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Although a post about updated branding may seem benign, this is, I believe, a response to critics who believe the company should be broken up. For example: ht

• MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  Why is the government itching to break up tech companies? I feel like it's a bad idea for them to get involved at all.
  • notatoad 7y ago
    as the power of the big tech companies approach the power of the government, governments are naturally going to seek to limit their power.
    • MuffinFlavored 7y ago
      Can you elaborate how Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/WhatsApp/Google/Microsoft/Apple are approaching power levels of the government? I know that Facebook + Twitter political ads are "powerful", as well as "fake news" spreading when it is relates to politics. I'd be curious to hear any other examples if you have them.
      • goatinaboat 7y ago
        how Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/WhatsApp/Google/Microsoft/Apple are approaching power levels of the government? Remember Twitter gloating about its role in the Arab Spring? They’re a psychological weapon that can overturn societies overnight. And they’ll do it just for a few more ad clicks.
        • celim307 7y ago
          Not to mention Facebook's libra. The government doesn't look too kindly on you subverting its main method of influence
  • duncan-donuts 7y ago
    Seems like the common theme is they own too much data on us and it’s not clear that any number of apps might just be a subsidiary of a larger org.
  • pron 7y ago
    Because democratic societies generally dislike so much power concentrated in the hands of undemocratic institutions.
    • dmix 7y ago
      Anti-trust laws are there for economic reasons, ie, monopolies preventing competition leaving society worse-off as a whole than can be gained from efficiencies of a single organization. It also typically requires proof of anti-competitive behaviour, beyond just being the biggest in the market. A lot of companies dominate their markets but don't engage in overt anti-competitive behaviour. I don't think they've ever been enforced to serve some political end, like punishing companies for not serving some greater democratic purpose to appease the political parties.
      • vkou 7y ago
        Yours is a very US-centric viewpoint. The US sees anti-trust as necessary when consumers are negatively impacted. The EU sees anti-trust as necessary when producers are negatively impacted. The latter is, of course, always colored by politics. I will also note that the nature of the social network market, with its network effects, means that a large enough system with a closed API is, under those constraints, by definition anti-competitive - certainly to producers, and possibly to consumers.
        • filoleg 7y ago
          >The US sees anti-trust as necessary when consumers are negatively impacted. The EU sees anti-trust as necessary when producers are negatively impacted. This statement is interesting, considering what it implies about the purpose of existence of producers for each respective side. With this stance, US is more like "producers exist to satisfy needs of customers", while EU is "producers exist just to compete with each other".
          • vkou 7y ago
            The EU, roughly, sees producers as a vehicle that exists to create jobs, and thus create prosperity for their employees. Once basic life needs are met, optimizing for customers tends to only good for someone who is living off their savings/welfare/etc. Optimizing for employees is good if you, like the majority of the people on Earth, have to work for a living, or are supported by someone who has to work for a living.
  • ForHackernews 7y ago
    Because big tech companies are now at the point where they can pick the winners in democratic elections, if they choose to do so.
    • filoleg 7y ago
      Really? Doesn't seem like it worked out well for them during the last elections, given that people like Dustin Moskowitz and Larry Page were directly supporting and assisting the DNC campaign (with others assisting the campaign less directly).
      • x220 7y ago
        Google[1] and Facebook[2] have sponsored the Republican party. Both have accepted ad contracts from Republican candidates. [1] https://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/google-gop-convention-trump-critics-222602 https://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/google-gop-convention... [2] https://fortune.com/2016/05/07/facebook-confirms-it-will-sponsor-trumps-republican-national-convention/ https://fortune.com/2016/05/07/facebook-confirms-it-will-spo...
        • filoleg 7y ago
          They accepted ad contracts from both sides, while the leadership directly supported DNC. The pendulum was definitely on the DNC side when it came to support from tech companies. Just because they were giving some support to the Republican party, doesn't disprove my assertion at all.
          • x220 7y ago
            What is your assertion?
            • filoleg 7y ago
              My assertion is that "tech companies can choose the winners of the election" is an extremely over-exaggerated statement that holds no basis in reality. Some of the most powerful people in tech industry openly sided with and assisted DNC, and yet they lost the election. Yes, they sold ads to both sides, but the level of support (direct and indirect) that DNC received from big tech was incomparable to that of the Republican party.
  • hellofunk 7y ago
    If they are undermining the fundamental purpose of government, then why wouldn’t the government want to do something about it?
  • baby 7y ago
    Seeing something similar happening in China (CEOs of companies that get large are stepping down and being replaced by party members), I wonder if the US model is similarly threatened by large companies. If you think about it, corruption is legal in the US through lobbies, and the larger and more powerful a company is, the easier it is for the company to influence policies and how the country is being run.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • MiroF 7y ago
      Pretty much every major republican thinker (and by republican I mean in the tradition of republicanism, not the political party) has discussed the problem that these concentrations of wealth/power have for stable societies.
      • philwelch 7y ago
        Most historical republics were defined and explicitly ruled by concentrations of wealth and power--Rome, Venice, Florence, Genoa, the Hanseatic League.
    • thedudeabides5 7y ago
      "If you think about it, corruption is legal in the US through lobbies" Well, whether we go so far as to say lobby = corruption, I think the idea is to bring more transparency and accountability to the general problem. Any society with free movement of capital is going to have issues with accumulated economic capital impacting politics. A democratic republic such as the USA hopes to address this issue by formalizing the channels the public can access the government. Right now I'd give us a 5/10 on that scale. Where's China on that scale? I don't have enough info to say...
  • z3ncyberpunk 7y ago
    It's a bad idea for them NOT to get involved.
  • legitster 7y ago
    Tech companies in particular have very concentrated employee bases - there is a lot of incentive to grandstand against them if your constituency doesn't get many benefits, especially if that constituency comes from places that don't have much in the way of technical literacy. Still, breaking up any company for being too successful is a great way to keep your economy from growing. I don't imagine sane politicians will actually follow through, especially since breaking up trusts in the past did almost nothing to help the consumers it was supposed to.
    • notfromhere 7y ago
      Breaking up trusts definitely helped - its the concentration of wealth and non-existent trust enforcement why there's so much consolidation and market concentration in a handful of firms.
      • legitster 7y ago
        Breaking up Microsoft didn't necessarily help any competitors, but it definitely made their products worse. Breaking up Bell turned one giant monopoly (with a well funded research division that drove innovation) into a bunch of regional monopolies that didn't necessarily drive better consumer outcomes. Trustbusting is a very blunt instrument and there's not much data that it actually drives the results it intends. It would be better to address the market conditions that drive the industry to a monopoly.
        • notfromhere 7y ago
          the nature of capitalist competition means that in the long-term markets will consolidate.
        • debaserab2 7y ago
          Breaking up Microsoft absolutely helped their competitors, but not in the PC software market. There was a time when Windows tightly integrated Internet Explorer throughout the operating system to the point that using a different browser was a hassle (and would never be done by their general audience). Microsoft subverted and contorted as many industry standards as they felt like it as they attempted to turn the internet into their own walled garden right from the start. The antitrust rulings that were made undid the clamped down version of the internet that Microsoft was trying to build. I highly doubt consumers would have somehow been better off the last two decades if this ruling wasn't made.
  • pengstrom 7y ago
    Why is that? Do you have an alternative?
  • ummonk 7y ago
    It isn’t. Some political candidates are.
  • robbrown451 7y ago
    Because many voters think that they would be better off if the government enforced antitrust law more strongly in this area. Most agree it was effective when the government broke up Standard Oil, and when they broke up AT&T, among others. Microsoft was not broken up (although it got really close), but they sure got a slap, partly from the EU. And they changed their behavior, rather dramatically, for the better in the years since. The idea being that more competition is better. I think the first question you should be asking is "why do free market economies need antitrust enforcement?" And then take it from there.
    • qubex 7y ago
      The reason why the EU “slapped” Microsoft is instructive though: in a nutshell, the argument was as follows: it is so big that it can crowd out other smaller competitors because it can offer products for almost free (because their marginal cost is basically zero) whereas starting up and/or sustaining a small competitor (perhaps with a subset of functionality, for a lower TCO) is more expensive. Since producers are (as remarked elsewhere) seen as “vehicles for job creation”, this is a net negative.
      • robbrown451 7y ago
        Yeah and it is also a net negative for consumers if the big company offering things for almost free stops innovating once their competition goes away. Personally I think that free markets just don't work with products that are zero marginal cost. I don't necessarily have a solution, but it sure seems like the rules just don't work well anymore.
    • onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
      I wish there was a corporate progressive tax, such that if you're business profit is between $0-$1M you pay no tax, and once your income gets into the tens of billions (in profit), the effective tax rate is over 50%. The big companies would just break themselves up to take advantage of the taxes.
  • kumarvvr 7y ago
    It's because FB has enormous power in influencing who becomes part of the government. Keeping aside the question whether FB should be broken up or not, having such power is incredibly dangerous. And they brought it upon themselves, by making a big push for being the primary conduit for all aspects of people's lives, Friends, Family, Events, News, Opinion, Shopping, etc. edit: Spelling
• dougweltman 7y ago
  Another likely explanation: Instagram now represents a very significant amount of the company's revenue and most of its future value. The new logo is designed to capture that, rather than reinforcing the association with its legacy business.
  • jacoblsievers 7y ago
    Agreed. This is clearly a pivot to a younger user base.
    • baroffoos 7y ago
      The facebook brand has such negative feelings associated with it but the new logo is really refreshing.
• debaserab2 7y ago
  The thing is, the differentiation that they tried to establish with the new branding is itself confusing. Using the same word just with different capitalization to specify between the company and the app is not going to help in any significant way since the two different logos can only be expressed differently in certain contexts. Which makes you wonder just how intentional that detail is.
  • Jldevictoria 7y ago
    I agree. The alphabet-google structure was much more convincing (Though they maintained the GOOG and GOOGL stock ticker symbol) I think at this point, they should be distancing themselves from the "facebook" brand since its popularity is in steep decline, and instead should have re-branded their larger business and software development infrastructure under a new name.
    • andy_ppp 7y ago
      For some reason Instagram Social strikes me as more fun than Facebook.
• hos234 7y ago
  Facebook has no imagination. That's the consistent message.
• papln 7y ago
  That's a real reach. People are talking about breaking up Google also, and Google already calls all its stuff Google, and that's no defense. "People know we are one company" isn't a defense against monopoly power.
  • robbrown451 7y ago
    It's not a defense, but the fact that many incorrectly think of them as separate entities can be an aggravating factor. Just because Google doesn't have that specific aggravating factor and there is still a question of whether they have monopoly power, doesn't mean that said aggravating factor doesn't count for something.
    • rhizome 7y ago
      But antitrust remedies are all about single companies, aren't they?
      • robbrown451 7y ago
        I'm not sure how that is relevant to what I said. Can you explain?
        • rhizome 7y ago
          Maybe I'm not understanding what you're defining as the "aggravating factor," but I'm interpreting it to mean that FB, IG, WA are seen as separate entities while Google properties like Docs, Keep, Calendar, etc. are seen as products under a Google umbrella. If so, I don't think it's a distinction with a difference, as antitrust attention is going to focus on the umbrella, regardless of its name. I'd say your FB example has already been dealt with in the horizontal instance of Internet Explorer, while the Google collective is more vertical. Different flavors of umbrella, but that's what gets dismantled. IANAEconomist, but hopefully my point comes through.
          • robbrown451 7y ago
• philwelch 7y ago
  The traditional method of differentiating the parent company from its eponymous application would be to rebrand the company as "Facebook Group". For example: "Expedia Group", "Match Group", "Zillow Group".
  • csteubs 7y ago
    I could see Facebook taking the approach Google did with Alphabet, but one can only guess what that would look like.