Hacker News Reader

Comment by yonran | Hacker News Reader

The moat that each tech company owns is its network. Rather than trust-busting these companies up into their different businesses, I think it would promote more competition to impose network interoperability requirements once the network is entrenched for too long.

A useful example is craigslist: a company with virtually no innovation for decades that still dominates the classified listings space. Other companies that try to offer a better experience face the hurdle of creating their own network or attempting to scrape craigslist’s items (and then being kicked off by their lawyers). What regulation would allow meaningful competition? A policy that requires craigslist to provide an API to competing firms for reading and writing at a reasonable price, and a requirement that changes to the network not favor craigslist vs. other firms.

View on HN

You don't need new regulation; you just need to get rid of existing regulation.

It is currently illegal to build third-party applications once the first party tells you to stop.

Craigslist actually was involved in the court case that cemented this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc.

> It is currently illegal to build third-party applications once the first party tells you to stop.

No, it is illegal to access the data of a third-party with your own app if that third-party doesn't allow you to do so.

You're spreading a lot of disinformation in this thread around the CFAA.

We could go back to the world where the AIM vs. MSN Messenger Chat Wars were legal (https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/). But reverse engineering APIs required an adversary with deep pockets, so I don’t think that is sufficient. We need an explicit regulation that a company’s monopoly over its network doesn’t last forever, just as patents are not forever.

What you're proposing would institute CL as a de facto utility in perpetuity with an API that innovated at the rate of the old Ma Bell. It may be true that craigslist dominates "classified ads" in a lot of markets, but there has been a constant chipping away at their marketshare by marketplaces unbundling various aspects of the service and doing it better. It's hard to believe, but prior to AirBnB & VRBO people used to actually go to the craigslist page for the city they were visiting and laboriously respond to classified ads. We're all better off that these companies were forced to innovate enough to gain marketshare, rather than just applying for read/write access on a glorified 1990s-era bulletin-board.

This graphic is out of date, and even just a cursory look at it reveals dozens of firms that are missing, but we should maybe be thankful that craigslist has decided to focus on a low-cost, low-revenue model for so long:

https://medium.com/@Mohsin585/unbundling-craigslist-eb592ff2...

> What you're proposing would institute CL as a de facto utility in perpetuity with an API that innovated at the rate of the old Ma Bell.

I don’t think so. For one thing, requiring established networks to be interoperable can enable other companies to create their own enhancements with additional features (e.g. 3Taps, PadMapper, MSN Messenger), so the original network is not the only game in town and is incentivized to innovate faster. For another thing, requiring open protocols does not mean the process needs to be slow; there are slow standards consortiums (e.g. W3C), and there are reasonably fast ones (e.g. WHATWG). I’m not even sure that a consortium would be required; perhaps a company can satisfy its interoperability requirement simply by documenting its API and authorizing competitors to use that API.

This example highlights the whole problem with the line of thinking in this article. Absolutely nobody thinks Craigslist needs to be broken up through anti-trust regulation. But several capable startups have failed to adaquately challenge Craigslist. Where do you draw the line between hampering competition and just meeting the consumer needs better than anyone else? The primary arguments against the tech giants hampering competition are literally speculation (with the possible exception of Amazon). You could have made the same arguments against Yahoo’s dominance in their heyday. When the paradigm of advertising supported services changes, Google and Facebook will become immediately vulnerable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com