14 ms·

Can Facebook Be Cut Down to Size?

144 points by panarky 8y ago

kumarvvr 8y ago
This is a fundamentally wrong question. Even if cut down, their business model remains the same. Selling users data to the highest bidder. It is fairly obvious that user privacy is utmost important to civil society. We, as a society, should move away from fb and let it die its natural death. Splitting it will only lead to normalization of sale of user data.
- ghostcluster 8y ago
  > Even if cut down, their business model remains the same. Selling users data to the highest bidder. How is this different than any other advertising company? Google does the exact same thing, and it's much bigger.
  - yayana 8y ago
    Advertising was primarily a business where you broadcast data at people who mostly don't want it. That model works fine as long as barriers to targeted unicast are maintained and strengthened, cutting the value of the market Google and fb are in to less than a tenth of what it is now.
- ryan-allen 8y ago
  > We, as a society, should move away from fb and let it die its natural death. I'm not sure how this could happen, but then again, nobody saw the demise of MySpace, but then again, MySpace was no-where as ubiquitous as fb. I'd love to see some analytics on demographics and their use of facebook, you could possibly then start to prune off some target demographics from their userbase with targeted products. This is wishful thinking on my part, though.
  - ghostcluster 8y ago
    Facebook had better more streamlined technology. Just like Google in the 1990s.
- xapata 8y ago
  > fairly obvious that user privacy is utmost important No, it's not obvious. Society has many competing priorities. Further, the definition of privacy changes rapidly.
  - donatj 8y ago
    I for one don’t understand how or why anyone would presume anything they do on Facebook is private. I’ve always considered what I enter as being given to Facebook rather than somehow mine despite being in Facebooks possession, on their drives in their servers. When I give it to Facebook, it’s theirs. If you don’t want something known I don’t give it to Facebook... If I give my friend my phone number, that’s their knowledge, not mine. It makes no sense to demand they forget it. If they hand it out, they’re a bad friend. I don’t tell bad friends important secrets.
    - gaius 8y ago
      I’ve always considered what I enter as being given to Facebook rather than somehow mine despite being in Facebooks possession, on their drives in their servers. There is a huge difference between what you explicitly type into boxes on FB's own website, and their policy of tracking you on every other site they can and correlating the data. Further, they (and others) go to extreme lengths to do so even if you log out of their site, clear cookies, browse in private mode, yadda yadda.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    A simple question for you. What do you think is going to happen when 'we' (modern, developed, western nation) eventually put a tyrant into power, and this tyrant has access to immense amounts of information on each and every person the nation? Or do you think that will never happen? In a way we're repeating on a social scale, what we do on a political scale. Many are upset at the level of power of the president, which initially began as a much more limited position than the one-man-war machine we have of today. Yet both sides of the political spectrum rejoice as executive level power increases when 'their side' is in power, as if that will always be the case. And so too today on a social level we're happy (or at least apathetic) to see ever more private information siphoned off without considering what this will, sooner or later, end up being used for.
uabstraction 8y ago
Not with this Congress.
africasiaeuro 8y ago
What question. Nonsense really. Why not? is the answer. If the authorities want to deal - speak snoop - on several smaller firms ( logistics, cost ), they won't support the bid to reduce Fb. It has worked well for them so far.
ghostcluster 8y ago
The majority of Facebook's users are outside of the US, and it is smaller than other big US tech companies (https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/market_cap https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/market_cap). I'd rather see antitrust brought against a company using other kinds of anti competitive tactics. Why deprecate OpenGL and not support Vulkan, Apple? Even with DirectX, Microsoft always maintained updated OpenGL on their platform... And extracting 30% on every transaction, including your competitors? Imagine if Microsoft tried taking a 30% cut of every transaction that passed through Internet Explorer, or Windows, in the 1990s Apple's market cap is bigger than Facebook's. Almost twice as big. https://ycharts.com/companies/FB/market_cap https://ycharts.com/companies/FB/market_cap https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/market_cap https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/market_cap
- United857 8y ago
  Unlike 1990s Microsoft, Apple is far from a monopoly in terms of market share. And Apple doesn't take money off browser-based transactions, so that's a flawed analogy.
  - ghostcluster 8y ago
    It seems it is a bigger chunk of the economy than Microsoft was in the 1990s Microsoft didn't take 30% of Windows based transactions. Can you imagine what would've happened if they had tried?
    - johncolanduoni 8y ago
      What does that have to do with its lack of support for a particular API being anti-competitive? On the contrary, it’s giving Android (or other future mobile platforms) a vector to distinguish itself.
      - ghostcluster 8y ago
        It's a tactic to artificially reinforce the position of a propreitary API in the market (by killing support for its competitors)
jadedhacker 8y ago
My first reaction was to be shocked. The NYT? Advocating for the death of a major corporation? What's in it for them? My guess is they've sensed the national mood is shifting. If something isn't done, then people will start to demand something more drastic than simply breaking up a large world spanning company. The capitalist system must give the appearance of health to forestall further demands. It is looking very ill at the top of the tech sector. The tyranny (iron rule by a minority) inherent to private enterprise is flowering atop an incredibly concentrated sector and it's becoming obvious to anyone that looks.
- danjayh 8y ago
  You're right to be shocked about the NYT calling for the breakup of facebook, but I think your a bit off on the 'why'. I say you're right to be shocked because Facebook is run by a person who some on the left were previously calling to make a presidential run, who was previously a shining beacon to the world's left-dominated media (including the NYT) ... so yeah, it's kind of shocking to see how quickly they've turned on Zuckerberg and Facebook. The real story of 'why' the about face has to do with Cambridge Analytica, though. Many in the media still feel that the election 'should' have gone the other way (regardless of how people actually voted), and now they blame FB/Zuck. The irony is that in 2008 Obama's team did all of the same things that Trump's did. The media was OK with it then (in fact, celebrated it) because it was for their side.
  - jadedhacker 8y ago
    I would say FB was celebrated by liberals, not by leftists. CA is a media project of the liberal media, not the leftist media. I've been very skeptical that CA had a large impact when FB's ad categories are so often blatantly wrong. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-difference-between-liberalism-and-leftism https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-difference-betwee...
- nafey 8y ago
  I have been toying with this theory for a while: Media outlets (NYT, WSJ, etc.) have been seeing their business and influence become increasingly beholden to the whims of social network algorithms. This is the old media fighting with their backs to the wall before they see themselves sidelined to perpetual irrelevance.
zestyping 8y ago
This op-ed argues the question "Should Facebook Be Cut Down to Size?" but doesn't really address whether it can, or how. Can it? What would work? How would you do it, if you could?
- vermilingua 8y ago
  I don't think it can. The AT&T breakup worked, because even then, if you had a phone number, you could contact anyone else with a phone number, even if they weren't an AT&T customer. Facebook, and the other social media silos, are built with anti-compatibility as an explicit goal. That, coupled with Metcalfe's law, means that any upstart will never be able to directly compete with Facebook (or another social network) on it's ground.
  - nafey 8y ago
    How about coming up with some standards to allow federated social networking, and requiring every major social network to follow this standard?
    - russdpale 8y ago
      perhaps federated protocols for all social media.
    - squiggleblaz 8y ago
      But a post on Facebook looks different from a post on Twitter. Could they really share? Could you write a regulation where it makes sense that they're different? Maybe you could. Twitter and Tumblr seem to be about the same modulo the length. Isn't the advantage of Twitter its shortness? Maybe we'd discover what the advantage of Twitter is. And perhaps Facebook is the same just with better networking features. Maybe we should try to write federated Facebook and Twitter clones to prove it can be done.
      - kruczek 8y ago
        The only difference is that a post on Twitter has artificially limited size. This is a restriction imposed by Twitter and as such could be handled by them - for example by showing a short summary + a link to full message for posts that were imported from other networks.
coderdude 8y ago
Ugh. People. Can we cut them down to size? Revisiting this vomit, can we cut people down to their actual 7 billionth size? Then add all the relevant people together to get a number related to... who gives a fudge
cm2187 8y ago
Is facebook still a problem? I don't know anyone around me who didn't tell me they ceased to use it.
- nxc18 8y ago
  You're in a bubble. I quit Facebook on principle but I'm suffering for it. I'm trying to meet new people, strengthen friendships, get out more, etc. Literally everyone I know except for one person does eventing and communicating on Facebook, so that's pretty rough. Facebook's network effect should not be underestimated.
yedawg 8y ago
Facebook just needs to have enough unsuccessful attempts at buying out it's competitors. This displaces power. With enough power and media displacement facebook falls. It's really that simple. Facebook is betting on people to sell out (which they always do) and for users to pay the price.
lwansbrough 8y ago
Why does Facebook seem to be everyone's focus? Look at the control Google has over the web. Why would you start with Facebook?
- jowiar 8y ago
  The social tie-ins of FB make it much “stickier” than Google. Google has a ton of power, but very little of it locks an individual in. The “chase you around the internet” bit is a problem, but addressing that is not that complicated. The service FB provides is much closer to a natural monopoly. The value of FB’s service derived entirely from the sheer volume of people who use it. Saying “I am not going to use FB” is a cost to everyone around you.
  - thisacctforreal 8y ago
    This can be a problem with Google, at least if you consider baby duck syndrome[1]. Google Docs is often the only comfortable and familiar way to collaborate on documents for many groups, and YouTube is often the only source of video content on the internet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Duck_Syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Duck_Syndrome
    - jgh 8y ago
      Right but deciding not to use Google services doesn't cut you off from everybody you know. My family uses Messenger, my US friends use Instagram, my European friends use Whatsapp... Even though I don't have a Facebook profile anymore, I'm still very much a Facebook user because it would be difficult for me to convince everyone else to switch to some alternative.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - aylmao 8y ago
    There's two fronts worth noting: First, Android is huge, oscillating around 85% world wide market share [1]. In many parts of the world it's the only real option for customers. You might use Facebook because your group chat is there. Many people use Android because 90% of their options are Android phones, regardless of brand, and they can't afford the ones that aren't. Secondly, what about the actual customers (advertisers)? Google has by far the lion's share in the online advertising market; they take more than twice of Facebook's revenues, and have ads all over the web in contrast to Facebook, which is mostly (only?) on Facebook applications. Google sounds far "stickier" than Facebook to them, and way more in a position of market control. [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266136/global-market-share-held-by-smartphone-operating-systems/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266136/global-market-sha... [2]: https://www.statista.com/chart/12179/google-and-facebook-share-of-ad-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/chart/12179/google-and-facebook-sha...
KasianFranks 8y ago
No need, they're going the way of AOL, friendster and myspace.
merinowool 8y ago
If you can use different social network than Facebook, then Facebook is not a monopoly.
- Niksko 8y ago
  Not necessarily disagreeing, but doesn't that basically invalidate the idea of a monopoly in a free and open internet? Perhaps the definition of a monopoly from analog era doesn't apply to the internet?
  - merinowool 8y ago
    Yes, in the free market monopoly is impossible to form. You only get anomalies when you start adding socialism into the mix.
    - simion314 8y ago
      Do you have a scientific resource that proves your statement? Like a model that was run in a computer and resulted in a perfect free market? Maybe it would be true in a perfect free market, where people would act rational and won't be jerks, I don't have proof but intuitively I can see a free market simulator where some actors will find a small loophole and exploit it to maximize it's profit destroying everyone else.
      - merinowool 8y ago
        It is just common sense. Regulations give one advantage and restrict competition which is a breeding ground for monopolies.
        icebraining 8y ago
        That only shows that regulations may create monopolies, not that they're the only reason for their existence.
rcar1046 8y ago
One could argue that a social network must necessarily be a monopoly to be useful to users unless cross site communication between multiple social networks was mandated. Just as 5 different companies each listing 20% of the residential phone numbers wouldn't make sense. The more completely a social network covers the population the more useful it becomes to users.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  But it'd be a poor argument. Email does multi-provider interop well.
  - amelius 8y ago
    Yes, they should force Facebook to support the ActivityPub protocol. Not sure what that would mean for privacy/GDPR though ...
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    If you have rather low standards. Email works just well enough, but it's turning into walled gardens, has no de facto e2e encryption, still has a spam problem and has a terrible UI for non-technical users in group settings.
- wu-ikkyu 8y ago
  The same argument can and has been made for the economy, government, religion etc. But as we've seen, too much centralized power in the hands of the few has lead to some of the greatest mass human suffering in history.
eulers__number 8y ago
fake news
musage 8y ago
if you close down Facebook - the users will spill out onto other sites - and that shouldn't be allowed That's the longest song I can justify writing about it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
russdpale 8y ago
I doubt it can be reigned in. No government has control of the money flow, how can it possibly have any real control?
pascalxus 8y ago
If facebook is in danger of being cut down, why doesn't facebook just not higher so many employees? It seems like a win win situation: less cost, more profit and if fewer products get built as a result of the lower employee highering then there's less chance of blowback from the public

144 points by panarky 8y ago

This is a fundamentally wrong question. Even if cut down, their business model remains the same. Selling users data to the highest bidder. It is fairly obvious that user privacy is utmost important to civil society. We, as a society, should move away from fb and let it die its natural death. Splitting it will only lead to normalization of sale of user data.

ghostcluster 8y ago
> Even if cut down, their business model remains the same. Selling users data to the highest bidder. How is this different than any other advertising company? Google does the exact same thing, and it's much bigger.
- yayana 8y ago
  Advertising was primarily a business where you broadcast data at people who mostly don't want it. That model works fine as long as barriers to targeted unicast are maintained and strengthened, cutting the value of the market Google and fb are in to less than a tenth of what it is now.
ryan-allen 8y ago
> We, as a society, should move away from fb and let it die its natural death. I'm not sure how this could happen, but then again, nobody saw the demise of MySpace, but then again, MySpace was no-where as ubiquitous as fb. I'd love to see some analytics on demographics and their use of facebook, you could possibly then start to prune off some target demographics from their userbase with targeted products. This is wishful thinking on my part, though.
- ghostcluster 8y ago
  Facebook had better more streamlined technology. Just like Google in the 1990s.
xapata 8y ago
> fairly obvious that user privacy is utmost important No, it's not obvious. Society has many competing priorities. Further, the definition of privacy changes rapidly.
- donatj 8y ago
  I for one don’t understand how or why anyone would presume anything they do on Facebook is private. I’ve always considered what I enter as being given to Facebook rather than somehow mine despite being in Facebooks possession, on their drives in their servers. When I give it to Facebook, it’s theirs. If you don’t want something known I don’t give it to Facebook... If I give my friend my phone number, that’s their knowledge, not mine. It makes no sense to demand they forget it. If they hand it out, they’re a bad friend. I don’t tell bad friends important secrets.
  - gaius 8y ago
    I’ve always considered what I enter as being given to Facebook rather than somehow mine despite being in Facebooks possession, on their drives in their servers. There is a huge difference between what you explicitly type into boxes on FB's own website, and their policy of tracking you on every other site they can and correlating the data. Further, they (and others) go to extreme lengths to do so even if you log out of their site, clear cookies, browse in private mode, yadda yadda.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  A simple question for you. What do you think is going to happen when 'we' (modern, developed, western nation) eventually put a tyrant into power, and this tyrant has access to immense amounts of information on each and every person the nation? Or do you think that will never happen? In a way we're repeating on a social scale, what we do on a political scale. Many are upset at the level of power of the president, which initially began as a much more limited position than the one-man-war machine we have of today. Yet both sides of the political spectrum rejoice as executive level power increases when 'their side' is in power, as if that will always be the case. And so too today on a social level we're happy (or at least apathetic) to see ever more private information siphoned off without considering what this will, sooner or later, end up being used for.

uabstraction 8y ago

Not with this Congress.

africasiaeuro 8y ago

What question. Nonsense really. Why not? is the answer. If the authorities want to deal - speak snoop - on several smaller firms ( logistics, cost ), they won't support the bid to reduce Fb. It has worked well for them so far.

ghostcluster 8y ago

The majority of Facebook's users are outside of the US, and it is smaller than other big US tech companies (https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/market_cap https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/market_cap). I'd rather see antitrust brought against a company using other kinds of anti competitive tactics. Why deprecate OpenGL and not support Vulkan, Apple? Even with DirectX, Microsoft always maintained updated OpenGL on their platform... And extracting 30% on every transaction, including your competitors? Imagine if Microsoft tried taking a 30% cut of every transaction that passed through Internet Explorer, or Windows, in the 1990s Apple's market cap is bigger than Facebook's. Almost twice as big. https://ycharts.com/companies/FB/market_cap https://ycharts.com/companies/FB/market_cap https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/market_cap https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/market_cap

United857 8y ago
Unlike 1990s Microsoft, Apple is far from a monopoly in terms of market share. And Apple doesn't take money off browser-based transactions, so that's a flawed analogy.
- ghostcluster 8y ago
  It seems it is a bigger chunk of the economy than Microsoft was in the 1990s Microsoft didn't take 30% of Windows based transactions. Can you imagine what would've happened if they had tried?
  - johncolanduoni 8y ago
    What does that have to do with its lack of support for a particular API being anti-competitive? On the contrary, it’s giving Android (or other future mobile platforms) a vector to distinguish itself.
    - ghostcluster 8y ago
      It's a tactic to artificially reinforce the position of a propreitary API in the market (by killing support for its competitors)

jadedhacker 8y ago

My first reaction was to be shocked. The NYT? Advocating for the death of a major corporation? What's in it for them? My guess is they've sensed the national mood is shifting. If something isn't done, then people will start to demand something more drastic than simply breaking up a large world spanning company. The capitalist system must give the appearance of health to forestall further demands. It is looking very ill at the top of the tech sector. The tyranny (iron rule by a minority) inherent to private enterprise is flowering atop an incredibly concentrated sector and it's becoming obvious to anyone that looks.

danjayh 8y ago
You're right to be shocked about the NYT calling for the breakup of facebook, but I think your a bit off on the 'why'. I say you're right to be shocked because Facebook is run by a person who some on the left were previously calling to make a presidential run, who was previously a shining beacon to the world's left-dominated media (including the NYT) ... so yeah, it's kind of shocking to see how quickly they've turned on Zuckerberg and Facebook. The real story of 'why' the about face has to do with Cambridge Analytica, though. Many in the media still feel that the election 'should' have gone the other way (regardless of how people actually voted), and now they blame FB/Zuck. The irony is that in 2008 Obama's team did all of the same things that Trump's did. The media was OK with it then (in fact, celebrated it) because it was for their side.
- jadedhacker 8y ago
  I would say FB was celebrated by liberals, not by leftists. CA is a media project of the liberal media, not the leftist media. I've been very skeptical that CA had a large impact when FB's ad categories are so often blatantly wrong. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-difference-between-liberalism-and-leftism https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-difference-betwee...
nafey 8y ago
I have been toying with this theory for a while: Media outlets (NYT, WSJ, etc.) have been seeing their business and influence become increasingly beholden to the whims of social network algorithms. This is the old media fighting with their backs to the wall before they see themselves sidelined to perpetual irrelevance.

zestyping 8y ago

This op-ed argues the question "Should Facebook Be Cut Down to Size?" but doesn't really address whether it can, or how. Can it? What would work? How would you do it, if you could?

vermilingua 8y ago
I don't think it can. The AT&T breakup worked, because even then, if you had a phone number, you could contact anyone else with a phone number, even if they weren't an AT&T customer. Facebook, and the other social media silos, are built with anti-compatibility as an explicit goal. That, coupled with Metcalfe's law, means that any upstart will never be able to directly compete with Facebook (or another social network) on it's ground.
- nafey 8y ago
  How about coming up with some standards to allow federated social networking, and requiring every major social network to follow this standard?
  - russdpale 8y ago
    perhaps federated protocols for all social media.
  - squiggleblaz 8y ago
    But a post on Facebook looks different from a post on Twitter. Could they really share? Could you write a regulation where it makes sense that they're different? Maybe you could. Twitter and Tumblr seem to be about the same modulo the length. Isn't the advantage of Twitter its shortness? Maybe we'd discover what the advantage of Twitter is. And perhaps Facebook is the same just with better networking features. Maybe we should try to write federated Facebook and Twitter clones to prove it can be done.
    - kruczek 8y ago
      The only difference is that a post on Twitter has artificially limited size. This is a restriction imposed by Twitter and as such could be handled by them - for example by showing a short summary + a link to full message for posts that were imported from other networks.

coderdude 8y ago

Ugh. People. Can we cut them down to size? Revisiting this vomit, can we cut people down to their actual 7 billionth size? Then add all the relevant people together to get a number related to... who gives a fudge

cm2187 8y ago

Is facebook still a problem? I don't know anyone around me who didn't tell me they ceased to use it.

nxc18 8y ago
You're in a bubble. I quit Facebook on principle but I'm suffering for it. I'm trying to meet new people, strengthen friendships, get out more, etc. Literally everyone I know except for one person does eventing and communicating on Facebook, so that's pretty rough. Facebook's network effect should not be underestimated.

yedawg 8y ago

Facebook just needs to have enough unsuccessful attempts at buying out it's competitors. This displaces power. With enough power and media displacement facebook falls. It's really that simple. Facebook is betting on people to sell out (which they always do) and for users to pay the price.

lwansbrough 8y ago

Why does Facebook seem to be everyone's focus? Look at the control Google has over the web. Why would you start with Facebook?

jowiar 8y ago
The social tie-ins of FB make it much “stickier” than Google. Google has a ton of power, but very little of it locks an individual in. The “chase you around the internet” bit is a problem, but addressing that is not that complicated. The service FB provides is much closer to a natural monopoly. The value of FB’s service derived entirely from the sheer volume of people who use it. Saying “I am not going to use FB” is a cost to everyone around you.
- thisacctforreal 8y ago
  This can be a problem with Google, at least if you consider baby duck syndrome[1]. Google Docs is often the only comfortable and familiar way to collaborate on documents for many groups, and YouTube is often the only source of video content on the internet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Duck_Syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Duck_Syndrome
  - jgh 8y ago
    Right but deciding not to use Google services doesn't cut you off from everybody you know. My family uses Messenger, my US friends use Instagram, my European friends use Whatsapp... Even though I don't have a Facebook profile anymore, I'm still very much a Facebook user because it would be difficult for me to convince everyone else to switch to some alternative.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- aylmao 8y ago
  There's two fronts worth noting: First, Android is huge, oscillating around 85% world wide market share [1]. In many parts of the world it's the only real option for customers. You might use Facebook because your group chat is there. Many people use Android because 90% of their options are Android phones, regardless of brand, and they can't afford the ones that aren't. Secondly, what about the actual customers (advertisers)? Google has by far the lion's share in the online advertising market; they take more than twice of Facebook's revenues, and have ads all over the web in contrast to Facebook, which is mostly (only?) on Facebook applications. Google sounds far "stickier" than Facebook to them, and way more in a position of market control. [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266136/global-market-share-held-by-smartphone-operating-systems/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266136/global-market-sha... [2]: https://www.statista.com/chart/12179/google-and-facebook-share-of-ad-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/chart/12179/google-and-facebook-sha...

KasianFranks 8y ago

No need, they're going the way of AOL, friendster and myspace.

merinowool 8y ago

If you can use different social network than Facebook, then Facebook is not a monopoly.

Niksko 8y ago
Not necessarily disagreeing, but doesn't that basically invalidate the idea of a monopoly in a free and open internet? Perhaps the definition of a monopoly from analog era doesn't apply to the internet?
- merinowool 8y ago
  Yes, in the free market monopoly is impossible to form. You only get anomalies when you start adding socialism into the mix.
  - simion314 8y ago
    Do you have a scientific resource that proves your statement? Like a model that was run in a computer and resulted in a perfect free market? Maybe it would be true in a perfect free market, where people would act rational and won't be jerks, I don't have proof but intuitively I can see a free market simulator where some actors will find a small loophole and exploit it to maximize it's profit destroying everyone else.
    - merinowool 8y ago
      It is just common sense. Regulations give one advantage and restrict competition which is a breeding ground for monopolies.
      - icebraining 8y ago
        That only shows that regulations may create monopolies, not that they're the only reason for their existence.

rcar1046 8y ago

One could argue that a social network must necessarily be a monopoly to be useful to users unless cross site communication between multiple social networks was mandated. Just as 5 different companies each listing 20% of the residential phone numbers wouldn't make sense. The more completely a social network covers the population the more useful it becomes to users.

lallysingh 8y ago
But it'd be a poor argument. Email does multi-provider interop well.
- amelius 8y ago
  Yes, they should force Facebook to support the ActivityPub protocol. Not sure what that would mean for privacy/GDPR though ...
- akvadrako 8y ago
  If you have rather low standards. Email works just well enough, but it's turning into walled gardens, has no de facto e2e encryption, still has a spam problem and has a terrible UI for non-technical users in group settings.
wu-ikkyu 8y ago
The same argument can and has been made for the economy, government, religion etc. But as we've seen, too much centralized power in the hands of the few has lead to some of the greatest mass human suffering in history.

eulers__number 8y ago

fake news

musage 8y ago

if you close down Facebook - the users will spill out onto other sites - and that shouldn't be allowed That's the longest song I can justify writing about it.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

russdpale 8y ago

I doubt it can be reigned in. No government has control of the money flow, how can it possibly have any real control?

pascalxus 8y ago

If facebook is in danger of being cut down, why doesn't facebook just not higher so many employees? It seems like a win win situation: less cost, more profit and if fewer products get built as a result of the lower employee highering then there's less chance of blowback from the public