Can Facebook Be Cut Down to Size?
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I'd rather see antitrust brought against a company using other kinds of anti competitive tactics. Why deprecate OpenGL and not support Vulkan, Apple? Even with DirectX, Microsoft always maintained updated OpenGL on their platform...
And extracting 30% on every transaction, including your competitors? Imagine if Microsoft tried taking a 30% cut of every transaction that passed through Internet Explorer, or Windows, in the 1990s
Apple's market cap is bigger than Facebook's. Almost twice as big.
Microsoft didn't take 30% of Windows based transactions. Can you imagine what would've happened if they had tried?
Vulkan wasn’t around when Metal started. Is it really their responsibility to kill their pre-existing API because an open one finally showed up?
Well... Yes. If they want to do best by their users.
Microsoft had (has?) a monopoly on the desktop OS (the only OS that mattered back then), before it diversified.
Google had (has?) a monopoly on search before it diversified.
Amazon has a monopoly on e-commerce, and is just now starting to really diversify.
Apple is the only exception-- they aren't really a "software" company though.
Claiming that Facebook should be broken up but not other big-tech companies isn't taking this into account.
Search is not Google's product.
It's hardly Big Company's fault that one non-employee X of Big Company forces another non-employee Y of Big Company to use something. It's X who is instigating it.
The competitors to Google, outside of a few markets like Russia and China, are trivial at best.
Google's search competitors are so weak, all they've collectively done is lose market share for 20 years. The social competitors to Facebook - Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, etc. - are no more threatening to FB's monopoly than DuckDuckGo and Bing are to Google's search monopoly.
When companies like Google and Facebook have monopolies, what they do in response is lie: they claim competition is everywhere. Microsoft used that lying tactic as well. They pretend they're not really in the search space specifically, they're an ad company in general, and they're only a small N% of the whole global ad market. So Google likes to lie and pretend they compete with every input box on the Web, and every ad served anywhere on earth; naturally their share of all text input box usage is merely 1%.
Tough thing is it grew to a position of dominance, on the user side, organically. (On the ad side, the story is more complicated.) Facebook grew on both sides by gobbling up potential competition, e.g. Instagram, WhatsApp, et cetera.
A dominant, extreme majority market position by itself isn't valid justification to break a company up or apply anti-trust (in the US). Monopolies are of course not illegal in the US. Google's search product remains superior and it's unlikely to be directly, seriously challenged by a threatening competitor. It's the change in integrity that might take them down. Call it greed. The greed eats the ecosystem, pushes for a greater share of the pot, then the ecosystem cries foul to regulators, identical to Microsoft's mistakes derived from greed. If a monopoly platform can't control itself properly - in terms of human nature, it's probably extremely difficult to restrain that level of economic power while existing in a low feedback, low consequence bubble - then the authorities will probably step in and do it. When it comes to monopolies, you can eat this, maybe you can eat this and that, you can't eat this and that and that and that and that. It's pretty much that simple, you control yourself or eventually the guys with the guns will do it for you (if only out of concerns for preserving their own power).
Currently I use DuckDuckGo for probably 85% of searches. There are specific search cases that don’t work well, and specific types of automatic categorization and presentation (e.g. sports scores, rich location data) that Google is well ahead on.
But in many mundane searches, the result quality is indistinguishable and the lack of personalized tracking would break any ties strongly in DuckDuckGo’s favor, so strongly that it’s obviously worth it to split searches between two different engines on a case by case basis.
And in fact, I like some things about DuckDuckGo better, particularly I like the visual experience of its Open Street Maps results better. It’s not as information rich as a Google Maps result, but Google Maps is visually too cluttered and often suffers performance issues that a lower-tech maps service doesn’t. (DuckDuckGo also lets you select from a few choices for the maps backend, including Google Maps).
Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure Google will remain far ahead as the search product leader.
I only mean that in terms of the implementation and actual user experience, DuckDuckGo doesn’t have far to go before it would be entirely a substitute product that completely replaces an average search experience on Google.
(I’m speaking as someone who had worked on all types of personalization features for an Alexa top 400 site’s product search engine — so I have a lot of work experience informing my opinion that the actual distance, in terms of the investment to reproduce feature parity, between DuckDuckGo and Google is not that high.)
Google’s original efforts to create internet search were amazing. But now the underlying search tech is totally a commodity, including most of the fancier machine learning and information retrieval features. It’s why they have to integrate advertising so tightly to it. Search features alone don’t differentiate it as a product anymore.
I do hope a service like DuckDuckGo invests in that last 10% of the squirrly little extra features it needs to provide to seriously compete for overall market share.
That way, I would actually use DDG as my main search engine because it would be easy to resort to Google in specific cases.
Then a user can go to my site at www.mycashcow.com or something and type in a query, which behind the scenes farms out queries to other search engines, gets characteristics about their results and predicts which of the search engines you would most prefer for this particular query, and then navigates you to that search engine's results page.
This way you always use one portal to search, and to the extent that you approve of its underlying prediction model, it automatically routes you to your preferred search engine for a given task, without needing to open a different tab or even click a button.
Expedia-like sites have been able to do this because by acting as aggregators, they solved a general search traffic problem for a fractured set of service providers (hotels, airlines, etc), which in some cases have to make some of the data publicly available. So the providers could not easily avoid a race-to-the-bottom commodity effect or avoid paying the aggregator sites for preferred placement. Seamless is doing this now with local food delivery.
We would get destroyed by Google if we tried this though, because then it would mean Google traffic would depend on Google actually functioning as a quality search engine, rather than happening to be a monopoly search engine (good quality, sure, but still monopoly) and reaping benefits in the form of advertising integration. Advertising would only pay for Google ads if the traffic driven to Google from www.mycashcow.com was in line with what they wanted, which would incentivize Google to either pay me to rank them higher, or do things like ceasing to track users because that would make them competitive with what users like about DuckDuckGo.
Since Google could sue me so hard regarding whether I am allowed to farm out a "pre-query" to their search engine, analyze "their" search results data, and recommend if a user would prefer it to the other options, I don't think this business could get off the ground unless it was created with a pre-arranged collusion with Google from the start.
Of course, if somebody is making money off of it (mycashcow.com in your example), then it might be a different story.
1. tap DDG search bar
2. tap space
3. tap shift key
4. tap "!"
5. tap shift key
6. tap "g"
7. tap enter key
Look at browsers and Google has most of the market even though you have to download to get when the PC comes with MS browser. Why?
Google came late to search as well as browsers and simply won because of a much better product that continue to improve far faster than competitors. Why on Earth would we penalize this?
It doesn't make any sense to say a company that has achieved monopoly status can abuse its power as long as they acquired their monopoly legitimately.
This is dangerously incorrect. A market economy requires competition to function correctly. Any monopoly — but especially one in a major market — is a hazard to the health of the broader economy and the society that depends upon it.
See: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/amazons-antitrust-par...
> The long-term interests of consumers include product quality, variety, and innovation—factors best promoted through both a robust competitive process and open markets. By contrast, allowing a highly concentrated market structure to persist endangers these long-term interests, since firms in uncompetitive markets need not compete to improve old products or tinker to create news ones.
A platform owner is free to do whatever it feels like on their platform, provided it respects the law.
You are quite outdated about the state of OpenGL in Windows.
The only thing Microsoft did was to let ICD drivers be around for desktop applications. OpenGL is not supported on UWP or Win32 store apps, nor the Windows 10 UI compositor.
Finally, contrary to OpenGL urban myths,game consoles always favored their own 3D APIs, with the exception of OpenGL ES 1.0's failure on the PS3.
> A platform owner is free to do whatever it feels like on their platform, provided it respects the law.
The law that would come to mind here is the Sherman Antitrust Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Thing is, Apple platforms aren't a monopoly at the eye of the law.
You are free to just use something else with bigger market share.
"The plaintiffs alleged that Apple abused monopoly power on A10, A10x, and A11 based smartphones and tablet computers in its handling of operating system and web browser sales"
Would that make it a monopoly?
IIRC Apple didn't sell Intel based machines when Microsoft lost this case so IIRC there was only the tiny Linux market (at the time) relative to MS. No one else sells A10, A10x, and A11 based devices so Apple does have a monopoly there by that definition.
I'm frustrated that I can't replace Apple Maps with Google Maps so that it's the integrated "map" function in iOS. I can't use real Chrome, which has a proven record of being faster and more secure than Safari, on my iPhone, even if it happened to use more battery. Frustrated can't make gmail my default mail app so clicking a mailto link goes to Apple's Mail app. I'm frustrated that it's extremely hard to run GPLed software on iOS (requires $99 a year and self-signing or free and resigning every week). No Kodi. No EMUs.
I would love to see Apple change their polices there.
Apple does not have a monopoly regardless how many times you type the word, and come up with your own definitions.
Got a source on that one? I did plenty of work on the PS3 and never heard anyone complaining about that(the SPUs on the other hand, not many people were ready for massive vectorization).
Also X360 was DirectX based, I knew plenty of PC engines that ported straight over(although with a ton of pain when they realized they couldn't call malloc all over the place).
As for a source, here is one from Sandstorm developers.
https://sandstormgames.ca/2011/07/22/debug-playstation3/
<quote>
At one point, Sony was asking developers whether they would be interested in having PSGL conform to the OpenGL ES 2.0 specs (link here). This has unfortunately never happened however, as developers seem to have mostly preferred to go with libGCM as their main graphics API of choice on PS3. This has meant that the development environment has started becoming more libGCM-centric over the years with PSGL eventually becoming a second-class citizen – in fact, new features like 3D stereo mode is not even possible unless you are using libGCM directly.
</quote>
I assume as former PS3 dev you also have access to the GLESTutorial07_Arnaud_Remi_PSGL.pdf done at GDC 2006, otherwise you can get it from https://tinyurl.com/yajn75h2.
They realized that by being the curators of the platform, they could charge developers for access to it.
Can it? What would work? How would you do it, if you could?
Maybe you could. Twitter and Tumblr seem to be about the same modulo the length. Isn't the advantage of Twitter its shortness? Maybe we'd discover what the advantage of Twitter is.
And perhaps Facebook is the same just with better networking features. Maybe we should try to write federated Facebook and Twitter clones to prove it can be done.
Whether or not such a requirement would be good for privacy is an important question.
The list doesn't help if your friends aren't on the other network. HN loves to come up with technical solutions to the problem of Facebook when it largely isn't a technical problem, it is a social one.
Imagine, which Google+ launched, how things might have gone if 5% of Facebook users could have moved their own social graphs to G+ with two clicks of a mouse. If everyone had 100 friends, and those friends were uniformly distributed (all stark simplifying assumptions), then a huge fraction of the global social graph could have been moved to the new network by a small fraction of the users.
Social media has no such incentive, so how could a regulated federated standard work? Even if it could, who would pay for / provide the development? The social media companies certainly wouldn't (https://xkcd.com/927/), and governments wouldn't for largely the same reason.
That gives Facebook engineers a year to design and implement a federated API that would work seamlessly. If reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing was required on the API standards, then possibly others could interoperate with it too. Hopefully the mini-Facebooks could start to differentiate themselves through features, price, privacy, etc...
Needless to say, I think even if congress ordered facebook to breakup, it would be cheaper and easier for Zuckerberg to just move everything off shore and thumb his nose at a relatively impotent body. Zuck could also just lobby his ass off and probably end up writing the laws for the congressman.. Unfortunately, business writing the law for itself is pretty common in the USA, I'm sure Zuck knows that.
The root cause of a lot of problems Facebook creates is the like count next to every utterances, article or behaviour on the net. This has to be regulated much more than private data/friend graphs/location data/what you view/search for etc etc.
Psychologists will tell you the most effective way to influence behaviour of an individual is to show people what the herd around them is thinking, saying or doing. This is how society has always created "social norms".
If people around you don't smoke, you are less likely to be a smoker. Teen girls who see other girls get pregnant are more likely to get pregnant. There are literally thousands of examples that can be cited about how seriously we take this signal.
In a world with too much info that no one is trained to handle or are too busy or distracted to handle, we look at what what the majority of people around us are doing and do that blindly. This is signal influences behaviour. Both good and bad.
Facebook has fucked that signal up for society. In every sphere of life. And we are currently dealing with the fallout. The signal is being delievered too fast and too much imho. And this speed is highly overrated in its value to society.
Whether these counts should be displayed, to who, how quickly, next to what type of content, for different communities, education levels etc needs to be debated and regulated.
Yeah, but wouldn't that apply to HN too? What if they decide that we're seeing too many different articles posted on HN? That we might get stressed by the amount of new computer languages we hear about, or depressed by the number of Show HN posts ...
I have bought this up multiple times before. There are a lot of impressionable minds around here being exposed to lot of half baked/frustrated/misguided thoughts. Many times the upvotes mechanism just amplifies and reinforces these thoughts.
So people should only be able to see vetted information? Who decides whats not a "half baked/frustrated/misguided thoughts"? Seems like a slippery slope.
Easy starting point: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp.
The service FB provides is much closer to a natural monopoly. The value of FB’s service derived entirely from the sheer volume of people who use it. Saying “I am not going to use FB” is a cost to everyone around you.
Google Docs is often the only comfortable and familiar way to collaborate on documents for many groups, and YouTube is often the only source of video content on the internet.
Even though I don't have a Facebook profile anymore, I'm still very much a Facebook user because it would be difficult for me to convince everyone else to switch to some alternative.
First, Android is huge, oscillating around 85% world wide market share [1]. In many parts of the world it's the only real option for customers. You might use Facebook because your group chat is there. Many people use Android because 90% of their options are Android phones, regardless of brand, and they can't afford the ones that aren't.
Secondly, what about the actual customers (advertisers)? Google has by far the lion's share in the online advertising market; they take more than twice of Facebook's revenues, and have ads all over the web in contrast to Facebook, which is mostly (only?) on Facebook applications. Google sounds far "stickier" than Facebook to them, and way more in a position of market control.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266136/global-market-sha...
[2]: https://www.statista.com/chart/12179/google-and-facebook-sha...
I use snapchat (and somewhat instagram). That does the trick.
Heck, I'm mostly over social media.
I dont care about the daily activities of my friends, they arent that interesting. Food, work, food, work, food, gym, bar, selfies.
I can google image that crap.
“Hey! I’m throwing a party”... “Oh shit, I need to go out of my way to make sure so-and-so gets an invite”.
Eventually, one of my friends told me “You not being on FB is adding work for the rest of us. Someone always needs to go out of their way to mention everything to you”.
This article sums up a lot of it: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/28/17293056/facebook-deletef...
For most people I know who aren’t on FB, they either:
- Have a very small, very tight group of friends.
- Have a (usually) wife / roommate to whom they outsource the maintenance of their social calendar
My wife does a bit of the social planning, but the other thing is to invite my friends to things I want via text.
I cannot say I have a small friend group, me and my wife are sort of the hub of many friends.
Snapchat is still pretty good for keeping me connected, checking facebook 1-3 times a month has kept me in the loop for events.
Tangible problems beat hypothetical risks. Particularly when it comes to technology. Google hasn't dropped the ball in a public, easy-to-understand way. Facebook has. It then reacted with repeated disdain towards governments and its users.
hard to see how to split of Google into companies that compete against each other in a meaningful way.
Just as 5 different companies each listing 20% of the residential phone numbers wouldn't make sense. The more completely a social network covers the population the more useful it becomes to users.
My guess is they've sensed the national mood is shifting. If something isn't done, then people will start to demand something more drastic than simply breaking up a large world spanning company.
The capitalist system must give the appearance of health to forestall further demands. It is looking very ill at the top of the tech sector. The tyranny (iron rule by a minority) inherent to private enterprise is flowering atop an incredibly concentrated sector and it's becoming obvious to anyone that looks.
The real story of 'why' the about face has to do with Cambridge Analytica, though. Many in the media still feel that the election 'should' have gone the other way (regardless of how people actually voted), and now they blame FB/Zuck. The irony is that in 2008 Obama's team did all of the same things that Trump's did. The media was OK with it then (in fact, celebrated it) because it was for their side.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-difference-betwee...
$30M were requested for this, for which Narendra MOdi can build 200,000 toilets, a number which is larger than the homeless population itself.
Maybe it would be true in a perfect free market, where people would act rational and won't be jerks,
I don't have proof but intuitively I can see a free market simulator where some actors will find a small loophole and exploit it to maximize it's profit destroying everyone else.
I would really love some economist to team up with some game developers and run some economic simulations with different level of regulations, it would be interesting to see how well the model would match the reality.
I quit Facebook on principle but I'm suffering for it. I'm trying to meet new people, strengthen friendships, get out more, etc. Literally everyone I know except for one person does eventing and communicating on Facebook, so that's pretty rough.
Facebook's network effect should not be underestimated.
Even if cut down, their business model remains the same. Selling users data to the highest bidder.
It is fairly obvious that user privacy is utmost important to civil society.
We, as a society, should move away from fb and let it die its natural death.
Splitting it will only lead to normalization of sale of user data.
How is this different than any other advertising company? Google does the exact same thing, and it's much bigger.
I'm not sure how this could happen, but then again, nobody saw the demise of MySpace, but then again, MySpace was no-where as ubiquitous as fb.
I'd love to see some analytics on demographics and their use of facebook, you could possibly then start to prune off some target demographics from their userbase with targeted products. This is wishful thinking on my part, though.
No, it's not obvious. Society has many competing priorities.
Further, the definition of privacy changes rapidly.
I’ve always considered what I enter as being given to Facebook rather than somehow mine despite being in Facebooks possession, on their drives in their servers. When I give it to Facebook, it’s theirs. If you don’t want something known I don’t give it to Facebook...
If I give my friend my phone number, that’s their knowledge, not mine. It makes no sense to demand they forget it. If they hand it out, they’re a bad friend. I don’t tell bad friends important secrets.
There is a huge difference between what you explicitly type into boxes on FB's own website, and their policy of tracking you on every other site they can and correlating the data. Further, they (and others) go to extreme lengths to do so even if you log out of their site, clear cookies, browse in private mode, yadda yadda.
In a way we're repeating on a social scale, what we do on a political scale. Many are upset at the level of power of the president, which initially began as a much more limited position than the one-man-war machine we have of today. Yet both sides of the political spectrum rejoice as executive level power increases when 'their side' is in power, as if that will always be the case. And so too today on a social level we're happy (or at least apathetic) to see ever more private information siphoned off without considering what this will, sooner or later, end up being used for.
Two points specifically on Facebook:
1 - The extensive profiling and datamining of Facebook is not necessary for their core service. Third parties can of course always datamine what people voluntarily put out there on their own (https://www.snoopsnoo.com/ is a great example of a very primitive platform exploiting what users say on reddit - even that is disconcerting), but much of the nastier stuff that Facebook does is first party only - cross matching devices/fingerprints, tracking non-registered 'users' through various means, quantifying response to various categories of information, and so on.
2 - I would think it's becoming increasingly clear that people connecting easily is not necessarily as good as it seemed like it should have been. Instead of becoming a more diverse, varied, and embracing world - people have instead just sought out people that confirm their own biases and we're becoming more segregated into our own bubbles than ever before. And as people surround themselves only with those with the same biases of themselves they rapidly slide further down the path to radicalism in their own biases. Lastly it's also creating systems of groupthink as individuals fear that expressing views outside the social standard of their group could result in social expulsion.
In times past your friends were whoever you ended up being thrown together with. And it resulted in relationships that would never form today, often to great result. And even this 'great connectivity' of society has had a paradoxical effect as depression and loneliness are at record levels. Clearly there's far greater implications to 'connecting with people easily' than the kneejerk reaction to such a marketing point.
I disagree about your second point though. I mean, I understand it and I'm aware that what you are saying is true for a big chunk of people, but that doesn't decrease the usefulness for the rest of the population. I'm in various support groups and I see random people helping other people with real-life problems, not just comments or likes. I see people finding partners for outdoor activities. I see close friends and families meeting again after not seeing each other for a while, as a reaction to some post on their new feed. All anecdotal, of course, but I see a lot of positive impact on people.
We've had pamphlets for hundreds of years. I suppose they did cause some revolutions, which killed people. So, net negative?
The internet ain't going away. Your points aren't specific to Facebook. Between your phone and your credit cards, companies have a pretty good idea of what you do on a daily basis.
I've tried numerous such systems -- most of which used my facebook -- and I've never been impressed by one.
I think Trump is a tyrant. There are a handful of tyrannical leaders around the world.
> What do you think is going to happen ...?
I'm not sure what you're asking. I think the US is going to have an experiment on how the legislative and judicial branches of government might "check and balance" the executive branch in a two-party system. This seems only mildly related to Facebook. Other media organizations are equally if not more important for propaganda.