Why is the government itching to break up tech companies? I feel like it's a bad idea for them to get involved at all.
A lot of companies dominate their markets but don't engage in overt anti-competitive behaviour.
I don't think they've ever been enforced to serve some political end, like punishing companies for not serving some greater democratic purpose to appease the political parties.
The US sees anti-trust as necessary when consumers are negatively impacted. The EU sees anti-trust as necessary when producers are negatively impacted.
The latter is, of course, always colored by politics.
I will also note that the nature of the social network market, with its network effects, means that a large enough system with a closed API is, under those constraints, by definition anti-competitive - certainly to producers, and possibly to consumers.
This statement is interesting, considering what it implies about the purpose of existence of producers for each respective side. With this stance, US is more like "producers exist to satisfy needs of customers", while EU is "producers exist just to compete with each other".
Once basic life needs are met, optimizing for customers tends to only good for someone who is living off their savings/welfare/etc. Optimizing for employees is good if you, like the majority of the people on Earth, have to work for a living, or are supported by someone who has to work for a living.
Everybody eats food, pays taxes, pays tariffs, and benefits from the protection of the military, but 300 million people who pay marginally fewer taxes and tariffs, eat marginally cheaper food, and enjoy the defense of a marginally more effective and efficient military are often "outvoted" by geographic concentrations of tens of thousands of people who have substantial vested interests.
Given this inherent bias in democracy, I think it makes sense for policy to at least try to favor the consumer over the producer, just because producers do a good job taking care of themselves already.
>We've never had communications platforms so centralized
And as mentioned elsewhere, it was broken up, and then allowed to recongeal.
Note: I’m not American, I’m not in the USA, but this applies to most postal services worldwide.
Why? The biggest USPS customer base (unsolicited bulk mail) got pissed.
If you saw how much spam I get via snail mail maybe you’d understand a little more.
Of course, healthy competition & pricing is a core issue here (duh). But power, in all its forms, is also a key issue. The founding fathers were very concerned about a corporation gaining too much power and interfering with democracy [1].
In addition, Facebook is constantly engaged in anti-competitive and unacceptable behavior, including buying multiple competitors (anti-competitive) and lying about its product (the recent inflated-ad-views scandal, which was literally a scam). The antitrust case against fb is complicated by the nature of the business, but there are plenty of very good reasons for the gov to investigate fb for antitrust violations [2].
Matt Stoller has done some good writing on monopoly, so has Binyamin Appelbaum. Both of them have books worth reading.
[1]: In 1816, Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, said he hoped to "crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." (https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/local/article/Angela-Carell...)
[2]: https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
Like many of Jefferson's quotes, this one and yours are both out of context, with yours being in reference to a wealthy elite dodging taxes illegally. That context is a bit different than wanting the government breaking up a social media company because you disagree with it's methods of managing free speech.
That wasn't always true. The US was once fond of trust- busting.
Oh sure you may have the option to elect a few select people at different levels but the vast majority is not subject to your whims or even large groups of people.
the reason is simple, in facebook's case and other companies which provide people a new way to assemble is that politicians do not control the message and that is intolerable to many of them. they pretty much had the news industry in their back pocket for generations but the internet blew that away when anyone could be the news.
so don't subscribe to these fear tactics that big bad companies are taking our privacy and freedom, government is just jealous because it has all that and never had to share
If you think about it, corruption is legal in the US through lobbies, and the larger and more powerful a company is, the easier it is for the company to influence policies and how the country is being run.
Well, whether we go so far as to say lobby = corruption, I think the idea is to bring more transparency and accountability to the general problem.
Any society with free movement of capital is going to have issues with accumulated economic capital impacting politics.
A democratic republic such as the USA hopes to address this issue by formalizing the channels the public can access the government.
Right now I'd give us a 5/10 on that scale.
Where's China on that scale? I don't have enough info to say...
Most agree it was effective when the government broke up Standard Oil, and when they broke up AT&T, among others. Microsoft was not broken up (although it got really close), but they sure got a slap, partly from the EU. And they changed their behavior, rather dramatically, for the better in the years since.
The idea being that more competition is better.
I think the first question you should be asking is "why do free market economies need antitrust enforcement?" And then take it from there.
Personally I think that free markets just don't work with products that are zero marginal cost. I don't necessarily have a solution, but it sure seems like the rules just don't work well anymore.
Still, breaking up any company for being too successful is a great way to keep your economy from growing. I don't imagine sane politicians will actually follow through, especially since breaking up trusts in the past did almost nothing to help the consumers it was supposed to.
Trustbusting is a very blunt instrument and there's not much data that it actually drives the results it intends. It would be better to address the market conditions that drive the industry to a monopoly.
I know that Facebook + Twitter political ads are "powerful", as well as "fake news" spreading when it is relates to politics. I'd be curious to hear any other examples if you have them.
Remember Twitter gloating about its role in the Arab Spring? They’re a psychological weapon that can overturn societies overnight. And they’ll do it just for a few more ad clicks.
Keeping aside the question whether FB should be broken up or not, having such power is incredibly dangerous. And they brought it upon themselves, by making a big push for being the primary conduit for all aspects of people's lives, Friends, Family, Events, News, Opinion, Shopping, etc.
edit: Spelling
[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/google-gop-convention... [2] https://fortune.com/2016/05/07/facebook-confirms-it-will-spo...
Just because they were giving some support to the Republican party, doesn't disprove my assertion at all.
If they haven't done it (yet), it's only because they've decided not to (so far).