4 ms·
Why do we need to break up FB? That makes no sense to me. In previous antitrust cases, there was always the economic argument (to help out up-and-coming competi
by dvt 9y ago
Why do we need to break up FB? That makes no sense to me. In previous antitrust cases, there was always the economic argument (to help out up-and-coming competitors or to prevent price gouging). But Snapchat clearly showed that new players can compete.
Are we breaking them up because they have "too much information"? What does that even mean? A move like that would be beyond unprecedented.
- volgo 9y agoThe point for government to breakup anything is to prevent monopoly. NYTimes is far from a monopoly - there are tons of news site with more traffic. But there's no competitor that comes close to Facebook
- dvt 9y agoAnd the purpose of preventing a monopoly is, yet again, generally an economic one: to prevent price gouging or help out smaller competitors. Neither of those applies to FB.
- volgo 9y agoIt could be a monopoly on ideology too. There's a precedent for this. Back in the early days of broadcasting, NBC was broken up into NBC + ABC for having too much control of public discourse
- dvt 9y agoThis is simply not true. It was an economic argument[1]. Newer & smaller radio stations could not compete. And if anyone should be broken up for monopolizing online ad revenue, it should probably be Google (Alphabet). [1] http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7045&context=penn_law_review http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...