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Comment by namelessoracle | Hacker News Reader

Targeting Facebook and not Google or Amazon for tech monopoly is not a good look, and just makes people feel like Zuck didnt make the right political donations and didnt censor for the benefit of the party in power hard enough.

Whether Meta qualifies or not is a different question, but Facebook as your first target?

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If they were targeting Amazon, you would probably say "Targeting Amazon and not Google or Facebook for tech monopoly is not a good luck." You need to start somewhere. If you have a specific reason why Facebook is not a monopoly worthy of breaking up, then let's hear it. Some vague theory about not donating money doesn't cut it.

> If they were targeting Amazon, you would probably say "Targeting Amazon and not Google or Facebook for tech monopoly is not a good luck."

Nope.

I don’t have Facebook and have zero interactions with ANY of their products in my life. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have been harder to extricate myself from. I could, but the inconvenience as a regular consumer would be quite difficult or costly. This hasn’t been the case with FB so I am in very strong agreement with the sentiment of the comment you replied to.

I actually hate Facebook but am reflexively disgusted with the irrational, partisan hatred of it from people who could just delete their accounts and never interact with the company again. At worst, they still log your IP on many websites if you don’t use uBlock or something similar.

> At worst, they still log your IP on many websites if you don’t use uBlock or something similar.

It's fairly easy to think of worse. One clear example is the fact that they've been running facial recognition on non-Facebook users in photos for years.

I can understand an opinion that claims this is worse, but it’s something I don’t personally care about because I don’t take many photos with people who would post them on Facebook. It also occurs in a more public setting than private internet browsing.

At this point, I’m think it’s safe to assume they every picture saved remotely is facial recognitioned. And every public photo has been processed by at least Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook.

It sucks but certainly isn’t anything unique to FB. It would be weird if they didn’t run it through CV even to find stuff like dogs, babies, etc.

Irrational hatred? It's a company that literally was complacent in a genocide. The fact that I haven't logged in during several years doesn't change that.

Just ignoring companies that do harm and saying you don't have to use them is one of the ways companies continue getting away with perpetuating harm.

> I don’t have Facebook and have zero interactions with ANY of their products in my life.

Maybe. But if any of your friends/family is on Facebook, they may have uploaded their contacts, and you quite likely have a "shadow profile" that they're using to track you across the net. You might not know Facebook, but Facebook knows you.

Is that really an issue? Its really a missing data problem. Your data is "missing" and facebook can infer with some probability you exist and the people your "shadow profile" might interact with.

That’s pretty much all there is to it, yeah, just a missing data problem. But once you slap the “shadow profile” label on it, it gets “shady” and “scary”. A pretty cool lesson in how to make something fairly trivial and non-threatening seem scary to people.

Note: not currently or in the past employed by Meta or any affiliated companies, so that’s just purely my own take.

If six of your contacts have provided them with the same name and email address, then they know with near certainty that those six people have you as a mutual contact. When they spot an ad profile with the same email address, that comes with a dossier on your browsing and shopping habits, which are used to infer your interests etc. It's not a "missing" data problem, it's an embarrassment of data problem.

> You need to start somewhere.

Correct, and you may have noticed media and political sentiment turning hard against Facebook coincidentally overnight after it was discovered that the guy who won used it in a more “clever” manner than did the one who lost. What better place to start?

Not that I’m complaining because they all need to go, but there is clear and obvious evidence as to why Facebook is facing the brunt of all of this.

Who are you referring to with won and lost?

Facebook is just obviously not a monopoly. There's TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, Reddit, and many other social networks. At least 5-10 billion dollar social networks have been created while Facebook exists.

Allowing them to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp were probably not wise decisions. But it hasn't stopped others from competing

Trust != monopoly, for a reason.

For example, OP lists Amazon and Google as other viable targets for trust busting, yet their primary products/services also have competitors. The issue is that, while they do have competitors, the lot of them have decided to act in certain ways that are overly harmful to the consumer.

Would Facebook/Google/Amazon do even more damage as a true monopoly? Of course. Should they have to get to that point before anything is done? Definitely not -- for one, they're too smart to let themselves become proper monopolies.

Breaking up tech is a pretty bipartisan sentiment, I'm not sure that people feel like it's because FB didn't pay enough to play.

In my mind there are a bunch of political reasons to choose FB first.

1. Older generations are familiar with what a central role FB plays in their lives, and regardless of what side you find yourself on the political divide, you either think they are pushing radicalizing ads or have silenced e.g. antivax rhetoric which you might agree with.

2. Many people don't really know Alphabet exists. Google is a search company in many people's minds, maybe an email/calendar one too. Outside of HN and maybe some frustrated Q-tubers, I'm not sure people have much hatred for Google.

3. Breaking up Amazon can pretty quickly be spun as a worker's rights/union issue, and I can see how Republicans might have a hard time being seen as promoting unions.

At least that's my armchair analysis

3. Workers rights would be an especially ineffective angle, given Amazon’s enthusiasm for replacing humans with machines wherever possible.

I think there’s something a bit iffy about the Kindle looking like a loss-leader for the books, and separately consumer rights & small business issues due to “equivalent” products being substituted silently to make stuff arrive sooner, but a fight over worker rights is just likely to mean it uses “humans need not apply” warehouses even sooner.

If that is or isn’t a good outcome, I lack the economic background to even guess confidently. But it would definitely be a spectacular fail politically.

I think you're right, and I don't think most dems would approach it that way, but I think that Republican news outlets would be framing it that way, and the more progressive wing of the dems wouldn't be able to deny their pro-union sentiment when questioned.

I'm just saying there's a ripe culture jamming opportunity here for the right, and it's a tactic they're pretty great at.

> ...but a fight over worker rights is just likely to mean it uses “humans need not apply” warehouses even sooner. The humans at Amazon's warehouses are being utilized as meat-robots in any case, robots that Amazon doesn't have to repair when they break down.

This "Sharecroppers or tractors" argument doesn't even register as a dilemma for me: if you're going to take human labor, then pay a living wage, if not, then automate and free the humans to work elsewhere. It's a net-negative on society to have an employed person on food-stamps.

Agriculture used to be a major "employer" and then got mechanized; society seems to be better for it.

> 2. Many people don't really know Alphabet exists. Google is a search company in many people's minds, maybe an email/calendar one too. Outside of HN and maybe some frustrated Q-tubers, I'm not sure people have much hatred for Google.

Politicians and FTC must know the real alphabet. Like, they're gov agencies who job it is to know this stuff. In fact, existing suits by the government against google show they do in fat know.

> n my mind there are a bunch of political reasons to choose FB first.

I'm not actually sire that FB is first, i think the media just talks about FB the most.

Facebook's purchases of WhatsApp, Oculus, and Instagram probably make them a softer target given how they've used those properties. On top of that, they've had some of the worst overall news.

Why not start with thesortedt target and get some ammunition when you go for the others?

Facebook actually has pretty decent arguments why all their products have strong competition. They can also make some arguments about how the other tech giants have much worse monopolies.

Antitrust is not about monopolies. It's true Facebook is not a monopoly in the classic sense of that word.

Antitrust is about anticompetitiveness. Big tech and especially Facebook is in this new situation where they're causing anticompetitiveness not due to supply side control (i.e. you can get other services that compete against Facebook's products). They're causing anticompetitiveness due to demand side control - the social media that people want to use _in practice_ is all controlled by Facebook. Not because Facebook is intrinsically a superior product (e.g. cheaper, quality of content, technical qualities), but due to network effects and acquisitions of network effect through Instagram and Whatsapp.

We're in a new situation where new precedent needs to be created in what kind of demand side control is desired, permitted and should be dealt with. Which makes this new territory, and it also means that a defense of "we have decent competitors" shouldn't be a decisive argument on Facebook's behalf.

>the social media that people want to use _in practice_ is all controlled by Facebook

Twitter? Reddit? LinkedIn?

Hell TikTok just passed Whatsapp in monthly active participants.

Anticompetitiveness is hard to argue when one of your largest competitors started after all of these acquisitions

I'm not saying it's a clear cut case. I'm just saying that we should view this in a different light than past antitrust cases.

Kia, Ferrari and caterpillar are not competitors despite all producing vehicles.

In the same way TikTok, LinkedIn and WhatsApp are not competitors. Every sensible person understands that.

But are you arguing that Instagram and TikTok are not competitors? Or WhatsApp and Telegram? Or Facebook and Twitter?

Facebooks buying Oculus is kind of a weird example. WhatsApp could be argued buying a competitor. But buying Oculus seems like a clear example of buying a company for its technology because you want to use it. Did Facebook have some kind of competing VR program i didnt know about?

Action against Amazon is also currently building towards a formal case from the FCC.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-22/amazon-cl... and a lot more if you look into Lina Kahn's previous anti-trust work.

Facebook (and Twitter) are the most likely targets because they're the ones most involved in politics + that politicians, lawyers, and activists can understand. The power that FB and Twitter wield is social and therefore political.

Google and Amazon are smart enough to hide their concerning activities in areas the average person considers completely uninteresting: Infrastructure.

It’s a joke right? Seems like Meta may end up being the industry’s scapegoat so the gov can say they did something. Probably also explains all the FUD we see in social media about FB, but none of the other tech giants.

To facebooks credit they were good at supporting every platform under the sun and not actively using their breadth/power/reach to stop consumer choice, but be the consumer choice. The best thing that happened to consumers was the failure of Facebook phone - because they wanted to be like google. i'm glad we rejected that.

Google on the other hand, absolutely used its power to stifle competition and still does to this day. Platforms, Content, and Creators live and die by google's whims.

All three are the targets of federal investigations and suits. It would be hard to say which was "first" as all have been ongoing for years and reach various milestones at different times depending on court schedules, commissioner appointments, etc.

It seems to me that people have started to clutch their pearls with the revelations of psychological manipulation that Facebook has/is doing. I don't know if that's the impetus or not, but it's a big difference.

In the balance between looking good and getting started somewhere, what's more important?

> Targeting Facebook and not Google

When the last guy won, Google literally had a leadership meeting in which the participants were crying and angry.

Facebook literally helped the last guy win.

Is it truly any wonder one is being targeted harder than the other?

They shouldn't be surprised when Google gets slammed like a truck when the other side takes powers and decides they are the thorn in their side, just like Facebook is the thorn in the other parties side.

There was a reason companies traditionally pretended to be apolitical. (They never actually were, but at least acted like they were reacting to the social sphere instead of actively trying to shape it)

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