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It seems like it would be a disaster to break up Facebook. You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off

It seems like it would be a disaster to break up Facebook. You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly.

huac 9y ago
but they can break out instagram/whatsapp
heurist 9y ago
They could be the global distributor for individual companies operating different regions, like a franchise but without regional providers existing under one corporate umbrella. That could open the market to competing distributors and regional operators. Unlikely and less efficient but that could be one way to handle it.
- king07828 9y ago
  Split it into Facebook back-end, Facebook Red, FB Green, and FB Blue. FB back-end is the current back-end. The Red, Green, and Blue are separate front end that all have equal access to the back-end so a user of FB Red can friend a user of FB Blue. FB Red, Blue, and Green compete with each other on prices they charge to advertisers and can change their user interface to compete for users. Any user can use any one of FB R, G, or B and to get full access, but with their preferred UI
taurath 9y ago
That's a good point - how could one even break it up? It depends on the network effect to get revenue from the ad platform. Maybe all the acquisitions or something - it's all so intertwined. Instead of it being a cable company, its more like "TV" as a whole.
losteric 9y ago
But we could have an open social network that operates outside a single company... building on the foundational principles of the internet. These "social networks" exist because it's still too hard to setup and manage a personal website, and those sites lack the interactiveness of FB. Imagine if everyone had their own 1-click website with glorified RSS feeds, webrtc-based chat, access control, media sharing, and standard APIs for 3p apps - plus, perhaps, a web-of-trust or some other mechanism for validating identity. All rolled into standardized APIs backed by large competitors of FB (perhaps MS/Goog/etc?). If the ISP monopolies can be broken, perhaps all that could be hosted on a little Android-like box connected to a home ISP - your little social box, connecting you to every human on earth... always online, it caches messages from friends when your phone looses signal, p2p shares videos from friends so you can watch high quality with no load time, and automatically curates content from connected feeds (perhaps with some on-board ML). No ads, no big brother, for pennies a month. I know Google's ad revenue is getting eaten by FB - perhaps they would profit from something like this. Cap FB at the knees by giving people FB's functionality without the corporate data-mining/lock-in, and reap ad revenue from the increased relevance of el Goog's search. There are similar benefits to shops, manufacturers, services, bands, etc all too. Standard information/inventory protocols, and a review system connected to those individual personal identities, could undermine Yelp and even AMZN. I've been thinking about this quite a bit and I think it's mostly a matter of execution. There is prior art covering all of the pieces, but no one has assembled all the pieces into a compelling product (think: iPod vs prior mp3 players, FB versus the myriad of ex-competitors)... hard but tractable with the right support.
- nradov 9y ago
  The vast majority of Facebook users don't want to install and maintain a home server. A distributed social network will never take off if it requires users to purchase another dedicated piece of hardware.
  - tboughen 9y ago
    Make it run on as a part of a distributed cloud computing service on a device that consumers are paid to install and keep. Maybe its a radiator/secondary water heater too. The payment is for reduced datacentre cooling expense.
  - losteric 9y ago
    That's the point: They don't have to! If you have protocols and software that lets someone run a social OS on their personal hardware and connected to the global network, then the walls have been broken. Any 3rd party can integrate or offer hosting. You could also take the rabbit hole of battery improvements leading to running this on mobile devices or sending data through a distributed p2p network instead of personal HW. None of those are orthogonal to the proposal.
- mahyarm 9y ago
  It turns into email with all of it's problems. And everyone will just use a gmail equivalent or whatever else they signed up with 15 years ago anyway.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- skybrian 9y ago
  The biggest issue is what the rules are and how that affects the user interface. Using email, the rule is that if someone sends you something, you own it; they could ask you to do delete it, but you can refuse. Facebook and other social networks let you edit and delete posts. Snapchat became big because you can send pictures that are automatically deleted after you view them. Sure, you can reimplement basic message exchange in a decentralized way, but figuring out how to enforce the same rules in a decentralized system is nontrivial.
Eridrus 9y ago
It doesn't necessarily need to be broken up, but if you wanted to weaken Facebook you could mandate that they made their APIs open so that social networks that wanted to spring up would be able to automatically show you content from Facebook in their UI.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  That's a good one. I'm not sure how enforceable that would be, but in principle that'd be beneficial for competition. There are a multitude of problems, like privacy concerns and the fact that FB would have no incentive to keep the API very up to date or reliable, but I wonder if something like that could work.
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    I guess the Microsoft Office anti-trust rulings should be instructive here. Their monopoly is effectively broken in the sense that you can read Office documents in other software, but that hasn't really killed their business; though it did make the transition to Google Docs easier for me.
    - jordanb 9y ago
      I'd argue that the monopoly action against Microsoft was an unqualified success, even if the consent decree ended up being weak tea. Before the antitrust action Microsoft was knifing the baby and cutting off the air supply whenever anyone threatened their hegemony. Afterwards, a million little inroads were made that ended up making their monopoly irrelevant. In fact the continued existence of Apple is a product of the antitrust action. Bill Gates struck the deal with Jobs in order to keep Apple alive as a "showcase competitor." If Gates didn't feel the need to keep up appearances he would have crushed Apple by ending the Office port.
      - Eridrus 9y ago
        The anti-trust action certainly changed Microsoft, and Microsoft has lost it's Monopoly power, I'm just not sure how closely those two are linked and what the lessons to learn are. I feel like the thing that really hurt Microsoft the most was the web, which made the OS far less relevant and has largely been their downfall. The failure of the mobile web seems to be largely why mobile OSs do matter. Clearly, without the anti-trust ruling Microsoft was doing all it could to make the web proprietary, but the web wasn't pre-ordained to happen, and if it hadn't we might still be locked into Windows, regardless of what the anti-trust authorities did. Or maybe we'd be largely where we are today with the web having never happened and the focus shifting to mobile anyway. And to look at Office, I feel like the real downfall of the network effects of Office was when PDF readers became ubiquitous and embedded in browsers, so that you could export a PDF from whatever editor you were using and send it to everyone and expect that they could read it.
ouid 9y ago
I don't even think it's clear that it would be a disaster to completely outlaw facebook.
- tedunangst 9y ago
  How would you write such legislation that doesn't also outlaw Reddit?
  - nothrabannosir 9y ago
    You'd write "Facebook".
    - tedunangst 9y ago
      Pesky Constitution always getting in the way.
      - rconti 9y ago
        Calling Facebook a religion is a bit much
        lwf 9y ago
        OP was referring to freedom of speech, I assume?
        tedunangst 9y ago
        No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
        lmm 9y ago
        Bills of Attainder were against humans. Limited liability corporations exist by consent of the state and the state has no obligation to grant them new charters or continued use of their existing one. Facebook could continue operating as a partnership - that would be much harder to stop - but they might not want to given the liability implications.
Sir_Substance 9y ago
>You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly. Of course you can, you just need to have standardized protocols. You and I can use any email provider we like, your client can use exchange to talk to it's server and mine can use a version of POP from the 80's and it /doesn't matter/ because the servers talk over a standardized protocol. Facebook and Google used to support this. There was once a time when Facebook and Google Plus both had XMPP gateways for their real time chat traffic, which meant you could send a message from Google Plus to Facebook Messenger with no problems. They shut it down because they both have a strong incentive to push vendor lock-in. They've been so successful that you've started to forget that life could ever be otherwise. Take a look at projects like diaspora and mastodon. There's nothing stopping Facebook from reaching out to these projects and working with them to incorporate Facebook nodes into their network using the same protocol. But it'll never happen, because Facebook needs the corral nice and enclosed before they can start tagging you and selling you off.
- likpok 9y ago
  There's a real engineering cost to federation. Your email example is a good one, I think. But digging a little deeper, what's the last major feature that got added to email? For example, we've been trying to get encryption in email for longer than WhatsApp has ever existed. WhatsApp rolled out encryption for everyone on its network last year. That's a billion people! I'd be surprised if 100 thousand people regularly used encrypted email, and even fewer used effectively encrypted email. Social networks have been adding lots of features over the years to compete with each other. Realistically I think that fractured platforms would struggle to catch on because each provider would prioritize different features. Since social networking grows in utility superlinearly with the connectivity with your friends, features get less useful and the whole thing stagnates. Basically: Microsoft Outlook is a social network of the kind you envision. Even Outlook for Mac versus Outlook for Windows is a sharp divide in terms of features! Do you think that people would use social networks if they looked like Outlook?
  - Sir_Substance 9y ago
brightball 9y ago
They just need one viable competitor. That's the crux of it. They need something on the other side of the "or" in "Uses Facebook or ..." They do their best to buy anybody that sneaks in there.
- anth1988 9y ago
  > They just need one viable competitor I'm not convinced that is sufficient. Facebook at 80% isn't really any different than facebook at 99, or whatever. Google has a viable competitor in Bing, but google still dominates search to a massive degree.
  - brightball 9y ago
    I don't disagree, but it's more like having a viable alternative in the background that gets relatively popular and stable. As long as it's there, then if there's every a major ball drop on Facebook's part that makes a lot of people want to switch to something else they'll have somewhere to go. When people moved to Facebook from MySpace it was driven by a lot of issues with MySpace that pushed people away. Something like this past year's election with all of the controversy over how the trending news was handled could have promoted a movement of "Enough, I'm done. Going to X." Enough "me too's" and you start a trend. A lot of that happened with Instagram. People wanted a place they could go free of political rants and Instagram largely provided that...and Facebook owns them. You've seen a lot of "quitting Facebook" trends this year and I believe that it's largely a result of lack of a viable alternative.
jdavis703 9y ago
Sure you can break Facebook up without destroying the Facebook.com social network. Facebook's dev tools and infrastructure (including Oculus) is spun off into a developer tools focused company. Facebook advertising is spun off into a separate "ad agency." Facebook.com can be this new ad agency's launch customer, but they're free to add their ads to other sites such as Twitter. Instagram and Whatsapp are spun off into separate entities.
anth1988 9y ago
Short term pain for the longer term goal of not having a few conglomerates dominating the tech sector. Worth it.

huac 9y ago

but they can break out instagram/whatsapp

heurist 9y ago

They could be the global distributor for individual companies operating different regions, like a franchise but without regional providers existing under one corporate umbrella. That could open the market to competing distributors and regional operators. Unlikely and less efficient but that could be one way to handle it.

king07828 9y ago
Split it into Facebook back-end, Facebook Red, FB Green, and FB Blue. FB back-end is the current back-end. The Red, Green, and Blue are separate front end that all have equal access to the back-end so a user of FB Red can friend a user of FB Blue. FB Red, Blue, and Green compete with each other on prices they charge to advertisers and can change their user interface to compete for users. Any user can use any one of FB R, G, or B and to get full access, but with their preferred UI

taurath 9y ago

That's a good point - how could one even break it up? It depends on the network effect to get revenue from the ad platform. Maybe all the acquisitions or something - it's all so intertwined. Instead of it being a cable company, its more like "TV" as a whole.

losteric 9y ago

But we could have an open social network that operates outside a single company... building on the foundational principles of the internet. These "social networks" exist because it's still too hard to setup and manage a personal website, and those sites lack the interactiveness of FB. Imagine if everyone had their own 1-click website with glorified RSS feeds, webrtc-based chat, access control, media sharing, and standard APIs for 3p apps - plus, perhaps, a web-of-trust or some other mechanism for validating identity. All rolled into standardized APIs backed by large competitors of FB (perhaps MS/Goog/etc?). If the ISP monopolies can be broken, perhaps all that could be hosted on a little Android-like box connected to a home ISP - your little social box, connecting you to every human on earth... always online, it caches messages from friends when your phone looses signal, p2p shares videos from friends so you can watch high quality with no load time, and automatically curates content from connected feeds (perhaps with some on-board ML). No ads, no big brother, for pennies a month. I know Google's ad revenue is getting eaten by FB - perhaps they would profit from something like this. Cap FB at the knees by giving people FB's functionality without the corporate data-mining/lock-in, and reap ad revenue from the increased relevance of el Goog's search. There are similar benefits to shops, manufacturers, services, bands, etc all too. Standard information/inventory protocols, and a review system connected to those individual personal identities, could undermine Yelp and even AMZN. I've been thinking about this quite a bit and I think it's mostly a matter of execution. There is prior art covering all of the pieces, but no one has assembled all the pieces into a compelling product (think: iPod vs prior mp3 players, FB versus the myriad of ex-competitors)... hard but tractable with the right support.

nradov 9y ago
The vast majority of Facebook users don't want to install and maintain a home server. A distributed social network will never take off if it requires users to purchase another dedicated piece of hardware.
- tboughen 9y ago
  Make it run on as a part of a distributed cloud computing service on a device that consumers are paid to install and keep. Maybe its a radiator/secondary water heater too. The payment is for reduced datacentre cooling expense.
- losteric 9y ago
  That's the point: They don't have to! If you have protocols and software that lets someone run a social OS on their personal hardware and connected to the global network, then the walls have been broken. Any 3rd party can integrate or offer hosting. You could also take the rabbit hole of battery improvements leading to running this on mobile devices or sending data through a distributed p2p network instead of personal HW. None of those are orthogonal to the proposal.
mahyarm 9y ago
It turns into email with all of it's problems. And everyone will just use a gmail equivalent or whatever else they signed up with 15 years ago anyway.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
skybrian 9y ago
The biggest issue is what the rules are and how that affects the user interface. Using email, the rule is that if someone sends you something, you own it; they could ask you to do delete it, but you can refuse. Facebook and other social networks let you edit and delete posts. Snapchat became big because you can send pictures that are automatically deleted after you view them. Sure, you can reimplement basic message exchange in a decentralized way, but figuring out how to enforce the same rules in a decentralized system is nontrivial.

Eridrus 9y ago

It doesn't necessarily need to be broken up, but if you wanted to weaken Facebook you could mandate that they made their APIs open so that social networks that wanted to spring up would be able to automatically show you content from Facebook in their UI.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
That's a good one. I'm not sure how enforceable that would be, but in principle that'd be beneficial for competition. There are a multitude of problems, like privacy concerns and the fact that FB would have no incentive to keep the API very up to date or reliable, but I wonder if something like that could work.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  I guess the Microsoft Office anti-trust rulings should be instructive here. Their monopoly is effectively broken in the sense that you can read Office documents in other software, but that hasn't really killed their business; though it did make the transition to Google Docs easier for me.
  - jordanb 9y ago
    I'd argue that the monopoly action against Microsoft was an unqualified success, even if the consent decree ended up being weak tea. Before the antitrust action Microsoft was knifing the baby and cutting off the air supply whenever anyone threatened their hegemony. Afterwards, a million little inroads were made that ended up making their monopoly irrelevant. In fact the continued existence of Apple is a product of the antitrust action. Bill Gates struck the deal with Jobs in order to keep Apple alive as a "showcase competitor." If Gates didn't feel the need to keep up appearances he would have crushed Apple by ending the Office port.
    - Eridrus 9y ago
      The anti-trust action certainly changed Microsoft, and Microsoft has lost it's Monopoly power, I'm just not sure how closely those two are linked and what the lessons to learn are. I feel like the thing that really hurt Microsoft the most was the web, which made the OS far less relevant and has largely been their downfall. The failure of the mobile web seems to be largely why mobile OSs do matter. Clearly, without the anti-trust ruling Microsoft was doing all it could to make the web proprietary, but the web wasn't pre-ordained to happen, and if it hadn't we might still be locked into Windows, regardless of what the anti-trust authorities did. Or maybe we'd be largely where we are today with the web having never happened and the focus shifting to mobile anyway. And to look at Office, I feel like the real downfall of the network effects of Office was when PDF readers became ubiquitous and embedded in browsers, so that you could export a PDF from whatever editor you were using and send it to everyone and expect that they could read it.

ouid 9y ago

I don't even think it's clear that it would be a disaster to completely outlaw facebook.

tedunangst 9y ago
How would you write such legislation that doesn't also outlaw Reddit?
- nothrabannosir 9y ago
  You'd write "Facebook".
  - tedunangst 9y ago
    Pesky Constitution always getting in the way.
    - rconti 9y ago
      Calling Facebook a religion is a bit much
      - lwf 9y ago
        OP was referring to freedom of speech, I assume?
        tedunangst 9y ago
        No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
        lmm 9y ago
        Bills of Attainder were against humans. Limited liability corporations exist by consent of the state and the state has no obligation to grant them new charters or continued use of their existing one. Facebook could continue operating as a partnership - that would be much harder to stop - but they might not want to given the liability implications.

Sir_Substance 9y ago

>You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly. Of course you can, you just need to have standardized protocols. You and I can use any email provider we like, your client can use exchange to talk to it's server and mine can use a version of POP from the 80's and it /doesn't matter/ because the servers talk over a standardized protocol. Facebook and Google used to support this. There was once a time when Facebook and Google Plus both had XMPP gateways for their real time chat traffic, which meant you could send a message from Google Plus to Facebook Messenger with no problems. They shut it down because they both have a strong incentive to push vendor lock-in. They've been so successful that you've started to forget that life could ever be otherwise. Take a look at projects like diaspora and mastodon. There's nothing stopping Facebook from reaching out to these projects and working with them to incorporate Facebook nodes into their network using the same protocol. But it'll never happen, because Facebook needs the corral nice and enclosed before they can start tagging you and selling you off.

likpok 9y ago
There's a real engineering cost to federation. Your email example is a good one, I think. But digging a little deeper, what's the last major feature that got added to email? For example, we've been trying to get encryption in email for longer than WhatsApp has ever existed. WhatsApp rolled out encryption for everyone on its network last year. That's a billion people! I'd be surprised if 100 thousand people regularly used encrypted email, and even fewer used effectively encrypted email. Social networks have been adding lots of features over the years to compete with each other. Realistically I think that fractured platforms would struggle to catch on because each provider would prioritize different features. Since social networking grows in utility superlinearly with the connectivity with your friends, features get less useful and the whole thing stagnates. Basically: Microsoft Outlook is a social network of the kind you envision. Even Outlook for Mac versus Outlook for Windows is a sharp divide in terms of features! Do you think that people would use social networks if they looked like Outlook?
- Sir_Substance 9y ago

brightball 9y ago

They just need one viable competitor. That's the crux of it. They need something on the other side of the "or" in "Uses Facebook or ..." They do their best to buy anybody that sneaks in there.

anth1988 9y ago
> They just need one viable competitor I'm not convinced that is sufficient. Facebook at 80% isn't really any different than facebook at 99, or whatever. Google has a viable competitor in Bing, but google still dominates search to a massive degree.
- brightball 9y ago
  I don't disagree, but it's more like having a viable alternative in the background that gets relatively popular and stable. As long as it's there, then if there's every a major ball drop on Facebook's part that makes a lot of people want to switch to something else they'll have somewhere to go. When people moved to Facebook from MySpace it was driven by a lot of issues with MySpace that pushed people away. Something like this past year's election with all of the controversy over how the trending news was handled could have promoted a movement of "Enough, I'm done. Going to X." Enough "me too's" and you start a trend. A lot of that happened with Instagram. People wanted a place they could go free of political rants and Instagram largely provided that...and Facebook owns them. You've seen a lot of "quitting Facebook" trends this year and I believe that it's largely a result of lack of a viable alternative.

jdavis703 9y ago

Sure you can break Facebook up without destroying the Facebook.com social network. Facebook's dev tools and infrastructure (including Oculus) is spun off into a developer tools focused company. Facebook advertising is spun off into a separate "ad agency." Facebook.com can be this new ad agency's launch customer, but they're free to add their ads to other sites such as Twitter. Instagram and Whatsapp are spun off into separate entities.

anth1988 9y ago

Short term pain for the longer term goal of not having a few conglomerates dominating the tech sector. Worth it.