Google, Facebook may have to reveal deepest secrets

Do you really believe this? You really think 100k stands up to 1Billion?

That's ridiculous.

There is no way that a crack Russian/Ukranian team understand or have better info on the American public than American "pundits" and campaign professionals.

Why couldn't Bernie buy 200k of highly targeted ads and beat Hillary or why couldn't a very well connected Hillary (who has good connections to Russia as well) not buy highly targeted and effective ads?

I don't buy that narrative. There is no way a rag-tag team with $100k beats a political machine with real connections in DC, Wall Street, etc. which happened to also spend over $1billion. It's a ridiculous assertion.

Why don't we, the US, buy these highly targeted ads in a place like Venezuela and get people to vote against Maduro (or any other gov't we don't like).

It just does not work that way. Or, if it were to, the likes of FB and Google are doomed. Whoever this band of propagandists are they can undercut Madison ave and rake in the money for pennies on the dollar from corporate America.

Then why are the likes of P&G rethinking their digital ads?

You know, even if the amount were $10 million, in the face of over $1 Billion, it's still peanuts.

If it were that easy, we'd be toppling regimes all over the world for pennies on the dollar but we're not because that's dreamland stuff.

You're mistaken if you think there were not opposition ads against the opposition. Even just looking at the mainstream traditional ads by Hillary, they were very dark ads. Just the other day she was still chiding women for not voting for her, as if she was owed their vote. Who has that much entitlement?

In your example Satan is accused of owning the pope and all other miscreants.

Who is "they"? If this isn't a bipartisan issue, that's a travesty and a mockery of our democracy. Another nation interfering in our elections shouldnt be a partisan issue.

So where do you suggest we draw the line between what state-sponsored news is allowed vs forbidden to do? Should we only forbid them from buying advertising? Why not forbid their reporting of news altogether?

Also, I don't think people have similar complaints about Al Jazeera's reporting on Russian election campaigns?

Every major country does this, every election, to every other major country. It's something we live with and I don't get the overreaction.

I guess that's a step worse than CNN/MSNBC/etc., which were caught in WikiLeaks collaborating with the Democratic National Committee.

We need to more closely regulate what is 'really news' and what is not.

while we're doing things we'll never actually do, let's decide that money is not speech, ban all political contributions and publicly finance all election campaigns and fix every American problem for real.

That would solve all the current problems because the internet as we know it would collapse overnight and the world economy would be devastated.

The fraction of income that goes into research is not that large for the companies that you mention.

Lets remember that these are not traditional monopolies, in the sense of Standard Oil. They are much worse, as they are so embedded in the lives of people today. Their status as monopolies will be tolerated by society only as far as they don't exhibit anti-competitive practices.

I generally agree with you that they are doing good things but the bigger question is what harm are they doing? We need to stop having these huge mergers. Think what a different landscape we'd have if Facebook didn't own Instagram and WhatsApp. Those companies had a choice, fight FB with limited money or cash out. (I'm not judging them...) Look at Snap. They've said no and so FB threw all their money at duplicating all their features in all their own properties. This is the downside of the products that just throw off cash. All the money and time in the world they can devote to squashing all competition.

It reminds me of the same things that happened with the banks and Comcast. Most people who have Comcast got there because Comcast bought their provider and the investors wanted to cash out, not because people voted with their dollars. The banks got too big to fail, not because everyone rushed to switch all their money to bank X but because bank X bought up all the smaller players with money bet on the bubble.

I think they do need broken up but I would argue all we really need to do is "unmerge" these acquisitions and spin them back out separate. Absolute power has always corrupted absolutely. To be fair, this isn't new. Gates did a lot of the same things but now their foundation is doing wonderful things. However, it is easy to be a philanthropist with spare billions. What I would love to see from one of these founders is to attack one of the world's biggest problems personally and with the same ruthlessness they did their main companies. Musk is the only one who really seems to be "walking the walk".

So much power concentrated in a single entity cannot be good for democracy in the long run.

For example look at the web. Google has pretty much free pass to crawl and index any website, while smaller players get blacklisted and blocked immediately. Paywalled websites open their door if the link comes from Facebook. If you get black listed by gmail, your emails have no chance of reaching user’s inboxes. And the list goes on.

In the same way the ancient Athenians used to exile citizens who were getting too powerful, it’s a good idea to split up companies that become too powerful. Even if they haven’t violated any laws.

I don’t think that any research gap will left unfilled by smaller startups if they get split up.