Doesn't it creep you out that one company has a monopoly on the social graph? When we busted up Ma Bell, we basically put into place standards for interoperation. What if we had a law mandating social graph companies open themselves up for interoperation once they reach some critical threshold of size? Basically, the idea is that once you're massive enough in social media, you don't get to hold onto your lead purely through the network effect. Staying at the top, just because you're at the top doesn't really promote the general welfare of society or motivate people to make better products.
The main reason that competitors to Google don't do well is that people will just use the search engine that returns the most relevant results (unless your internet connection is censored).
At home, I use Duck Duck Go. It gives good enough results but comes with a better reputation with regards to privacy.
To me that sounds like legally-mandated proliferation of sensitive user data. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is essentially a case of Facebook being too open with their data.
If we open up Facebook's data to other companies, what makes you think those companies are willing and capable of securing the data and respecting user privacy?
Facebook having all of that data is bad enough. Requiring Facebook to share it with other companies would not make that data more secure -- but it could definitely make it less secure.
But also, and maybe more importantly, interoperation does not really necessarily require any sharing of data. Think the telephone network: All telephone network operators world wide do interoperate, which is why it doesn't matter where you are a customer, you still can call any other telephone on the planet. But that doesn't mean that those telcos somehow share data of their customers, apart from the particular calls that happen between customers of two different telcos.
Also, one way in which Facebook could be forced to share data would be for migration to a different service: If you think Facebook is abusing your data, you could move to a different provider, and Facebook would have to allow them to pull your data over and then delete it on their side--and all that without you losing contact with people who stay on Facebook thanks to enforced interoperability.
DRM actually has a potential for societal good. We should make companies like Facebook subject to DRM around our data. DRM is subject to the same asymmetry as privacy. Privacy for individuals is a societal good, in contrast to governments and big public companies, which should be as transparent as possible. Likewise, DRM used by big companies and organizations against individuals is bad for individuals and societies. However, DRM used on behalf of individuals to protect them from big companies would be a societal good.
What does help is simply encryption and decentralized services, no need for DRM.
Putting in another hoop for abusive corporations to jump through does have a function. There would be additional opportunities for whistleblowers to spot it happening, opening up the company to legal and regulatory action. Also, it wouldn't necessarily have to be centrally controlled. 3rd party companies could be hired to do the administration.
What does help is simply encryption and decentralized services, no need for DRM.
DRM could well be implemented as encryption and decentralized services.
In which case DRM doesn't do anything, but regulation and whistleblowers do?
> DRM could well be implemented as encryption and decentralized services.
How would that work? You don't have control over your own machine, but everyone else does?!
DRM is the idea that your property has a function that controls what you can do with your property based on instructions from a third party ... who would that "decentralized third party"(?) be? And what would even be the point of that? I am not sure I even understand what kind of construction you have in mind that would qualify as DRM and also be useful for the end user in any way.
What's the point of making _my_ data accessible? AFAIR under GDPR facebook already can provide you all your data in downloadable form, at least if you are in EU.
If we want to break Facebook network effect, you need much more.
I, being early adopter, move to new service, called Bookface, and now I want to talk with my friends, who are still using FB. So I ask Bookface to connect to FB and suck the latest updates about these 1000 people, because they are my friends. Hmmm...
The fact that you do so, with no additional effort needed, kinda breaks the entire trust/monopoly argument, doesn't it?
Maybe we can get the EU to pass some data probability laws and force Facebook and Google to share...
You could just split Google in half into Goo and Gle and force them to publish protocols their services use so they can share the network. This could also allow smaller players to join the network.
At the beginning you could bounce people going to google.com at random to goo.com or gle.com until they start prefering one or the other for whatever reason and go there directly.
And who knows ... maybe at some point Gle could attract more users by being more precise and less intrusive with their ads.
Until there is one Google, there is one strategy that can be tried at one time. This harms progress.
I mean, have you seen the full list of google chat apps? You call it "one strategy that can be tried at one time"?
If what google monopolist does to try new things was best or even sufficcient then planned economies would thrive.
And between your examples there's also XMPP.
I mean, not sure how sensible that would really be, but I think it's worth considering that Facebook is not some PHP script with a small local MySQL database behind it either, but rather a massive distributed system in itself, even if under the administrative control of a single entity.
Unfortunately, regulating ethics tends to lead us to exactly what is starting to happen... Even centrist and center-left commentators and journalists are starting to see some fallout from the gatekeepers of money/donations/subscriptions online. Most of it is far-right targeted, but there's some bleed and it may expand.
I'm not a fan of extremist points of view. I'm more opposed to censorship as I feel it's far more dangerous than letting idiots talk. When a handful of companies serve as the gatekeepers to the world, it's more important that censorship is minimized, even if they are "private" companies.
They're in a potentially tough position, however they have an unfair level of power. I'm not sure how they could reasonably be broken up.
The problem is that Facebook is allowed to buy out any potential Facebook-replacements, too, and thus be allowed as a company to continue its monopoly almost indefinitely. If Instagram is the "new Facebook" then Facebook shouldn't have been allowed to touch it. And if it already touched it, the government should split them up, as they did AT&T, for the public good. Same with WhatsApp.
My guess is Facebook wants to integrate the three now primarily because it wants to use the excuse that it "can't" neatly separate the platforms anymore and that users will rebel against the government if they attempt that. So if politicians plan to bust Facebook, they should do it soon.
While I think regulation definitely needs to be on the table to control the perverse incentives that would affect all Baby Facebook's, I don't think the network effect makes Facebook resistant to trust-busting. If a breakup mandates the successors to:
1) share the core IP (e.g. the Facebook brand and facebook.com, etc),
2) create and participate in an open federated social network protocol to blunt future network effects, and
3) divide Facebook's current userbase in a way that does not follow the contours of the social graph
...then I think the network effects will be muted enough to prevent the current monopoly situation from reoccurring.
The state could abuse its power: companies do abuse their power, because to do otherwise would reduce shareholder profits.
I think there's a very important truth in this sentence!
then the state should manage it
Do states have such a good track record with Internet tech.? I'm thinking of Korea and their mandated shopping encryption ActiveX.
IoT security is another are where lots of bad things are happening and an argument for state management could be made. How about the control of all IoT things, like webcams and smart assistants, go through government infrastructure? That way, they can 1) enforce security practices and 2) actually implement Orwell's total surveillance state from 1984.
You could have said the same about AT&T. When they broke it up, they split it into distinct entities. There is no reason we couldn't split it back up into Instagram, WhatsApp, and its other various apps. It also has tons of individual functions and features that are only bundled together because of path dependence. The Marketplace, the news feed, the home page, and the discussion forums/groups are all potentially distinct companies. You could still even have one company in charge of managing identity and authentication and make everything interoperable between the distinct branches.
Setting things up that way would make it look more like a federated platform and would take no small amount of work, both from the private companies and the government (to establish standards). But as things are now nobody has an incentive to design an internet that works like that.
No you couldn't have, you could use your telephone to call any other telephone on the planet. Even if AT&T did not own the wires.
THAT is the behavior we have to stop. Breaking up tech companies does nothing to solve that problem.
Silos need to be made illegal if you want to stop the tech companies. (And even if you make silos illegal, good luck keeping your social network from knowing what you are searching for on your search engine. That's another one of the fundamental problems not addressed by break ups. Privacy.)
What? The telephone exchange (run by Bell) had to actually make the connection for you. If you were not paying them for phone service your calls weren't getting connected. And they owned the entire vertical stack for phone service, from producing the handsets to leasing/selling the phones to owning the wires and operating the exchanges.
There were numerous reasons why it was just not viable to have an alternative business to AT&T. They owned all the infrastructure and it would have been impossible for any upstart to compete because you just can't build rival infrastructure overnight, and nobody wants to have a second-rate phone service.
Breaking it up IS how they solved that problem, for a little while, until technology moved ahead of the regulations and began consolidating again.
>That's another one of the fundamental problems not addressed by break ups. Privacy.
Break ups don't address climate change either. What does any of this have to do with the price of tea in China?
Also, if your social network isn't the same business as your search engine, why would they be sharing data with each other? This objection of yours makes no sense.
Exactly, and Facebook will not make an open connection for you to another social network. Any connection is strictly limited to protect Facebook's sovereignty over you. It would be like At&T making a connection to Sumatra for you, but only if you confine your discussion to the size of pants you wear. No other information would be allowed to be discussed. If you tried to even say your name, AT&T would automatically mute those parts of the conversation.
You cannot openly connect to another social network and move your data wherever you please. If you switch without moving your data, you cannot openly talk back to your friends who may still be on the old social network. ie - these are SILOS. And that's the behavior we should be targeting. You could go through the AT&T network back in the 70's and talk to someone in Sumatra, or Paris on a completely different national network not provided by AT&T. If you want to openly connect with someone in Sumatra or Paris via social network today, you have to be on the same social network. These networks are not open. What we need are laws obliging them to be open.
Trust busting does not do that, all it does, at best, is give you multiple siloed social networks to choose from. (But it probably wouldn't even do that. It would likely just separate, say, youtube from google. Or separate instagram from facebook. We're still left with silos.)
Yes. This is why I said you need to make it a condition of breaking the trust. To open the platform and create general standards for interoperability is part of the point. You're arbitrarily constraining the definition of a breakup to only refer to dividing up administrations, even though almost every instance of actual trust busting involves making all kinds of requirements about the conditions of subdividing operations to help make sure the same problems of consolidation and collusion don't repeat.