Zuckerberg threatens “major lawsuit” if Warren tries to break up Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Zuckerberg threatens “major lawsuit” if Warren tries to break up Facebook

vox.com

56 pointskoops20 comments

Who would go down without a fight if the government tried to break up your business? Just the logical next step of escalation.

This a little like waving the red flag at the snorting bull. Not a lot of upside.

Could the message be to the other bull? (wallstreet)

Well if warren wanted to breakup a tech monopoly it would be amazon retail and aws which subsidizes their business.

IIRC that isn't what she is most concerned about - it is about Amazon Basics and their own store brand being pushed over the results of other brands in the marketplace.

What is the evidence for such a claim?

AWS is the money maker

From someone with zero knowledge of this process of breaking up large companies (example: Instagram and Facebook), how would that work exactly? Obviously the company would split and become two entities - but what then? How do the finances work? Each business becomes independently run and cannot affiliate with each other? Are there protections against "freebie" services, for example Facebook providing free services/data sharing to Instagram where it may be a paid feature for other companies?

Would anyone expect anything else?

How is that a "threat"? If someone threatens to decimate your company, of course you'll fight hard to save it.

We're used to a world of such clear division and fighting between the 2 parties: democrats and republicans.

But, The irony here is that it's democrats that are threatening to break up facebook and yet facebook is deeply democratic/liberal.

How can you even claim that "Facebook" is deeply democratic/liberal? You could say the same about HN, and I've seen quite a few sharply pro-conservative comments posted here.

Anecdotally, the amount of far-right loose-with-facts garbage being posted to Facebook was the primary reason I stopped using it.

I think this misconception stems primarily from the 2008 Obama campaign where groundbreaking work was done directly by Obama's campaign staff using social media for outreach and organizing. This was largely driven by open and direct channels of communication to Facebook staff and the hiring of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and his work with the campaign.

In retrospect I think the relationships built between the Democratic party and Facebook were more about Facebook the company dipping its toe into the wider world of lobbying and the personal relationship of Chris Hughes to LGBT issues and his partner's burgeoning political career. It had less to do with Facebook's Executive staff having deeply held Democratic values or entrenching corporate values that align with the Democratic party and was driven more by a desire to see favorable economic policy for the company.

In the years since we've seen almost 0 movement by political campaigns to pursue this kind of outreach short of your typical ad buys. I think Democratic candidates realized that they were funneling huge amounts of time and money into a service that is actually a competitor. A competitor that is more regulated and less scary than what modern political parties actually track, retain, and use to target their base.

I wonder if Warren isn't getting as much grass roots traction in large part because she hasn't realized that what Facebook does is chump change compared to the operation she needs in place to win.

Let's see how far a candidate gets who takes a similar stand against LexisNexis and threatens to cut off their H-1B visa rubber stamps.

The modern political campaign is basically a startup on the scale of Facebook but your verticals are online, email, direct mail, text, calls, and door to door sales. Oh, and you have physical offices in 50 states, your CEO is perpetually out of office on the road, your sales model is largely B2C, the unpaid interns outnumber the poorly paid full time staff by 100:1, your runway is a couple of months, and you have to completely pivot the company to an entirely new business model 1 month before your IPO (GOTV).

I think people for some reason overlook the historical coincidence that the Obama campaign came along only two years after Facebook was open to the public.

I don't think that any other explanation of why they are associated can be meaningful, when it was the first presidential campaign that could work with them, and the last one where it could be groundbreaking.

Facebook lobbyists and execs are HIGHLY conservative. Look up their support for Kavanaugh during the confirmation hearings.

Their workers, based in Silicon Valley, may be liberal, but they pay them handsomely enough to not complain about the company.

After their 2016 electoral loss, the Democratic Party huddled up to develop their "Better Deal" agenda, to explain what they would stand for, should voters return control to their party.

Antitrust was a huge plank in that platform.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/31/16021844/a...

Do they really believe that something as abstruse as antitrust would resonate with voters? Setting aside the merits of it as policy, I find it hard to believe that a lot of voters are really clamoring for Walmart or Facebook to be broken up.

That said, perhaps a segment of their base would be more energized by attacking large corporations. Appealing to an extreme wing, and using that strength to create broad enthusiasm, worked for their opponents. I used to believe that if you were forced to appeal like that, you couldn't possibly get enough votes from the center, but my intuition appears to be in error.

Respectfully, I am not so sure that you are correct with your sentiment. I know a lot of privacy-concerned folks that are center of right who wouldn't mind FB being kneecapped. I view this as significant, as these are people who usually view government interference in business matters akin to messing with religion.

We went through a period where the Democratic Party endorsed the Reagan era Republican theory that consumer prices were the only factor that mattered when considering antitrust action and that it was no longer a goal to protect competition itself.

That period seems to have drawn to a close.

>and yet facebook is deeply democratic/liberal.

Facebook is all about making billions for Facebook. It could not care less about democratic vs republican. If the wind turned republican it would turn republican in a heartbeat. If it paid to play it neutral, it would as well. At the moment these two don't align with its interests, so it stands somewhere between neutral and pro-democrat.

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