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>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

>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.

bilbo0s 8y ago
>What? The telephone exchange (run by Bell) had to actually make the connection for you.... Exactly, and Facebook will not make an open connection for you to another social network. Any connection is strictly limited to protect Facebook's sovereignty over you. It would be like At&T making a connection to Sumatra for you, but only if you confine your discussion to the size of pants you wear. No other information would be allowed to be discussed. If you tried to even say your name, AT&T would automatically mute those parts of the conversation. You cannot openly connect to another social network and move your data wherever you please. If you switch without moving your data, you cannot openly talk back to your friends who may still be on the old social network. ie - these are SILOS. And that's the behavior we should be targeting. You could go through the AT&T network back in the 70's and talk to someone in Sumatra, or Paris on a completely different national network not provided by AT&T. If you want to openly connect with someone in Sumatra or Paris via social network today, you have to be on the same social network. These networks are not open. What we need are laws obliging them to be open. Trust busting does not do that, all it does, at best, is give you multiple siloed social networks to choose from. (But it probably wouldn't even do that. It would likely just separate, say, youtube from google. Or separate instagram from facebook. We're still left with silos.)
- naravara 8y ago
  >Exactly, and Facebook will not make an open connection for you to another social network. Yes. This is why I said you need to make it a condition of breaking the trust. To open the platform and create general standards for interoperability is part of the point. You're arbitrarily constraining the definition of a breakup to only refer to dividing up administrations, even though almost every instance of actual trust busting involves making all kinds of requirements about the conditions of subdividing operations to help make sure the same problems of consolidation and collusion don't repeat.

bilbo0s 8y ago

>What? The telephone exchange (run by Bell) had to actually make the connection for you.... Exactly, and Facebook will not make an open connection for you to another social network. Any connection is strictly limited to protect Facebook's sovereignty over you. It would be like At&T making a connection to Sumatra for you, but only if you confine your discussion to the size of pants you wear. No other information would be allowed to be discussed. If you tried to even say your name, AT&T would automatically mute those parts of the conversation. You cannot openly connect to another social network and move your data wherever you please. If you switch without moving your data, you cannot openly talk back to your friends who may still be on the old social network. ie - these are SILOS. And that's the behavior we should be targeting. You could go through the AT&T network back in the 70's and talk to someone in Sumatra, or Paris on a completely different national network not provided by AT&T. If you want to openly connect with someone in Sumatra or Paris via social network today, you have to be on the same social network. These networks are not open. What we need are laws obliging them to be open. Trust busting does not do that, all it does, at best, is give you multiple siloed social networks to choose from. (But it probably wouldn't even do that. It would likely just separate, say, youtube from google. Or separate instagram from facebook. We're still left with silos.)

naravara 8y ago
>Exactly, and Facebook will not make an open connection for you to another social network. Yes. This is why I said you need to make it a condition of breaking the trust. To open the platform and create general standards for interoperability is part of the point. You're arbitrarily constraining the definition of a breakup to only refer to dividing up administrations, even though almost every instance of actual trust busting involves making all kinds of requirements about the conditions of subdividing operations to help make sure the same problems of consolidation and collusion don't repeat.