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U.S. states plan to sue Facebook next week: sources

264 points by hhs 6y ago

r00fus 6y ago
I hate FB as much as any other HNer but honestly how could DOJ go after them for predatory acquisitions like WhatsApp when the price they paid was (at the time) one of the largest startup acquisition prices of all time?
- georgeecollins 6y ago
  Price of acquisition is not relevant to anti-trust. It is not like a monopoly is OK as long as you paid enough for a monopoly.
  - quest88 6y ago
    How do they have a monopoly when there are many other messaging apps?
    - coderintherye 6y ago
      You are thinking of Facebook's technology, not Facebook's business. Business is what matters in terms of monopoly. Facebook's business is ads. Google + Facebook have a virtual duopoly on online ad revenue.
      - onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
        Amazon has a non-trivial ad business... (Still does not mean this is not a problem)
    - latch 6y ago
      I'm honestly not sure if you implicitly meant that these other apps are popular/used - which would be valid, but I guess we'd need to get the market share #, or if you are asking strictly based on the presence of competition. Monopoly is defined by market share in a specific regions, not by the unavailability of alternatives (1). So it doesn't matter if there are "many other messaging apps" what matters is what's being used. (1) https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
    - onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
      There were tons of oil companies beside Standard Oil...
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > How do they have a monopoly when there are many other messaging apps? Monopoly is with respect to a market. If everyone on the East Coast uses AT&T to the exclusion of any other provider, and you could only communicate with AT&T customers by becoming an AT&T customer, that's a monopoly on the customers on the East Coast. Even if everyone on the West Coast used Verizon. The fact that the Facebook customers aren't all concentrated in a specific geographic area doesn't really change anything. If the only way to communicate with a large population of specific individuals is to use Facebook, they have a monopoly on the market for communication with those individuals. That wouldn't be true if they were using a federated protocol -- like the telephone network is in real life, but like Facebook is not -- because then you could sign up for some other service and still "call" the people on Facebook.
      - chrismcb 6y ago
        Are you saying, if the only way to communicate with Facebook users, is to use Facebook? I think if users are only allowed to use Facebook then it might be an issue. But it sounds like you are saying company X has a monopoly because only users of company X can use company X programs. That doesn't sound like a monopoly to me. In the US who only has access to Facebook?
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        The issue is that you can't switch from Facebook to something else by yourself. You may want to use Signal, but the 75 people you want to communicate with on Facebook don't have Signal, and the cost of convincing every one of them to switch so that you don't have to use Facebook is insurmountable. Whenever there is a network effect, anyone with a monopoly on the network has a monopoly on a market.
        crakhamster01 6y ago
        By this logic, shouldn't every messaging app that's not based on an open protocol be subject to lawsuit? I would love if every network was interoperable, but that approach requires broad regulation - not just suing Facebook.
  - nojito 6y ago
    Monopolies aren’t illegal.
    - inetknght 6y ago
      There are a lot of things that aren't illegal. That doesn't mean they're not a problem.
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  It's going to be a disaster of a case that's for sure. Who is the protagonist? The customer already gets Facebook for free, and can opt out by simply not using it. Smaller ad tech companies? Literal scammers! Facebook lied about video views - everyone lies about impressions. But 0% of Google and Facebook's competitors' inventory converts, because it's shit traffic, carefully disguised and evasive of efforts to avoid it. I don't use Facebook, I have no dog in this race.What are they even talking about though? It's a dumb as nails case.
- hnick 6y ago
  I have the exact opposite reading. A monopoly is perfectly positioned to make outlandish offers way over value for potential future competitors to kill or absorb them and maintain dominance. Make them an offer they can't refuse.
- disown 6y ago
  They are accusing FB of paying big/unrealistic premium to gain a monopoly position. "One allegation often made against Facebook is that it has strategically sought to buy small potential rivals, often at a big premium." An exaggerated example would be google buying firefox for $100 billion. It's a ridiculous price, but it helps google's monopoly. You can grow a monopoly by intentionally underselling your competitor out of business. Or you can grow your monopoly by overpaying for your competitor and buying him out. Rockefeller and Standard Oil used both tactics to monopolize oil.
echelon 6y ago
Go after Apple next. They're the worst of the lot. Apple is destroying the notion of computing freedom by locking up all their computing devices. You shouldn't be able to sell a computer or phone and prohibit what runs on it. These aren't game consoles sold at a loss with tons of competition - these are the gateways to digital lives and international business. And what the hell business do any of these three companies have doing movie/tv production? (Four companies, if you count Amazon.) They wouldn't even allow studios to own theaters, and yet we allow these four monopolies to own payments infrastructure, communication, entertainment, devices. What the fuck? Are we just going to let them soak up the entire economy? It's absurd and it has to stop. Break up all four. Microsoft is doing better than ever post-DOJ, and the intervention led to Apple, Google, and Facebook ascendency. (Microsoft had to pay Apple!) The intervention created wealth and opportunity. It required Microsoft to innovate more - and look where they are now! Make Apple pay Epic and all the companies it hurts on the App Store. Don't let them have a say what you can and can't run on your device, how you install software, or how you make repairs or upgrades. And don't let them limit which browsers you can install, either! Tell Google they can't do Chrome and AMP anymore, and threaten to pull AdSense into a separate company. Make Facebook open up its chat protocol and provide rich data export and interoperability tools. Split Amazon and AWS. Make them stop bundling services and selling their own products. Fine them for fakes. My absolute dream would be for the DOJ to make Google and Apple collaborate on a cross-platform native app API and treat it as a first class citizen. Doubly so if web/WASM can make those API calls. Visiting Netflix.com should give me first-class native streaming, casting, and screen sharing. Technology belongs to us, not the giants. Edit: Apple enablers downvoting. Y'all need to rethink what's going on and have a serious change of heart. I'm not a heretic calling for more freedom and you're not in a puritanical sect defending a blameless entity. This company has trillions of dollars and they don't need you to defend them. You don't need this company to protect you and everyone else - don't blindly trust them while they erode the world around us.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  Apple is pretty ridiculous for what they've been doing. The M1 is pretty cool but jesus christ not only did it take them 2 years to fess up going "sorry we got caught that our keyboards were trash..." but they KEPT SELLING THEM! For the cost of an Apple product, that's downright unacceptable. Those should've been recalled on the spot. But oh no, Apple cant have a recall. Gimme a break. They only care about their consumers with endless pockets.
MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
The simple fact that 40 states are getting involved just says Facebook is guilty until proven innocent at this point. They should've just kept out of conservative circles and let them exist. Now they're facing not only a conservative stacked supreme court, but several conservative states that are out for nothing but blood. Facebook played it way too liberal here and now they're gonna get screwed.
- Majromax 6y ago
  > The simple fact that 40 states are getting involved just says Facebook is guilty until proven innocent at this point This is a matter of civil law -- the burden of proof is the balance of probabilities (more likely than not that the allegations are true) rather than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of criminal law.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
    Which is why they're screwed. You can't tell me nobody is walking in that case without an opinion against them at this point. Zuckerberg has enough influence still to alter the way Facebook operates and every time he's been subpoenaed by congress to testify defending Facebook, he gives backhanded do-nothing corporate speak. He continually let his lower level managers police conservative voices (it's entirely irrelevant whether they were legitimate or not) and thusly garnered a lot of hate and people who are spiteful enough to write to their politicians. On top of that they along with Twitter have actively tried silencing conservative voices and politicians. Now a lot of these state governments had enough and they're going to reign in big tech. These major companies have just gone too far. They shot themselves in the foot when they didn't bother to self regulate in a way that could appease both sides fairly. They tried running it like a typical corporate business when it's not that. They've been in the media too much and their name is constantly plastered with a negative connotation. They did this to themselves and they deserve ever ounce of dissolution they get.
    - dismantlethesun 6y ago
      I don't think there is a way for the industry to self regulate censorship (for lack of a better word) on a broad scale. They can do like MPAA and refuse to rate certain content, but that's only if the number of producer is small versus the general population, and everyone is forced to go through the same pipeline to reach wide distribution. However with Facebook, the number of producers is more than 2 billion people; and mires them in laws and customs of every country in the world. They can't self-regulate because they are trying to control a number of people many orders of magnitude greater than their own internal manpower. Governments can only control so many people at once because: (a) they are unbound by privacy requirements, and know your real name, history, and physical location (b) they can dictate punishments at will until you comply; ranging from fines to jail time to gag orders to physical penalties like whipping So now the ball is right back where it should be: in the hands of government. Are the Proud Boys a white-nationalist terrorist group or merely an ethnocentric all-boys political action club? That's something the U.S. government should decide on its own, the U.K. government should decide on its own, and so on. Facebook is in no position to figure out if people opining about election fraud are conspiracy theorists, foreign agents, or dangerously close to sedition. That kind of deep investigative work is the role of government.
btilly 6y ago
For the reasons explained in http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf (yes, I'm one of the co-authors), I DO NOT believe that Facebook's social media "monopoly" is nearly as durable as it appears in our daily experience. And I think that they themselves are aware of that. The fact that Wall St misprices them gives them the money to buy potential competitors early. Which they have to do because they know very well that the barrier to entry to overthrow them is less than it appears to be. And indeed, the success of Tik Tok stands as a demonstration that their strategy of "buy every potential competitor for more than anyone else is willing to pay" is doomed to failure in the end.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  The durability or lack thereof of monopolies is incidental to their harms and methods. The fact that one tax-shirking abusive anticompetitive monopoly replaces another with depressing regularity (IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, ...) isn't a sign of progress but of pathology. And old monopolies often prove impressively durable. What's become clear to me in the decades since we first decried Microsoft's FUD, embrace-extend-extinguish, and unholy business practice methods is that every case of a monopoly I've encountered has 1) been describable as an extensive network (physical or virtual), where 2) that network structure is fundamental to its monopoly nature, with 3) a privately held central point of control. If you can describe a firm in terms of nodes and links, and it holds key control points, you're looking at a very likely monopoly: transport (people, cargo, pipelenes, ...), energy, water, utilities, communications, information, standards & protocols, APIs, marketing relationships and contracts, logistics, retail and wholesale networks, knowledge, education and certification, finance, insurance (access, underwriting, risk), social networks, reputation and ratings systems, just for starters. Understanding of these points are hugely distorted in large part through the direct and self-serving efforts of the Chicago School (Aaron Director, Milton Friedman, Robert Bork, Richard Posner, ...). It's only with recent revival in antitrust concerns, rejection of the Bork-Posner antitrust doctrine (in part by Posner himself), and work of people such as Lina Khan, Matt Stoller Tim Wu, Cry Doctorow, and Shoshana Zubboff, as well as the recognition of the intrinsic network-monopoly relationship, that this is beginning to change. That said, the Refutation is excellent.
- 6y ago
austincheney 6y ago
It’s certainly not going to happen, but the most directly way to eliminate Facebook as a monopoly is to repeal section 230. Facebook cannot exist without it.
- teraflop 6y ago
  Neither can a great many other sites, such as this one.
  - austincheney 6y ago
    That is not necessarily true. Section 230 is a protective shield against certain types of lawsuits, but it’s absence does not guarantee the opposite. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      Its absence almost ensures the death of open forums anywhere on the internet. Nobody is going to take the legal risk of being held responsible for what some rando on the other side of the planet said. On the other hand, it would lead to the proliferation of distributed, decentralized systems where there's not a good way to demonstrate culpability for a suit, so maybe burning down Facebook is a nice side effect of a kind of decentralization that would be more healthy in the long run anyways.
      - SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
        I wonder if it would result in something like what you said where every user hosts their own social media hub which only hosts their own content. But would the responsibility fall down to the one who owns the machine running the software? Is digital ocean responsible for the post I host on a vps in their datacenter?
      - tim333 6y ago
        Alternatively it might lead to centralized forums hosted from countries who are not bothered about the liability stuff. China etc.
woeirua 6y ago
I think it's kind of naive to think that antitrust litigation will really fundamentally alter the balance of power with these companies. Remember, that initially Microsoft lost their antitrust lawsuit and was ordered to break up. On appeal MS managed to get the order to bifurcate the company overturned and the rest is history. MS is bigger and worth more now than it was back during the antitrust lawsuit, although it also faces a lot more competition now and has no clear monopoly outside of perhaps business productivity software.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. The anti-trust lawsuit took a lot of wind out of microsoft sails and probably played it's part in helping to break its browser monopoly.
  - zepto 6y ago
    The browser monopoly was first broken by Mozilla Firefox, and then Apple and Google developing WebKit and Chrome. There is no reason an industry consortium couldn’t produce a new platform.
    - baby 6y ago
      Not only this but they caught some slack due to IE being built-in and users having no options to start their browsing experience.
- furyofantares 6y ago
  > MS is bigger and worth more now than it was back during the antitrust lawsuit I'm pretty sure it changed their behavior for quite some time though. And wouldn't the relevant comparison be whether it outpaced the growth of the tech sector in the last 20 years rather than whether it's bigger than ever? Like if MS is 10x bigger now and the industry is 20x bigger then that would indicate to me that maybe they didn't choke out competition using monopoly power.
- Zanni 6y ago
jaimex2 6y ago
Question - Did Facebook become a monster because it was forced to go public?
- annadane 6y ago
  Facebook: The Inside Story notes that Zuckerberg didn't want to go public because then there would be a pressure to monetize more
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
  There is a very early quote from zuck with him bragging about the personal data he collected from the first users and how they were stupid to trust him. Facebook has been rotten since the beginning.
  - tim333 6y ago
    I think he was kind of joking there.
bogwog 6y ago
Whenever one of these types of articles pops up, the comments are always filled with "What about company X?!" Which is mildly annoying, but I think it's a good indicator of just how much people hate all of the tech giants. Something is clearly very very wrong with the tech industry.
- CivBase 6y ago
  The US government lost its teeth when it came to anti-trust issues over the last couple decades. That coincided with the meteoric rise of many of the now-maligned tech companies. I do not think them coinciding is coincidental.
exabrial 6y ago
Just noticed tonight Google won't read text messages anymore with Android Auto because it needs location and web history to do that. Sue them all. This is stupid.
julius_set 6y ago
Why not telecom? This is dumb. Yes I get it Facebook did so e idiotic things I agree, but Telecoms are pillaging us everyday.
- cecja 6y ago
  They did? Do you remember Bell?
- adventured 6y ago
  Because telecom is dramatically more difficult to solve and the regulators don't have the competence - or the legal standing - to implement a good outcome. With Facebook you can order them to split off Instagram and WhatsApp. That's a very feasible thing to do technically, and could be accomplished within a year. It's straight-forward compared to dealing with telecom. So you split Comcast into a dozen baby Comcasts. You just changed absolutely nothing (and plausibly made the situation worse for a lot of people, as some of those baby Comcasts will suck even worse over time) because it's a physical location problem, it's geographically limited competition (unless you redo the entire regulatory structure re telecom). Each baby Comcast will dominate their little territory and then the re-combination will begin again, as it did with AT&T and the baby bells. Regulate that outcome away? That's the part where the competence and legal standing is a huge problem. Make it so the pipes are forced open and lots of competitors can use them? Un huh. You would have to entirely remake the telecom industry in the US, get us entirely different Congress and regulators, and overall that isn't going to happen for a few dozen reasons that would require paragraphs to explain fully. You know it's not going to happen, I know it's not going to happen, everyone knows it's not going to happen. So what would going after telecom accomplish? Not much most likely.
  - kungito 6y ago
    What does it even mean to split WhatsApp/Instagram? That changes nothing. They aren't even now connected. The only useful feature is to crosspost which barely anyone knows how to do and it's super useful for small NGO's and such where bigger players can just pay someone to do it manually.
ngcc_hk 6y ago
Why not also wechat etc. from china. You cannot weaken your own internal devil but let in the external one.
known 6y ago
FB could become https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread if it doesn't toe with Govt policies/priorities
one2know 6y ago
There is a political rat race to control tech companies that gather the most data on all Americans. Facebook has few divisions compared to Amazon which has moved into everything from groceries to medical industry to self driving cars. However the entire internet is littered with facebook javascripts that are logging data on web usage.

264 points by hhs 6y ago

I hate FB as much as any other HNer but honestly how could DOJ go after them for predatory acquisitions like WhatsApp when the price they paid was (at the time) one of the largest startup acquisition prices of all time?

georgeecollins 6y ago
Price of acquisition is not relevant to anti-trust. It is not like a monopoly is OK as long as you paid enough for a monopoly.
- quest88 6y ago
  How do they have a monopoly when there are many other messaging apps?
  - coderintherye 6y ago
    You are thinking of Facebook's technology, not Facebook's business. Business is what matters in terms of monopoly. Facebook's business is ads. Google + Facebook have a virtual duopoly on online ad revenue.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
      Amazon has a non-trivial ad business... (Still does not mean this is not a problem)
  - latch 6y ago
    I'm honestly not sure if you implicitly meant that these other apps are popular/used - which would be valid, but I guess we'd need to get the market share #, or if you are asking strictly based on the presence of competition. Monopoly is defined by market share in a specific regions, not by the unavailability of alternatives (1). So it doesn't matter if there are "many other messaging apps" what matters is what's being used. (1) https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
  - onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
    There were tons of oil companies beside Standard Oil...
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > How do they have a monopoly when there are many other messaging apps? Monopoly is with respect to a market. If everyone on the East Coast uses AT&T to the exclusion of any other provider, and you could only communicate with AT&T customers by becoming an AT&T customer, that's a monopoly on the customers on the East Coast. Even if everyone on the West Coast used Verizon. The fact that the Facebook customers aren't all concentrated in a specific geographic area doesn't really change anything. If the only way to communicate with a large population of specific individuals is to use Facebook, they have a monopoly on the market for communication with those individuals. That wouldn't be true if they were using a federated protocol -- like the telephone network is in real life, but like Facebook is not -- because then you could sign up for some other service and still "call" the people on Facebook.
    - chrismcb 6y ago
      Are you saying, if the only way to communicate with Facebook users, is to use Facebook? I think if users are only allowed to use Facebook then it might be an issue. But it sounds like you are saying company X has a monopoly because only users of company X can use company X programs. That doesn't sound like a monopoly to me. In the US who only has access to Facebook?
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        The issue is that you can't switch from Facebook to something else by yourself. You may want to use Signal, but the 75 people you want to communicate with on Facebook don't have Signal, and the cost of convincing every one of them to switch so that you don't have to use Facebook is insurmountable. Whenever there is a network effect, anyone with a monopoly on the network has a monopoly on a market.
        crakhamster01 6y ago
        By this logic, shouldn't every messaging app that's not based on an open protocol be subject to lawsuit? I would love if every network was interoperable, but that approach requires broad regulation - not just suing Facebook.
- nojito 6y ago
  Monopolies aren’t illegal.
  - inetknght 6y ago
    There are a lot of things that aren't illegal. That doesn't mean they're not a problem.
an_opabinia 6y ago
It's going to be a disaster of a case that's for sure. Who is the protagonist? The customer already gets Facebook for free, and can opt out by simply not using it. Smaller ad tech companies? Literal scammers! Facebook lied about video views - everyone lies about impressions. But 0% of Google and Facebook's competitors' inventory converts, because it's shit traffic, carefully disguised and evasive of efforts to avoid it. I don't use Facebook, I have no dog in this race.What are they even talking about though? It's a dumb as nails case.
hnick 6y ago
I have the exact opposite reading. A monopoly is perfectly positioned to make outlandish offers way over value for potential future competitors to kill or absorb them and maintain dominance. Make them an offer they can't refuse.
disown 6y ago
They are accusing FB of paying big/unrealistic premium to gain a monopoly position. "One allegation often made against Facebook is that it has strategically sought to buy small potential rivals, often at a big premium." An exaggerated example would be google buying firefox for $100 billion. It's a ridiculous price, but it helps google's monopoly. You can grow a monopoly by intentionally underselling your competitor out of business. Or you can grow your monopoly by overpaying for your competitor and buying him out. Rockefeller and Standard Oil used both tactics to monopolize oil.

echelon 6y ago

Go after Apple next. They're the worst of the lot. Apple is destroying the notion of computing freedom by locking up all their computing devices. You shouldn't be able to sell a computer or phone and prohibit what runs on it. These aren't game consoles sold at a loss with tons of competition - these are the gateways to digital lives and international business. And what the hell business do any of these three companies have doing movie/tv production? (Four companies, if you count Amazon.) They wouldn't even allow studios to own theaters, and yet we allow these four monopolies to own payments infrastructure, communication, entertainment, devices. What the fuck? Are we just going to let them soak up the entire economy? It's absurd and it has to stop. Break up all four. Microsoft is doing better than ever post-DOJ, and the intervention led to Apple, Google, and Facebook ascendency. (Microsoft had to pay Apple!) The intervention created wealth and opportunity. It required Microsoft to innovate more - and look where they are now! Make Apple pay Epic and all the companies it hurts on the App Store. Don't let them have a say what you can and can't run on your device, how you install software, or how you make repairs or upgrades. And don't let them limit which browsers you can install, either! Tell Google they can't do Chrome and AMP anymore, and threaten to pull AdSense into a separate company. Make Facebook open up its chat protocol and provide rich data export and interoperability tools. Split Amazon and AWS. Make them stop bundling services and selling their own products. Fine them for fakes. My absolute dream would be for the DOJ to make Google and Apple collaborate on a cross-platform native app API and treat it as a first class citizen. Doubly so if web/WASM can make those API calls. Visiting Netflix.com should give me first-class native streaming, casting, and screen sharing. Technology belongs to us, not the giants. Edit: Apple enablers downvoting. Y'all need to rethink what's going on and have a serious change of heart. I'm not a heretic calling for more freedom and you're not in a puritanical sect defending a blameless entity. This company has trillions of dollars and they don't need you to defend them. You don't need this company to protect you and everyone else - don't blindly trust them while they erode the world around us.

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
Apple is pretty ridiculous for what they've been doing. The M1 is pretty cool but jesus christ not only did it take them 2 years to fess up going "sorry we got caught that our keyboards were trash..." but they KEPT SELLING THEM! For the cost of an Apple product, that's downright unacceptable. Those should've been recalled on the spot. But oh no, Apple cant have a recall. Gimme a break. They only care about their consumers with endless pockets.

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago

The simple fact that 40 states are getting involved just says Facebook is guilty until proven innocent at this point. They should've just kept out of conservative circles and let them exist. Now they're facing not only a conservative stacked supreme court, but several conservative states that are out for nothing but blood. Facebook played it way too liberal here and now they're gonna get screwed.

Majromax 6y ago
> The simple fact that 40 states are getting involved just says Facebook is guilty until proven innocent at this point This is a matter of civil law -- the burden of proof is the balance of probabilities (more likely than not that the allegations are true) rather than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of criminal law.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  Which is why they're screwed. You can't tell me nobody is walking in that case without an opinion against them at this point. Zuckerberg has enough influence still to alter the way Facebook operates and every time he's been subpoenaed by congress to testify defending Facebook, he gives backhanded do-nothing corporate speak. He continually let his lower level managers police conservative voices (it's entirely irrelevant whether they were legitimate or not) and thusly garnered a lot of hate and people who are spiteful enough to write to their politicians. On top of that they along with Twitter have actively tried silencing conservative voices and politicians. Now a lot of these state governments had enough and they're going to reign in big tech. These major companies have just gone too far. They shot themselves in the foot when they didn't bother to self regulate in a way that could appease both sides fairly. They tried running it like a typical corporate business when it's not that. They've been in the media too much and their name is constantly plastered with a negative connotation. They did this to themselves and they deserve ever ounce of dissolution they get.
  - dismantlethesun 6y ago
    I don't think there is a way for the industry to self regulate censorship (for lack of a better word) on a broad scale. They can do like MPAA and refuse to rate certain content, but that's only if the number of producer is small versus the general population, and everyone is forced to go through the same pipeline to reach wide distribution. However with Facebook, the number of producers is more than 2 billion people; and mires them in laws and customs of every country in the world. They can't self-regulate because they are trying to control a number of people many orders of magnitude greater than their own internal manpower. Governments can only control so many people at once because: (a) they are unbound by privacy requirements, and know your real name, history, and physical location (b) they can dictate punishments at will until you comply; ranging from fines to jail time to gag orders to physical penalties like whipping So now the ball is right back where it should be: in the hands of government. Are the Proud Boys a white-nationalist terrorist group or merely an ethnocentric all-boys political action club? That's something the U.S. government should decide on its own, the U.K. government should decide on its own, and so on. Facebook is in no position to figure out if people opining about election fraud are conspiracy theorists, foreign agents, or dangerously close to sedition. That kind of deep investigative work is the role of government.

btilly 6y ago

For the reasons explained in http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf (yes, I'm one of the co-authors), I DO NOT believe that Facebook's social media "monopoly" is nearly as durable as it appears in our daily experience. And I think that they themselves are aware of that. The fact that Wall St misprices them gives them the money to buy potential competitors early. Which they have to do because they know very well that the barrier to entry to overthrow them is less than it appears to be. And indeed, the success of Tik Tok stands as a demonstration that their strategy of "buy every potential competitor for more than anyone else is willing to pay" is doomed to failure in the end.

dredmorbius 6y ago
The durability or lack thereof of monopolies is incidental to their harms and methods. The fact that one tax-shirking abusive anticompetitive monopoly replaces another with depressing regularity (IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, ...) isn't a sign of progress but of pathology. And old monopolies often prove impressively durable. What's become clear to me in the decades since we first decried Microsoft's FUD, embrace-extend-extinguish, and unholy business practice methods is that every case of a monopoly I've encountered has 1) been describable as an extensive network (physical or virtual), where 2) that network structure is fundamental to its monopoly nature, with 3) a privately held central point of control. If you can describe a firm in terms of nodes and links, and it holds key control points, you're looking at a very likely monopoly: transport (people, cargo, pipelenes, ...), energy, water, utilities, communications, information, standards & protocols, APIs, marketing relationships and contracts, logistics, retail and wholesale networks, knowledge, education and certification, finance, insurance (access, underwriting, risk), social networks, reputation and ratings systems, just for starters. Understanding of these points are hugely distorted in large part through the direct and self-serving efforts of the Chicago School (Aaron Director, Milton Friedman, Robert Bork, Richard Posner, ...). It's only with recent revival in antitrust concerns, rejection of the Bork-Posner antitrust doctrine (in part by Posner himself), and work of people such as Lina Khan, Matt Stoller Tim Wu, Cry Doctorow, and Shoshana Zubboff, as well as the recognition of the intrinsic network-monopoly relationship, that this is beginning to change. That said, the Refutation is excellent.
6y ago

austincheney 6y ago

It’s certainly not going to happen, but the most directly way to eliminate Facebook as a monopoly is to repeal section 230. Facebook cannot exist without it.

teraflop 6y ago
Neither can a great many other sites, such as this one.
- austincheney 6y ago
  That is not necessarily true. Section 230 is a protective shield against certain types of lawsuits, but it’s absence does not guarantee the opposite. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    Its absence almost ensures the death of open forums anywhere on the internet. Nobody is going to take the legal risk of being held responsible for what some rando on the other side of the planet said. On the other hand, it would lead to the proliferation of distributed, decentralized systems where there's not a good way to demonstrate culpability for a suit, so maybe burning down Facebook is a nice side effect of a kind of decentralization that would be more healthy in the long run anyways.
    - SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
      I wonder if it would result in something like what you said where every user hosts their own social media hub which only hosts their own content. But would the responsibility fall down to the one who owns the machine running the software? Is digital ocean responsible for the post I host on a vps in their datacenter?
    - tim333 6y ago
      Alternatively it might lead to centralized forums hosted from countries who are not bothered about the liability stuff. China etc.

woeirua 6y ago

I think it's kind of naive to think that antitrust litigation will really fundamentally alter the balance of power with these companies. Remember, that initially Microsoft lost their antitrust lawsuit and was ordered to break up. On appeal MS managed to get the order to bifurcate the company overturned and the rest is history. MS is bigger and worth more now than it was back during the antitrust lawsuit, although it also faces a lot more competition now and has no clear monopoly outside of perhaps business productivity software.

Barrin92 6y ago
don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. The anti-trust lawsuit took a lot of wind out of microsoft sails and probably played it's part in helping to break its browser monopoly.
- zepto 6y ago
  The browser monopoly was first broken by Mozilla Firefox, and then Apple and Google developing WebKit and Chrome. There is no reason an industry consortium couldn’t produce a new platform.
  - baby 6y ago
    Not only this but they caught some slack due to IE being built-in and users having no options to start their browsing experience.
furyofantares 6y ago
> MS is bigger and worth more now than it was back during the antitrust lawsuit I'm pretty sure it changed their behavior for quite some time though. And wouldn't the relevant comparison be whether it outpaced the growth of the tech sector in the last 20 years rather than whether it's bigger than ever? Like if MS is 10x bigger now and the industry is 20x bigger then that would indicate to me that maybe they didn't choke out competition using monopoly power.
Zanni 6y ago

jaimex2 6y ago

Question - Did Facebook become a monster because it was forced to go public?

annadane 6y ago
Facebook: The Inside Story notes that Zuckerberg didn't want to go public because then there would be a pressure to monetize more
SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
There is a very early quote from zuck with him bragging about the personal data he collected from the first users and how they were stupid to trust him. Facebook has been rotten since the beginning.
- tim333 6y ago
  I think he was kind of joking there.

bogwog 6y ago

Whenever one of these types of articles pops up, the comments are always filled with "What about company X?!" Which is mildly annoying, but I think it's a good indicator of just how much people hate all of the tech giants. Something is clearly very very wrong with the tech industry.

CivBase 6y ago
The US government lost its teeth when it came to anti-trust issues over the last couple decades. That coincided with the meteoric rise of many of the now-maligned tech companies. I do not think them coinciding is coincidental.

exabrial 6y ago

Just noticed tonight Google won't read text messages anymore with Android Auto because it needs location and web history to do that. Sue them all. This is stupid.

julius_set 6y ago

Why not telecom? This is dumb. Yes I get it Facebook did so e idiotic things I agree, but Telecoms are pillaging us everyday.

cecja 6y ago
They did? Do you remember Bell?
adventured 6y ago
Because telecom is dramatically more difficult to solve and the regulators don't have the competence - or the legal standing - to implement a good outcome. With Facebook you can order them to split off Instagram and WhatsApp. That's a very feasible thing to do technically, and could be accomplished within a year. It's straight-forward compared to dealing with telecom. So you split Comcast into a dozen baby Comcasts. You just changed absolutely nothing (and plausibly made the situation worse for a lot of people, as some of those baby Comcasts will suck even worse over time) because it's a physical location problem, it's geographically limited competition (unless you redo the entire regulatory structure re telecom). Each baby Comcast will dominate their little territory and then the re-combination will begin again, as it did with AT&T and the baby bells. Regulate that outcome away? That's the part where the competence and legal standing is a huge problem. Make it so the pipes are forced open and lots of competitors can use them? Un huh. You would have to entirely remake the telecom industry in the US, get us entirely different Congress and regulators, and overall that isn't going to happen for a few dozen reasons that would require paragraphs to explain fully. You know it's not going to happen, I know it's not going to happen, everyone knows it's not going to happen. So what would going after telecom accomplish? Not much most likely.
- kungito 6y ago
  What does it even mean to split WhatsApp/Instagram? That changes nothing. They aren't even now connected. The only useful feature is to crosspost which barely anyone knows how to do and it's super useful for small NGO's and such where bigger players can just pay someone to do it manually.

ngcc_hk 6y ago

Why not also wechat etc. from china. You cannot weaken your own internal devil but let in the external one.

known 6y ago

FB could become https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread if it doesn't toe with Govt policies/priorities

one2know 6y ago

There is a political rat race to control tech companies that gather the most data on all Americans. Facebook has few divisions compared to Amazon which has moved into everything from groceries to medical industry to self driving cars. However the entire internet is littered with facebook javascripts that are logging data on web usage.