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I feel like instead of pushing for the companies to separate, congress should pass laws mandating [adversarial interoperability](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2

I feel like instead of pushing for the companies to separate, congress should pass laws mandating [adversarial interoperability](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...). Then the data (including the social graph) really would belong to the users, and facebook would have to compete with multiple other “social network clients” that would rapidly emerge. Facebook would lose some monopoly profits, but in the long-run they might even make more money - they have a lot of very smart practical engineers (at least based on seeing their approach to writing libraries e.g. react vs angular, pytorch vs tensorflow etc.) So if forced to compete, I think they would do just fine, particularly because I believe that the ecosystem would develop faster in the presence of real, and actually grow the market beyond what it would otherwise be.

bzb6 6y ago
No thanks, I don’t want to spend all day receiving spam via WhatsApp like in the days of irc.
- Triv888 6y ago
  IRC spam?
theanarcrist 6y ago
I agree and find the attempt at a breakup a bit frustrating. This is an action that could have profoundly disruptive effect and it's not really clear what the positives or negatives would be. For instance, FB has invested massively in trust and safety people operations and AI. What happens to that investment when IG is spun off? Laying out laws and regulations so the market works as intended (no doubt with adjustments on the way) seems like the far preferable way to ensure healthy competition than taking a hammer to the job site and hoping for the best.
- natex 6y ago
  > Laying out laws and regulations so the market works as intended (no doubt with adjustments on the way) seems like the far preferable way to ensure healthy competition... That's what antitrust/monopoly laws do.
- mfer 6y ago
  > This is an action that could have profoundly disruptive effect If FB is doing anti-competitive things than disruption is needed. It's not meant to be comfortable. Companies are really good at learning the playing field and then gaming it for their benefits. Tweaks to laws are often easy to work around. Disruption that stops an illegal monopoly is going to be uncomfortable. Especially at first. But, it opens the door for the future in ways that aren't options today.
  - efwfwef 6y ago
    But the product provides real value to real people today, why disrupt this? Also weren't these companies free to not accept an acquisition?
    - jzoch 6y ago
      Andrew Carnegie provided far more real, unquestionable value to people too. It ended up being worth it. The same can be said for Leland Stanford or most other monopolies. They didn't become monopolies by not providing value.
      - will_pseudonym 6y ago
        > Andrew Carnegie provided far more real, unquestionable value to people too. It ended up being worth it. The same can be said for Leland Stanford or most other monopolies. They didn't become monopolies by not providing value. Absolutely. The same could also be said of the closest parallel of Facebook in history, the Bell System. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
    - hef19898 6y ago
      Because move fast and brake things? Disruption good? No, seriously, modern tech companies are an anti-trust challenge that was not truely forseen in existing anti-trust laws. That governments are now trying to find answers is a good thing.
  - TheRealNGenius 6y ago
- WhompingWindows 6y ago
  Your answer sidesteps regulatory capture. These big companies wield massive power in Washington, don't you think any regulation and law that's actually passed will benefit them and prevent competition?
- maxerickson 6y ago
  In some sense this lawsuit is saying that the regulatory approvals of the Instagram and Whatsapp acquisitions were errors. How is the market going to fix that?
  - mgiampapa 6y ago
    It's not, because it makes them a bucket of money. Only in hindsight with an FTC in the final days of a mercurial administration do we get stuff like this.
    - adamcstephens 6y ago
      Or, the winds are changing and the FTC under the current administration is following them. 46 states are siding with them, if that helps convince you.
- kordlessagain 6y ago
  > it's not really clear what the positives or negatives would be Isn't this also true for Facebook itself as related to how dependent they are on revenue and at what cost that comes to the users who help generate it (by being presented as "eyeballs" to the advertisers)? We used to let kids play with dry cleaning bags, until we discovered they were idiots and can suffocate on them. The realization today is that parents were the actual idiots, not the kids.
- southeastern 6y ago
  >I agree and find the attempt at a breakup a bit frustrating. This is an action that could have profoundly disruptive effect and it's not really clear what the positives or negatives would be. This organization itself is disruptive. As interesting as it is to discuss the potential costs and benefits, there's been a very real cost to society for these issues. It makes no sense to wait for further damage reports if that's at the cost of further damage. It's simple cost vs benefits really. Also I thought disruption was a good thing..? Downvoted so I'll just add one more thing; this isn't a conversation that is new. I'm coming to this with that context. Do I want them to fail? No. The desired outcome is that they will self regulate. But if not, there should be competition. Monopolies naturally have negative side effects, that's why we try to avoid them.
- glenstein 6y ago
  >For instance, FB has invested massively in trust and safety people operations and AI. What happens to that investment when IG is spun off? If what's being said is that those investments are important and necessary, then we should be looking for reasons to sustain them that aren't just about validating the continued existence of a monopoly.
- ViViDboarder 6y ago
  And yet, Facebook is untrustworthy, unsafe, and had developed AI that amplifies controversy... The Facebook purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram were not innovative and should have triggered antitrust at the time. There is no healthy competition when you buy Any worthy competitors.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Tough. There is more at stake than FB recovering its investment into IG. Besides... they will get to sell it, probably at a profit. They got to own it for 8 years, enjoyed the benefits of lowered competition. They will be fine. I agree that this should have been prevented in the first place, but we are where we are. Controversially, I don't think ordinary rule of law can apply to FAANG-scale monopolies. There's no way to generalize rules, laws or industrial policies when the industry is "social media." Social media is (economically) mostly FB. Any rule, law or policy is basically regulating FB specifically. Anyway, the danger of a hammer coming out is low. Even if prosecutors succeed, a cost-of-business fine is the most likely result. Even if they do spin out whatsapp & IG... that leaves facebook mostly intact. I'd also note that the worst case scenario for overzealous trustbusting is basically nothing. At worst you kill FB. This isn't steel production or auto manufacturing. FB could be swallowed by a demon tomorrow and by next thursday any shortage in social media will be filled. We're not exactly short on the stuff. FB bring in $80bn pa, but that's totally arbitrary to the cost of doing social networking. It could be done for $40bn or $8bn and I doubt the consumer would notice a difference. Again, this isn't auto manufacturing. A car company can't make as many cars with half the revenue. If one dies, we actually have less manufacturing capacity and we'll make fewer cars for a while. None of this applies to social media.
  - drstewart 6y ago
    Imagine being so callous about putting 50,000+ people out of work overnight and calling it basically nothing.
    - ralph84 6y ago
      People call for putting way more than 50,000+ people out of work all of the time (eliminating the oil and gas industry as an example). If the belief is those people are engaged in harmful activity, why wouldn't you want them to stop ASAP?
    - thraway12 6y ago
      Imagine making your money off of what Zuckerberg has done to our fucking democracy.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
In an ideal world, I'd like both. Mandated interoperability would help a great deal—but I also don't believe Facebook should ever have been allowed to buy Whatsapp, and it's worth undoing that.
- baby 6y ago
  Why? WhatsApp today is a great messaging app platform with end-to-end encryption.
  - uoaei 6y ago
    ...and known backdoors, due to their custom implementation of the Signal encryption protocol.
    - namanaggarwal 6y ago
      Known backdoors? Can you back that up with a source? Custom implementation is likely because they want to strike a balance between security and usability.
      - uoaei 6y ago
        https://thehackernews.com/2017/01/whatsapp-encryption-backdoor.html https://thehackernews.com/2017/01/whatsapp-encryption-backdo... In short, their implementation allows to change the encryption keys of users without their consent to arbitrary, known keys. The protocol won't re-encrypt sent messages, but there is nothing in the protocol forcing the app to show a notification that your encryption key has changed, which amounts to a man-in-the-middle attack. Any subsequent messages sent or received using that encryption key will be exposed to the attacker. Encryption keys are managed on servers controlled by WhatsApp.
        annadane 6y ago
        Wasn't this specific story debunked? (Don't shoot me, I'm genuinely asking)
croes 6y ago
You can't really compete with FAANG. They are too big. They just destroy or buy all competitors. Especially Facebook.
- jasonhansel 6y ago
  That's why we have antitrust laws--and why, on unfortunately rare occasions, we enforce them.
- hardtke 6y ago
  With both Google and Facebook, mandatory licensing of their advertising inventory (within reason) would help competitors grow. Advertisers want to buy on Facebook/Google because they are the only two ad platforms with quality and scale. Companies like Pinterest/Twitter/Snapchat don't have the enough scale to be interesting to most advertisers. Programatic marketplaces (Adwords, etc.) have the scale, but not the quality (too many spammy publishers and lack of identity resolution across the marketplace). If the big two digital ad platforms were required to license their premium inventory, other companies could invest in their products and gain substantial incremental revenues as consumers started using them. With current business practice, you need to reach massive scale before you can even think about monetizing at reasonable rate ($30+ CPM).
- thanksforthe42 6y ago
  Let's wait a few years. Bloat will kill these companies. It's inevitable.
siliconmountain 6y ago
I want Facebook to stop tracking me, not enable more of it. Which does this enable?
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Stop using their free service and block their Javascript. Don't use apps built with their login framework.
  - secfirstmd 6y ago
    And what about their tracking through a huge chunk of popular websites? Shadow profiles and all kinds of shadey stuff.
    - uoaei 6y ago
      Install the uMatrix extension. Blacklist anything from facebook.com and fb.com. Now their tracking pixels can't see you.
      - nvrspyx 6y ago
        Just in case you weren't aware, uMatrix has been deprecated and will receive no further development, including fixes. It still runs fine now, but it may not in the future.
        uoaei 6y ago
        Thank you! I was not. The GitHub repo has indeed been archived.[1] Any ideas where to go for similar functionality that will be supported in the future? [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix
        Forbo 6y ago
        There seem to be several forks, although it doesn't look like there's much consolidation on merging PRs into any specific repo. Hopefully they don't just splinter off and end up fragmented and neglected. :-\ https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/network https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/network
saddlerustle 6y ago
There's no way to provide access to the social graph in a privacy preserving way. It's not okay to allow a third party to access the data your friends have shared with you without your friends consenting. Unencumbered API access to the social graph is exactly what led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and promising to restrict API access was part of Facebook's settlement with the FTC.
- civilized 6y ago
  But you could get your own data and the list of people authorized to see it, and pass that to a third party. If you and one of your friends both move to another network, you get to see each other's data. Any problem with this?
  - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
    What if I don't want you telling folks that you are my friend? Why do you get to divulge this information to a third party that I know nothing about?
    - mindcrime 6y ago
      Can you stop your real-world friends from divulging your friendship to 3rd parties? Would you even presume to have any standing to do so? I think a case could be made that knowledge that <A friend B> belongs to A and B equally and that neither has standing to preclude the other from sharing that fact. Of course they could both mutually agree to such an arrangement ahead of time, but outside of such an agreement, I have a hard time seeing the case for "B prevents A from telling C that A and B are friends". Another aspect of this though, is "how much can A tell C about B without permission from B?" We know that IRL, people do get angry when friends reveal overly personal details about their lives to others, so this is definitely something to consider.
      - sogen 6y ago
        Like that Seinfeld episode where George _happily_ gives Jerry's address to the dog owner...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
I agree, and as a counter argument to most of the below threads, its worth noting that the Social Graph is likely to be consider a public good at some point in the future. These are not the creations of Facebook or Google, any more than Anemometer (1) manufacturers should own the shipping forecast. (1) The spinney half-ball things that measure wind speed.
ineedasername 6y ago
The link mentions adversarial interoperability for ad blockers, which made me really remember how bad the ad landscape used to be. Crazy amounts of popups, ads that crashed your browser, the explorer shell, or the whole computer, seemingly recursive popups that you had to force-quit the browser to get out of... Sure, I still use an ad blocker, but it seems like have been forced to realize that if they want any of the advertising pie, they need to meet a minimal standard of playing nice with the user.
Tallasatree 6y ago
Imagine congress understanding a word you just said.
- thraway12 6y ago
  You get that congress isn't a single actor and that there are people in congress who do, right?
Enginerrrd 6y ago
You know, the principle is hard to justify in some ways, but thinking back, some of the fastest and best innovation I've seen came about when the people making interoperable software were ahead of the companies trying to shut it down.
zelly 6y ago
the social graph isn't all that valuable to outsiders. anyone determined enough can scrape it without permission anyway. no one else can do much with it except maybe intelligence agencies which were already voluntarily given root access a long time ago. the main economic value of it is to serve ads on Facebook dot com. that's it. that's how they make 100% of their earnings.
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
Separating companies, while certainly a more blunt instrument, is far more broadly applicable when it comes to anti-trust enforcement than it is to come up with a specific policy proposal on a per-company basis. The latter would require an act of Congress each time a company went too far, and Congress moves too slowly, is too divided, and doesn't have the bandwidth to individually address every anti-trust situation with a new law.
ksolanki 6y ago
Yes, can’t we have an email equivalent of social graphs and interaction that can be driven by open standards? I am sure people have thought about this. All the Government needs to do is to enforce compliance to such standards.
baybal2 6y ago
I doubt most lawmakers dealing with this know what Internet is, let alone API.
lanevorockz 6y ago
Good Idea ... It solves the critical problem of turning people into products.
throwaway9870 6y ago
I don't believe it works in practice. I remember CableCARDs and Tivo, what a disaster that was. Comcast came to my house 3 times and never got the CableCARD to work right, so I gave up and just took their DVR. I imagine an interoperable API would have all sorts of problems, bugs, timeouts, etc. and the company would just claim they are doing what the law requires.

bzb6 6y ago

No thanks, I don’t want to spend all day receiving spam via WhatsApp like in the days of irc.

Triv888 6y ago
IRC spam?

theanarcrist 6y ago

I agree and find the attempt at a breakup a bit frustrating. This is an action that could have profoundly disruptive effect and it's not really clear what the positives or negatives would be. For instance, FB has invested massively in trust and safety people operations and AI. What happens to that investment when IG is spun off? Laying out laws and regulations so the market works as intended (no doubt with adjustments on the way) seems like the far preferable way to ensure healthy competition than taking a hammer to the job site and hoping for the best.

natex 6y ago
> Laying out laws and regulations so the market works as intended (no doubt with adjustments on the way) seems like the far preferable way to ensure healthy competition... That's what antitrust/monopoly laws do.
mfer 6y ago
> This is an action that could have profoundly disruptive effect If FB is doing anti-competitive things than disruption is needed. It's not meant to be comfortable. Companies are really good at learning the playing field and then gaming it for their benefits. Tweaks to laws are often easy to work around. Disruption that stops an illegal monopoly is going to be uncomfortable. Especially at first. But, it opens the door for the future in ways that aren't options today.
- efwfwef 6y ago
  But the product provides real value to real people today, why disrupt this? Also weren't these companies free to not accept an acquisition?
  - jzoch 6y ago
    Andrew Carnegie provided far more real, unquestionable value to people too. It ended up being worth it. The same can be said for Leland Stanford or most other monopolies. They didn't become monopolies by not providing value.
    - will_pseudonym 6y ago
      > Andrew Carnegie provided far more real, unquestionable value to people too. It ended up being worth it. The same can be said for Leland Stanford or most other monopolies. They didn't become monopolies by not providing value. Absolutely. The same could also be said of the closest parallel of Facebook in history, the Bell System. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
  - hef19898 6y ago
    Because move fast and brake things? Disruption good? No, seriously, modern tech companies are an anti-trust challenge that was not truely forseen in existing anti-trust laws. That governments are now trying to find answers is a good thing.
- TheRealNGenius 6y ago
WhompingWindows 6y ago
Your answer sidesteps regulatory capture. These big companies wield massive power in Washington, don't you think any regulation and law that's actually passed will benefit them and prevent competition?
maxerickson 6y ago
In some sense this lawsuit is saying that the regulatory approvals of the Instagram and Whatsapp acquisitions were errors. How is the market going to fix that?
- mgiampapa 6y ago
  It's not, because it makes them a bucket of money. Only in hindsight with an FTC in the final days of a mercurial administration do we get stuff like this.
  - adamcstephens 6y ago
    Or, the winds are changing and the FTC under the current administration is following them. 46 states are siding with them, if that helps convince you.
kordlessagain 6y ago
> it's not really clear what the positives or negatives would be Isn't this also true for Facebook itself as related to how dependent they are on revenue and at what cost that comes to the users who help generate it (by being presented as "eyeballs" to the advertisers)? We used to let kids play with dry cleaning bags, until we discovered they were idiots and can suffocate on them. The realization today is that parents were the actual idiots, not the kids.
southeastern 6y ago
>I agree and find the attempt at a breakup a bit frustrating. This is an action that could have profoundly disruptive effect and it's not really clear what the positives or negatives would be. This organization itself is disruptive. As interesting as it is to discuss the potential costs and benefits, there's been a very real cost to society for these issues. It makes no sense to wait for further damage reports if that's at the cost of further damage. It's simple cost vs benefits really. Also I thought disruption was a good thing..? Downvoted so I'll just add one more thing; this isn't a conversation that is new. I'm coming to this with that context. Do I want them to fail? No. The desired outcome is that they will self regulate. But if not, there should be competition. Monopolies naturally have negative side effects, that's why we try to avoid them.
glenstein 6y ago
>For instance, FB has invested massively in trust and safety people operations and AI. What happens to that investment when IG is spun off? If what's being said is that those investments are important and necessary, then we should be looking for reasons to sustain them that aren't just about validating the continued existence of a monopoly.
ViViDboarder 6y ago
And yet, Facebook is untrustworthy, unsafe, and had developed AI that amplifies controversy... The Facebook purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram were not innovative and should have triggered antitrust at the time. There is no healthy competition when you buy Any worthy competitors.
dalbasal 6y ago
Tough. There is more at stake than FB recovering its investment into IG. Besides... they will get to sell it, probably at a profit. They got to own it for 8 years, enjoyed the benefits of lowered competition. They will be fine. I agree that this should have been prevented in the first place, but we are where we are. Controversially, I don't think ordinary rule of law can apply to FAANG-scale monopolies. There's no way to generalize rules, laws or industrial policies when the industry is "social media." Social media is (economically) mostly FB. Any rule, law or policy is basically regulating FB specifically. Anyway, the danger of a hammer coming out is low. Even if prosecutors succeed, a cost-of-business fine is the most likely result. Even if they do spin out whatsapp & IG... that leaves facebook mostly intact. I'd also note that the worst case scenario for overzealous trustbusting is basically nothing. At worst you kill FB. This isn't steel production or auto manufacturing. FB could be swallowed by a demon tomorrow and by next thursday any shortage in social media will be filled. We're not exactly short on the stuff. FB bring in $80bn pa, but that's totally arbitrary to the cost of doing social networking. It could be done for $40bn or $8bn and I doubt the consumer would notice a difference. Again, this isn't auto manufacturing. A car company can't make as many cars with half the revenue. If one dies, we actually have less manufacturing capacity and we'll make fewer cars for a while. None of this applies to social media.
- drstewart 6y ago
  Imagine being so callous about putting 50,000+ people out of work overnight and calling it basically nothing.
  - ralph84 6y ago
    People call for putting way more than 50,000+ people out of work all of the time (eliminating the oil and gas industry as an example). If the belief is those people are engaged in harmful activity, why wouldn't you want them to stop ASAP?
  - thraway12 6y ago
    Imagine making your money off of what Zuckerberg has done to our fucking democracy.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

In an ideal world, I'd like both. Mandated interoperability would help a great deal—but I also don't believe Facebook should ever have been allowed to buy Whatsapp, and it's worth undoing that.

baby 6y ago
Why? WhatsApp today is a great messaging app platform with end-to-end encryption.
- uoaei 6y ago
  ...and known backdoors, due to their custom implementation of the Signal encryption protocol.
  - namanaggarwal 6y ago
    Known backdoors? Can you back that up with a source? Custom implementation is likely because they want to strike a balance between security and usability.
    - uoaei 6y ago
      https://thehackernews.com/2017/01/whatsapp-encryption-backdoor.html https://thehackernews.com/2017/01/whatsapp-encryption-backdo... In short, their implementation allows to change the encryption keys of users without their consent to arbitrary, known keys. The protocol won't re-encrypt sent messages, but there is nothing in the protocol forcing the app to show a notification that your encryption key has changed, which amounts to a man-in-the-middle attack. Any subsequent messages sent or received using that encryption key will be exposed to the attacker. Encryption keys are managed on servers controlled by WhatsApp.
      - annadane 6y ago
        Wasn't this specific story debunked? (Don't shoot me, I'm genuinely asking)

croes 6y ago

You can't really compete with FAANG. They are too big. They just destroy or buy all competitors. Especially Facebook.

jasonhansel 6y ago
That's why we have antitrust laws--and why, on unfortunately rare occasions, we enforce them.
hardtke 6y ago
With both Google and Facebook, mandatory licensing of their advertising inventory (within reason) would help competitors grow. Advertisers want to buy on Facebook/Google because they are the only two ad platforms with quality and scale. Companies like Pinterest/Twitter/Snapchat don't have the enough scale to be interesting to most advertisers. Programatic marketplaces (Adwords, etc.) have the scale, but not the quality (too many spammy publishers and lack of identity resolution across the marketplace). If the big two digital ad platforms were required to license their premium inventory, other companies could invest in their products and gain substantial incremental revenues as consumers started using them. With current business practice, you need to reach massive scale before you can even think about monetizing at reasonable rate ($30+ CPM).
thanksforthe42 6y ago
Let's wait a few years. Bloat will kill these companies. It's inevitable.

siliconmountain 6y ago

I want Facebook to stop tracking me, not enable more of it. Which does this enable?

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
Stop using their free service and block their Javascript. Don't use apps built with their login framework.
- secfirstmd 6y ago
  And what about their tracking through a huge chunk of popular websites? Shadow profiles and all kinds of shadey stuff.
  - uoaei 6y ago
    Install the uMatrix extension. Blacklist anything from facebook.com and fb.com. Now their tracking pixels can't see you.
    - nvrspyx 6y ago
      Just in case you weren't aware, uMatrix has been deprecated and will receive no further development, including fixes. It still runs fine now, but it may not in the future.
      - uoaei 6y ago
        Thank you! I was not. The GitHub repo has indeed been archived.[1] Any ideas where to go for similar functionality that will be supported in the future? [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix
        Forbo 6y ago
        There seem to be several forks, although it doesn't look like there's much consolidation on merging PRs into any specific repo. Hopefully they don't just splinter off and end up fragmented and neglected. :-\ https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/network https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/network

saddlerustle 6y ago

There's no way to provide access to the social graph in a privacy preserving way. It's not okay to allow a third party to access the data your friends have shared with you without your friends consenting. Unencumbered API access to the social graph is exactly what led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and promising to restrict API access was part of Facebook's settlement with the FTC.

civilized 6y ago
But you could get your own data and the list of people authorized to see it, and pass that to a third party. If you and one of your friends both move to another network, you get to see each other's data. Any problem with this?
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  What if I don't want you telling folks that you are my friend? Why do you get to divulge this information to a third party that I know nothing about?
  - mindcrime 6y ago
    Can you stop your real-world friends from divulging your friendship to 3rd parties? Would you even presume to have any standing to do so? I think a case could be made that knowledge that <A friend B> belongs to A and B equally and that neither has standing to preclude the other from sharing that fact. Of course they could both mutually agree to such an arrangement ahead of time, but outside of such an agreement, I have a hard time seeing the case for "B prevents A from telling C that A and B are friends". Another aspect of this though, is "how much can A tell C about B without permission from B?" We know that IRL, people do get angry when friends reveal overly personal details about their lives to others, so this is definitely something to consider.
    - sogen 6y ago
      Like that Seinfeld episode where George _happily_ gives Jerry's address to the dog owner...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

I agree, and as a counter argument to most of the below threads, its worth noting that the Social Graph is likely to be consider a public good at some point in the future. These are not the creations of Facebook or Google, any more than Anemometer (1) manufacturers should own the shipping forecast. (1) The spinney half-ball things that measure wind speed.

ineedasername 6y ago

The link mentions adversarial interoperability for ad blockers, which made me really remember how bad the ad landscape used to be. Crazy amounts of popups, ads that crashed your browser, the explorer shell, or the whole computer, seemingly recursive popups that you had to force-quit the browser to get out of... Sure, I still use an ad blocker, but it seems like have been forced to realize that if they want any of the advertising pie, they need to meet a minimal standard of playing nice with the user.

Tallasatree 6y ago

Imagine congress understanding a word you just said.

thraway12 6y ago
You get that congress isn't a single actor and that there are people in congress who do, right?

Enginerrrd 6y ago

You know, the principle is hard to justify in some ways, but thinking back, some of the fastest and best innovation I've seen came about when the people making interoperable software were ahead of the companies trying to shut it down.

zelly 6y ago

the social graph isn't all that valuable to outsiders. anyone determined enough can scrape it without permission anyway. no one else can do much with it except maybe intelligence agencies which were already voluntarily given root access a long time ago. the main economic value of it is to serve ads on Facebook dot com. that's it. that's how they make 100% of their earnings.

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago

Separating companies, while certainly a more blunt instrument, is far more broadly applicable when it comes to anti-trust enforcement than it is to come up with a specific policy proposal on a per-company basis. The latter would require an act of Congress each time a company went too far, and Congress moves too slowly, is too divided, and doesn't have the bandwidth to individually address every anti-trust situation with a new law.

ksolanki 6y ago

Yes, can’t we have an email equivalent of social graphs and interaction that can be driven by open standards? I am sure people have thought about this. All the Government needs to do is to enforce compliance to such standards.

baybal2 6y ago

I doubt most lawmakers dealing with this know what Internet is, let alone API.

lanevorockz 6y ago

Good Idea ... It solves the critical problem of turning people into products.

throwaway9870 6y ago

I don't believe it works in practice. I remember CableCARDs and Tivo, what a disaster that was. Comcast came to my house 3 times and never got the CableCARD to work right, so I gave up and just took their DVR. I imagine an interoperable API would have all sorts of problems, bugs, timeouts, etc. and the company would just claim they are doing what the law requires.