Tim Wu thinks it’s time to break up Facebook

I use Facebook and I don't think that's going to change any time soon, but I also used to develop against the Facebook API. I say "used to" because there is nothing of value to get from the Facebook API anymore. Their data is now entirely locked into Facebook and cannot be easily moved.

My site pulled local event data into an event calendar, since Facebook's discovery of truly local events is shitty at best and useless most of the time. These are all public events at businesses open to the public and the businesses want more people to come. But now Facebook considers public events posted by public-welcoming businesses to be too sensitive of information to share, and that API disappeared overnight in April, with no advance warning and no ability to get it back. It's gone. Completely gone.

Coincidentally, they now have their own app called Facebook Local that shows events near you. I'm sure that has nothing to do with them shutting down that API.

Break up Facebook.

The focus on tech companies seems to be, I don’t think a red herring, but mostly misplaced when compared to the extreme damage being caused by other companies. Oil, pharma, telcos (no, telcos are not part of the cohort of tech companies being talked about here), all of whom are actually using the platforms of the tech companies to deeply undermine the basis of Western society by attacking the fundamental concepts of evidence and reason. Sure, they’re using twitter to do it, but why not attack the source?

The theory of internet monopolies stills seems nascent to me. Google is often accused of being a search engine monopoly, but I would disagree because Google doesn't get money from search, they get money from advertising. They use their search engine as market research. The same thing is true of Facebook. A social network isn't a business because no one pays for it. Advertising is the business and the social network is the research arm.

This makes the charge that Google and Facebook are "inefficient monopolies" pretty weak. First, they're not monopolies (yet). Together Google and Facebook only comprise about 63% of online add revenue in the US, and that's not even counting Amazon which is basically an online market where Amazon monopolizes advertising on their own platform (among many other things). Saying that Google and Facebook's dominance is bad for the consumer is weird, because the average person isn't the consumer. Other businesses are the real consumers of the tech giants's services and they still have plenty of leeway in how they do business. Labeling the internet giants as monopolies feels weird because they are not monopolies in the classic sense of oil, rail, telephone or even cable. Those monopolies erected fences around their products that were very real and very physical. Customers (people like you and me) really didn't have any other options. The same can't be said of big tech.

Of course if you find the above arguments unconvincing, I understand why. When you get right down to it people aren't as concerned about "tech as advertising". What really scares the bejesus out of everyone is "tech as media". TV stations used to be similar. They made their money in advertising, and the audience were the product not the customers. But even tv stations were local in scope, unlike the internet. If you wanted to watch TV, the local stations were all you had. But with Google, nothing is yet stopping me from going to DuckDuckGo. This is a real blow to the label of Google as a monopoly. If Google is a monopoly, it's a kind that hasn't been clearly defined yet.

That brings us to the big problem. If you're going to break up companies, I want there to be clear defensible reasons why. This article is frustratingly vague in their motivation. Their claim that innovation is impossible in the face of the tech giants seems a little disingenuous. Snapchat, Instagram, and Whatsapp were very successful before they were bought. If the founders of these companies were more interested in the conflict, they would have been major threats to Facebook. Then they suggest "dirty tricks" as the source of the tech giants's success, but they don't offer proof (outside of some vague references to Amazon that they don't elaborate on). This article fundamentally misunderstands what business the tech giants are in and then makes comparison to history that don't hold up under even cursory scrutiny.

If you break up Google, search will get worse, so it would be nice if there's a good reason why we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot. My biggest concern is that the latest push to break up the big tech giants is fueled by resentment from the American Left for what they see as tech's complicity in allowing Russia to steal the election for Trump. While there is merit to that idea, without clear evidence of collusion or malfeasance I don't think that's a good enough reason to break them up.