seems so defeatist and reactionary. Oh no, nobody has beaten Facebook after 13 years, it's never gonna happen.

If you make them a utility, you're giving them recognition and connecting the to government in ways specific to them.

The government could arguably do two things here:

1. Tell them that they have to comply with common carrier style rules for any infrastructure that is deemed utility like

2. Nationalize the services which are utility like

Both are politically hard to do with #2 being arguably impossible in the US. Hell, even the railroads are still privately owned - despite the monopoly hell they went through with Roosevelt.

If anything would happen though it would be #1 as it's fairly straight forward like the FCC did with ISPs under Title II - now repealed. Again, politically difficult.

I am not sure why Sales Revenue would be the metric you want to look at, sure it's much smaller than 1P sales revenue but that's because you can't count the sales price of the marketplace in sales revenue. Total GMV is higher on the marketplace and the margins are incredibly higher.

3rd party sales make up more than half of amazon sales to my knowledge.

Couldn't be. AWS alone is a quarter of total revenue. I think it's just over half of all Retail sales, but not total revenues.

That seemed high to me. Looking at the financial statement for Q1 2017, AWS is 3,661 million USD in net sales out of 35,714 million in net sales overall. I don't know if Q1 is unusual but this is around 10% for AWS.

I came here to say the same thing. AWS is definitely not a quarter of their revenue.

I think AWS is the majority of their profit but not revenue, it basically allows them to subsidize the rest of their business to gain market share off the absurd AWS profit margin.

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