Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

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> What would a break-up of Facebook look like?

1) Publish open APIs that enable federation between Facebook-like services 2) Split Facebook.com into three companies - Facebook the infrastructure company, Facebook the we-sell-advertisements-to-our-users-plus-sell-unprocessed-user-data company, and Facebook the we-process-user-data-to-sell-insights-useful-for-advertising company. Establish legal walls between these companies to ensure that they only communicate with each other through their APIs. 3) Enforce federation by splitting the middle "we actually host users and their walls and their data" company along state lines and international borders, so that they are more beholden to local authorities and jurisdictions.

> Enforce federation by splitting the middle "we actually host users and their walls and their data" company along state lines and international borders, so that they are more beholden to local authorities and jurisdictions.

this would push up the costs massively. Every single state int he US requiring its own data centre. And what do you do if I have a friend in another state and share a post with them? who has the legal power to block that post?

I didn't call for the infrastructure company to be split up along state lines, just the company doing the equivalent of being the Mastodon admins for a given state's instance. So, at least in the beginning, no new data centers need to be constructed. Because the API is publicly published, new companies may spring up to sell their own implementations of the FacebookInfrastructure API, and existing infrastructure businesses (AWS, GCE, OpenShift, etc.) may decide to write their own implementations as well, which provides more competition.

Both states have the power the block - the state hosting the post may block the post from being posted on it's instance, and the state accessing the post may block the post from being seen. Again, because the API is publicly available, oppressive outcomes will probably result in competing solutions implementing the federated API and adopting more liberal administration.

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