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Small countries can ban facebook from doing certain things. Ultimately, some sovereignty exists even in global commerce. If New Zealand made (eg) political adve

by netcan 6y ago

Small countries can ban facebook from doing certain things. Ultimately, some sovereignty exists even in global commerce. If New Zealand made (eg) political advertising, targeted advertising, or such ilegal, Facebook would stop doing it in New Zealand. That is treating the symptom, but it is not totally ineffective. Treating the problem is dealing with the monopoly. The current state of antitrust laws, norms and regulatory pressure is entirely useless. It's entirely based around regulating 19th century monopolies, and tempered by 20th century failings. Facebook, Amazon, & Google are not Bell. With the old infrastructure monopolies, regulators needed to break up the monopoly without losing the services & capital investments. They needed post-antitrust companies to still be viable. Facebook doesn't have that problem. Facebook could disappear tomorrow and consumers would barely be inconvenienced. Social media is not in short supply and doesn't require much capital. Facebook didn't need to sink much capital into building it. Their competitors will not need much capital to replace it. All they need is for Facebook to move out of the way. Antitrust action, at least in facebook's case, doesn't need to be precise. It just needs to be strong.

justaguyhere 6y ago
Maybe future generations will realize how shitty FB is and stop using it (one can hope!) A bigger problem is FB owns much better products like WhatsApp - it is easy to quit FB than WhatsApp in my opinion
- scarface74 6y ago
  So you mean the solution to the FB “problem” is people using their own free will and it doesn’t involve the Nanny State?
  - netcan 6y ago
    Nanny-state/libertarian arguments against antitrust are misguided. I am against a nanny state. Deeply against it. It gets abused of power. is invariably useless and freedom is important for its own sake. Monopolies extend these problems into the commercial realm. Nanny companies instead of Nanny State. Facebook is worse than most state media monopolies. It's like living in a company town and complaining about the nanny state. Just let the company rule us in peace.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Facebook doesn’t have coercive power to force me to do anything. The government does. It’s not Libertarianism. It’s a fundamental distrust of governments.
      - netcan 6y ago
        That's what I mean. Your distrust should extend to things that have the same qualities as "government." At the more monopolistic end of the spectrum, and in many real life examples, they're a type of government... in the sense that they govern. This can also be true of very powerful religious institutions. Power, coercive or otherwise, is more complex than that. If all media is state media, that's something to seriously distrust. If all media is FB, the church of england church... same problems. Whether or not media is "coercive" is uninteresting semantics. Whether it's big tech or ccp "soft power" is a technicality. Abusable power is abusable power, and being nannied is a symptom. Sure, you can still kinda hide from Facebook. Takes a little effort, but whatever. You can also get around the great firewall, if you really want to. A lot of chinese people do, some of the time. Most of the time though, most people read the state approved internet. Most of the time, most people are within the influence of the FB machine... and it's still gaining power.
        scarface74 6y ago
        Can Facebook have me arrested? Take my property via “civil forfeiture” or “imminent domain”? Can they force me to pay taxes? Do they employ police who can shoot me in the back to make me use their services? Can they hire people to choke me for nine minutes? Do their employees have military styled weapons who can be summoned to someone’s house just by making a false report? Comparing any modern private company’s power to the government is like comparing a flea to the sun.
        dragonwriter 6y ago
        > Comparing any modern private company’s power to the government is like comparing a flea to the sun. Well, that's trivially true for corporations, since each corporation is itself an exercise of government power, so all of their power is a subset of government power.
  - justaguyhere 6y ago
    Nanny states are never a good idea. But lets say we prefer nanny state and lets say it works with FB. There is no guarantee that it will always work with every other shitty FB, or if it works, it might become China like, which is worse. The best long term solution is to educate people - make them understand how much of their privacy is being violated, how much harm social media is causing (broadly speaking here, I know social media can be good too, once in a while) etc. If the general public understands these, they might stop/reduce willingly giving so much of their data to FB. That said, not many people seemed to care (outside of tech circles) when Snowden happened :(
- fr2null 6y ago
  As part of the "future generation" (Maybe? I'm 18 years old), almost none of my peers use Facebook anymore. At least not actively. We do however still use WhatsApp and Instagram. While Instagram and WhatsApp are still used the most, by far, there are some other social media apps that are also heavily used. Most notably Snapchat and TikTok.
  - cptnapalm 6y ago
    I recently signed in for the first time in a long while in order to chat with a friend of mine in the Navy. While my "friend's" list is about 700 people, it looked like no more than a couple of dozen of them actually post anything regularly. That's a big change from 3 or so years ago. Obligatory anecdotes are not data disclaimer.
- netcan 6y ago
  None of these are easy to quit because of network effects. Rick has to use FB because his grandkids' photos are there. Morty uses whatsapp because his soccer club posts practice times there. Network effects are essentially like infrastructure. The problem isn't shitty FB. FB can be as shitty as it wants to be. The problem is their power, especially as a media company.
rmrfstar 6y ago
> It's entirely based around regulating 19th century monopolies, This isn't as problematic as you suggest. We don't need an act of Congress to deal with FAAMG. The way the laws are enforced and interpreted has changed in a very meaningful way. Read the A&P cases and ask yourself, "if Congress hasn't changed the law then what's up with Walmart?"[1] The DOJ Antitrust division is asleep at the switch. There are a lot of reasons for this. One reason is the Microsoft case. The DOJ won at trial big time. At trial they won a break up. This was scaled back enormously on appeal, and it damaged the careers of the very talented lawyers involved. This created a high degree of risk aversion in careerist antitrust litigators. Something similar happened after Enron (fancy people were upset by how vigorously the DOJ pursued members of their class), which partially explains the lack of prosecutions after the 2008 financial crisis. There was also a sea-change in ideology coming from the law and economics movement, and from the re-framing of antitrust through the "consumer welfare" lens. In practice, "consumer welfare tests" only consider price. They do not consider quality. To "consumer welfare" tests, a $50 phone plan that sells my location without my consent is superior to a $55 phone plan that does not [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1949/02/25/archives/a-p-loses-appeal-in-antitrust-suit.html https://www.nytimes.com/1949/02/25/archives/a-p-loses-appeal...
- netcan 6y ago
  Antitrust legislation & enforcement are inextricably linked, for all sorts of reasons. This isn't just a US problem. The entire conventional legal approach was (and still is) flawed. First, monopolies tend to form in The way it works is by "proving" anticompetitive and/or monopolistic behaviour, and fining companies. Take the recent EU ruling (and pending copycat cases in the US) on the adwords "platform monopoly." The idea was that (1) Google controls the search engine marketing platform and (2) they use this control to favour their own search engine. They proved it. Google got a "cost of doing fine." First, the whole premise is. If a monopoly exists, we state prosecutors shouldn't need to prove monopolistic actions. Monopolistic practices are proof of a monopoly, but the logical premise behind antitrust law is that monopolies are harmful... and we assume that anti-competitive/monopolistic behaviour happens. Let 3rd parties sue privately for specific abuses, but the state should be focused on preventing monopoly not retroactively punishing use of that monopoly. If prosecutors have to prove individual abuses separately, they will never make a dent. Most "monopolistic behaviours" are not proveable. They may not even be decisions, they're just what happens in a monopoly. I totally agree with you about bogus "consumer welfare tests." This is academic hogwash, and it's probably there to provide cover for inaction. Second, "what to do now" is unavoidably hard, subjective and uncomfortable for a court. Cases vary too much. From a "greater good perspective," FB could just be shut down. As long as data is destroyed, no one but FB shareholders (and employees) lose. I don't mean that they should be shut down, just that there are no external welfare concerns. Google is more complicated. Alphabet needs to be restructured into 5-6 companies. Google's (high quality and public benefiting) R&D would be in danger. You'd need to enforce non-collusion between infrastructure, content & ad platforms. It's not something a court can do well, using 19th century case law especially. Case law says nothing about whether or not a ruling was a success. Mostly, antitrust law should deter monopolies from forming in the first place. Monopolies should voluntarily avoided by companies, because antitrust should be something that doesn't pay to mess with. As things stand, monopoly is the best strategy. Last, a lot of what needs to happen needs to happen outside of strict antitrust bounds. The phone plans available to you are more closely related to political decisions (eg radio spectrum) than the actions of individual companies. Facebook's monopoly, the most worrying aspects of it, rest on data collection and advertising practices that most people find horrible, and believe should be illegal. Antitrust may not have even been necessary if (a) those mergers hadn't happened (b) personal data hoarding wasn't a free-for-all and (c) advertising was not so unregulated. I agree about sleeping on the wheel though.
missedthecue 6y ago
>Facebook could disappear tomorrow and consumers would barely be inconvenienced. Correction: If facebook disappeared tomorrow YOU would be barely inconvenienced. I don't think you accurately speak for all of Facebook's 2 billion monthly users and the millions of businesses and orgs that advertise on the platform. (paid or unpaid)
- netcan 6y ago
  I think you're misunderstanding me. I don't mean that FB sucks. I don't care either way. I mean this: If toyota were to disappear tomorrow, $250bn worth of car-production capacity would disappear. Fewer cars could be made, at least until new investment in factories and such. If FB disappeared, people would still have plenty of social media to access... or other forms of media, communication and entertainment.

by netcan 6y ago

justaguyhere 6y ago

Maybe future generations will realize how shitty FB is and stop using it (one can hope!) A bigger problem is FB owns much better products like WhatsApp - it is easy to quit FB than WhatsApp in my opinion

scarface74 6y ago
So you mean the solution to the FB “problem” is people using their own free will and it doesn’t involve the Nanny State?
- netcan 6y ago
  Nanny-state/libertarian arguments against antitrust are misguided. I am against a nanny state. Deeply against it. It gets abused of power. is invariably useless and freedom is important for its own sake. Monopolies extend these problems into the commercial realm. Nanny companies instead of Nanny State. Facebook is worse than most state media monopolies. It's like living in a company town and complaining about the nanny state. Just let the company rule us in peace.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Facebook doesn’t have coercive power to force me to do anything. The government does. It’s not Libertarianism. It’s a fundamental distrust of governments.
    - netcan 6y ago
      That's what I mean. Your distrust should extend to things that have the same qualities as "government." At the more monopolistic end of the spectrum, and in many real life examples, they're a type of government... in the sense that they govern. This can also be true of very powerful religious institutions. Power, coercive or otherwise, is more complex than that. If all media is state media, that's something to seriously distrust. If all media is FB, the church of england church... same problems. Whether or not media is "coercive" is uninteresting semantics. Whether it's big tech or ccp "soft power" is a technicality. Abusable power is abusable power, and being nannied is a symptom. Sure, you can still kinda hide from Facebook. Takes a little effort, but whatever. You can also get around the great firewall, if you really want to. A lot of chinese people do, some of the time. Most of the time though, most people read the state approved internet. Most of the time, most people are within the influence of the FB machine... and it's still gaining power.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        Can Facebook have me arrested? Take my property via “civil forfeiture” or “imminent domain”? Can they force me to pay taxes? Do they employ police who can shoot me in the back to make me use their services? Can they hire people to choke me for nine minutes? Do their employees have military styled weapons who can be summoned to someone’s house just by making a false report? Comparing any modern private company’s power to the government is like comparing a flea to the sun.
        dragonwriter 6y ago
        > Comparing any modern private company’s power to the government is like comparing a flea to the sun. Well, that's trivially true for corporations, since each corporation is itself an exercise of government power, so all of their power is a subset of government power.
- justaguyhere 6y ago
  Nanny states are never a good idea. But lets say we prefer nanny state and lets say it works with FB. There is no guarantee that it will always work with every other shitty FB, or if it works, it might become China like, which is worse. The best long term solution is to educate people - make them understand how much of their privacy is being violated, how much harm social media is causing (broadly speaking here, I know social media can be good too, once in a while) etc. If the general public understands these, they might stop/reduce willingly giving so much of their data to FB. That said, not many people seemed to care (outside of tech circles) when Snowden happened :(
fr2null 6y ago
As part of the "future generation" (Maybe? I'm 18 years old), almost none of my peers use Facebook anymore. At least not actively. We do however still use WhatsApp and Instagram. While Instagram and WhatsApp are still used the most, by far, there are some other social media apps that are also heavily used. Most notably Snapchat and TikTok.
- cptnapalm 6y ago
  I recently signed in for the first time in a long while in order to chat with a friend of mine in the Navy. While my "friend's" list is about 700 people, it looked like no more than a couple of dozen of them actually post anything regularly. That's a big change from 3 or so years ago. Obligatory anecdotes are not data disclaimer.
netcan 6y ago
None of these are easy to quit because of network effects. Rick has to use FB because his grandkids' photos are there. Morty uses whatsapp because his soccer club posts practice times there. Network effects are essentially like infrastructure. The problem isn't shitty FB. FB can be as shitty as it wants to be. The problem is their power, especially as a media company.

rmrfstar 6y ago

> It's entirely based around regulating 19th century monopolies, This isn't as problematic as you suggest. We don't need an act of Congress to deal with FAAMG. The way the laws are enforced and interpreted has changed in a very meaningful way. Read the A&P cases and ask yourself, "if Congress hasn't changed the law then what's up with Walmart?"[1] The DOJ Antitrust division is asleep at the switch. There are a lot of reasons for this. One reason is the Microsoft case. The DOJ won at trial big time. At trial they won a break up. This was scaled back enormously on appeal, and it damaged the careers of the very talented lawyers involved. This created a high degree of risk aversion in careerist antitrust litigators. Something similar happened after Enron (fancy people were upset by how vigorously the DOJ pursued members of their class), which partially explains the lack of prosecutions after the 2008 financial crisis. There was also a sea-change in ideology coming from the law and economics movement, and from the re-framing of antitrust through the "consumer welfare" lens. In practice, "consumer welfare tests" only consider price. They do not consider quality. To "consumer welfare" tests, a $50 phone plan that sells my location without my consent is superior to a $55 phone plan that does not [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1949/02/25/archives/a-p-loses-appeal-in-antitrust-suit.html https://www.nytimes.com/1949/02/25/archives/a-p-loses-appeal...

netcan 6y ago
Antitrust legislation & enforcement are inextricably linked, for all sorts of reasons. This isn't just a US problem. The entire conventional legal approach was (and still is) flawed. First, monopolies tend to form in The way it works is by "proving" anticompetitive and/or monopolistic behaviour, and fining companies. Take the recent EU ruling (and pending copycat cases in the US) on the adwords "platform monopoly." The idea was that (1) Google controls the search engine marketing platform and (2) they use this control to favour their own search engine. They proved it. Google got a "cost of doing fine." First, the whole premise is. If a monopoly exists, we state prosecutors shouldn't need to prove monopolistic actions. Monopolistic practices are proof of a monopoly, but the logical premise behind antitrust law is that monopolies are harmful... and we assume that anti-competitive/monopolistic behaviour happens. Let 3rd parties sue privately for specific abuses, but the state should be focused on preventing monopoly not retroactively punishing use of that monopoly. If prosecutors have to prove individual abuses separately, they will never make a dent. Most "monopolistic behaviours" are not proveable. They may not even be decisions, they're just what happens in a monopoly. I totally agree with you about bogus "consumer welfare tests." This is academic hogwash, and it's probably there to provide cover for inaction. Second, "what to do now" is unavoidably hard, subjective and uncomfortable for a court. Cases vary too much. From a "greater good perspective," FB could just be shut down. As long as data is destroyed, no one but FB shareholders (and employees) lose. I don't mean that they should be shut down, just that there are no external welfare concerns. Google is more complicated. Alphabet needs to be restructured into 5-6 companies. Google's (high quality and public benefiting) R&D would be in danger. You'd need to enforce non-collusion between infrastructure, content & ad platforms. It's not something a court can do well, using 19th century case law especially. Case law says nothing about whether or not a ruling was a success. Mostly, antitrust law should deter monopolies from forming in the first place. Monopolies should voluntarily avoided by companies, because antitrust should be something that doesn't pay to mess with. As things stand, monopoly is the best strategy. Last, a lot of what needs to happen needs to happen outside of strict antitrust bounds. The phone plans available to you are more closely related to political decisions (eg radio spectrum) than the actions of individual companies. Facebook's monopoly, the most worrying aspects of it, rest on data collection and advertising practices that most people find horrible, and believe should be illegal. Antitrust may not have even been necessary if (a) those mergers hadn't happened (b) personal data hoarding wasn't a free-for-all and (c) advertising was not so unregulated. I agree about sleeping on the wheel though.

missedthecue 6y ago

>Facebook could disappear tomorrow and consumers would barely be inconvenienced. Correction: If facebook disappeared tomorrow YOU would be barely inconvenienced. I don't think you accurately speak for all of Facebook's 2 billion monthly users and the millions of businesses and orgs that advertise on the platform. (paid or unpaid)

netcan 6y ago
I think you're misunderstanding me. I don't mean that FB sucks. I don't care either way. I mean this: If toyota were to disappear tomorrow, $250bn worth of car-production capacity would disappear. Fewer cars could be made, at least until new investment in factories and such. If FB disappeared, people would still have plenty of social media to access... or other forms of media, communication and entertainment.