Advocacy groups are pushing the FTC to break up Facebook
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Also, what about microsoft, netflix, amazon, twitter and most importantly google? Also, what about humongous international banks? Or the chemicals/agribusiness where 2 or 3 companies dominate the world's market. What about the media? Where a handle of megacorporations own so much of the market?
Only have to break up one and the rest will fall into line.
what aboutism
Other than Google, which clearly abuses (at times) their market power from the dominance of Google Ads, Android, and Chrome, I have no idea what draws the ire of all those other companies; not individually and certainly not as a group.
I guess it's supposed to be something... something... social media... something... privacy... something. But I strongly suspect it's just vague anti-corporate sentiment, anxiety around our bitter political divisiveness, and resentment over the excesses in the technology sector (e.g. brogrammers).
I'm no anti-trust scholar but I don't think the purpose and design of anti-trust law is to resolve national cultural crises.
But I don't think this is what people have on their minds. Few in the industry question the consequences of moving to AWS. And most people--techies and non-techies--use and enjoy Google Search, Chrome, and Android without qualms. Nobody is shedding a tear for Bing, Firefox, or Yahoo, and in any event nobody is arguing that Google unfairly muscled them out.
It's only when a service or technology implicates social media do people really get fired up, and to a lesser degree the selling of mined personal data. But the fact that people think of Facebook, Google, and Twitter, plus a litany of other tech companies with household recognition, should all be punished betrays their logic. None of this behavior is anti-competitive; it's not destroying markets; it's not transferring wealth. It's one thing to argue personal data aggregation, mining, and selling should be more heavily regulated (a la GDPR). But anti-trust has nothing to do with it, and I don't see how splitting any of these companies up would substantially change anything, let alone result in a net benefit. At least not under the pretense of "fixing" social media, privacy, or fake news.
An "open and documented protocol" is what led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal; most people are not informed enough to properly manage permissions and even if they were, the personal data of friends would necessarily be available via this protocol. Posting something on this new platform-ized Facebook would be akin to sharing with every app each of your friends has authorized.
They have way too much power, have to take some sort of steps.
Off the top of my head:
- Facebook content
- Facebook advertising
- Facebook messenger
- whatever other apps Facebook owns
- probably a whole bunch of others that will require thinking about it more than four seconds.
Those are all inextricable from the Facebook platform. If there is no Facebook platform there is no place for ads or content, if there is no Facebook user database there is no way to route messages. I suppose for messages you could clone the database and give it to each company but that seems strictly worse since now you have two companies with your Facebook PII.
> Instagram... whatever other apps Facebook owns
Sure, but like I said, that that doesn't really change anything. Can you please elaborate on how the consumer would benefit from this?
> probably a whole bunch of others that will require thinking about it more than four seconds.
No need for sarcastic quips.
the concerns are not about meddling in elections but meddling by people not approved by existing parties and their supporters.
they want to control the message and approve the messengers. the internet as a whole is a threat to that but not organized enough to where other groups can communicate with like thinking people easily and quickly. tools like facebook give people the ability to organize beyond their local geographical area.
The second pane was titled “Microsoft after the breakup”, and it was a picture of two big, mean, nasty octopi.
Short of the government making these companies the only government approved ones in their respective fields I do not see how breaking them up would be something that can be done. Even then the monopoly would only exist because yet again the government created it.
American Tobacco Company, for one. There are a number of others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._American_Toba....
How is Facebook conspiring to restrain trade? With whom? Would breaking Facebook up result in lower prices for using social media services? The services are already free. Should people expect to get paid for posting selfies?
Breaking up Facebook for its behavior would be like breaking up IBM for age discrimination. It doesn't matter whether it's wrong nor even whether it's illegal. It's neither the function nor intent of anti-trust law to break up companies under such pretenses.
LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, Youtube, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr. I be they would also argue Google, which would be true from an advertising perspective.
But I think the most effective way to take down the monopoly isn't by regulating, because it may hurt consumers. Instead the government could help make FB obsolete.
If people could "login with us.gov" instead of "login with Facebook", I think most people would.
Oh hell no. Bad enough that Facebook knows every step I do on the Internet thanks to ubiquitous trackers - but the government? No way. This is China's Social Credit Score waiting to happen.
Also, why should the government help make any private company "obsolete"? Do you really want the government deciding which private company succeeds or not? So from 2008 to 2016, obama gets to decide which company gets to exist. Now you want Trump to decide which companies exist? I can't believe there are people here actually advocating for government control of the private sector.
I'd rather not use a "gov" account for anything but "gov" related things. Nevermind that the government tends to be a bureaucratic mess, it's also a major privacy and security problem. Facebook is a spying and data collecting behemoth. Lets solve it by having the government spy on us.
When did the hacker ethos become "government is the solution for everything" so "let's trust government"?
If we wanted a government login for everything, we'd already have it. I don't know if you are american or not, but I'm willing to bet that most of us don't want a government login or identity for the internet.
How's your shadow profile?
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-...
No way. I trust the government less than I trust Facebook to maintain privacy and not abuse power. And I don't trust Facebook.
When it comes to online social identity, the US is years behind China anyways.
1. Seen as radical at the time, and odious to all private industry. 2. Able to leave shareholder value somewhat intact because they were simply splitting physical assets.
While I think 2 might be addressed by eg forcing Instagram/YouTube/etc to spin off, 1 would require the election of radicals to high office. Our political system has built in so many safeguards over the years to keep true radicals out of office that I just can't see it happening. Trump promised many things, but disruption of business was not one of them.
edit: What I see as more likely is regulations that preserve shareholder value and enshrine these companies as utilities, erecting barriers to entry so high that they become permanent monopolies, while (hopefully) slowly reigning in the wild profits.
edit 2: Facebook's current share price basically values it as a utility already, and given their slowing growth they might even lobby for such regulation themselves to staunch the bleeding.
How does Theodore Roosevelt fit into this model? How does JFK/Johnson fit into this model?
edit: What I see as more likely is regulations that preserve shareholder value and enshrine these companies as utilities, erecting barriers to entry so high that they become permanent monopolies, while (hopefully) slowly reigning in the wild profits.
That's 180 degrees away from where I'd go. Change regulations to favor new competitors arising. Right now, big tech companies seem to comprise a faction which sometimes colludes to crush potential competitors.
Edit: I didn’t say what I want to happen, just what I thought was most likely. Strange reason to downvote
Edit 2: I think Vietnam weighs heavily on LBJ and JFK. I personally lay that on the feet of the military industrial complex coopting an inexperienced JFK, and LBJ doing everything he could to see through his predecessors policies.
Market cap is a measure of investors' beliefs of a company's future free cash flows. Regulated utilities have capped profits, so their valuation tends to be lower. Facebook absolutely does not have the valuation of a utility. Name a utility with a market cap of 400 billion USD (hint: the largest electric utility in the world has a market cap of $86.16 bilion).
Edit: name a utility with a global monopoly.
Google is probably the most dangerous and abusive of the three today, but I think Amazon is trying to steal that throne and will probably be much scarier in a few years.