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I appreciate the snark, but I'll just say anyway that I'm actually asking what are the factors that determine when a company is "too big"?
by root_axis 7y ago
I appreciate the snark, but I'll just say anyway that I'm actually asking what are the factors that determine when a company is "too big"?
- CamperBob2 7y agoIn all honesty, the only way a company like Facebook gets this big is through the support of the larger society that sustains them. The Internet itself is a product of that society. Everyone with a stake in that society is at least entitled to an opinion, if not an outright vote, regarding how the company operates. This is a reflection of a larger point, which is that any sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government. Especially with the introduction of Libra, that's starting to sound less like a cliche and more like an axiom. This also (should) give the rest of us more input in how the company does business.
- root_axis 7y agoI don't disagree with much of anything you've written there, but corporate dominance has been an issue for a long time and the impact of social media companies is trivial compared to the impact of companies that e.g. kill citizens with addictive drugs for profit, withhold life saving drugs and medical treatment for profit, hoard and reserve huge swaths of residential property for rent seeking, contaminate the water table and arable land for natural gas etc and the political proclivities of these companies is never scrutinized outside of partisan politics. I'm not saying that Facebook isn't also a problem, but it seems very much like bikeshedding to tie ourselves into knots writing new laws so that people have the right to share low-effort memes on Facebook's servers when there are so many real problems that could be solved with new laws.