I want this to be the start of a forced breakup of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. There’s zero benefit to consumers, and a lot of harm.
Would be great not to have six chat apps open all the time.
Does one encryption scheme have to mandated as the standard scheme?
> but if you've got three broken companies and you fix one of them, you've now only got two broken companies to fix.
Now, we've to somehow decide the order. I say with start at Amazon, the parent will say Facebook and someone else will say Apple. We are back to square one. Therefore, my suggestion was to take uniform and consistent action. Not, go after one organisation because of popularity.
Unless your suggestion is to do them all simultaneously? But then who's going to synchronize all the hearings to make sure all the judges hit their gavels at the same time? And if one company stalls, won't that stop any action on any of them?
That wasn't my suggestion, really. The parent comment said that "We should start at Facebook". I facetiously said, "We can also start at Amazon or Apple".
> Unless your suggestion is to do them all simultaneously? But then who's going to synchronize all the hearings to make sure all the judges hit their gavels at the same time? And if one company stalls, won't that stop any action on any of them?
Good questions! What's your solution?
Now you've given the other two companies more of the market share. Not only that you've given them time to lobby and protect themselves.
So you've now reduced competition even more.
You are trying to fix the wrong problem. The problem is the market, not facebook.
Maybe the problem is the political system that lets corporations make the government do whatever the heck they want.
Problems with Facebook, et al, are symptoms of bad legislation. By focusing energy on "fixing" the companies, we risk losing sight of the institutional failures that allowed them to become a problem.
I'm doubtful if there is any material harm in those companies being under the same roof, and the benefit to consumers may just be that they are free services, but that doesn't have to be demonstrated.
They are not essential services, it's better to just not use them if you don't like them.
Where there needs to be more regulation is in Search Monopoly, Search Result Transparency, App Store Monopolies etc. - there are serious consumer and industry issues there.
- Nam Nguyen, who is the head of engineering at Instagram. He would remain head of engineering at the standalone Instagram. Maybe he'd get a cosmetic change to his job title like CTO or something.
- Ashley Yuki is the head of product at Instagram. Same with her, she'll stay head of product. They aren't going to fire and replace her just because Instagram trades under $GRAM instead of $FB.
Repeat this down the line for the rest of the people that run Instagram. Instagram will literally be the same product, with the same owners, same management, and same business model.
okay
> There’s zero benefit to consumers, and a lot of harm.
There's a ton of potential societal benefit in centralization and/or monopoly in theory. There's also a ton of potential downside. What in particular makes this fall in the latter bucket?
You could argue that features can make it easier across products, but each product would be big enough on their own to develop these features at little cost compared to their income. Apart from that there's no potential upside I can see for a user to have these products under one company.
The same applies to Giphy. Right now, messenger companies don't own Gif companies and it's still very easy to use them together. I don't see the benefit here for a user to have them owned by the same company.
Common-ish arguments for monopolies, as applied to this situation:
* potentially the interoperability you indicate
* infrastructure investment leading to stability
* similarly: best in class client side software
* security / privacy guarantees (yes. I know, ironic, etc. but the fully distributed multi-company alternative is likely worse on these dimensions)
* single point of accountability for the state and law enforcement. (yes. not likely a HN concern. Still valuable to the state and potentially regular consumers.)
* general pro monopoly argument: fewer resources are wasted in competition, and so can be applied to product development and research. i.e. bell labs
IDK how I feel the scales tip in this case, but treating it as cut and dry feels a bit naive.
Strong +1 on the ensuing twisted incentives.
If anything, being a centralised conglomerate makes them less stable, less secure. And with less competition, they actually become more wasteful.
I.e. It’s nontrivial to be more wasteful than it would be to have multiple teams duplicating the same product.
(Strong disagree on your suggestion that the centralisation generally makes them less stable/secure, but granted on the tail risks.)
You are arguing for Central Planning. You can't be pro-free market and pro monopoly.
At least government monopoly is theoretically accountable to the voters.
Downsides:
* Higher risk - a bigger database to attack.
* A very big single point of failure
* Slows down innovation
* Less private
Upsides (for society):
* ???
Usually we dont ask "What in particular makes this fall in the latter bucket?"