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Advocacy groups are pushing the FTC to break up Facebook
- ashton314 8y agoAre there any analogous corporate breakups in history? Any tech companies that have been broken up as these people are suggesting?
- b11484 8y agoAT&T and Bell were broken up, but that was because it was a monopoly.[1] I don't think Facebook is a monopoly though. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
- joker3 8y agoWho are Facebook's competitors?
- penagwin 8y agoWhat is Facebook's market? Social media or advertising? If the main "clients/users" are the typical average Joe, and the service is free, does it count as a monopoly (At least in terms of anti-trust laws)?
- strictnein 8y agoThat it doesn't own? In the US you could probably could argue: LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, Youtube, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr. I be they would also argue Google, which would be true from an advertising perspective.
- ConceitedCode 8y agoAlso Standard oil back in 1911[1]. Those are the only 2 cases I'm aware of in US history. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#Breakup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#Breakup
- evv 8y agoIt does effectively have a monopoly on online identity. Organizations like Uber and Airbnb depend on FB accounts for trust. But I think the most effective way to take down the monopoly isn't by regulating, because it may hurt consumers. Instead the government could help make FB obsolete. If people could "login with us.gov" instead of "login with Facebook", I think most people would.
- jerkstate 8y agoIf there's any dependency it's a soft dependency. I don't have FB and I use uber and airbnb.
- evv 8y agoIt may be harder as a host/driver, but you're right that they may have fixed that dependency. Back in 2008, it was one of the main ways you could trust the car or house that you're about to step into.
- mschuster91 8y ago> If people could "login with us.gov" instead of "login with Facebook", I think most people would. Oh hell no. Bad enough that Facebook knows every step I do on the Internet thanks to ubiquitous trackers - but the government? No way. This is China's Social Credit Score waiting to happen.
- porpoisely 8y agoI've never had a facebook account. My online identity is fine thank you. Also, why should the government help make any private company "obsolete"? Do you really want the government deciding which private company succeeds or not? So from 2008 to 2016, obama gets to decide which company gets to exist. Now you want Trump to decide which companies exist? I can't believe there are people here actually advocating for government control of the private sector. I'd rather not use a "gov" account for anything but "gov" related things. Nevermind that the government tends to be a bureaucratic mess, it's also a major privacy and security problem. Facebook is a spying and data collecting behemoth. Lets solve it by having the government spy on us. When did the hacker ethos become "government is the solution for everything" so "let's trust government"? If we wanted a government login for everything, we'd already have it. I don't know if you are american or not, but I'm willing to bet that most of us don't want a government login or identity for the internet.
- basic1 8y agoBreak up Google while you're at it.
- AimForTheBushes 8y agoMore like Amazon
- endofcapital 8y agoHow about all three? Instead of everyone just picking their favorite platform for dubious reasons and blindly adhering to that corp maybe we should just bust them all up at once in one swoop, whether they are on your "team" or not. Google is probably the most dangerous and abusive of the three today, but I think Amazon is trying to steal that throne and will probably be much scarier in a few years.
- moate 8y agoWhy not both?
- JumpCrisscross 8y agoWhat’s the best one for a New Yorker to get involved with?
- root_axis 8y agoBreak it up into what? All the problems of Facebook are inherent to Facebook as a product, "breaking up" Facebook doesn't really fix anything.
- chr1 8y agoTwo facebooks that need to talk with each other (and new implementations) via open and documented protocol.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jwalton 8y agoYes, exactly; just like breaking up Bell in the 80s.
- traek 8y agoThis is the worst case scenario for consumers. An "open and documented protocol" is what led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal; most people are not informed enough to properly manage permissions and even if they were, the personal data of friends would necessarily be available via this protocol. Posting something on this new platform-ized Facebook would be akin to sharing with every app each of your friends has authorized.
- endofcapital 8y agoInsta/Facebook is the most obvious split. Maybe break it out into regions or countries? They have way too much power, have to take some sort of steps.
- reaperducer 8y agoBreak it up into what? Off the top of my head: - Facebook content - Facebook advertising - Facebook messenger - Instagram - whatever other apps Facebook owns - probably a whole bunch of others that will require thinking about it more than four seconds.
- wudangmonk 8y agoAre there any historical examples of this where the company in question was not in charge or national resources or infrastructure that was paid by a government?. All the bell, oil, railroad examples have this in common. Short of the government making these companies the only government approved ones in their respective fields I do not see how breaking them up would be something that can be done. Even then the monopoly would only exist because yet again the government created it.
- reaperducer 8y agoAre there any historical examples of this where the company in question was not in charge or [sic] national resources or infrastructure that was paid by a government?. American Tobacco Company, for one. There are a number of others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._American_Tobacco_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._American_Toba....
- wahern 8y agoAmerican Tobacco was aggressively and successfully conspiring with other companies to maintain high prices. It's precisely such conspiracies to restrain trade that are specifically prohibited by the Sherman Act. How is Facebook conspiring to restrain trade? With whom? Would breaking Facebook up result in lower prices for using social media services? The services are already free. Should people expect to get paid for posting selfies? Breaking up Facebook for its behavior would be like breaking up IBM for age discrimination. It doesn't matter whether it's wrong nor even whether it's illegal. It's neither the function nor intent of anti-trust law to break up companies under such pretenses.
- porpoisely 8y ago"Advocacy groups" hired and funded by whom? There are lots of "advocacy groups" demanding a lot of things. It would be interesting to find out why theverge and other news companies selectively choose which "advocacy groups" to promote. Also, what about microsoft, netflix, amazon, twitter and most importantly google? Also, what about humongous international banks? Or the chemicals/agribusiness where 2 or 3 companies dominate the world's market. What about the media? Where a handle of megacorporations own so much of the market?
- reaperducer 8y agoAlso, what about microsoft, netflix, amazon, twitter and most importantly google Only have to break up one and the rest will fall into line. what aboutism
- wahern 8y agoFall in line how? Other than Google, which clearly abuses (at times) their market power from the dominance of Google Ads, Android, and Chrome, I have no idea what draws the ire of all those other companies; not individually and certainly not as a group. I guess it's supposed to be something... something... social media... something... privacy... something. But I strongly suspect it's just vague anti-corporate sentiment, anxiety around our bitter political divisiveness, and resentment over the excesses in the technology sector (e.g. brogrammers). I'm no anti-trust scholar but I don't think the purpose and design of anti-trust law is to resolve national cultural crises.
- giornogiovanna 8y agoMicrosoft is the poster-child of abusing market power, and Amazon isn't exactly innocent on that front, either.
- wahern 8y agoI do think Amazon is the new Microsoft. With AWS, Amazon figured out how to embrace, extend, and extinguish the entire open source ecosystem. But AFAIK AWS isn't yet acting anti-competitively. (And neither is Microsoft any longer, for that matter.) I suppose maybe in the book publishing industry there are strong anti-trust concerns. But I don't think this is what people have on their minds. Few in the industry question the consequences of moving to AWS. And most people--techies and non-techies--use and enjoy Google Search, Chrome, and Android without qualms. Nobody is shedding a tear for Bing, Firefox, or Yahoo, and in any event nobody is arguing that Google unfairly muscled them out. It's only when a service or technology implicates social media do people really get fired up, and to a lesser degree the selling of mined personal data. But the fact that people think of Facebook, Google, and Twitter, plus a litany of other tech companies with household recognition, should all be punished betrays their logic. None of this behavior is anti-competitive; it's not destroying markets; it's not transferring wealth. It's one thing to argue personal data aggregation, mining, and selling should be more heavily regulated (a la GDPR). But anti-trust has nothing to do with it, and I don't see how splitting any of these companies up would substantially change anything, let alone result in a net benefit. At least not under the pretense of "fixing" social media, privacy, or fake news.
- nkingsy 8y agoIt seems to me that US trust busting in the past was: 1. Seen as radical at the time, and odious to all private industry. 2. Able to leave shareholder value somewhat intact because they were simply splitting physical assets. While I think 2 might be addressed by eg forcing Instagram/YouTube/etc to spin off, 1 would require the election of radicals to high office. Our political system has built in so many safeguards over the years to keep true radicals out of office that I just can't see it happening. Trump promised many things, but disruption of business was not one of them. edit: What I see as more likely is regulations that preserve shareholder value and enshrine these companies as utilities, erecting barriers to entry so high that they become permanent monopolies, while (hopefully) slowly reigning in the wild profits. edit 2: Facebook's current share price basically values it as a utility already, and given their slowing growth they might even lobby for such regulation themselves to staunch the bleeding.
- stcredzero 8y ago1 would require the election of radicals to high office How does Theodore Roosevelt fit into this model? How does JFK/Johnson fit into this model? edit: What I see as more likely is regulations that preserve shareholder value and enshrine these companies as utilities, erecting barriers to entry so high that they become permanent monopolies, while (hopefully) slowly reigning in the wild profits. That's 180 degrees away from where I'd go. Change regulations to favor new competitors arising. Right now, big tech companies seem to comprise a faction which sometimes colludes to crush potential competitors.
- nkingsy 8y agoTR was punted to the vice presidency to get him out of New York because he was too radical. Johnson and JFK pushed through some of the most progressive civil rights and anti poverty measures this country has ever seen. By today’s standards all three would 100% be considered radicals, and were considered so by their contemporaries. Edit: I didn’t say what I want to happen, just what I thought was most likely. Strange reason to downvote Edit 2: I think Vietnam weighs heavily on LBJ and JFK. I personally lay that on the feet of the military industrial complex coopting an inexperienced JFK, and LBJ doing everything he could to see through his predecessors policies.