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> In this case, it's hard to see the problem with facebook being broken up. Who, exactly, loses? No one except Zuckerberg, I'd think. However, it raises an in

> In this case, it's hard to see the problem with facebook being broken up. Who, exactly, loses? No one except Zuckerberg, I'd think. However, it raises an interesting question: how exactly would you break up an entity like facebook? It doesn't seem like a business that would lend itself to subdivision.

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
Geographically, like a phone network. Then mandate interoperability with an open standard, like a phone network.
- Chaebixi 10y ago
  > Geographically, like a phone network. I don't think that makes much sense for breaking up something like Facebook. Unlike a phone network, Facebook's service is not rooted in geography. Yes, it's users have homes and geographic locations, but those are just arbitrary account attributes, just like their name or if they like the Denver Broncos. You might as well have one post-breakup company start out with all the A-M accounts and the other the N-Z accounts. If you had to divide up the users between N successor companies, I'd probably be best to do it based on friend-graph connectivity, with mandated interoperability between them. That might make the successors sticky enough to survive.
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    There's a high correlation between geography and social graph, while the part of the social graph that gets "cut" will give an incentive to make interoperability work, as people will care about it. So your premise is true(ish), but the conclusion can't be drawn from it (and your comparison falls apart) because we don't need strict dependency on geography, only a (relatively strong) correlation.
dane-pgp 10y ago
Just as Microsoft was required to open up its Win32 APIs, one possible remedy here would be for Facebook to be forced to allow users to receive/make posts from/to their Facebook friends on any competing site, and allow people to log into those competing sites using their Facebook accounts (using a single sign-on system like OpenID Connect / OAuth 2.0). That way each competitor could offer its own interface and algorithm for filtering people's feeds, and show their own ads (or offer a competing business model). If users opted to have their posts on the competing site automatically sent to Facebook (so their Facebook-only friends could still see them) then Facebook would be free to data-mine those posts still. The next question is, could someone code a browser extension or other tool which makes this possible without needing any changes from Facebook's side? If it would break the Facebook terms of service, would someone crowd-fund the anti-trust lawsuit to override those terms?
- lelandbatey 10y ago
  People have tried to just "code around" these centralization issues, but Facebook/Google have a lot of developers that can put a lot of time into identifying/rate-limiting/blocking unauthorized use of their API's. Nothing has been able to get past the "but does it work almost all the time" barrier that those engineering efforts put in the way to technically circumventing centralizaiton.

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago

Geographically, like a phone network. Then mandate interoperability with an open standard, like a phone network.

Chaebixi 10y ago
> Geographically, like a phone network. I don't think that makes much sense for breaking up something like Facebook. Unlike a phone network, Facebook's service is not rooted in geography. Yes, it's users have homes and geographic locations, but those are just arbitrary account attributes, just like their name or if they like the Denver Broncos. You might as well have one post-breakup company start out with all the A-M accounts and the other the N-Z accounts. If you had to divide up the users between N successor companies, I'd probably be best to do it based on friend-graph connectivity, with mandated interoperability between them. That might make the successors sticky enough to survive.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  There's a high correlation between geography and social graph, while the part of the social graph that gets "cut" will give an incentive to make interoperability work, as people will care about it. So your premise is true(ish), but the conclusion can't be drawn from it (and your comparison falls apart) because we don't need strict dependency on geography, only a (relatively strong) correlation.

dane-pgp 10y ago

Just as Microsoft was required to open up its Win32 APIs, one possible remedy here would be for Facebook to be forced to allow users to receive/make posts from/to their Facebook friends on any competing site, and allow people to log into those competing sites using their Facebook accounts (using a single sign-on system like OpenID Connect / OAuth 2.0). That way each competitor could offer its own interface and algorithm for filtering people's feeds, and show their own ads (or offer a competing business model). If users opted to have their posts on the competing site automatically sent to Facebook (so their Facebook-only friends could still see them) then Facebook would be free to data-mine those posts still. The next question is, could someone code a browser extension or other tool which makes this possible without needing any changes from Facebook's side? If it would break the Facebook terms of service, would someone crowd-fund the anti-trust lawsuit to override those terms?

lelandbatey 10y ago
People have tried to just "code around" these centralization issues, but Facebook/Google have a lot of developers that can put a lot of time into identifying/rate-limiting/blocking unauthorized use of their API's. Nothing has been able to get past the "but does it work almost all the time" barrier that those engineering efforts put in the way to technically circumventing centralizaiton.