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How to tame the tech titans

194 points by kawera 9y ago

shaqbert 9y ago
If they are smart, they will do some self regulation to preempt the government from coming in. Giving more transparency and empowerment to the users, and explaining a little more what they are doing, and why they are doing it, would go a long way.
pqh 9y ago
I mostly agree with the points leading up to the suggestion of mandatory data sharing. I'm still mulling that over. But I do agree that just breaking up Google, for example, wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. Of all the tech giants, I think Google is still doing the most good in terms of investing in innovation. Their research teams are varied and doing the fantastic. Disclaimer: I don't work there and forewent an offer to network my way in.
billysielu 9y ago
I'm not convinced there's a problem here that needs to be solved. "The dominance of Google, Facebook and Amazon is bad for consumers and competition" ... really?? - Amazon provides good products and services at good prices and that's why they're successful. Some things are cheaper locally, some things aren't. I buy loads of stuff from Amazon and don't want that to change. - Google, privacy is a concern, but their search engine is extremely useful, and gmail, and chrome, etc. I rely on Chrome, and the search engine, as long as they're the best at what they do I'm happy to continue using them. - Facebook, is still the most widely used (and that makes it the best) social network. I think Facebook is going to die a natural death - especially when people realize how difficult it is to actually delete their content. It's still the easiest way to run a group, as most people are already on Facebook. I run a local residents group on Facebook and am happy to continue using Facebook for that. I don't use it for personal stuff anymore because everyone's too political, the risk isn't worth the reward. My actual friends use a WhatsApp group to chat with each other, that's a good service I want to keep using. Facebook doesn't belong in the same list as Amazon and Google - because tbh Facebook could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn't affect very much at all.
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  "The dominance of Google, Facebook and Amazon is bad for consumers and competition" ... really?? Yes, really. The existence of monopoly or significantly market-dominating providers is definitionally a failure of competition. I suppose you could argue about whether or not a competitive market is good, but I'm pretty sure it is.
  - billysielu 9y ago
    I reacted more to the word 'consumers' than 'competition' as the competition argument comes back around to what's best for consumers anyway. So I put my consumer hat on and pondered what would I rather have: - The current situation - Intervention And I concluded I quite like the current situation, these companies provide meaningful benefits to me. If I put my tin foil hat on, it seems quite obvious that 'bad for consumers' is what someone wants you to think, but it isn't entirely true.
    - wavefunction 9y ago
      >If I put my tin foil hat on, it seems quite obvious that 'bad for consumers' is what someone wants you to think, but it isn't entirely true. Is putting your tinfoil hat on really a good way to get to the truth of any subject? And you've concluded that because you prefer the current situation the situation faced by society or consumers is the same. And that's really just your opinion. My opinion, for example, is that Amazon has obviously operated maliciously in numerous examples. Not calling 911 when their employee was suffering from the heat of its facility, leading to his death. Encouraging individuals to sell (generate markets) on the Amazon network then under-cutting or pushing out that small seller when there's revenue to be earned instead by Amazon. Encouraging waste and flippant purchases that are fulfilled in an inefficient and non-evironmentally friendly manner. Amazon is Walmart, online. And neither organizations present long-term benefits to society, in my opinion.
    - CodeCube 9y ago
      Unfortunately, you may be happy with Amazon, but there's loads of examples of where this is going wrong for consumers. From issues with counterfit products (see the post recently about the guy who unknowingly was "charged" with import fraud and denied privileged flight status due to an Amazon order), to them taking advantage of the fact that people assume they're the cheapest price (they aren't always), to "prime shipping" becoming more and more of a thing you can't depend on (late shipments ... all the time). Maybe you live in an area that Amazon gives higher priority to, maybe you live closer to a shipping center than I do, maybe the things you tend to order tend to be highly stocked in their warehouses ... I don't know, but the more time passes, the more Amazon frustrates me personally as a consumer, and others as well based on articles being written and social media chatter; which is frustrating, because the average national retail store is terrible (and they already killed all the mom n pop stores), and having to maintain accounts on lots of smaller online retailers is a pain (not to mention lax security can lead to stolen credit cards, etc). So obviously, in some ways, I agree with you because Amazon does provide benefits ... they just need to not be the only viable player in the online space.
crdoconnor 9y ago
For Google you could separate the search index from the rest of the company, start regulating it as a public utility and force them to open up its APIs to startups. At this point it's a little hard to argue that a plucky young startup can come along and build a competing index at the same scale. The amount of power alone needed to maintain it is staggering.
- godelmachine 9y ago
  Regulating would only diminish its QoS, methinks. Algorithms improve at such fast scale that no one person has complete knowledge about it. Regulating it may drive the regulators mad.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    Are you arguing that setting up QoS metrics for a search engine index is intrinsically hard in the way that monitoring the safe running of a nuclear power plant or an air traffic control system is not? I think maintaining a search index is intrinsically hard - much like maintaining a nuclear power plant. I don't think monitoring a search index is though. I'm also skeptical of the notion that the engineering of the search index has changed fundamentally in the last 5 years. Realistically Google is not under much competitive pressure any more.
cletus 9y ago
Ugh, The Economist. > However, the barriers to entry are rising. Largely irrelevant. Antritrust doesn't exist to protect you from competition. It exists to protect you from unfair practices resulting in market dominance (typically monopolies). There's a difference. > If this trend runs its course, consumers will suffer as the tech industry becomes less vibrant Not every surface is a slipper slope. More to the point, we're now talking about what might happen rather than what is happening? > Less money will go into startups Absolutely no evidence of that yet. In fact I'd argue there's still too much sloshing around the tech industry. But that's fine. If "sophisticatd" investors want to lose their collective shirts on pets.com or whatever, go for it. > The European Commission has accused Google of using control of Android, its mobile operating system, to give its own apps a leg up. I've never understood the complaints about Android for two reasons: 1. Consumers have other options (mainly iOS); and 2. Apple isn't held to the same standard. The only reason Google seems to be is that they let third-party manufacturers use their stuff at all. Apple doesn't. So Google gets raked over the anti-competitive coals? WTF? It's also worth nothing that Android consists of two principal parts: 1. The open source part, which anyone can do anything with (license permitting); and 2. The Google apps and Android trademark, which come with constraints. Amazon has gone the route of using (1) for their Fire line. Samsung is in camp (2). The point here is you don't have to use (2). People are capable of writing their own apps. Well, let me clarify. They should be but they aren't. Samsung apps in particular are terrible. That's not Google's fault. That's Samsung's. > Facebook keeps buying firms which could one day lure users away Isn't this a sign that their alleged market dominance is fragile? Honestly, this whole piece seems like a giant FUD exercise in "What if..."
- yoz-y 9y ago
  > Antritrust doesn't exist to protect you from competition. Depends on which antitrust you are talking about. European regulators are generally interested in keeping the market competitive. In the US they give bigger priority to effect on the end user. So in US a single monopoly which does not hike prices is fine whereas in the EU it is not. This is also why Google was hit in the US over Android and search (they stifled the competition, while giving arguably better experience to the users) and Apple was hit in the US over e-books (they hiked the prices while having a puny market share). Problem with Android in EU is mostly that without Google services it is not particularly useful as the alternatives are pretty bad. Google Maps has only a few very local competitors for example, DDG local search is pretty terrible and so on.
daviddumenil 9y ago
A gentle contradiction in the article: "a full-scale break-up would cripple the platforms’ economies of scale" but later: "Trustbusters should scrutinise mergers to gauge whether a deal is likely to neutralise a potential long-term threat" There also seems to be plenty of middle ground there. Like forcing a sell-off of Waze and Instagram without breaking up the whole parent company.
smg 9y ago
I am surprised there has not been an antitrust case against Google and Facebook. Google is definitely abusing the monopoly position it has in search. The claim that any user can switch to Bing by just typing in a different URL is ridiculous. The remedy that the original article suggest is right on point. The way search systems work these days is by learning from how users interact with them. Google's market share ensures that it will always have access to more tail queries and user's intent while asking them. Building a better search engines than Google is no longer about hiring engineers or investing in data centers, it is about having access to the data that Google has on searches. Just like the DOJ forced Microsoft to document and provide API's that were being used by IE and Office to all software companies, a case today that forces Google to share all the data that it collects on searches would help break its monopoly.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  > The claim that any user can switch to Bing by just typing in a different URL is ridiculous. It's not though; people have a choice in this case, not so when it comes to e.g. ISPs or cell phone operators.
  - Zhyl 9y ago
    And more people seem [0] to be exercising that choice. [0]https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
- wbl 9y ago
  And that makes Google noticeably worse then it used to be for many queries.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    Right, so how much of a moat is that data really?
- 9y ago
zerostar07 9y ago
Easy: cut their government - bodyguard
jstewartmobile 9y ago
So, we get a prescription article from the industry that tech has struck the hardest: print journalism. And their prescription? Regulation! Not much better than placebo if you ask me. US government is so venal. Only reason Europe is on the war path is that the offenders aren't European companies. With the amount of cash the big 4/5/6 have on hand, they'll eventually neuter and/or bypass the European regulators as well. I don't know about Amazon, but with the amount of compute power lying around today, a lot of what Google and Facebook do could probably done just as well--if not better--through a distributed model. Sometimes I wonder if NAT and all of the extraneous junk in IPv6 were just the incumbents' way of salting the ground?
dalbasal 9y ago
Apple is a bit of a herring here. Apple had a very unusual strategy of (a) not pursuing market share and (b) not building moats. This was part of their quirkiness as a tech giant. The truth is that they are far more exposed to competitive pressures, and their own future performance than others. IE, the ipod had little or no moat. OSX never had 10% market share. iOS has tsomewhat of a platform moat, but they left the high volume segment of the market to Google. They have some network-effect-moats like facetime built in, but it doesn't add up to a persistent dominance. Facetime still needs to be better than whatsapp and skype on iphones to maintain popularity. In all their major product lines, the current competition could really hurt them if Apple underperform for one or two generations. iOS, OSX, itunes... Few other companies think like this. IE maintained dominance (despite antitrust) for a long time.It wasn't untill Firefox & Chrome broke their monopoly that browsers/www started advancing again. They survived bad operating systems, that no one wanted (Vista), extending XP by 5+ years past its use by date. Amazon dominate online selling. They had a patent on remembering your CC number, a mf patent! ...just to turn past market share into future market share. The infrastructure services are platforms, with lock in. Google is all about 100% market share, all about lock in. All about accumulating data so that they have FB has all the people and all the sites (FB tracking pixel). They have the best ad-targetting platorm for this reason. All the people regsitered. Detailed data on their FB dataset. Vast off-platform collected from advertiser sites (all the advertisers). I agree that part of the FB problem is that they aren't treated like news media, and are exempt from journalistic norms. But, this is also a red herring. Their monopoly is a problem regardless. Many of their acquisitions are defensive, buying potential competition. Antitrust needs a total re-build from the ground up. It's not about price fixing anymore. It's about taking up all the space so that no one else can play. I don't think that the standards of antitrust are any good right now. You have to prve price fixing, unfair competition or some other hard to prove and potentially irelevant activities. I think antitrust has to be preventive. It needs to make sure there is ample room in a market for innovation, and/or regulate all the giants by default. Got a dataset that includes all the people in a country? Maybe that should be a public dataset.
- mercutio2 9y ago
  Apple would only be a red herring if the article in question was talking in any way about Apple! It’s not, it’s subtitle specifies it’s referring to Google, Facebook, and Amazon. In fact, Apple is mentioned only once in the article, in a sentence saying “Apple is to be admired for making things people want to buy”. Pedantry about RTFA aside, I generally agree with your points, Apple has chosen a business model that makes it relatively unlikely to receive serious anti-trust scrutiny!
pg_bot 9y ago
I'm still surprised that no one has proposed a protocol to replace Facebook / Twitter. If a real time RSS system existed then both of those companies don't really need to exist. In fact, I think you could mock up a service just using SMTP that would work exactly as both those companies do today.
- dude01 9y ago
  The darn network effects keep people on the existing services and off of new ones. There have been protocols, like https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/ (newer) and https://xmpp.org/ https://xmpp.org/ (older) . If Facebook and Twitter were forced to interoperate with any of these other protocols then you could have a gradual migration. That's why you sure won't see that happen!
- davidcbc 9y ago
  The problem is you're trying to solve a problem that most Facebook users don't care about. The hurdles to replacing Facebook or Twitter aren't technical, they are social. The killer feature of any social network is people using it.
- zeveb 9y ago
  > I'm still surprised that no one has proposed a protocol to replace Facebook / Twitter. Isn't that what WebSub[0] (formerly PubSubHubbub) is for? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
- xj9 9y ago
  like ActivityPub? or OStstus? https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org https://pleroma.social/ https://pleroma.social/
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  The tech to do what Facebook does (more or less) is easy. The issue is with the network. It's why most of the "Facebook competitors" died. What good is having the ability to receive feeds like that if no one I'm interested is broadcasting?
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
We CAN break them up. Facebook can be broken up into a federated network. Split Google into YouTube, Hangouts, Cloud, and The Rest. Force any integrations between these to be done with open protocols anyone can implement.
- beisner 9y ago
  In your example, The Rest would still be the vast majority of the company.
- neolefty 9y ago
  Search and ads are the big ones. And you can't really split any part of the company off from ads because that's revenue. So if you're going to split Google, the only way I can see it working is a bilateral (or multilateral) split, like the AT&T breakup into the Baby Bells. Each part would get search and ads and maybe the existing YouTube corpus, ??? Discussion question: How did the AT&T breakup work out in the long run? (Genuinely curious, not trying to be snarky.)
  - theandrewbailey 9y ago
    In the long run, tech changed the landscape so much that the breakup was ultimately a success. I'm skeptical that cell phones would be as ubiquitous and cheap as they are if it didn't. Long distance calling (a big deal back then) was killed by tech and competition at the same time.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
      Other things like answering machines probably would not have happened, too. I wasn't around back then but as I understand it you were only allowed to connect Ma Bell's telephones to your telephone line and Bell's goons would break in and rip out unapproved telephone equipment.
      - theandrewbailey 9y ago
        Third party devices were "legalized" by the Carterfone decision in the 1950s, long before the breakup. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/carterfone-40-years/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/carterfone-40-ye...
chx 9y ago
I am surprised my esteemed colleagues haven't jumped on > Immunity to content liability must go, too. This would be quite a hurdle to quite a few sites if it applied across the board. To begin with, this site. Reddit. Etc.
- zeveb 9y ago
  Yeah, that really worries me. OTOH, it's probably easier for a small company to police its users than a very very large one, so maybe it'd actually be an advantage for smaller competitors? I think that the real answer is to mandate open protocols. The government has a real role in determining weights & measures used in trade (which it's rather shamefully ignored: I should be able to order a small, medium or large coffee or pizza anywhere in the country and get the exact same size); that same role could be legitimately used to describe exactly the right (though not the sole) formats which must be supported by a service. E.g., the State could mandate that Facebook provide users a well-supported way to publish to or read from RSS, or for Spotify, Pandora, Google Play Music, Amazon Prime & iTunes to share music. There is a danger there, in that it's not exactly well-defined 'share music' means (are those services even comparable? what about some future service with a revolutionary new model?), but I think that it should be doable.
- WovenTales 9y ago
  On the one hand, definitely worrisome when taking into account the alternative sites. On the other, it's in a paragraph about legal exceptions, so I'm wondering if the article's saying that Facebook and such get more people looking the other way, and that any smaller competitors would get jumped on disproportionally; just looking at music, YouTube doesn't seem to be suffering too greatly from everyone uploading recordings, while I can easily see a small upstart getting sued into oblivion for a fraction of the infringement. Maybe some of that is that they can point to their algorithms as mitigation, but, A, that gets into proprietary secrets that would be key to even existing clashing with anti-trust laws, and B, there's still plenty of eight-year-old music videos that they somehow haven't gotten around to checking.
CurtMonash 9y ago
I posted a few minutes ago about how chaotic privacy-related public policy is around the world. http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/08/privacy-data-use-gap-theory/ http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/08/privacy-data-use-gap-theory/ This article is another wrinkle yet.
alvil 9y ago
At first, stop calling them titans.
titzer 9y ago
FTA: > The tricky task for policymakers is to restrain them without unduly stifling innovation. This suggests a profound lack of understanding of the power imbalance between the Tech Giants(TM) and the rest of the world. The fact that these big companies operate what amounts to mini-surveillance states and face little to no scrutiny about it, and this is not even mentioned in the article, is proof this person has not thought deeply about this problem. The additional fact that these huge Titans dominate vast monocultures puts us all at risk of catastrophic failure or the vulnerability of cyber attack and should scare the bejesus out of policymakers, militaries, and agencies tasked with securing national infrastructure. People need to think harder about how bad it would be if, e.g. Apple or Google actually _were_ evil, or were co-opted into evil overnight. Or what if they were just evil _to you_. Some of these companies essentially possess "kill switches" over vast parts of the computing landscape. Laptops are a bad software update from being bricks; the cloud is divided up into huge chunks that could go dark; one provider holds more than a third of the world's email; 90% of the world's search traffic. These entities don't need to be somehow (gently) "restrained", but as a civilization we need to rethink the power we've ceded to them at a very fundamental level, or we risk growing ever weaker and more dependent on them.
- jlos 9y ago
  >>if , e.g. Apple or Google actually _were_evil Sean Parker on Facebook (and other Social Media giants) exploiting dopamine triggers and psychological drives for social validation: "[We're] exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology ... [The inventors] understood this, consciously, and we did it anyway." [0] https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-only-knows-what-its-doing-to-our-childrens-brains-1513306792-f855e7b4-4e99-4d60-8d51-2775559c2671.html https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-on...
  - tzs 9y ago
    Isn't that a fancy way of saying they are making their product do things that people enjoy, so that people will use the product? This reminds me of the time I once had a chance encounter with Richard Feynman and was able to solve right there for him a particular instance of the local labeling problem in applied chronometrics that had stumped him. (Less fancy version: Feynman asked what time it was. I looked at my watch and told him).
vinceguidry 9y ago
I think Google Search is going to eventually become a regulated public utility, and we can look to the telecom industry for an example of how that will go down. The thing that comes to mind is the fact that Google refuses to allow API access to searching. They used to, with results limited to just five bad results, but quietly removed even that when they released a new tool and discontinued the old one. It struck me at the time that I learned this, as I figured that Google was so large, that search would become like a free public utility that they ran. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that they don't, but other similar adventures got me to conclude that the API revolution is still in it's barest infancy. But Google instead goes to enormous lengths to protect Search. I might make it a weekend project some day to figure out just what the current state of Google scraping is, that cat and mouse game probably has a fascinating history. This will probably become a point of debate 20 years down the road when antitrust cases on tech giants finally become politically feasible.
- bagacrap 9y ago
  Do you actually want it to be a free public utility? In terms of reliability, Google search currently has a lot more 9s than any utility I know of (roads, power, water, internet service). Utility companies are not really known for innovation as much as stagnation, unless you count innovative new ways to extract rent. To me the reason Google dominates search is not that it's loads better than the competition but because it's a little bit better, and there's minimal cost of switching (from Bing to Google, say).
Feniks 9y ago
You can't, the US is too dysfunctional and corrupt. Current administration has realised this and instead of aiming high opts to go low. The EU struggles in vain to get their tech sector off the ground and China is doing their own thing.
kome 9y ago
I like Amazon because it proves that coordinated economy can work pretty well nowadays. We need to nationalize it. :)
- debt 9y ago
  Give Bezos a second. He'll become a lunatic in due time, they all do.
  - kome 9y ago
    To be fair, he is already a lunatic.
- sekou 9y ago
  I think the first country to do this will be an interesting thing to watch, particularly as older models for society appear to be increasingly dysfunctional.
kumarski 9y ago
Part of their motivation to maximize costs is to minimize tax exposure. Since 2008 Walmart has paid $64B in corporate income tax, while Amazon has paid $1.4B. (Source: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-sec http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-sec) Amazon is taking NYC's lunch money - New York City has the power to stop Amazon and to restore middle-class equilibrium. (Source: http://www.adamtownsend.me/amazon-nyc/ http://www.adamtownsend.me/amazon-nyc/) Jean-Claude Juncker and Luxembourg's exclusive relationship granted Amazon illegal tax evasion. (source: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-3701_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-3701_en.htm) Only 13 percent of Amazon’s profits went to federal, state, local and foreign taxes from 2007 through 2015, according to an analysis by S&P Global Market Intelligence. For the sake of comparison, that’s about half the average amount S&P 500 companies paid over same period. Amazon paid just a 9.3 percent effective federal income tax between 2008 and 2012. Source: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jul/26/donald-trump/amazon-no-tax-monopoly-donald-trump-said/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jul/... Amazon will unemploy millions of people. Source: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-is-going-to-kill-more-american-jobs-than-china-did-2017-01-19 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-is-going-to-kill-mo... "Since 2008 Walmart has paid $64B in corporate income tax, while Amazon has paid $1.4B. This is despite the fact that, in the last 24 months, Amazon has added the value of Walmart to its market cap. The most uncomfortable question in business, in my view, is how do we pay our soldiers, firefighters, and teachers if a firm can ascend to $460B in value (#5 in the world) without paying any meaningful corporate taxes." - Professor Scott Galloway Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-19/why-wal-mart-pays-a-lot-more-in-taxes-than-amazon https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-19/why-wal-m...
- zBard 9y ago
  Comparing tax paid to market cap is disingenuous at best - I was surprised Bloomberg would print that, but they then go on to explain it in the article.
ekidd 9y ago
> Regulators could oblige platform firms to make anonymised bulk data available to competitors, in return for a fee, a bit like the compulsory licensing of a patent. Such data-sharing requirements could be calibrated to firms’ size: the bigger platforms are, the more they have to share. These mechanisms would turn data from something titans hoard, to suppress competition, into something users share, to foster innovation. This is a terrible idea, and would be massively destructive of user privacy. "Anonymized" data can very often be de-anonymized. Maybe I'm dumb, but I actually trust a fair amount Google with my less sensitive data. Google is secretive, and a bit paranoid, and they don't like to share. Data goes in, but historically, not much has come out. I do not, however, trust Facebook with my data. And that's the point: Just because I've looked at the tradeoffs and decided to share certain data with Google, I don't want the government ordering Google to share it with other companies. Ditto for LinkedIn: I'm happy to give them a resume, but I don't necessary want to share that with scrapers who are repurposing the data.
panabee 9y ago
monopoly analysis feels outdated. most government policies are rightly evaluated on how they impact society overall, not a single issue group (SIG). for instance, it benefits society overall to tax cigarettes even though it harms employees and companies related to the tobacco industry. why not view monopolies with the same societal lens? for argument's sake, assume google does have a monopoly position in search and abuses it. the resulting cash flows enabled self-driving cars, free worldwide communication, and cheaper smartphones. so google hurt search but helped other industries, increasing competition in automobiles, communication, and smartphones -- all of which are larger industries. is this better or worse for society? understanding how tech should help society is a complex and critical issue, but the pursuit of truth requires a balanced, dispassionate analysis from the perspective of society, not one SIG.
ntonozzi 9y ago
Ben Thompson has some awesome writing on tech titans, and their role in the economy. Here's some definitions: https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/ https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/ and here's an some writing on why they are not necessarily bad monopolies: https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/ https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/.
oldgun 9y ago
> Apple is to be admired as the world’s most valuable listed company for the simple reason that it makes things people want to buy, even while facing fierce competition. Not sure if I completely agree that Apple's an angel in this case.
joejerryronnie 9y ago
We're all gonna look back at this in 15 years with a good laugh at our naivety. New paradigms will emerge, and with them new competitors we can't even imagine today. Google and Facebook are one technical/cultural shift away from irrelevancy. Amazon is much closer to a traditional monopolist and will perhaps require regulatory intervention. I literally had this same conversation about Microsoft and Yahoo in 2000. Remember when we all thought that George W Bush was the worst possible president imaginable? Yeah, those were good times . . .
kashyapc 9y ago
"Apple is to be admired as the world’s most valuable listed company for the simple reason that it makes things people want to buy, even while facing fierce competition." Really? Apple gets a clean chit for everything? I live in the Linux world, can the BSD (including all the variants) contributors / maintainers enlighten if Apple is contributing anything back? (NB: I am aware of what the BSD license allows. I'm mostly interested about Apple's behaviour from the "being a good citizen" POV.)
pjungwir 9y ago
If people are interested in tech monopolies, innovation, and government, here are some great books: - The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, by John Gertner: A running theme is how AT&T was motivated to "give back" to the country to avoid anti-monopoly action by the government. I take today's talk about Google/Facebook/Apple/Amazon to be a negotiating tactic to motivate them to act similarly, although I wouldn't be surprised to see real government involvement either. - The Chip by T. R. Reid: the invention of the integrated circuit near-simultaneously by two different people/companies. - Where Wizards Stay up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon: the origins of ARPANET at BBN. Two other closely-related themes in these books are: - Patents (a limited monopoly), and how the patents for both transistors and integrated circuits were licensed very freely, allowing much faster innovation. - Government spending, e.g. how the space race and arms buildup paid for the early years of IC development before they were commercially competitive with just wiring up lots of components. . . . OT, I found all these books more interesting than The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Although it won a Pulitzer, it never felt like any of it "mattered" in the same way. (I had never heard of the Data General Eclipse.) It just seemed like another story of engineers killing themselves with overwork.

194 points by kawera 9y ago

If they are smart, they will do some self regulation to preempt the government from coming in. Giving more transparency and empowerment to the users, and explaining a little more what they are doing, and why they are doing it, would go a long way.

pqh 9y ago

I mostly agree with the points leading up to the suggestion of mandatory data sharing. I'm still mulling that over. But I do agree that just breaking up Google, for example, wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. Of all the tech giants, I think Google is still doing the most good in terms of investing in innovation. Their research teams are varied and doing the fantastic. Disclaimer: I don't work there and forewent an offer to network my way in.

billysielu 9y ago

I'm not convinced there's a problem here that needs to be solved. "The dominance of Google, Facebook and Amazon is bad for consumers and competition" ... really?? - Amazon provides good products and services at good prices and that's why they're successful. Some things are cheaper locally, some things aren't. I buy loads of stuff from Amazon and don't want that to change. - Google, privacy is a concern, but their search engine is extremely useful, and gmail, and chrome, etc. I rely on Chrome, and the search engine, as long as they're the best at what they do I'm happy to continue using them. - Facebook, is still the most widely used (and that makes it the best) social network. I think Facebook is going to die a natural death - especially when people realize how difficult it is to actually delete their content. It's still the easiest way to run a group, as most people are already on Facebook. I run a local residents group on Facebook and am happy to continue using Facebook for that. I don't use it for personal stuff anymore because everyone's too political, the risk isn't worth the reward. My actual friends use a WhatsApp group to chat with each other, that's a good service I want to keep using. Facebook doesn't belong in the same list as Amazon and Google - because tbh Facebook could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn't affect very much at all.

matthewmacleod 9y ago
"The dominance of Google, Facebook and Amazon is bad for consumers and competition" ... really?? Yes, really. The existence of monopoly or significantly market-dominating providers is definitionally a failure of competition. I suppose you could argue about whether or not a competitive market is good, but I'm pretty sure it is.
- billysielu 9y ago
  I reacted more to the word 'consumers' than 'competition' as the competition argument comes back around to what's best for consumers anyway. So I put my consumer hat on and pondered what would I rather have: - The current situation - Intervention And I concluded I quite like the current situation, these companies provide meaningful benefits to me. If I put my tin foil hat on, it seems quite obvious that 'bad for consumers' is what someone wants you to think, but it isn't entirely true.
  - wavefunction 9y ago
    >If I put my tin foil hat on, it seems quite obvious that 'bad for consumers' is what someone wants you to think, but it isn't entirely true. Is putting your tinfoil hat on really a good way to get to the truth of any subject? And you've concluded that because you prefer the current situation the situation faced by society or consumers is the same. And that's really just your opinion. My opinion, for example, is that Amazon has obviously operated maliciously in numerous examples. Not calling 911 when their employee was suffering from the heat of its facility, leading to his death. Encouraging individuals to sell (generate markets) on the Amazon network then under-cutting or pushing out that small seller when there's revenue to be earned instead by Amazon. Encouraging waste and flippant purchases that are fulfilled in an inefficient and non-evironmentally friendly manner. Amazon is Walmart, online. And neither organizations present long-term benefits to society, in my opinion.
  - CodeCube 9y ago
    Unfortunately, you may be happy with Amazon, but there's loads of examples of where this is going wrong for consumers. From issues with counterfit products (see the post recently about the guy who unknowingly was "charged" with import fraud and denied privileged flight status due to an Amazon order), to them taking advantage of the fact that people assume they're the cheapest price (they aren't always), to "prime shipping" becoming more and more of a thing you can't depend on (late shipments ... all the time). Maybe you live in an area that Amazon gives higher priority to, maybe you live closer to a shipping center than I do, maybe the things you tend to order tend to be highly stocked in their warehouses ... I don't know, but the more time passes, the more Amazon frustrates me personally as a consumer, and others as well based on articles being written and social media chatter; which is frustrating, because the average national retail store is terrible (and they already killed all the mom n pop stores), and having to maintain accounts on lots of smaller online retailers is a pain (not to mention lax security can lead to stolen credit cards, etc). So obviously, in some ways, I agree with you because Amazon does provide benefits ... they just need to not be the only viable player in the online space.

crdoconnor 9y ago

For Google you could separate the search index from the rest of the company, start regulating it as a public utility and force them to open up its APIs to startups. At this point it's a little hard to argue that a plucky young startup can come along and build a competing index at the same scale. The amount of power alone needed to maintain it is staggering.

godelmachine 9y ago
Regulating would only diminish its QoS, methinks. Algorithms improve at such fast scale that no one person has complete knowledge about it. Regulating it may drive the regulators mad.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  Are you arguing that setting up QoS metrics for a search engine index is intrinsically hard in the way that monitoring the safe running of a nuclear power plant or an air traffic control system is not? I think maintaining a search index is intrinsically hard - much like maintaining a nuclear power plant. I don't think monitoring a search index is though. I'm also skeptical of the notion that the engineering of the search index has changed fundamentally in the last 5 years. Realistically Google is not under much competitive pressure any more.

cletus 9y ago

Ugh, The Economist. > However, the barriers to entry are rising. Largely irrelevant. Antritrust doesn't exist to protect you from competition. It exists to protect you from unfair practices resulting in market dominance (typically monopolies). There's a difference. > If this trend runs its course, consumers will suffer as the tech industry becomes less vibrant Not every surface is a slipper slope. More to the point, we're now talking about what might happen rather than what is happening? > Less money will go into startups Absolutely no evidence of that yet. In fact I'd argue there's still too much sloshing around the tech industry. But that's fine. If "sophisticatd" investors want to lose their collective shirts on pets.com or whatever, go for it. > The European Commission has accused Google of using control of Android, its mobile operating system, to give its own apps a leg up. I've never understood the complaints about Android for two reasons: 1. Consumers have other options (mainly iOS); and 2. Apple isn't held to the same standard. The only reason Google seems to be is that they let third-party manufacturers use their stuff at all. Apple doesn't. So Google gets raked over the anti-competitive coals? WTF? It's also worth nothing that Android consists of two principal parts: 1. The open source part, which anyone can do anything with (license permitting); and 2. The Google apps and Android trademark, which come with constraints. Amazon has gone the route of using (1) for their Fire line. Samsung is in camp (2). The point here is you don't have to use (2). People are capable of writing their own apps. Well, let me clarify. They should be but they aren't. Samsung apps in particular are terrible. That's not Google's fault. That's Samsung's. > Facebook keeps buying firms which could one day lure users away Isn't this a sign that their alleged market dominance is fragile? Honestly, this whole piece seems like a giant FUD exercise in "What if..."

yoz-y 9y ago
> Antritrust doesn't exist to protect you from competition. Depends on which antitrust you are talking about. European regulators are generally interested in keeping the market competitive. In the US they give bigger priority to effect on the end user. So in US a single monopoly which does not hike prices is fine whereas in the EU it is not. This is also why Google was hit in the US over Android and search (they stifled the competition, while giving arguably better experience to the users) and Apple was hit in the US over e-books (they hiked the prices while having a puny market share). Problem with Android in EU is mostly that without Google services it is not particularly useful as the alternatives are pretty bad. Google Maps has only a few very local competitors for example, DDG local search is pretty terrible and so on.

daviddumenil 9y ago

A gentle contradiction in the article: "a full-scale break-up would cripple the platforms’ economies of scale" but later: "Trustbusters should scrutinise mergers to gauge whether a deal is likely to neutralise a potential long-term threat" There also seems to be plenty of middle ground there. Like forcing a sell-off of Waze and Instagram without breaking up the whole parent company.

smg 9y ago

I am surprised there has not been an antitrust case against Google and Facebook. Google is definitely abusing the monopoly position it has in search. The claim that any user can switch to Bing by just typing in a different URL is ridiculous. The remedy that the original article suggest is right on point. The way search systems work these days is by learning from how users interact with them. Google's market share ensures that it will always have access to more tail queries and user's intent while asking them. Building a better search engines than Google is no longer about hiring engineers or investing in data centers, it is about having access to the data that Google has on searches. Just like the DOJ forced Microsoft to document and provide API's that were being used by IE and Office to all software companies, a case today that forces Google to share all the data that it collects on searches would help break its monopoly.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
> The claim that any user can switch to Bing by just typing in a different URL is ridiculous. It's not though; people have a choice in this case, not so when it comes to e.g. ISPs or cell phone operators.
- Zhyl 9y ago
  And more people seem [0] to be exercising that choice. [0]https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
wbl 9y ago
And that makes Google noticeably worse then it used to be for many queries.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Right, so how much of a moat is that data really?
9y ago

zerostar07 9y ago

Easy: cut their government - bodyguard

jstewartmobile 9y ago

So, we get a prescription article from the industry that tech has struck the hardest: print journalism. And their prescription? Regulation! Not much better than placebo if you ask me. US government is so venal. Only reason Europe is on the war path is that the offenders aren't European companies. With the amount of cash the big 4/5/6 have on hand, they'll eventually neuter and/or bypass the European regulators as well. I don't know about Amazon, but with the amount of compute power lying around today, a lot of what Google and Facebook do could probably done just as well--if not better--through a distributed model. Sometimes I wonder if NAT and all of the extraneous junk in IPv6 were just the incumbents' way of salting the ground?

dalbasal 9y ago

Apple is a bit of a herring here. Apple had a very unusual strategy of (a) not pursuing market share and (b) not building moats. This was part of their quirkiness as a tech giant. The truth is that they are far more exposed to competitive pressures, and their own future performance than others. IE, the ipod had little or no moat. OSX never had 10% market share. iOS has tsomewhat of a platform moat, but they left the high volume segment of the market to Google. They have some network-effect-moats like facetime built in, but it doesn't add up to a persistent dominance. Facetime still needs to be better than whatsapp and skype on iphones to maintain popularity. In all their major product lines, the current competition could really hurt them if Apple underperform for one or two generations. iOS, OSX, itunes... Few other companies think like this. IE maintained dominance (despite antitrust) for a long time.It wasn't untill Firefox & Chrome broke their monopoly that browsers/www started advancing again. They survived bad operating systems, that no one wanted (Vista), extending XP by 5+ years past its use by date. Amazon dominate online selling. They had a patent on remembering your CC number, a mf patent! ...just to turn past market share into future market share. The infrastructure services are platforms, with lock in. Google is all about 100% market share, all about lock in. All about accumulating data so that they have FB has all the people and all the sites (FB tracking pixel). They have the best ad-targetting platorm for this reason. All the people regsitered. Detailed data on their FB dataset. Vast off-platform collected from advertiser sites (all the advertisers). I agree that part of the FB problem is that they aren't treated like news media, and are exempt from journalistic norms. But, this is also a red herring. Their monopoly is a problem regardless. Many of their acquisitions are defensive, buying potential competition. Antitrust needs a total re-build from the ground up. It's not about price fixing anymore. It's about taking up all the space so that no one else can play. I don't think that the standards of antitrust are any good right now. You have to prve price fixing, unfair competition or some other hard to prove and potentially irelevant activities. I think antitrust has to be preventive. It needs to make sure there is ample room in a market for innovation, and/or regulate all the giants by default. Got a dataset that includes all the people in a country? Maybe that should be a public dataset.

mercutio2 9y ago
Apple would only be a red herring if the article in question was talking in any way about Apple! It’s not, it’s subtitle specifies it’s referring to Google, Facebook, and Amazon. In fact, Apple is mentioned only once in the article, in a sentence saying “Apple is to be admired for making things people want to buy”. Pedantry about RTFA aside, I generally agree with your points, Apple has chosen a business model that makes it relatively unlikely to receive serious anti-trust scrutiny!

pg_bot 9y ago

I'm still surprised that no one has proposed a protocol to replace Facebook / Twitter. If a real time RSS system existed then both of those companies don't really need to exist. In fact, I think you could mock up a service just using SMTP that would work exactly as both those companies do today.

dude01 9y ago
The darn network effects keep people on the existing services and off of new ones. There have been protocols, like https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/ (newer) and https://xmpp.org/ https://xmpp.org/ (older) . If Facebook and Twitter were forced to interoperate with any of these other protocols then you could have a gradual migration. That's why you sure won't see that happen!
davidcbc 9y ago
The problem is you're trying to solve a problem that most Facebook users don't care about. The hurdles to replacing Facebook or Twitter aren't technical, they are social. The killer feature of any social network is people using it.
zeveb 9y ago
> I'm still surprised that no one has proposed a protocol to replace Facebook / Twitter. Isn't that what WebSub[0] (formerly PubSubHubbub) is for? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub
xj9 9y ago
like ActivityPub? or OStstus? https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org https://pleroma.social/ https://pleroma.social/
s73ver_ 9y ago
The tech to do what Facebook does (more or less) is easy. The issue is with the network. It's why most of the "Facebook competitors" died. What good is having the ability to receive feeds like that if no one I'm interested is broadcasting?

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

We CAN break them up. Facebook can be broken up into a federated network. Split Google into YouTube, Hangouts, Cloud, and The Rest. Force any integrations between these to be done with open protocols anyone can implement.

beisner 9y ago
In your example, The Rest would still be the vast majority of the company.
neolefty 9y ago
Search and ads are the big ones. And you can't really split any part of the company off from ads because that's revenue. So if you're going to split Google, the only way I can see it working is a bilateral (or multilateral) split, like the AT&T breakup into the Baby Bells. Each part would get search and ads and maybe the existing YouTube corpus, ??? Discussion question: How did the AT&T breakup work out in the long run? (Genuinely curious, not trying to be snarky.)
- theandrewbailey 9y ago
  In the long run, tech changed the landscape so much that the breakup was ultimately a success. I'm skeptical that cell phones would be as ubiquitous and cheap as they are if it didn't. Long distance calling (a big deal back then) was killed by tech and competition at the same time.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    Other things like answering machines probably would not have happened, too. I wasn't around back then but as I understand it you were only allowed to connect Ma Bell's telephones to your telephone line and Bell's goons would break in and rip out unapproved telephone equipment.
    - theandrewbailey 9y ago
      Third party devices were "legalized" by the Carterfone decision in the 1950s, long before the breakup. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/carterfone-40-years/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/carterfone-40-ye...

chx 9y ago

I am surprised my esteemed colleagues haven't jumped on > Immunity to content liability must go, too. This would be quite a hurdle to quite a few sites if it applied across the board. To begin with, this site. Reddit. Etc.

zeveb 9y ago
Yeah, that really worries me. OTOH, it's probably easier for a small company to police its users than a very very large one, so maybe it'd actually be an advantage for smaller competitors? I think that the real answer is to mandate open protocols. The government has a real role in determining weights & measures used in trade (which it's rather shamefully ignored: I should be able to order a small, medium or large coffee or pizza anywhere in the country and get the exact same size); that same role could be legitimately used to describe exactly the right (though not the sole) formats which must be supported by a service. E.g., the State could mandate that Facebook provide users a well-supported way to publish to or read from RSS, or for Spotify, Pandora, Google Play Music, Amazon Prime & iTunes to share music. There is a danger there, in that it's not exactly well-defined 'share music' means (are those services even comparable? what about some future service with a revolutionary new model?), but I think that it should be doable.
WovenTales 9y ago
On the one hand, definitely worrisome when taking into account the alternative sites. On the other, it's in a paragraph about legal exceptions, so I'm wondering if the article's saying that Facebook and such get more people looking the other way, and that any smaller competitors would get jumped on disproportionally; just looking at music, YouTube doesn't seem to be suffering too greatly from everyone uploading recordings, while I can easily see a small upstart getting sued into oblivion for a fraction of the infringement. Maybe some of that is that they can point to their algorithms as mitigation, but, A, that gets into proprietary secrets that would be key to even existing clashing with anti-trust laws, and B, there's still plenty of eight-year-old music videos that they somehow haven't gotten around to checking.

CurtMonash 9y ago

I posted a few minutes ago about how chaotic privacy-related public policy is around the world. http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/08/privacy-data-use-gap-theory/ http://www.dbms2.com/2013/07/08/privacy-data-use-gap-theory/ This article is another wrinkle yet.

alvil 9y ago

At first, stop calling them titans.

titzer 9y ago

FTA: > The tricky task for policymakers is to restrain them without unduly stifling innovation. This suggests a profound lack of understanding of the power imbalance between the Tech Giants(TM) and the rest of the world. The fact that these big companies operate what amounts to mini-surveillance states and face little to no scrutiny about it, and this is not even mentioned in the article, is proof this person has not thought deeply about this problem. The additional fact that these huge Titans dominate vast monocultures puts us all at risk of catastrophic failure or the vulnerability of cyber attack and should scare the bejesus out of policymakers, militaries, and agencies tasked with securing national infrastructure. People need to think harder about how bad it would be if, e.g. Apple or Google actually _were_ evil, or were co-opted into evil overnight. Or what if they were just evil _to you_. Some of these companies essentially possess "kill switches" over vast parts of the computing landscape. Laptops are a bad software update from being bricks; the cloud is divided up into huge chunks that could go dark; one provider holds more than a third of the world's email; 90% of the world's search traffic. These entities don't need to be somehow (gently) "restrained", but as a civilization we need to rethink the power we've ceded to them at a very fundamental level, or we risk growing ever weaker and more dependent on them.

jlos 9y ago
>>if , e.g. Apple or Google actually _were_evil Sean Parker on Facebook (and other Social Media giants) exploiting dopamine triggers and psychological drives for social validation: "[We're] exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology ... [The inventors] understood this, consciously, and we did it anyway." [0] https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-only-knows-what-its-doing-to-our-childrens-brains-1513306792-f855e7b4-4e99-4d60-8d51-2775559c2671.html https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-on...
- tzs 9y ago
  Isn't that a fancy way of saying they are making their product do things that people enjoy, so that people will use the product? This reminds me of the time I once had a chance encounter with Richard Feynman and was able to solve right there for him a particular instance of the local labeling problem in applied chronometrics that had stumped him. (Less fancy version: Feynman asked what time it was. I looked at my watch and told him).

vinceguidry 9y ago

I think Google Search is going to eventually become a regulated public utility, and we can look to the telecom industry for an example of how that will go down. The thing that comes to mind is the fact that Google refuses to allow API access to searching. They used to, with results limited to just five bad results, but quietly removed even that when they released a new tool and discontinued the old one. It struck me at the time that I learned this, as I figured that Google was so large, that search would become like a free public utility that they ran. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that they don't, but other similar adventures got me to conclude that the API revolution is still in it's barest infancy. But Google instead goes to enormous lengths to protect Search. I might make it a weekend project some day to figure out just what the current state of Google scraping is, that cat and mouse game probably has a fascinating history. This will probably become a point of debate 20 years down the road when antitrust cases on tech giants finally become politically feasible.

bagacrap 9y ago
Do you actually want it to be a free public utility? In terms of reliability, Google search currently has a lot more 9s than any utility I know of (roads, power, water, internet service). Utility companies are not really known for innovation as much as stagnation, unless you count innovative new ways to extract rent. To me the reason Google dominates search is not that it's loads better than the competition but because it's a little bit better, and there's minimal cost of switching (from Bing to Google, say).

Feniks 9y ago

You can't, the US is too dysfunctional and corrupt. Current administration has realised this and instead of aiming high opts to go low. The EU struggles in vain to get their tech sector off the ground and China is doing their own thing.

kome 9y ago

I like Amazon because it proves that coordinated economy can work pretty well nowadays. We need to nationalize it. :)

debt 9y ago
Give Bezos a second. He'll become a lunatic in due time, they all do.
- kome 9y ago
  To be fair, he is already a lunatic.
sekou 9y ago
I think the first country to do this will be an interesting thing to watch, particularly as older models for society appear to be increasingly dysfunctional.

kumarski 9y ago

Part of their motivation to maximize costs is to minimize tax exposure. Since 2008 Walmart has paid $64B in corporate income tax, while Amazon has paid $1.4B. (Source: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-sec http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-sec) Amazon is taking NYC's lunch money - New York City has the power to stop Amazon and to restore middle-class equilibrium. (Source: http://www.adamtownsend.me/amazon-nyc/ http://www.adamtownsend.me/amazon-nyc/) Jean-Claude Juncker and Luxembourg's exclusive relationship granted Amazon illegal tax evasion. (source: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-3701_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-3701_en.htm) Only 13 percent of Amazon’s profits went to federal, state, local and foreign taxes from 2007 through 2015, according to an analysis by S&P Global Market Intelligence. For the sake of comparison, that’s about half the average amount S&P 500 companies paid over same period. Amazon paid just a 9.3 percent effective federal income tax between 2008 and 2012. Source: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jul/26/donald-trump/amazon-no-tax-monopoly-donald-trump-said/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jul/... Amazon will unemploy millions of people. Source: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-is-going-to-kill-more-american-jobs-than-china-did-2017-01-19 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-is-going-to-kill-mo... "Since 2008 Walmart has paid $64B in corporate income tax, while Amazon has paid $1.4B. This is despite the fact that, in the last 24 months, Amazon has added the value of Walmart to its market cap. The most uncomfortable question in business, in my view, is how do we pay our soldiers, firefighters, and teachers if a firm can ascend to $460B in value (#5 in the world) without paying any meaningful corporate taxes." - Professor Scott Galloway Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-19/why-wal-mart-pays-a-lot-more-in-taxes-than-amazon https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-19/why-wal-m...

zBard 9y ago
Comparing tax paid to market cap is disingenuous at best - I was surprised Bloomberg would print that, but they then go on to explain it in the article.

ekidd 9y ago

> Regulators could oblige platform firms to make anonymised bulk data available to competitors, in return for a fee, a bit like the compulsory licensing of a patent. Such data-sharing requirements could be calibrated to firms’ size: the bigger platforms are, the more they have to share. These mechanisms would turn data from something titans hoard, to suppress competition, into something users share, to foster innovation. This is a terrible idea, and would be massively destructive of user privacy. "Anonymized" data can very often be de-anonymized. Maybe I'm dumb, but I actually trust a fair amount Google with my less sensitive data. Google is secretive, and a bit paranoid, and they don't like to share. Data goes in, but historically, not much has come out. I do not, however, trust Facebook with my data. And that's the point: Just because I've looked at the tradeoffs and decided to share certain data with Google, I don't want the government ordering Google to share it with other companies. Ditto for LinkedIn: I'm happy to give them a resume, but I don't necessary want to share that with scrapers who are repurposing the data.

panabee 9y ago

monopoly analysis feels outdated. most government policies are rightly evaluated on how they impact society overall, not a single issue group (SIG). for instance, it benefits society overall to tax cigarettes even though it harms employees and companies related to the tobacco industry. why not view monopolies with the same societal lens? for argument's sake, assume google does have a monopoly position in search and abuses it. the resulting cash flows enabled self-driving cars, free worldwide communication, and cheaper smartphones. so google hurt search but helped other industries, increasing competition in automobiles, communication, and smartphones -- all of which are larger industries. is this better or worse for society? understanding how tech should help society is a complex and critical issue, but the pursuit of truth requires a balanced, dispassionate analysis from the perspective of society, not one SIG.

ntonozzi 9y ago

Ben Thompson has some awesome writing on tech titans, and their role in the economy. Here's some definitions: https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/ https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/ and here's an some writing on why they are not necessarily bad monopolies: https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/ https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/.

oldgun 9y ago

> Apple is to be admired as the world’s most valuable listed company for the simple reason that it makes things people want to buy, even while facing fierce competition. Not sure if I completely agree that Apple's an angel in this case.

joejerryronnie 9y ago

We're all gonna look back at this in 15 years with a good laugh at our naivety. New paradigms will emerge, and with them new competitors we can't even imagine today. Google and Facebook are one technical/cultural shift away from irrelevancy. Amazon is much closer to a traditional monopolist and will perhaps require regulatory intervention. I literally had this same conversation about Microsoft and Yahoo in 2000. Remember when we all thought that George W Bush was the worst possible president imaginable? Yeah, those were good times . . .

kashyapc 9y ago

"Apple is to be admired as the world’s most valuable listed company for the simple reason that it makes things people want to buy, even while facing fierce competition." Really? Apple gets a clean chit for everything? I live in the Linux world, can the BSD (including all the variants) contributors / maintainers enlighten if Apple is contributing anything back? (NB: I am aware of what the BSD license allows. I'm mostly interested about Apple's behaviour from the "being a good citizen" POV.)

pjungwir 9y ago

If people are interested in tech monopolies, innovation, and government, here are some great books: - The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, by John Gertner: A running theme is how AT&T was motivated to "give back" to the country to avoid anti-monopoly action by the government. I take today's talk about Google/Facebook/Apple/Amazon to be a negotiating tactic to motivate them to act similarly, although I wouldn't be surprised to see real government involvement either. - The Chip by T. R. Reid: the invention of the integrated circuit near-simultaneously by two different people/companies. - Where Wizards Stay up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon: the origins of ARPANET at BBN. Two other closely-related themes in these books are: - Patents (a limited monopoly), and how the patents for both transistors and integrated circuits were licensed very freely, allowing much faster innovation. - Government spending, e.g. how the space race and arms buildup paid for the early years of IC development before they were commercially competitive with just wiring up lots of components. . . . OT, I found all these books more interesting than The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Although it won a Pulitzer, it never felt like any of it "mattered" in the same way. (I had never heard of the Data General Eclipse.) It just seemed like another story of engineers killing themselves with overwork.