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Lets hope they push through with it and follow up with Google. Its about time - its ridiculous how incredibly powerful these institutions have become. Question

Lets hope they push through with it and follow up with Google. Its about time - its ridiculous how incredibly powerful these institutions have become. Question: is there an argument not to split up these gigantic corporations?

hntcz 6y ago
The way I see it, an important argument is that it won't solve the problem: these organizations take advantage of network effects to build monopolies and that mechanism won't go away. A good book on this is Who Owns The Future by Jaron Lanier. Of course, forbidding anti-competitive acquisitions would have helped in that maybe then we'd all be using an independent Instagram under the leadership of its original founders and Facebook would be dying. But that still wouldn't change the fact that it would be more than likely to be a quasi monopoly. That's just the nature of social networks.
belval 6y ago
While they crush local competition, they also crush it in other countries. Google and Facebook/Whatsapp own a sizeable chunk of Internet interactions in just about every country except China, which in turns means more revenue which can be used to pay these insane Silicon Valley salaries to their workforce. While I don't like these monopolistic practices, they have given the US a tremendous amount of power over communications abroad.
dontblink 6y ago
Yes. I would imagine it revolves around demonstrating harm. Just because something is big doesn't necessitate a break up.
adrr 6y ago
Argument for FB not being broken up would be “how does it harm the consumer?”. Sherman act doesn’t ban monopolies, it’s protects the consumer from being abused by the monopoly.
julienb_sea 6y ago
Yes, the argument is if you split them up their core value proposition is put into question. Apparently a very large group of users are on board with the core value proposition, and you are imposing on that group a ton of assumptions that the regulatory breakup and oversight will end up "working out better for everyone". These companies are also vulnerable to competition in a fickle market. Tik Tok has gained massive ground and is on a similar trajectory that instagram was on some years ago. For everyone's claiming that FB stifles innovation, we have an obvious counterexample happening literally before our eyes.

hntcz 6y ago

The way I see it, an important argument is that it won't solve the problem: these organizations take advantage of network effects to build monopolies and that mechanism won't go away. A good book on this is Who Owns The Future by Jaron Lanier. Of course, forbidding anti-competitive acquisitions would have helped in that maybe then we'd all be using an independent Instagram under the leadership of its original founders and Facebook would be dying. But that still wouldn't change the fact that it would be more than likely to be a quasi monopoly. That's just the nature of social networks.

belval 6y ago

While they crush local competition, they also crush it in other countries. Google and Facebook/Whatsapp own a sizeable chunk of Internet interactions in just about every country except China, which in turns means more revenue which can be used to pay these insane Silicon Valley salaries to their workforce. While I don't like these monopolistic practices, they have given the US a tremendous amount of power over communications abroad.

dontblink 6y ago

Yes. I would imagine it revolves around demonstrating harm. Just because something is big doesn't necessitate a break up.

adrr 6y ago

Argument for FB not being broken up would be “how does it harm the consumer?”. Sherman act doesn’t ban monopolies, it’s protects the consumer from being abused by the monopoly.

julienb_sea 6y ago

Yes, the argument is if you split them up their core value proposition is put into question. Apparently a very large group of users are on board with the core value proposition, and you are imposing on that group a ton of assumptions that the regulatory breakup and oversight will end up "working out better for everyone". These companies are also vulnerable to competition in a fickle market. Tik Tok has gained massive ground and is on a similar trajectory that instagram was on some years ago. For everyone's claiming that FB stifles innovation, we have an obvious counterexample happening literally before our eyes.