27 ms·

Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook

311 points by colinprince 5y ago

keewee7 5y ago
Generation Z is on TikTok and the rest of society is also slowly moving there. "Breaking up" Facebook/Instagram is like going for a dinosaur hunt. The FB platforms are already dying.
waynesonfire 5y ago
personally, i'd prefer a sexually arousing answer to Google and Facebook.
- spacemanmatt 5y ago
  antitrust enforcement is fair pillow talk in my house
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    I get goosebumps: https://pics.onsizzle.com/Imgur-1fbc96.png https://pics.onsizzle.com/Imgur-1fbc96.png
    - consumer451 5y ago
      Holy crap.. how is this even close to related? Interpretation 1: Any regulation = communism Interpretation 2: Communism is a good thing, even given all evidence to the contrary. Interpretation 3: ... ? Can you help me out here please?
      - spacemanmatt 5y ago
        My take on this is, we can't be surprised if the entire spectrum of anti-capitalists show up to cheer-lead for stronger anti-trust enforcement. I don't think the GP was trying to conflate enforcement with communism, rather trying to notch a hypothetical victory benefiting their cause.
        NoGravitas 5y ago
        Your interpretation is correct. Also, pillow talk.
      - spacemanmatt 5y ago
        But, also, I love the memes of mid-20th century Americans longing for communism. It's just refreshing to me.
- alexfromapex 5y ago
  Yeah breaking up monopolies is pretty arousing, not sure why the author thought it was "unsexy".
  - klyrs 5y ago
    They're probably unfamiliar with the sheer complexity of the monorepo at google. Carving that up is going to be so juicy. I realize that it's not everybody's kink, but wow.
- dekhn 5y ago
  Well, here's an anecdote from the past that might or might not help you. When AT&T was broken up, the lawyers literally went to Bell Labs and put a piece of tape down the middle of the carpet and said "everybody on this side works for company A, and everybody on that side works for company B". Kinda like monopoly bondage, if you're into that sort of thing.
tqi 5y ago
How does breaking up Facebook help fight misinformation, polarization, engagement baiting, objectionable content, etc?
- analyte123 5y ago
  "If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism?"
- keewee7 5y ago
  I agree. The only thing that will come after breaking up (destroying) Facebook is that everyone will move to Chinese/Russian platforms. Generation Z is almost entirely on TikTok so Facebook/Instagram doesn't have a monopoly on them.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Perhaps those aren't the problems this aims to solve
  - tqi 5y ago
    What are the problems then?
    - throwdecro 5y ago
      > What are the problems then? As stated in the review, and presumably in the book: that "the very bigness of present-day companies — especially those in the tech sector — does not just harm consumers, but that it also threatens innovation and undermines the power of government." The problem that trust-busting is meant to solve is the bigness, and its impact on the government, innovation, and consumer markets.
      - tqi 5y ago
        That seems tautological. How does bigness harm consumers in this case?
throwdecro 5y ago
This is a fantastic review. These books are going on my list.
camjohnson26 5y ago
Trust busting can seem like it’s anti free market, but when a company has a monopoly on a network it stops functioning as a company and basically becomes a government. The problem with Facebook/Amazon/Google is that they have a monopoly on a specific information network, for Facebook the social graph, internet discoverability for Google, and online shopping for Amazon. It’s similar to if a single company owned the road systems or the internet, since the structure of these networks means that competitors can’t exist, there can only be one network for it to have value, so the first company to build it will have a monopoly and be able to indefinitely milk it for a profit. The same thing happened with railroad barons in the 1800s and also in other areas of the economy, and the trust busting response the government took seems to have worked well to bring back a fair market. Government should keep the information networks predictable and accessible. This is a core theme in George Gilder’s controversial but imho extremely insightful book Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World: https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Power-Information-Capitalism-Revolutionizing/dp/1621570274 https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Power-Information-Capitalis...
- ethbr0 5y ago
  An associated component to trust-busting should be foreign trust blocking. Given the way the world works, if the US breaks Facebook up, (insert here) government-supported competitor takes its place. Part of creating a fair, diverse playing field is ensuring international competition is playing by the same rules in the internal market (because you have no jurisdiction to prosecute them as a monopoly in their home country). Which isn't an argument for not breaking Facebook up. But is an argument that if you break Facebook up, you should probably impose substantial limitations on ByteDance and Tencent as they operate in the US.
  - hellbannedguy 5y ago
    "Given the way the world works, if the US breaks Facebook up, (insert here) government-supported competitor takes its place." I don't think that will happen. Americans selfworth, on a deep psychological level, is tied to making large amounts of money. (And yes, I find it sad) We will have many new Zuck types coding away in the new gold rush if FB is crippled. I sometimes think the only reason FB is as financially successful is because Zuck knew no one would love him without money. America is loaded with white fugly irritating intelligent investors that would love to make more money. Tech will stay here.
disgruntledphd2 5y ago
Sigh, another day, another blame of Facebook for destroying Snap. Fundamentally, products are always gonna get copied. Google tried to do it to Facebook, back when FB was the size that Snap was at the time, how well did that work? Fundamentally, while competing with a megacorp sucks monkey balls, Snap shot themselves in the foot with their boneheaded product strategy. They literally didn't invest in their Android app because they wanted to be exclusive. Given that the vast majority of countries are majority Android, this gave FB the space to clone their product and put it in front of hundreds of millions of users who'd never seen the concept before. Ultimately, while I do agree with most of the articles points (breaking up the internet behemoths would probably be a good idea), I really dislike the Snap analogy, as they could easily have beaten FB to the punch if they'd had an effective growth strategy.
- BbzzbB 5y ago
  >They literally didn't invest in their Android app because they wanted to be exclusive Mind blown, I had no idea Snapchat was iOS exclusive. I was thinking just yesterday about how Clubhouse's strategy may (who knows really) have backfired, it seems to me by betting on FOMO-manufacturing they just gave time for others (like Twitter Spaces) to catch up before they filled a niche.
  - maxwell 5y ago
    Snapchat launched their Android app in 2012. Maybe stories landed in iOS before Android?
    - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      I sortof exaggerated, they did have an Android app but basically invested nothing in it. I remember that just before FB cloned them (in literally every place they could) they were talking about how iOS was all that mattered, as those users are richer. They didn't seem to get that you either need to show user growth or revenue growth, and failed at both.
      - 5y ago
ho_schi 5y ago
As Wu and others have rightly pointed out, the straightforward Chicago School standard overlooks, among other things, the stifling effect monopolies can have on innovation. As a case in point: when AT&T was broken up in 1984, a torrent of new products came on the market, everything from the first answering machines to early ISPs. This is a oversimplification and wrong. AT&T was controlled by the government until 1984 and only because of this we were able to got technical innovations like UNIX, The C Programming Language and reusable open-source software. This formed not only the foundation of Linux and C but also later the Internet. And all of this happened because AT&T was actually controlled instead of split up. They were not allowed to enter new markets and therefore we benefit all. What happened next? UNIX-Wars, Lawsuits and disastrous situation which enabled especially Microsoft. The lesson learned here is that - just mere splitting up - doesn't fix anything. The government subsequently did actually nothing against Microsoft and it's contracts with PC-Manufacturers. What I cannot say is whether the government still doesn't understand what software is and it's influence?Especially mass gravitation through user. Or if just no market regulation happens since the 1980ies. I wonder how Personal-Computers and the handling of source-code would've been evolved if BSD and SysV were have been better friends? The appreciation of source code availability? And maybe an simple option at the store which sold that IBM-PCs with the 386 processors. If you got that "UNIX" thing on our PC with the source - you would probably wondered a lot that the spreadsheet application doesn't came with the source...especially when you pay for it.
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  The problem was even lets say AT&T was willing to put BSD on pc style hardware they were wildly overpricing it. If you were dead set at that time having a PC you could kit one out for ~2k which was respectable for the time. Yet then AT&T would come along and say 'oh you want BSD? 20,000 please, oh and that PC you got well it does not work correctly with it you need to buy a different set of kit that is 8x the cost, plus a 40k per year support cost'. AT&T is and was a phone company through and through. I have worked at the leftovers of another one. They only care about one thing, number of lines hooked up. Their sales staff and training is all about that. How can software sell me more lines. It is one of the metrics that they look at. A few thousand PC sales? A blip on the balance sheet and probably not really worth investing in because it does not sell more lines. Phone companies are laser focused on that.
smoldesu 5y ago
How are Google and Facebook considered trusts in this context but not Apple? I really must be missing something here.
- dontblink 5y ago
  Apple should be broken up. But how? Maybe the AppStore needs to be independent?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - maxwell 5y ago
    Yeah, as Warren proposed. https://www.ilounge.com/news/elizabeth-warren-break-apple https://www.ilounge.com/news/elizabeth-warren-break-apple
- jeffbee 5y ago
  That’s your clue right there. “Break up google” is an aesthetic argument with no sound legal or ethical basis, promoted by people who aesthetically prefer Apple and therefore give that company a free pass.
unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
[2019]
nathias 5y ago
We should consider technologies a public good once they go over some threshold of users, they should then eiter be nationalized or regulated as public or broken up.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  So then what if social networks capped the number of users at 1 below that threshold? For example, if nationalization occurs at 1 million users, what if all social networks limited the number of accounts to 999,999?. Personally I think that would be awesome. Imagine if every town, city, and borough of very large cities had their own independent social network or networks.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    You could do it the same way you would break up the banks. Just put a tax on companies with more users than e.g. 1M. Instead of a systemic risk tax, make it a data security tax; because once you're past a certain size, the negative externalities caused by a security failure justify the tax.
  - throwdecro 5y ago
    > [W]hat if all social networks limited the number of accounts to 999,999? That's interesting. It opens the door to the possibility that social networks might pay people to leave, in order to open spaces for more long-term-valuable customers.
    - jfk13 5y ago
      Why would they pay people to leave? They could arbitrarily kick them out for violation some obscure T&Cs, or for no stated reason at all...
  - nathias 5y ago
    Yes, we would go back from platforms to protocols and the internet would be good again. As for when a technology become good? There are a lot of possible criteria, but that doesn't really matter we can come up with a fuzzy cut off and any transparent criteria for it would be preferrable to the current state.
gajeam 5y ago
Hello, I wrote this! Happy to see it circulating HN again. You can find more of my writing on competition here in the Boston Globe — https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/11/opinion/be-wary-when-big-tech-says-its-defending-your-privacy/ https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/11/opinion/be-wary-when-...) in the Boston Globe
LatteLazy 5y ago
I don't see how trust busting actually solves the problems people care about. 2+ competing Facebook's have a lot more deniability, they have less budget to pay for things like moderating or anti-fake-news and they have all the more incentive to engage in exactly the sort of clickbait we want to escape. I am concerned that "we have to do something and this is something"...
- reincarnate0x14 5y ago
  Budget is clearly not the problem FB has with moderating and anti-fake news. They don't want to do it because it conflicts with letting their userbase exchange pointless outrage and insanity to up the mutual engagement and thus, ad revenue.
  - LatteLazy 5y ago
    Again though, how would 2+ mini Facebook's make that better?
    - klyrs 5y ago
      I've long desired a separate "Events" product, like what Facebook provides, but not associated with Facebook. Messenger and Whatsapp could be separate. Groups and Ads could also be separate. Those are horizontal cuts. I'd also cut two verticals, Identities from below, and Feeds from above. Common protocols could allow smaller players to enter the field in all of these distinct markets.
ilaksh 5y ago
People should educate themselves about decentralization technologies. That's really the direction for resolving these issues. And the first thing you will realize when you start to study them is that in a way the name 'decentralization' is misleading because they are actually the best ways we know of to keep holistic systems. But we get that without the actual physical or organizational centralization and at the same time can use them in ways that are open to evolution. And I know my comment will get buried but I am going to keep saying it. Just like I talked about remote work for years and had those comments downvoted before it suddenly became globally popular.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  If you mean cryptocurrencies or blockchain, you could hardly find a better argument for the efficiency benefits of centralization.
  - serverholic 5y ago
    Ethereum is in the process of doing an upgrade that will take effect later this year/early next year. This upgrade will drop energy usage by 99+%. After that the sharding upgrade + Layer 2 systems (available right now) will boost performance to 100,000 transactions per second.
- 1121redblackgo 5y ago
  Could you elaborate or simplify what you are saying? I'm curious to know more but I don't think I understand
  - ilaksh 5y ago
    Google, Facebook and Amazon are popular because they are platforms with large networks. They are a one-stop shop. The problem is they are marketplaces (for information, goods or ads) where they compete in the same space that they own, and they own most of that space as private for profit companies when what they are doing is more like a public utility at this point. But one that completely takes advantage. What we can do is build platforms to replace them that are actually public using decentralized technologies. For example, much (of course not all) of what Amazon does is connecting people to a very large database of products and making it convenient to buy them. We could replace that with cryptocurrency and a distributed database or something similar. Such as Ethereum and IPFS or OrbitDB and some related trchnologies. Not saying it's easy or there aren't technical challenges, but they are not insurmountable and the benefits are obvious. There are open decentralized networks like SSB or Matrix, and a few peer-to-peer ones that may ultimately work out better. For search and advertising, look at things like YaCy as a potential starting point. But really we have no reason not to explore new and existing distributed protocols for search and information exchange other than sheer laziness. And there is a fair amount of really useful research. But we are lazy.
fallingknife 5y ago
Stopped reading after the first 3 paragraphs which were made up entirely of bitching about the arrogance of selected silicon valley billionaires, none of whom have anything to do with any companies that could ever be called a monopoly. I suspected that this was the author's real motive, as is usually the case with journalists coming after big tech. If they really cared about monopolies, then they would have been writing about the destructive monopolies / oligopolies in many other industries that have existed much longer than the 10 years or so that Google and FB have been large powerful companies. It's a shame because Google's monopoly position in search is a real issue that deserves real discussion, not just the usual hit piece from another bitter journalist.
- joshmarinacci 5y ago
  You should keep reading. It gets a lot better.
- padobson 5y ago
  Sounds like you stopped after the hook. I don't blame you, if the hook is off-putting, the ultimate values of the piece may not align with yours anyhow. But there is something to be learned from continuing to read after off-putting hooks, including that the author might have something genuine to say beyond just looping in people that agree with them with inflammatory hooks.
smooth_remmy 5y ago
Instead of trust busting these companies, the libertarian answer to them would be to invalidate their patents. Google partially remains a search monopoly because of its search patents - of which it has many. If the state invalidates its patents and then moves out of the way, other competitors will naturally become successful. There is no need to break up companies. Just take away some of their state-imposed advantages like patents.
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  > Google partially remains a search monopoly because of its search patents According to this piece on Google's patent strategy, big tech benefits when the value of patents decreases anyway, which cuts against your argument[0]. Google gets pretty much everything it wants anyway, the gist of this piece is that individual patent holders that sue tech companies get a lot more value out of patents than the big companies do. Big companies benefit as the value of patents decrease, which is what you're calling for here. One huge reason for this is the network effect advantages that big tech companies have. Anyone can build a Facebook clone that copies most of the primary functionality, but it'll never gain traction because why would anyone leave the already-established social media network? All of their friends are already on there. In Google's case, numerous search engine alternatives have existed for years and yet Google remains pretty strong. I cannot find a case of Google asserting patent authority over a competing search engine, which tells me that it's doing just fine maintaining it's hold over the search market "naturally". Consumer technology use is notoriously habitual and cannot achieve market equilibrium when patents are removed. Sorry, but this is an oversimplified argument that doesn't reflect how Google's technology functions in the search market. 0: https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/03/21/how-google-and-big-tech-killed-the-u-s-patent-system/id=95080/ https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/03/21/how-google-and-big-tec...
- ncallaway 5y ago
  Wouldn't invalidating the patents of companies that are too powerful and abusive in the market just be another "trust busting" tactic? I don't see how that is separate from "trust busting", but rather just another way to bust trusts?
AlbertCory 5y ago
I wrote this [1] four years ago. It shows how to break up FAANG by making their biggest asset, their data, transparent and regulated. And you would get a check from it. Imagine your consuming history on Amazon in a company by itself, you own dividend-paying shares, and if you don't like their policies, you can take the data elsewhere, or keep it private. Anyone who wants to use it, including "Amazon" itself, has to pay Amazon Data for it, and they can only use it for approved purposes, all public. The history of the Internet in FAANG becomes a regulated asset, like a power plant. The "free market" would make much better use of all this data than FAANG itself does now. They are bloated bureaucracies who don't even realize what they have. Would FAANG scream? Sure, but they would own massive (but not controlling) shares of the FAANG Data companies, so as Larry Page says in my "interview" it works out well for them, too. [1] https://issuu.com/stanfordchaparral/docs/parody_119_3-4/17 https://issuu.com/stanfordchaparral/docs/parody_119_3-4/17
- Kalium 5y ago
  I love the idea of data portability and data dividends. I love it dearly. It gets at what are by far the most critical principles here - data sovereignty and data value. So it is with a heavy heart that I similarly always find myself deeply concerned by the security implications of such a world. As soon as you create data import and export functions, we will collectively realize that most people both have absolutely no idea how to handle it and are incredibly resistant to education on the subject. A lot of well-meaning ordinary people are going to get hurt when they get tricked into mishandling their data. There's already a sizable black market for personal data, and increasing transparency and access is going to grow that by both providing more ways to access data and more ways to use it. I don't know a good way to reconcile these two. The tension hurts my heart.
  - jraph 5y ago
    We should work on making user privacy more private, not more portable. If it does not exist it does not need to be ported. A piece of data which has been put somewhere is there forever. It cannot be moved, only copied. And we should disincentivize data collection by making it worthless or costly, so only the strict minimum to make something work is collected. edit: and having a central place where companies can request personal data is to be avoided: it should be hard to know where to find someone's data. Instauring data dividends would risk encouraging people to share personal data because it could benefit them financially, and that we probably want to avoid as well.
chiefalchemist 5y ago
> Wu argues that the very bigness of present-day companies — especially those in the tech sector — does not just harm consumers, but that it also threatens innovation and undermines the power of government. Absolutely. The fact that the government's power is being subverted should not be lost going forward with any related discussions. Along the same lines, The Media's status quo is also being banged up. These well established power bases aren't going to surrender without doing battle. Mind you, I'm not defending Big Tech. Having recently read the robust and extremely thorough "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" I'd be foolish to pick sides. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-under-surveillance-capitalism-on-the-media https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und... The arc of the point is, viewing current events with a 20th Century lens is foolish at best. There is a lot going on. Some of it obvious, but far more is covert / stealth.
m_ke 5y ago
I was just thinking last night about what I'd coin as "Apple Driven Development". If you look at the wave of tech business trends in the past 15 years they're largely driven by what Apple allowed to happen on the iPhone. It started with the launch of the iPhone, which forced a lot of businesses to move from an open web to mobile apps, then we got a wave of social apps that aimed for growth and ignored revenue because there was no easy way to charge users money, then at some point Tim Cook figured out that subscriptions are the ultimate business model and apple nudged the whole industry over to subscriptions, now apple is deciding that targeted advertising is bad and is in the process of killing the whole industry. They get to do all of it because they managed to capture the upper class of consumers.
dantheman 5y ago
I'd really prefer lawyers and congress to focus on breaking up monopolies in the health care system, where the government requires certificate of need and through licensing allows cartels to control the supply of labor to ensure high salaries. You know, actually abusing their monopoly position.
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  But that doesn't get them editorial influnce over an estate of power! Seriously it has been obvious from the start that the pissiness over "big tech" is really about them not doing the impossible and providing the exact influnce they want. So monopoly is their legal thug pretext because the judge would break their hand slapping them across the face for their blatantly First Ammendment violations if they said what they really wanted.
DeathArrow 5y ago
If we liquidate monopolies, we will have cartels.
consumer451 5y ago
Sean Carroll’s Mindscape episode with Cory Doctorow covers this topic very nicely. https://youtu.be/bH9TqJtMmT8 https://youtu.be/bH9TqJtMmT8 Or audio with full transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/10/21/69-cory-doctorow-on-technology-monopoly-and-the-future-of-the-internet/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/10/21/69-c...
encryptluks2 5y ago
Bust the ISPs first otherwise this is nothing more than attacking your enemy. There are alternatives to Google services already. They are more open than Apple.
novok 5y ago
Being anti-facebook & anti-google is popular in media circles because they are direct competitors in the advertising space that are eating their lunch. The fact the author does not include amazon, apple or microsoft is telling on it's own. "Cui bono" is something you should always apply to whatever you read.
- graeme 5y ago
  Yeah based on prevailing narratives it seems like trust busting is actually the sexy media answer, contrary to this article’s title
NoGravitas 5y ago
Senator John Sherman, the primary author of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, was the brother of Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. It seems there is a Sherman for every problem... if only we could send Uncle Billy on a march to the Pacific today...
bmitc 5y ago
I haven't read the article yet, but I'd find such trust-busting pretty sexy.
cheese_van 5y ago
I don't much feel I have a dog in this fight since I don't use social media. So I am curious, how has Facebook harmed you and what would it take to make you whole? I think Amazon is a different animal, and probably a different conversation. So... How has Facebook's market penetration harmed you?
Barrin92 5y ago
I don't buy this 'against bigness' argument at all, similar to the 'surveillance capitalism' critiques of Zuboff that are so popular. The central thesis is just plain wrong. Large tech firms aren't (most of the time) rent-seekers. They're competitive and innovative, and centralization is not prohibiting innovation, it's enabling it because in our information-based systems the limit to how large an effective institution can be has gone up. Aggregation of data improves efficiency. We have enabled a much larger degree of planning. Arguing for trust-busting to solve our problems to me sounds like arguing for a return to artisanal-craftsmanship when faced with the negative effects of modern capitalism. The issues may be identified correctly, the solution is anachronistic and going into the wrong direction. Instead of attempting to returning to some anarchy of an idealized free-market and opposing large corporations and government, which effectively just means you're going to be sidelined and irrelevant, the goal needs to be to figure out how these big tech mega-structures can be aligned with the interests of the public. Google isn't a robber baron, the analogies just fail. The only thing they're robbing are other industry oligarchs while users get everything for free.
verisimi 5y ago
When government is so beholden to lobbyists, and lobbyists are paid by corporations, how can you meaningfully get government to act against the interests of those who pay them?
tehjoker 5y ago
Google and Facebook have natural monopolies. The answer isn't to break them up (which will just restart the cycle) but to place them under public ownership. This would also enforce first amendment rights on both platforms and disallow the legal side-step the government has been using to pressure them into censoring people.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  Some men just want to watch teh world learn.
- quotemstr 5y ago
  Public ownership isn't really necessary and comes with its own downsides. All that's needed is to apply the first amendment to these companies, which can be done either through legislation or through the courts applying Marsh-like reasoning about freedom of speech in privately owned public accomodations.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    It could still happen, but I am doubtful. The public option appeals to me because it also erases all the advertising and spying incentives these guys have.
sam0x17 5y ago
I dunno I find the idea of trust-busting pretty sexy. I remember learning about how we broke up a lot of the oil and rail conglomerates in the early 1900s as a high schooler and I thought it was so cool that government could step in and prevent really bad things that would otherwise never be prevented with unregulated capitalism. In today's climate for whatever reason the break-in-case-of-emergency glass around trust-busting seems to be unbreakable, which is sad I think. I don't get how we got here, but I bet it's a long paragraph with the words "lobbyist" and "corporate political donations" appearing numerous times.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
This is such a good discussion in the context of game theory: any country that busts their companies is at an immediate global disadvantage without the introduction of tariffs.
rsj_hn 5y ago
The problem with these types of articles is that it doesn't contain a single actionable step on how one would go about breaking up these monopolies. It's a lot of "well, we did it with the electrical providers and telephone providers so we should do it with google." Well, you can take a national utility and split it across geographic regions so local calls or electricity bills go into the pockets of the region you are in, and calls between two regions go into the pockets of both according to whatever long distance agreement is in place. That's at least workable. Or you break up an Oil Company that has 500 wells/concessions, into 5 groups of 100 wells/concessions. Or a railroad with a nationwide network, split up into 5 regional networks. That could work, too. That's what we did in the past to break up monopolies. Now how would that work with google search? Prevent people in region A from loading a website in region B? Is that what we want? crickets Sure there is low hanging fruit in terms of divesting -- e.g. no reason to keep a video monopoly like youtube with a search monopoly. I'm all for it. But now you just have two monopolies, and have not solved the problem of lack of competition in either video or search, which is ostensibly what you use to justfy these actions. In fact the consumer pains with long distance in the wake of the ATT breakup is the reason why the law has changed on anti-trust. Now you must show consumer harm to pass constitutional muster and your proposal has to show consumer benefit. A proposal to break off youtube from google is going to have a hard time passing this test. So yes, we, get it, we solved the problem of anti-trusts in the past, we don't like google, so We Must Do Something. Except those old anti-trust strategies just wont work against monopolies that have no geographic dimension. That no one is willing to touch that explains why we have a deluge of pleas, none of which contain a single workable proposal.
- cwp 5y ago
  Agreed. This is a lot of words saying "the solution is easy" by someone who doesn't understand the problem.
- toast0 5y ago
  > But now you just have two monopolies, and have not solved the problem of lack of competition in either video or search, which is ostensibly what you use to justfy these actions. The problem is not really a monopoly (or at least market dominant position) in one business, it's using that dominant position to gain dominance in other businesses. So, you split out the obvious things: youtube, search, adwords, media ads, g suite stuff, android + chrome OS, payment/wallet, cloud, some sort of bucket for the rest. Require FRAND terms when baby Gs work with othet baby Gs and restrict the baby Gs from expanding into other lines of business. There's your actionable plan. It leaves you with a handful of mostly viable businesses that are still pretty dominant, but... If YouTube has the same relationship with its ad network as any other video site could get, other video sites can have a better chance to compete. Setting up an Android for people new to the internet won't require creating a gmail account and steer your choice of email providers, etc. Geographic splits don't really make sense for Google. And really, I'm not sure it did for AT&T, except that local vs long distance was a useful split, and I don't know that a nationwide local phone company that can't connect long distance calls would make sense. We certainly didn't get competitive local residential phone service by breaking up AT&T. The telecom act of 1996 came closer to giving us that, until the FCC decided it didn't care.
throwawayapples 5y ago
What about Apple? Apple and Google completely control their app stores on their respective platforms. That means that reaching mobile users means dealing with either both of those two, or (if you want to brave the PWA nightmare, especially on Apple), telco gatekeepers to send notifications to your users (note the new 10DLC requirements and massive fines/fees if you simply want to send SMS notifications to your users) These are absolutely trusts. They are cartels that control access to their networks. Not that G/FB controlling most of the ad space isn't concerning, but G/Apple are actually the ones that are the gatekeepers for any other apps that would present mobile ad alternatives. You want to do something new and interesting in the ad space -- or in any mobile space? Nope. You can't, unless both Google and Apple approve your app. Google and Apple are killing innovation through their arbitrary, capricious, and selectively enforced app store "guidelines", and their excessive tax on any purchase, regardless of the purpose.
alexashka 5y ago
Just get rid of arbitrary bundling - you don't get to bundle shit without an option to unbundle. Meaning you don't get to bundle my TV show with your garbage ads in the middle. You don't get to bundle a friend list with a news feed with a messaging service, without an option for me to only consume one part of it, or a combination of my own choosing. You don't get to bundle your political opinion in my search algorithm the same way you don't get to bundle surprise ingredients into my cookies. You get to provide the search service, you get to provide cookies, you don't get to provide magic cookies I don't understand or can make on my own with a bit of effort. Your service is efficiency at scale, not arbitrary shit bundled with everything because of a power imbalance.
orionblastar 5y ago
It happened to AT&T during the 1980s. Got split up into Baby Bells. My father worked for AT&T and was forced into early retirement after teaching new employees how to do his job as an installer. Then the DOJ set sights on Microsoft, but they avoided it. I wonder what Teddy Roosevelt would think about Google, Twitter, Amazon, Google having so much money and power?
m0zg 5y ago
Sorry to disappoint you, folks, but after Zuck's $400M "fortification" of US elections in swing states last year, he's not in danger of any "trust-busting" whatsoever. You can downvote me all you like, but you know it's true.
dreamcompiler 5y ago
Unfettered capitalism always tends toward monopolies, and then the invisible hand stops working and the whole system stops being capitalism. Capitalists who complain about competition are effectively complaining about the backbone of capitalism itself. Healthy capitalism requires antitrust regulation for the same reason football requires referees.
theknocker 5y ago
i.e. the entire fucking plan we were supposed to have for dealing with anticompetitive asshole corporations who think they're more important than the government.
wishawa 5y ago
Traditional anti-trust methods would only go so far with big techs because while monopolies in the past are driven by economies of scale (and lobbying and other illegal stuffs, of course), big techs’ monopolies are mainly driven by strong positive feedback loops (search results quality for Google and network effect for Facebook). If Google and Facebook were to play it 100% fair, I doubt they would be smaller than 75% of their current size.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  Breaking Google/Facebook up geographically for antitrust violations would be ineffective, but breaking them up by line-of-business would not and is well within traditional anti-trust remedies. The expansion of monopolies into adjacent and related markets is driven by leveraging the existing monopoly to monopolize new markets, which is already within the scope of acts addressed by traditional anti-trust (whether or not one views it as enabled by “network effects” or “feedback loops”), though regulators have been ineffective at addressing it in the internet space. This isn't a defect in traditional anti-trust law, but in anti-trust enforcement.
  - wishawa 5y ago
    I agree with your argument in the case of Google. It would be good if Android, Google Earth, etc., are broken off from the main Google. But for Facebook I don’t see how it can be broken down. Instagram, Whatsapp, and Messenger, Facebook’s three big children, are not really separate lines of business from Facebook itself. This isn’t due to defects in anti-trust laws or their enforcements. Capitalism itself just isn’t made for the wide-reaching and feedback-loop-y industry that is social media.
JamesAdir 5y ago
Article is from 2019. Should be added to the text link.

311 points by colinprince 5y ago

Generation Z is on TikTok and the rest of society is also slowly moving there. "Breaking up" Facebook/Instagram is like going for a dinosaur hunt. The FB platforms are already dying.

waynesonfire 5y ago

personally, i'd prefer a sexually arousing answer to Google and Facebook.

spacemanmatt 5y ago
antitrust enforcement is fair pillow talk in my house
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  I get goosebumps: https://pics.onsizzle.com/Imgur-1fbc96.png https://pics.onsizzle.com/Imgur-1fbc96.png
  - consumer451 5y ago
    Holy crap.. how is this even close to related? Interpretation 1: Any regulation = communism Interpretation 2: Communism is a good thing, even given all evidence to the contrary. Interpretation 3: ... ? Can you help me out here please?
    - spacemanmatt 5y ago
      My take on this is, we can't be surprised if the entire spectrum of anti-capitalists show up to cheer-lead for stronger anti-trust enforcement. I don't think the GP was trying to conflate enforcement with communism, rather trying to notch a hypothetical victory benefiting their cause.
      - NoGravitas 5y ago
        Your interpretation is correct. Also, pillow talk.
    - spacemanmatt 5y ago
      But, also, I love the memes of mid-20th century Americans longing for communism. It's just refreshing to me.
alexfromapex 5y ago
Yeah breaking up monopolies is pretty arousing, not sure why the author thought it was "unsexy".
- klyrs 5y ago
  They're probably unfamiliar with the sheer complexity of the monorepo at google. Carving that up is going to be so juicy. I realize that it's not everybody's kink, but wow.
dekhn 5y ago
Well, here's an anecdote from the past that might or might not help you. When AT&T was broken up, the lawyers literally went to Bell Labs and put a piece of tape down the middle of the carpet and said "everybody on this side works for company A, and everybody on that side works for company B". Kinda like monopoly bondage, if you're into that sort of thing.

tqi 5y ago

How does breaking up Facebook help fight misinformation, polarization, engagement baiting, objectionable content, etc?

analyte123 5y ago
"If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism?"
keewee7 5y ago
I agree. The only thing that will come after breaking up (destroying) Facebook is that everyone will move to Chinese/Russian platforms. Generation Z is almost entirely on TikTok so Facebook/Instagram doesn't have a monopoly on them.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
Perhaps those aren't the problems this aims to solve
- tqi 5y ago
  What are the problems then?
  - throwdecro 5y ago
    > What are the problems then? As stated in the review, and presumably in the book: that "the very bigness of present-day companies — especially those in the tech sector — does not just harm consumers, but that it also threatens innovation and undermines the power of government." The problem that trust-busting is meant to solve is the bigness, and its impact on the government, innovation, and consumer markets.
    - tqi 5y ago
      That seems tautological. How does bigness harm consumers in this case?

throwdecro 5y ago

This is a fantastic review. These books are going on my list.

camjohnson26 5y ago

Trust busting can seem like it’s anti free market, but when a company has a monopoly on a network it stops functioning as a company and basically becomes a government. The problem with Facebook/Amazon/Google is that they have a monopoly on a specific information network, for Facebook the social graph, internet discoverability for Google, and online shopping for Amazon. It’s similar to if a single company owned the road systems or the internet, since the structure of these networks means that competitors can’t exist, there can only be one network for it to have value, so the first company to build it will have a monopoly and be able to indefinitely milk it for a profit. The same thing happened with railroad barons in the 1800s and also in other areas of the economy, and the trust busting response the government took seems to have worked well to bring back a fair market. Government should keep the information networks predictable and accessible. This is a core theme in George Gilder’s controversial but imho extremely insightful book Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World: https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Power-Information-Capitalism-Revolutionizing/dp/1621570274 https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Power-Information-Capitalis...

ethbr0 5y ago
An associated component to trust-busting should be foreign trust blocking. Given the way the world works, if the US breaks Facebook up, (insert here) government-supported competitor takes its place. Part of creating a fair, diverse playing field is ensuring international competition is playing by the same rules in the internal market (because you have no jurisdiction to prosecute them as a monopoly in their home country). Which isn't an argument for not breaking Facebook up. But is an argument that if you break Facebook up, you should probably impose substantial limitations on ByteDance and Tencent as they operate in the US.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  "Given the way the world works, if the US breaks Facebook up, (insert here) government-supported competitor takes its place." I don't think that will happen. Americans selfworth, on a deep psychological level, is tied to making large amounts of money. (And yes, I find it sad) We will have many new Zuck types coding away in the new gold rush if FB is crippled. I sometimes think the only reason FB is as financially successful is because Zuck knew no one would love him without money. America is loaded with white fugly irritating intelligent investors that would love to make more money. Tech will stay here.

disgruntledphd2 5y ago

Sigh, another day, another blame of Facebook for destroying Snap. Fundamentally, products are always gonna get copied. Google tried to do it to Facebook, back when FB was the size that Snap was at the time, how well did that work? Fundamentally, while competing with a megacorp sucks monkey balls, Snap shot themselves in the foot with their boneheaded product strategy. They literally didn't invest in their Android app because they wanted to be exclusive. Given that the vast majority of countries are majority Android, this gave FB the space to clone their product and put it in front of hundreds of millions of users who'd never seen the concept before. Ultimately, while I do agree with most of the articles points (breaking up the internet behemoths would probably be a good idea), I really dislike the Snap analogy, as they could easily have beaten FB to the punch if they'd had an effective growth strategy.

BbzzbB 5y ago
>They literally didn't invest in their Android app because they wanted to be exclusive Mind blown, I had no idea Snapchat was iOS exclusive. I was thinking just yesterday about how Clubhouse's strategy may (who knows really) have backfired, it seems to me by betting on FOMO-manufacturing they just gave time for others (like Twitter Spaces) to catch up before they filled a niche.
- maxwell 5y ago
  Snapchat launched their Android app in 2012. Maybe stories landed in iOS before Android?
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    I sortof exaggerated, they did have an Android app but basically invested nothing in it. I remember that just before FB cloned them (in literally every place they could) they were talking about how iOS was all that mattered, as those users are richer. They didn't seem to get that you either need to show user growth or revenue growth, and failed at both.
    - 5y ago

ho_schi 5y ago

As Wu and others have rightly pointed out, the straightforward Chicago School standard overlooks, among other things, the stifling effect monopolies can have on innovation. As a case in point: when AT&T was broken up in 1984, a torrent of new products came on the market, everything from the first answering machines to early ISPs. This is a oversimplification and wrong. AT&T was controlled by the government until 1984 and only because of this we were able to got technical innovations like UNIX, The C Programming Language and reusable open-source software. This formed not only the foundation of Linux and C but also later the Internet. And all of this happened because AT&T was actually controlled instead of split up. They were not allowed to enter new markets and therefore we benefit all. What happened next? UNIX-Wars, Lawsuits and disastrous situation which enabled especially Microsoft. The lesson learned here is that - just mere splitting up - doesn't fix anything. The government subsequently did actually nothing against Microsoft and it's contracts with PC-Manufacturers. What I cannot say is whether the government still doesn't understand what software is and it's influence?Especially mass gravitation through user. Or if just no market regulation happens since the 1980ies. I wonder how Personal-Computers and the handling of source-code would've been evolved if BSD and SysV were have been better friends? The appreciation of source code availability? And maybe an simple option at the store which sold that IBM-PCs with the 386 processors. If you got that "UNIX" thing on our PC with the source - you would probably wondered a lot that the spreadsheet application doesn't came with the source...especially when you pay for it.

sumtechguy 5y ago
The problem was even lets say AT&T was willing to put BSD on pc style hardware they were wildly overpricing it. If you were dead set at that time having a PC you could kit one out for ~2k which was respectable for the time. Yet then AT&T would come along and say 'oh you want BSD? 20,000 please, oh and that PC you got well it does not work correctly with it you need to buy a different set of kit that is 8x the cost, plus a 40k per year support cost'. AT&T is and was a phone company through and through. I have worked at the leftovers of another one. They only care about one thing, number of lines hooked up. Their sales staff and training is all about that. How can software sell me more lines. It is one of the metrics that they look at. A few thousand PC sales? A blip on the balance sheet and probably not really worth investing in because it does not sell more lines. Phone companies are laser focused on that.

smoldesu 5y ago

How are Google and Facebook considered trusts in this context but not Apple? I really must be missing something here.

dontblink 5y ago
Apple should be broken up. But how? Maybe the AppStore needs to be independent?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- maxwell 5y ago
  Yeah, as Warren proposed. https://www.ilounge.com/news/elizabeth-warren-break-apple https://www.ilounge.com/news/elizabeth-warren-break-apple
jeffbee 5y ago
That’s your clue right there. “Break up google” is an aesthetic argument with no sound legal or ethical basis, promoted by people who aesthetically prefer Apple and therefore give that company a free pass.

unyttigfjelltol 5y ago

[2019]

nathias 5y ago

We should consider technologies a public good once they go over some threshold of users, they should then eiter be nationalized or regulated as public or broken up.

tenebrisalietum 5y ago
So then what if social networks capped the number of users at 1 below that threshold? For example, if nationalization occurs at 1 million users, what if all social networks limited the number of accounts to 999,999?. Personally I think that would be awesome. Imagine if every town, city, and borough of very large cities had their own independent social network or networks.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  You could do it the same way you would break up the banks. Just put a tax on companies with more users than e.g. 1M. Instead of a systemic risk tax, make it a data security tax; because once you're past a certain size, the negative externalities caused by a security failure justify the tax.
- throwdecro 5y ago
  > [W]hat if all social networks limited the number of accounts to 999,999? That's interesting. It opens the door to the possibility that social networks might pay people to leave, in order to open spaces for more long-term-valuable customers.
  - jfk13 5y ago
    Why would they pay people to leave? They could arbitrarily kick them out for violation some obscure T&Cs, or for no stated reason at all...
- nathias 5y ago
  Yes, we would go back from platforms to protocols and the internet would be good again. As for when a technology become good? There are a lot of possible criteria, but that doesn't really matter we can come up with a fuzzy cut off and any transparent criteria for it would be preferrable to the current state.

gajeam 5y ago

Hello, I wrote this! Happy to see it circulating HN again. You can find more of my writing on competition here in the Boston Globe — https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/11/opinion/be-wary-when-big-tech-says-its-defending-your-privacy/ https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/11/opinion/be-wary-when-...) in the Boston Globe

LatteLazy 5y ago

I don't see how trust busting actually solves the problems people care about. 2+ competing Facebook's have a lot more deniability, they have less budget to pay for things like moderating or anti-fake-news and they have all the more incentive to engage in exactly the sort of clickbait we want to escape. I am concerned that "we have to do something and this is something"...

reincarnate0x14 5y ago
Budget is clearly not the problem FB has with moderating and anti-fake news. They don't want to do it because it conflicts with letting their userbase exchange pointless outrage and insanity to up the mutual engagement and thus, ad revenue.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  Again though, how would 2+ mini Facebook's make that better?
  - klyrs 5y ago
    I've long desired a separate "Events" product, like what Facebook provides, but not associated with Facebook. Messenger and Whatsapp could be separate. Groups and Ads could also be separate. Those are horizontal cuts. I'd also cut two verticals, Identities from below, and Feeds from above. Common protocols could allow smaller players to enter the field in all of these distinct markets.

ilaksh 5y ago

People should educate themselves about decentralization technologies. That's really the direction for resolving these issues. And the first thing you will realize when you start to study them is that in a way the name 'decentralization' is misleading because they are actually the best ways we know of to keep holistic systems. But we get that without the actual physical or organizational centralization and at the same time can use them in ways that are open to evolution. And I know my comment will get buried but I am going to keep saying it. Just like I talked about remote work for years and had those comments downvoted before it suddenly became globally popular.

Robotbeat 5y ago
If you mean cryptocurrencies or blockchain, you could hardly find a better argument for the efficiency benefits of centralization.
- serverholic 5y ago
  Ethereum is in the process of doing an upgrade that will take effect later this year/early next year. This upgrade will drop energy usage by 99+%. After that the sharding upgrade + Layer 2 systems (available right now) will boost performance to 100,000 transactions per second.
1121redblackgo 5y ago
Could you elaborate or simplify what you are saying? I'm curious to know more but I don't think I understand
- ilaksh 5y ago
  Google, Facebook and Amazon are popular because they are platforms with large networks. They are a one-stop shop. The problem is they are marketplaces (for information, goods or ads) where they compete in the same space that they own, and they own most of that space as private for profit companies when what they are doing is more like a public utility at this point. But one that completely takes advantage. What we can do is build platforms to replace them that are actually public using decentralized technologies. For example, much (of course not all) of what Amazon does is connecting people to a very large database of products and making it convenient to buy them. We could replace that with cryptocurrency and a distributed database or something similar. Such as Ethereum and IPFS or OrbitDB and some related trchnologies. Not saying it's easy or there aren't technical challenges, but they are not insurmountable and the benefits are obvious. There are open decentralized networks like SSB or Matrix, and a few peer-to-peer ones that may ultimately work out better. For search and advertising, look at things like YaCy as a potential starting point. But really we have no reason not to explore new and existing distributed protocols for search and information exchange other than sheer laziness. And there is a fair amount of really useful research. But we are lazy.

fallingknife 5y ago

Stopped reading after the first 3 paragraphs which were made up entirely of bitching about the arrogance of selected silicon valley billionaires, none of whom have anything to do with any companies that could ever be called a monopoly. I suspected that this was the author's real motive, as is usually the case with journalists coming after big tech. If they really cared about monopolies, then they would have been writing about the destructive monopolies / oligopolies in many other industries that have existed much longer than the 10 years or so that Google and FB have been large powerful companies. It's a shame because Google's monopoly position in search is a real issue that deserves real discussion, not just the usual hit piece from another bitter journalist.

joshmarinacci 5y ago
You should keep reading. It gets a lot better.
padobson 5y ago
Sounds like you stopped after the hook. I don't blame you, if the hook is off-putting, the ultimate values of the piece may not align with yours anyhow. But there is something to be learned from continuing to read after off-putting hooks, including that the author might have something genuine to say beyond just looping in people that agree with them with inflammatory hooks.

smooth_remmy 5y ago

Instead of trust busting these companies, the libertarian answer to them would be to invalidate their patents. Google partially remains a search monopoly because of its search patents - of which it has many. If the state invalidates its patents and then moves out of the way, other competitors will naturally become successful. There is no need to break up companies. Just take away some of their state-imposed advantages like patents.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago
> Google partially remains a search monopoly because of its search patents According to this piece on Google's patent strategy, big tech benefits when the value of patents decreases anyway, which cuts against your argument[0]. Google gets pretty much everything it wants anyway, the gist of this piece is that individual patent holders that sue tech companies get a lot more value out of patents than the big companies do. Big companies benefit as the value of patents decrease, which is what you're calling for here. One huge reason for this is the network effect advantages that big tech companies have. Anyone can build a Facebook clone that copies most of the primary functionality, but it'll never gain traction because why would anyone leave the already-established social media network? All of their friends are already on there. In Google's case, numerous search engine alternatives have existed for years and yet Google remains pretty strong. I cannot find a case of Google asserting patent authority over a competing search engine, which tells me that it's doing just fine maintaining it's hold over the search market "naturally". Consumer technology use is notoriously habitual and cannot achieve market equilibrium when patents are removed. Sorry, but this is an oversimplified argument that doesn't reflect how Google's technology functions in the search market. 0: https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/03/21/how-google-and-big-tech-killed-the-u-s-patent-system/id=95080/ https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/03/21/how-google-and-big-tec...
ncallaway 5y ago
Wouldn't invalidating the patents of companies that are too powerful and abusive in the market just be another "trust busting" tactic? I don't see how that is separate from "trust busting", but rather just another way to bust trusts?

AlbertCory 5y ago

I wrote this [1] four years ago. It shows how to break up FAANG by making their biggest asset, their data, transparent and regulated. And you would get a check from it. Imagine your consuming history on Amazon in a company by itself, you own dividend-paying shares, and if you don't like their policies, you can take the data elsewhere, or keep it private. Anyone who wants to use it, including "Amazon" itself, has to pay Amazon Data for it, and they can only use it for approved purposes, all public. The history of the Internet in FAANG becomes a regulated asset, like a power plant. The "free market" would make much better use of all this data than FAANG itself does now. They are bloated bureaucracies who don't even realize what they have. Would FAANG scream? Sure, but they would own massive (but not controlling) shares of the FAANG Data companies, so as Larry Page says in my "interview" it works out well for them, too. [1] https://issuu.com/stanfordchaparral/docs/parody_119_3-4/17 https://issuu.com/stanfordchaparral/docs/parody_119_3-4/17

Kalium 5y ago
I love the idea of data portability and data dividends. I love it dearly. It gets at what are by far the most critical principles here - data sovereignty and data value. So it is with a heavy heart that I similarly always find myself deeply concerned by the security implications of such a world. As soon as you create data import and export functions, we will collectively realize that most people both have absolutely no idea how to handle it and are incredibly resistant to education on the subject. A lot of well-meaning ordinary people are going to get hurt when they get tricked into mishandling their data. There's already a sizable black market for personal data, and increasing transparency and access is going to grow that by both providing more ways to access data and more ways to use it. I don't know a good way to reconcile these two. The tension hurts my heart.
- jraph 5y ago
  We should work on making user privacy more private, not more portable. If it does not exist it does not need to be ported. A piece of data which has been put somewhere is there forever. It cannot be moved, only copied. And we should disincentivize data collection by making it worthless or costly, so only the strict minimum to make something work is collected. edit: and having a central place where companies can request personal data is to be avoided: it should be hard to know where to find someone's data. Instauring data dividends would risk encouraging people to share personal data because it could benefit them financially, and that we probably want to avoid as well.

chiefalchemist 5y ago

> Wu argues that the very bigness of present-day companies — especially those in the tech sector — does not just harm consumers, but that it also threatens innovation and undermines the power of government. Absolutely. The fact that the government's power is being subverted should not be lost going forward with any related discussions. Along the same lines, The Media's status quo is also being banged up. These well established power bases aren't going to surrender without doing battle. Mind you, I'm not defending Big Tech. Having recently read the robust and extremely thorough "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" I'd be foolish to pick sides. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-under-surveillance-capitalism-on-the-media https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und... The arc of the point is, viewing current events with a 20th Century lens is foolish at best. There is a lot going on. Some of it obvious, but far more is covert / stealth.

m_ke 5y ago

I was just thinking last night about what I'd coin as "Apple Driven Development". If you look at the wave of tech business trends in the past 15 years they're largely driven by what Apple allowed to happen on the iPhone. It started with the launch of the iPhone, which forced a lot of businesses to move from an open web to mobile apps, then we got a wave of social apps that aimed for growth and ignored revenue because there was no easy way to charge users money, then at some point Tim Cook figured out that subscriptions are the ultimate business model and apple nudged the whole industry over to subscriptions, now apple is deciding that targeted advertising is bad and is in the process of killing the whole industry. They get to do all of it because they managed to capture the upper class of consumers.

dantheman 5y ago

I'd really prefer lawyers and congress to focus on breaking up monopolies in the health care system, where the government requires certificate of need and through licensing allows cartels to control the supply of labor to ensure high salaries. You know, actually abusing their monopoly position.

Nasrudith 5y ago
But that doesn't get them editorial influnce over an estate of power! Seriously it has been obvious from the start that the pissiness over "big tech" is really about them not doing the impossible and providing the exact influnce they want. So monopoly is their legal thug pretext because the judge would break their hand slapping them across the face for their blatantly First Ammendment violations if they said what they really wanted.

DeathArrow 5y ago

If we liquidate monopolies, we will have cartels.

consumer451 5y ago

Sean Carroll’s Mindscape episode with Cory Doctorow covers this topic very nicely. https://youtu.be/bH9TqJtMmT8 https://youtu.be/bH9TqJtMmT8 Or audio with full transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/10/21/69-cory-doctorow-on-technology-monopoly-and-the-future-of-the-internet/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/10/21/69-c...

encryptluks2 5y ago

Bust the ISPs first otherwise this is nothing more than attacking your enemy. There are alternatives to Google services already. They are more open than Apple.

novok 5y ago

Being anti-facebook & anti-google is popular in media circles because they are direct competitors in the advertising space that are eating their lunch. The fact the author does not include amazon, apple or microsoft is telling on it's own. "Cui bono" is something you should always apply to whatever you read.

graeme 5y ago
Yeah based on prevailing narratives it seems like trust busting is actually the sexy media answer, contrary to this article’s title

NoGravitas 5y ago

Senator John Sherman, the primary author of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, was the brother of Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. It seems there is a Sherman for every problem... if only we could send Uncle Billy on a march to the Pacific today...

bmitc 5y ago

I haven't read the article yet, but I'd find such trust-busting pretty sexy.

cheese_van 5y ago

I don't much feel I have a dog in this fight since I don't use social media. So I am curious, how has Facebook harmed you and what would it take to make you whole? I think Amazon is a different animal, and probably a different conversation. So... How has Facebook's market penetration harmed you?

Barrin92 5y ago

I don't buy this 'against bigness' argument at all, similar to the 'surveillance capitalism' critiques of Zuboff that are so popular. The central thesis is just plain wrong. Large tech firms aren't (most of the time) rent-seekers. They're competitive and innovative, and centralization is not prohibiting innovation, it's enabling it because in our information-based systems the limit to how large an effective institution can be has gone up. Aggregation of data improves efficiency. We have enabled a much larger degree of planning. Arguing for trust-busting to solve our problems to me sounds like arguing for a return to artisanal-craftsmanship when faced with the negative effects of modern capitalism. The issues may be identified correctly, the solution is anachronistic and going into the wrong direction. Instead of attempting to returning to some anarchy of an idealized free-market and opposing large corporations and government, which effectively just means you're going to be sidelined and irrelevant, the goal needs to be to figure out how these big tech mega-structures can be aligned with the interests of the public. Google isn't a robber baron, the analogies just fail. The only thing they're robbing are other industry oligarchs while users get everything for free.

verisimi 5y ago

When government is so beholden to lobbyists, and lobbyists are paid by corporations, how can you meaningfully get government to act against the interests of those who pay them?

tehjoker 5y ago

Google and Facebook have natural monopolies. The answer isn't to break them up (which will just restart the cycle) but to place them under public ownership. This would also enforce first amendment rights on both platforms and disallow the legal side-step the government has been using to pressure them into censoring people.

dane-pgp 5y ago
Some men just want to watch teh world learn.
quotemstr 5y ago
Public ownership isn't really necessary and comes with its own downsides. All that's needed is to apply the first amendment to these companies, which can be done either through legislation or through the courts applying Marsh-like reasoning about freedom of speech in privately owned public accomodations.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  It could still happen, but I am doubtful. The public option appeals to me because it also erases all the advertising and spying incentives these guys have.

sam0x17 5y ago

I dunno I find the idea of trust-busting pretty sexy. I remember learning about how we broke up a lot of the oil and rail conglomerates in the early 1900s as a high schooler and I thought it was so cool that government could step in and prevent really bad things that would otherwise never be prevented with unregulated capitalism. In today's climate for whatever reason the break-in-case-of-emergency glass around trust-busting seems to be unbreakable, which is sad I think. I don't get how we got here, but I bet it's a long paragraph with the words "lobbyist" and "corporate political donations" appearing numerous times.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

This is such a good discussion in the context of game theory: any country that busts their companies is at an immediate global disadvantage without the introduction of tariffs.

rsj_hn 5y ago

The problem with these types of articles is that it doesn't contain a single actionable step on how one would go about breaking up these monopolies. It's a lot of "well, we did it with the electrical providers and telephone providers so we should do it with google." Well, you can take a national utility and split it across geographic regions so local calls or electricity bills go into the pockets of the region you are in, and calls between two regions go into the pockets of both according to whatever long distance agreement is in place. That's at least workable. Or you break up an Oil Company that has 500 wells/concessions, into 5 groups of 100 wells/concessions. Or a railroad with a nationwide network, split up into 5 regional networks. That could work, too. That's what we did in the past to break up monopolies. Now how would that work with google search? Prevent people in region A from loading a website in region B? Is that what we want? crickets Sure there is low hanging fruit in terms of divesting -- e.g. no reason to keep a video monopoly like youtube with a search monopoly. I'm all for it. But now you just have two monopolies, and have not solved the problem of lack of competition in either video or search, which is ostensibly what you use to justfy these actions. In fact the consumer pains with long distance in the wake of the ATT breakup is the reason why the law has changed on anti-trust. Now you must show consumer harm to pass constitutional muster and your proposal has to show consumer benefit. A proposal to break off youtube from google is going to have a hard time passing this test. So yes, we, get it, we solved the problem of anti-trusts in the past, we don't like google, so We Must Do Something. Except those old anti-trust strategies just wont work against monopolies that have no geographic dimension. That no one is willing to touch that explains why we have a deluge of pleas, none of which contain a single workable proposal.

cwp 5y ago
Agreed. This is a lot of words saying "the solution is easy" by someone who doesn't understand the problem.
toast0 5y ago
> But now you just have two monopolies, and have not solved the problem of lack of competition in either video or search, which is ostensibly what you use to justfy these actions. The problem is not really a monopoly (or at least market dominant position) in one business, it's using that dominant position to gain dominance in other businesses. So, you split out the obvious things: youtube, search, adwords, media ads, g suite stuff, android + chrome OS, payment/wallet, cloud, some sort of bucket for the rest. Require FRAND terms when baby Gs work with othet baby Gs and restrict the baby Gs from expanding into other lines of business. There's your actionable plan. It leaves you with a handful of mostly viable businesses that are still pretty dominant, but... If YouTube has the same relationship with its ad network as any other video site could get, other video sites can have a better chance to compete. Setting up an Android for people new to the internet won't require creating a gmail account and steer your choice of email providers, etc. Geographic splits don't really make sense for Google. And really, I'm not sure it did for AT&T, except that local vs long distance was a useful split, and I don't know that a nationwide local phone company that can't connect long distance calls would make sense. We certainly didn't get competitive local residential phone service by breaking up AT&T. The telecom act of 1996 came closer to giving us that, until the FCC decided it didn't care.

throwawayapples 5y ago

What about Apple? Apple and Google completely control their app stores on their respective platforms. That means that reaching mobile users means dealing with either both of those two, or (if you want to brave the PWA nightmare, especially on Apple), telco gatekeepers to send notifications to your users (note the new 10DLC requirements and massive fines/fees if you simply want to send SMS notifications to your users) These are absolutely trusts. They are cartels that control access to their networks. Not that G/FB controlling most of the ad space isn't concerning, but G/Apple are actually the ones that are the gatekeepers for any other apps that would present mobile ad alternatives. You want to do something new and interesting in the ad space -- or in any mobile space? Nope. You can't, unless both Google and Apple approve your app. Google and Apple are killing innovation through their arbitrary, capricious, and selectively enforced app store "guidelines", and their excessive tax on any purchase, regardless of the purpose.

alexashka 5y ago

Just get rid of arbitrary bundling - you don't get to bundle shit without an option to unbundle. Meaning you don't get to bundle my TV show with your garbage ads in the middle. You don't get to bundle a friend list with a news feed with a messaging service, without an option for me to only consume one part of it, or a combination of my own choosing. You don't get to bundle your political opinion in my search algorithm the same way you don't get to bundle surprise ingredients into my cookies. You get to provide the search service, you get to provide cookies, you don't get to provide magic cookies I don't understand or can make on my own with a bit of effort. Your service is efficiency at scale, not arbitrary shit bundled with everything because of a power imbalance.

orionblastar 5y ago

It happened to AT&T during the 1980s. Got split up into Baby Bells. My father worked for AT&T and was forced into early retirement after teaching new employees how to do his job as an installer. Then the DOJ set sights on Microsoft, but they avoided it. I wonder what Teddy Roosevelt would think about Google, Twitter, Amazon, Google having so much money and power?

m0zg 5y ago

Sorry to disappoint you, folks, but after Zuck's $400M "fortification" of US elections in swing states last year, he's not in danger of any "trust-busting" whatsoever. You can downvote me all you like, but you know it's true.

dreamcompiler 5y ago

Unfettered capitalism always tends toward monopolies, and then the invisible hand stops working and the whole system stops being capitalism. Capitalists who complain about competition are effectively complaining about the backbone of capitalism itself. Healthy capitalism requires antitrust regulation for the same reason football requires referees.

theknocker 5y ago

i.e. the entire fucking plan we were supposed to have for dealing with anticompetitive asshole corporations who think they're more important than the government.

wishawa 5y ago

Traditional anti-trust methods would only go so far with big techs because while monopolies in the past are driven by economies of scale (and lobbying and other illegal stuffs, of course), big techs’ monopolies are mainly driven by strong positive feedback loops (search results quality for Google and network effect for Facebook). If Google and Facebook were to play it 100% fair, I doubt they would be smaller than 75% of their current size.

dragonwriter 5y ago
Breaking Google/Facebook up geographically for antitrust violations would be ineffective, but breaking them up by line-of-business would not and is well within traditional anti-trust remedies. The expansion of monopolies into adjacent and related markets is driven by leveraging the existing monopoly to monopolize new markets, which is already within the scope of acts addressed by traditional anti-trust (whether or not one views it as enabled by “network effects” or “feedback loops”), though regulators have been ineffective at addressing it in the internet space. This isn't a defect in traditional anti-trust law, but in anti-trust enforcement.
- wishawa 5y ago
  I agree with your argument in the case of Google. It would be good if Android, Google Earth, etc., are broken off from the main Google. But for Facebook I don’t see how it can be broken down. Instagram, Whatsapp, and Messenger, Facebook’s three big children, are not really separate lines of business from Facebook itself. This isn’t due to defects in anti-trust laws or their enforcements. Capitalism itself just isn’t made for the wide-reaching and feedback-loop-y industry that is social media.

JamesAdir 5y ago

Article is from 2019. Should be added to the text link.