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Couldn’t agree more with the analysis- I just wish some of the politicians running on a “break up big tech” platform could show they’ve thought about these issu

Couldn’t agree more with the analysis- I just wish some of the politicians running on a “break up big tech” platform could show they’ve thought about these issues half as much as the author has. They seem to mostly be appealing to voters emotionally without ever diving into the significant details like “what is a monopoly”, “are these companies monopolies?”, “what good will come from breaking them up?”

amelius 7y ago
Yes, as always, analysis of the problem is the first step, and this is where the discussion ends. The real problem is not even finding a solution, but getting it accepted. Nobody blogs about that.
jerf 7y ago
Well, you can't completely understand the calls for breakup until you understand that the politicians don't really care about the traditional monopoly issues. They're upset that Facebook, Google, and Twitter have as much control over the political discourse as they do (note the missing Amazon in that list, modulo the fact that Amazon's CEO happens to own a major newspaper). If society is like a big collective brain as it thinks about the big issues, those companies have installed filters on a significant portion of the neural links and they aggressively use them. I personally think this is a bad thing as well, and fully support breaking them up for this reason alone. In a perfect world, we'd carefully and thoughtfully craft new laws to address this matter; in reality, we're going to probably "creatively" read some existing laws in new and unpredictable ways to get some unprincipled compromise of what several groups want. So I'm likely to be both unhappy at the theory and the practice of how they are actually broken up. Isn't government fun. But I do agree they need to be broken up. This analysis is then useful as a conventional reading of anti-trust laws, but I fully expect that if a conventional reading of the laws won't get it done, then either new laws are going to be made or unconventional readings will be made. I also think that these platforms are basically boned in terms of voters and public opinion. Consider two sets of forces on these platforms: First, the set of forces that want to insist that they carry any given piece of speech, and second, the forces that want to insist that they censor any given piece of speech. (Observe I'm not breaking this up on conventional political lines; all sides have their lists of both types of things they want.) I submit that there simply is no solution for a single universal platform that combines all of them. Almost all even remotely controversial speech is going to be on the mandatory list from one party and the banned list from another, which means that in the public opinion war, every political side is going to have an endless list of grievances against these platforms, literally no matter what they do. There is no solution for platforms at this scale. This is ultimately what is going to kill them; even if the government doesn't break them apart, something will. In fact, in my first paragraph, when I said they "aggressively use" the filters, I'm not saying they even necessarily have a choice, or particularly accusing them of "incorrect" usage. I think at this point, they're simply at a size where they're boned no matter what they do with those filters. I do have my own list of particular localized grievances, but if you don't have one now, you probably will soon. The latest YouTube demonetization purge is hitting a lot of weird channels, including... a channel dedicated to making completely a-political cartoon parodies of the Final Fantasy games? Everyone's going to be pissed at something. I don't think there's ultimately a solution to "the one big site that everyone uses". Applications to the stock price of the relevant entities left as an exercise for the reader.
- woodgrainz 7y ago
  > They're upset that Facebook, Google, and Twitter have as much control over the political discourse as they do This is the part that resonates with me the most. It's about power. The tech giants have amassed power in a way not seen before. It's different than Standard Oil and the Bell phone monopoly. On the balance, consumers aren't being harmed as they would in a typical antitrust scenario.
  - AlexandrB 7y ago
    > On the balance, consumers aren't being harmed as they would in a typical antitrust scenario. I would argue that they are. If private info is the new currency we're paying for access to these services, the price has been constantly increasing as more and more information is collected through tracking and "partnerships". This is one reason why it would be nice to put a dollar value on private data: to make this price increase obvious. Real competition might look like delivering similar services without requiring as much tracking data to do so.
    - jerf 7y ago
      One of the problems with claiming that customers are being harmed by the privacy invasion is that the companies can demonstrate that they are only making a few bucks per year per customer on these "privacy invasions", making the most naturally legally defensible definition of the "damage" being done only a few bucks per year, per customer. The argument at that point that the customer receives far more value than that is very, very easy. Showing that they do much, much more damage to privacy to make that several bucks is going to be legally challenging, and trying to convince a judge that the damage is yet higher because of my aforementioned nebulous concerns about "the social fabric being censored at the metaphorical-neural level" is going to fail unless you get a particularly activist judge, because they're not supposed to be ruling on the basis of such abstract concepts like that. (That's supposed to be what Congress is making laws based on.) One of the challenges to my mind here is precisely that on the whole, individual customers aren't being harmed. On the whole, individual customers come out ahead. For most people, this is an acceptable bargain and they are substantially on the winning side of it. It is only once a single entity aggregates substantially the entire market that society and democracy starts to be substantially harmed, even as at every moment, there was never a transition point where individual customers changed to being harmed.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tracker1 7y ago
I don't think that breaking them up is entirely necessary. Classifying them as public spaces in private ownership and extending similar freedoms from government to these large social media companies seems like a relatively reasonable approach. As to the counter argument that they are "private companies," corporations and companies exist because of the government. The positions allow for not only group ownership, but also for such limited liability that companies can collectively kill thousands and not be killed themselves. This can and should be offset by limited capability in scenarios where a corporation may have an unnatural leverage against competition. I tend to be very libertarian leaning, but corporations are not individuals, nor are they held to the same standards, and as such shouldn't be allowed the same freedoms. Restricting business is natural, and civil rights laws have already made business owners do what they might otherwise not want to. Extending freedom of speech rights enforcement to organizations with over 10m members or managing over 5b/year in revenue is not unreasonable. They already have platform protections.
- gfodor 7y ago
  I agree -- in fact, I'd argue that attacking the problems of social media through the lens of antitrust will result in a far worse outcome than directly addressing the problem head on that these companies have created a privately owned, global public square. The laws need to be updated to reflect the novel realities of the emergence of these platforms, which was likely an inevitability given the arc of the development of the Internet/web, and not something our forefathers could have forecasted when writing applicable laws and regulation around speech.

amelius 7y ago

Yes, as always, analysis of the problem is the first step, and this is where the discussion ends. The real problem is not even finding a solution, but getting it accepted. Nobody blogs about that.

jerf 7y ago

Well, you can't completely understand the calls for breakup until you understand that the politicians don't really care about the traditional monopoly issues. They're upset that Facebook, Google, and Twitter have as much control over the political discourse as they do (note the missing Amazon in that list, modulo the fact that Amazon's CEO happens to own a major newspaper). If society is like a big collective brain as it thinks about the big issues, those companies have installed filters on a significant portion of the neural links and they aggressively use them. I personally think this is a bad thing as well, and fully support breaking them up for this reason alone. In a perfect world, we'd carefully and thoughtfully craft new laws to address this matter; in reality, we're going to probably "creatively" read some existing laws in new and unpredictable ways to get some unprincipled compromise of what several groups want. So I'm likely to be both unhappy at the theory and the practice of how they are actually broken up. Isn't government fun. But I do agree they need to be broken up. This analysis is then useful as a conventional reading of anti-trust laws, but I fully expect that if a conventional reading of the laws won't get it done, then either new laws are going to be made or unconventional readings will be made. I also think that these platforms are basically boned in terms of voters and public opinion. Consider two sets of forces on these platforms: First, the set of forces that want to insist that they carry any given piece of speech, and second, the forces that want to insist that they censor any given piece of speech. (Observe I'm not breaking this up on conventional political lines; all sides have their lists of both types of things they want.) I submit that there simply is no solution for a single universal platform that combines all of them. Almost all even remotely controversial speech is going to be on the mandatory list from one party and the banned list from another, which means that in the public opinion war, every political side is going to have an endless list of grievances against these platforms, literally no matter what they do. There is no solution for platforms at this scale. This is ultimately what is going to kill them; even if the government doesn't break them apart, something will. In fact, in my first paragraph, when I said they "aggressively use" the filters, I'm not saying they even necessarily have a choice, or particularly accusing them of "incorrect" usage. I think at this point, they're simply at a size where they're boned no matter what they do with those filters. I do have my own list of particular localized grievances, but if you don't have one now, you probably will soon. The latest YouTube demonetization purge is hitting a lot of weird channels, including... a channel dedicated to making completely a-political cartoon parodies of the Final Fantasy games? Everyone's going to be pissed at something. I don't think there's ultimately a solution to "the one big site that everyone uses". Applications to the stock price of the relevant entities left as an exercise for the reader.

woodgrainz 7y ago
> They're upset that Facebook, Google, and Twitter have as much control over the political discourse as they do This is the part that resonates with me the most. It's about power. The tech giants have amassed power in a way not seen before. It's different than Standard Oil and the Bell phone monopoly. On the balance, consumers aren't being harmed as they would in a typical antitrust scenario.
- AlexandrB 7y ago
  > On the balance, consumers aren't being harmed as they would in a typical antitrust scenario. I would argue that they are. If private info is the new currency we're paying for access to these services, the price has been constantly increasing as more and more information is collected through tracking and "partnerships". This is one reason why it would be nice to put a dollar value on private data: to make this price increase obvious. Real competition might look like delivering similar services without requiring as much tracking data to do so.
  - jerf 7y ago
    One of the problems with claiming that customers are being harmed by the privacy invasion is that the companies can demonstrate that they are only making a few bucks per year per customer on these "privacy invasions", making the most naturally legally defensible definition of the "damage" being done only a few bucks per year, per customer. The argument at that point that the customer receives far more value than that is very, very easy. Showing that they do much, much more damage to privacy to make that several bucks is going to be legally challenging, and trying to convince a judge that the damage is yet higher because of my aforementioned nebulous concerns about "the social fabric being censored at the metaphorical-neural level" is going to fail unless you get a particularly activist judge, because they're not supposed to be ruling on the basis of such abstract concepts like that. (That's supposed to be what Congress is making laws based on.) One of the challenges to my mind here is precisely that on the whole, individual customers aren't being harmed. On the whole, individual customers come out ahead. For most people, this is an acceptable bargain and they are substantially on the winning side of it. It is only once a single entity aggregates substantially the entire market that society and democracy starts to be substantially harmed, even as at every moment, there was never a transition point where individual customers changed to being harmed.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tracker1 7y ago

I don't think that breaking them up is entirely necessary. Classifying them as public spaces in private ownership and extending similar freedoms from government to these large social media companies seems like a relatively reasonable approach. As to the counter argument that they are "private companies," corporations and companies exist because of the government. The positions allow for not only group ownership, but also for such limited liability that companies can collectively kill thousands and not be killed themselves. This can and should be offset by limited capability in scenarios where a corporation may have an unnatural leverage against competition. I tend to be very libertarian leaning, but corporations are not individuals, nor are they held to the same standards, and as such shouldn't be allowed the same freedoms. Restricting business is natural, and civil rights laws have already made business owners do what they might otherwise not want to. Extending freedom of speech rights enforcement to organizations with over 10m members or managing over 5b/year in revenue is not unreasonable. They already have platform protections.

gfodor 7y ago
I agree -- in fact, I'd argue that attacking the problems of social media through the lens of antitrust will result in a far worse outcome than directly addressing the problem head on that these companies have created a privately owned, global public square. The laws need to be updated to reflect the novel realities of the emergence of these platforms, which was likely an inevitability given the arc of the development of the Internet/web, and not something our forefathers could have forecasted when writing applicable laws and regulation around speech.