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There is a case for splitting Amazon and AWS. The point of anti-trust laws is to break up monopolies because they represent a massive and dangerous concentrati
by velcrovan 8y ago
There is a case for splitting Amazon and AWS.
The point of anti-trust laws is to break up monopolies because they represent a massive and dangerous concentration of market and political power in the hands of the few. You don't need evidence of any specific crime to do it.
You can say you'd prefer it not be that way. But it's a provision of existing law, with precedents. To really argue for your preference you'd need to show how those applications didn't turn out well.
- basch 8y agoFacebook should be treated the same way and spit up vertically then, not horizontally. Datacenter and infrastructure and all their low level services should be split from client apps, NOT messenger split from whatsapp.
- velcrovan 8y agoNot sure why this would carry over to Facebook. Amazon sells metered compute or hosting infrastructure used by half the internet, Facebook doesn't sell infrastructure to anyone. Going by their actual levers of market power, you absolutely would split WhatsApp and Instagram off.
- basch 8y agoI still dont think you can justify any of those as monopolies yet. Snapchat, twitter, pinterest, reddit, youtube, hangouts/gmessenger, linkedin, skype/groupme, imessage, discord, kik, line, telegram, signal. Especially justifying Instagram, because facebook really made it what it is. WhatsApp MAYBE, but in reality what facebook is doing is owning both the US and INTL messengers, I dont think they overlap in a way that justifies splitting it up, because FB's US marketshare doesnt drastically increase from WA. Is it the justice departments job from to allow the most popular domestic product from merging with the most popular international product? Uber being able to swallow up or own shares in all these regional services should be questioned then. FB/WA still have viable competition from imessage, snapchat, and skype.
- JackFr 8y ago> The point of anti-trust laws is to break up monopolies because they represent a massive and dangerous concentration of market and political power in the hands of the few. You don't need evidence of any specific crime to do it. Not actually true. To break up an existing company, you need to be taken to court by the United States under the one of the anti-trust acts, and prove a violation of the law. To be clear the FTC can prevent mergers with no evidence of wrongdoing, based solely on market share, but breaking up an existing company is a rarely used remedy in antitrust cases.
- sleepysysadmin 8y agoGeorge W Bush tried this against Microsoft. They were unsuccessful. You cannot just decide it's a crime to be large. The fundamental rights like unreasonable seizure and freedom of speech. Which means the government cant just steal the corporation from you or prevent your companies from working together.
- int_19h 8y agoThere's no fundamental right for a corporation (which, to remind, is a separate legal entity) to be of a certain size. This doesn't have anything to do with freedom of speech. And if you trim them down to size by splitting them, the original owners would still own the fragments, so it's not a seizure, either.
- velcrovan 8y agoIn America and in many other countries, the mere fact of monopolizing a market is in fact a crime. The constitution offers no protection against this whatsoever. Go google antitrust law, and read up on some history. The Sherman Act, Standard Oil and AT&T are some good places to start.