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Comment by dgudkov | Hacker News Reader

>That is, that they've become a monopoly.

Facebook has no monopoly on internet advertisement. I'm not a big fan of Facebook but I don't see where it would be a monopolist.

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> Facebook has no monopoly on internet advertisement

They do on local political ads. Google searches are no longer effective for targeting those not already political involved. The local papers have been run out of business. Direct mail is expensive and unreliable. Pretty much all roads in this arena lead to Facebook, which makes its willingness to censor opinions unfavourable to it disturbing.

There are strong reasons to break up Facebook into, at the very least, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Dissecting the company along those lines does nothing to curb their cumulative potential effect on controlling what ads a user sees. They all hook into the same ad backend anyways.

Wouldn't the point of breaking those into separate companies be to _prevent_ them from hooking into the same backend?

What if they break FB, IG, Messenger and WhatsApp in to separate companies. They also spin out Facebook Ad Solutions Inc. or whatever it’s called to sell ads to all those separate companies along with anyone else who wants to display FB ads. This isn’t to say that this is what will happen, but it’s one potential.

If they are broken up like this Google could sell ads to be shown on those platforms too.

> Dissecting the company along those lines does nothing to curb their cumulative potential effect on controlling what ads a user sees

If I can reach my audience through Facebook or Instagram, that’s more competition than Facebook properties alone.

> They all hook into the same ad backend anyways

Hence the call to break them up.

>If I can reach my audience through Facebook or Instagram, that’s more competition than Facebook properties alone.

I mean, if anything, competition will lower the price per contact with potential voter? What problem it will solve?

How in the world is that enforceable, or legal?

Well, there was the Bell System. But arguably that didn't work as planned. And it probably couldn't happen today.

But regulation as a public utility might work.

I strongly disagree. Political advertisement successfully worked long before internet existed yet alone Facebook. Voters still live in houses, walk on streets, drive cars on roads, use public transit, watch TV/Netflix/YT/whatever. There are still many ways to reach them. Even if other channels are more expensive it doesn't make Facebook a monopolist.

People no longer receive daily, or even weekly, deliveries of newspapers. They no longer crowd around the living room radio, and increasingly avoid the television, which increasingly has neither a cable connection nor rabbit ears.

Like it or not, the world has changed.

The world has changed, but not that much. People do have mailboxes, mailing addresses and receive letters at least once in a while. Again, they drive cars, use public transit, walk on streets, etc. The real life still here, far not everything has moved online. And even for that online part Facebook is not a monopoly.

Influential online company? Absolutely. Monopoly? No.

>People do have mailboxes, mailing addresses and receive letters at least once in a while.

Nothing they receive in their mailbox holds their attention long, the attention market is dominated by digital media.

>Again, they drive cars, use public transit, walk on streets, etc

With headphones in or bluetooth paired. Who the hell reads a billboard? Who pairs their cellphone with their car, or owns headphones? Damn near everybody. Just try to buy a new car without Bluetooth.

Old propaganda distribution channels are dead men walking, and everybody knows it. Unless you're advertising a chicken wings and cleavage bar at the next exit, you're a damn fool for paying for a billboard.

I don't pay any more attention to ads on facebook than I do to ads on billboards, or flyers in the mail. It all goes in the trash figuratively or literally.

My brain has been effectively trained to pattern recognize advertising and filter it out, as it is so ubiquitous and so very rarely actually useful.

Old propaganda distribution channels might be dead men walking, but the new ones are just as much (anecdotally).

I can name at least three of the snowflake data billboards, I know c3-iot is hiring, and espetus has two billboards (one in San Mateo and one at the 101/80 junction). And I mostly ride the 280, and don't eat that much meat.

Times Square billboards still sell for thousands of dollars a day. Do you have any evidence for your beliefs?

With that reasoning an old paper yellow pages means no one can have a monopoly on digital yellow pages or a horse and cart means no one can have a monopoly in the car business.

Standard oil was still a monopoly even though the cart and buggy was still around.

People aren't saying that you can't do any marketing without Facebook, but if Facebook is letting others use their targeted advertising and not you, they've just increased your advertising costs by thousands of percent, giving Facebook the ability to selectively grant massive advantages to specific groups.

That's the problem here, yes, there are still mail based catalogue companies, but if you're not online, you're at a massive disadvantage.

I just read the App Annie 2019 app report this morning, and the 3 most used apps in Singapore in 2018 were Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook. Though I didn't check for US stats I'm sure they are similar. That is effectively a monopoly.

>That is effectively a monopoly.

Monopoly on what exactly?

Eyeballs

The network effect is unaccounted for by current antitrust legislation, which is pathetically outdated.

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