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Would trust-busting do any good? The main reason no practical alternatives to Facebook exist is the network effect. The main reason that competitors to Google d

• malka 8y ago
  if such things are meant to be monopolistic, then the state should manage it.
  • Zecar 8y ago
    You want the state in charge of managing communications between friends and family members?
    • Qwertystop 8y ago
      In the same way/to the same degree that the state manages the phone lines and the postal system, I suppose.
    • gotocake 8y ago
      Yes, in the same way they had to bust Ma Bell for the same damned reasons we’re seeing again. Let the state be the dumb pipe or at least ensure that the pipes stay dumb. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the alternative.
    • x220 8y ago
      The state already unofficially manages, manipulates, and spies on communication.
    • roguecoder 8y ago
      Rather than private corporations who turn around and exploit private communications between friends and family members for maximum profit? Yes. The state could abuse its power: companies do abuse their power, because to do otherwise would reduce shareholder profits.
    • x220 8y ago
      I want the state to specify restrictions on how companies can use the data transmitted in private messages on social networks.
    • fixermark 8y ago
      The state already has extremely heavy involvement in management of the telephone system. There is plenty of precedent for this being generally benevolent authority.
    • lumberjack 8y ago
      There are technological solutions that could maximize privacy but they are not in use because the private service provider needs to snoop in on your conversations to build a profile of your life. With a public service we could have a system engineered to maximize privacy. Not to mention real transparency and oversight that is no possible with private services.
      • twblalock 8y ago
        With a public service we would have a system engineered poorly, like healthcare.gov. The government can't do that kind of thing well.
        • Larrikin 8y ago
          Then state should do what they did to make healthcare.gov work on the second time through. The roll out sucked but it's perfectly fine now
    • joshAg 8y ago
      more than i want facebook or google to, yes.
  • Aunche 8y ago
    The difference is that you can't really manipulate the power grid to favor a political party. You can do that with Google or Facebook.
  • stcredzero 8y ago
    if such things are meant to be monopolistic I think there's a very important truth in this sentence! then the state should manage it Do states have such a good track record with Internet tech.? I'm thinking of Korea and their mandated shopping encryption ActiveX. IoT security is another are where lots of bad things are happening and an argument for state management could be made. How about the control of all IoT things, like webcams and smart assistants, go through government infrastructure? That way, they can 1) enforce security practices and 2) actually implement Orwell's total surveillance state from 1984.
  • davidcbc 8y ago
    Which state?
• roguecoder 8y ago
  The main reason for that is because they have been allowed to build a walled garden. Interoperable protocols would allow other companies to innovate on an equal playing field. Indeed if we follow the Bell example, the networked platform could be forced to be separate from those who profit off of it.
  • x220 8y ago
    Can you name some successful interoperable protocols used by social networks that allow for meaningful innovation and updates? All I can think of is Agora* (which no one uses) and IRC (which hasn't added nontrivial features in a very, very long time).
    • eitland 8y ago
      Whatever protocol (Ostatus?) connects my write.as account with my mastodon account and everyone else seems to be enabling meaningful innovation now. And between your examples there's also XMPP.
      • daveid 8y ago
        It's ActivityPub, not OStatus!
    • zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
      Whatever protocol Facebook is using internally to interoperate between their thousands of servers, with some additional authentication and authorization layers put in? I mean, not sure how sensible that would really be, but I think it's worth considering that Facebook is not some PHP script with a small local MySQL database behind it either, but rather a massive distributed system in itself, even if under the administrative control of a single entity.
      • wmf 8y ago
        One would assume that Facebook's internal protocols are constantly upgraded to enable new features and those upgrades would be much slower if industry politics got in the way.
• zjaffee 8y ago
  One could argue that the level of data this network effect allows businesses to collect allows them to create a trust around advertising, which is in some sense true.
• scotty79 8y ago
  > The main reason no practical alternatives to Facebook exist is the network effect. You could just split Google in half into Goo and Gle and force them to publish protocols their services use so they can share the network. This could also allow smaller players to join the network. At the beginning you could bounce people going to google.com at random to goo.com or gle.com until they start prefering one or the other for whatever reason and go there directly. And who knows ... maybe at some point Gle could attract more users by being more precise and less intrusive with their ads. Until there is one Google, there is one strategy that can be tried at one time. This harms progress.
  • nopriorarrests 8y ago
    >Until there is one Google, there is one strategy that can be tried at one time. This harms progress. I mean, have you seen the full list of google chat apps? You call it "one strategy that can be tried at one time"?
    • scotty79 8y ago
      It's easy to halfassedly try dozens of things and fail at all of them if your existence doesn't depend on it. If what google monopolist does to try new things was best or even sufficcient then planned economies would thrive.
• naravara 8y ago
  >The main reason no practical alternatives to Facebook exist is the network effect. You could have said the same about AT&T. When they broke it up, they split it into distinct entities. There is no reason we couldn't split it back up into Instagram, WhatsApp, and its other various apps. It also has tons of individual functions and features that are only bundled together because of path dependence. The Marketplace, the news feed, the home page, and the discussion forums/groups are all potentially distinct companies. You could still even have one company in charge of managing identity and authentication and make everything interoperable between the distinct branches. Setting things up that way would make it look more like a federated platform and would take no small amount of work, both from the private companies and the government (to establish standards). But as things are now nobody has an incentive to design an internet that works like that.
  • bilbo0s 8y ago
    >You could have said the same about AT&T... No you couldn't have, you could use your telephone to call any other telephone on the planet. Even if AT&T did not own the wires. THAT is the behavior we have to stop. Breaking up tech companies does nothing to solve that problem. Silos need to be made illegal if you want to stop the tech companies. (And even if you make silos illegal, good luck keeping your social network from knowing what you are searching for on your search engine. That's another one of the fundamental problems not addressed by break ups. Privacy.)
    • naravara 8y ago
      >No you couldn't have, you could use your telephone to call any other telephone on the planet. Even if AT&T did not own the wires. What? The telephone exchange (run by Bell) had to actually make the connection for you. If you were not paying them for phone service your calls weren't getting connected. And they owned the entire vertical stack for phone service, from producing the handsets to leasing/selling the phones to owning the wires and operating the exchanges. There were numerous reasons why it was just not viable to have an alternative business to AT&T. They owned all the infrastructure and it would have been impossible for any upstart to compete because you just can't build rival infrastructure overnight, and nobody wants to have a second-rate phone service. Breaking it up IS how they solved that problem, for a little while, until technology moved ahead of the regulations and began consolidating again. >That's another one of the fundamental problems not addressed by break ups. Privacy. Break ups don't address climate change either. What does any of this have to do with the price of tea in China? Also, if your social network isn't the same business as your search engine, why would they be sharing data with each other? This objection of yours makes no sense.
• ticviking 8y ago
  If multiple competitors have to achieve interop to provide a similar experience that doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.
• stcredzero 8y ago
  The main reason no practical alternatives to Facebook exist is the network effect. Doesn't it creep you out that one company has a monopoly on the social graph? When we busted up Ma Bell, we basically put into place standards for interoperation. What if we had a law mandating social graph companies open themselves up for interoperation once they reach some critical threshold of size? Basically, the idea is that once you're massive enough in social media, you don't get to hold onto your lead purely through the network effect. Staying at the top, just because you're at the top doesn't really promote the general welfare of society or motivate people to make better products. The main reason that competitors to Google don't do well is that people will just use the search engine that returns the most relevant results (unless your internet connection is censored). At home, I use Duck Duck Go. It gives good enough results but comes with a better reputation with regards to privacy.
  • haberman 8y ago
    > What if we had a law mandating social graph companies open themselves up for interoperation once they reach some critical threshold of size? To me that sounds like legally-mandated proliferation of sensitive user data. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is essentially a case of Facebook being too open with their data.
  • twblalock 8y ago
    > What if we had a law mandating social graph companies open themselves up for interoperation once they reach some critical threshold of size? If we open up Facebook's data to other companies, what makes you think those companies are willing and capable of securing the data and respecting user privacy? Facebook having all of that data is bad enough. Requiring Facebook to share it with other companies would not make that data more secure -- but it could definitely make it less secure.
    • zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
      For one, where sharing of data is concerned, none of this is about forcing Facebook to give your data to some random third party that asks for it. It is about you as a user being able to demand from Facebook that they make your data (or some selection of it) accessible to some third party of your choice. But also, and maybe more importantly, interoperation does not really necessarily require any sharing of data. Think the telephone network: All telephone network operators world wide do interoperate, which is why it doesn't matter where you are a customer, you still can call any other telephone on the planet. But that doesn't mean that those telcos somehow share data of their customers, apart from the particular calls that happen between customers of two different telcos. Also, one way in which Facebook could be forced to share data would be for migration to a different service: If you think Facebook is abusing your data, you could move to a different provider, and Facebook would have to allow them to pull your data over and then delete it on their side--and all that without you losing contact with people who stay on Facebook thanks to enforced interoperability.
• tracker1 8y ago
  > The only practical solution is regulating ethical behavior of these incomprehensibly powerful corporations Unfortunately, regulating ethics tends to lead us to exactly what is starting to happen... Even centrist and center-left commentators and journalists are starting to see some fallout from the gatekeepers of money/donations/subscriptions online. Most of it is far-right targeted, but there's some bleed and it may expand. I'm not a fan of extremist points of view. I'm more opposed to censorship as I feel it's far more dangerous than letting idiots talk. When a handful of companies serve as the gatekeepers to the world, it's more important that censorship is minimized, even if they are "private" companies.
  • CM30 8y ago
    Given that much of this apparently comes down to the likes of Visa and Mastercard, perhaps these types of companies need breaking up or regulating. Maybe also large enough payment processors like PayPal.
    • tracker1 8y ago
      I'm not sure that they realistically can be broken up. I mean, a government based one could be created, but there's the matter of interoperation between countries. I think that keeping them out of ethics/censorship in terms of what they'll process payments for would be where to start. That should include transparency in terms of when government actors ask them to blacklist someone. They're in a potentially tough position, however they have an unfair level of power. I'm not sure how they could reasonably be broken up.
• mtgx 8y ago
  Even so, Facebook itself would eventually die out, as people would get bored with "social media", or at least the type of social media that Facebook embodies. How do I know this? Because I'm already seeing the trend for it. The trend might not be huge right now but no big trend is. After all, solar panels have been on a rising trend since the 80's, but its nominal growth only started to be noticeable by 2010 or so. The problem is that Facebook is allowed to buy out any potential Facebook-replacements, too, and thus be allowed as a company to continue its monopoly almost indefinitely. If Instagram is the "new Facebook" then Facebook shouldn't have been allowed to touch it. And if it already touched it, the government should split them up, as they did AT&T, for the public good. Same with WhatsApp. My guess is Facebook wants to integrate the three now primarily because it wants to use the excuse that it "can't" neatly separate the platforms anymore and that users will rebel against the government if they attempt that. So if politicians plan to bust Facebook, they should do it soon.
• tivert 8y ago
  > Would trust-busting do any good? The main reason no practical alternatives to Facebook exist is the network effect. ... The only practical solution is regulating ethical behavior of these incomprehensibly powerful corporations. While I think regulation definitely needs to be on the table to control the perverse incentives that would affect all Baby Facebook's, I don't think the network effect makes Facebook resistant to trust-busting. If a breakup mandates the successors to: 1) share the core IP (e.g. the Facebook brand and facebook.com, etc), 2) create and participate in an open federated social network protocol to blunt future network effects, and 3) divide Facebook's current userbase in a way that does not follow the contours of the social graph ...then I think the network effects will be muted enough to prevent the current monopoly situation from reoccurring.
  • michaelchisari 8y ago
    4) Require the baby facebooks to coordinate an open standard federated social networking profile that is managed through a non-profit consortium.