4 ms·

In Facebook's case they own some of their biggest potential competitors for attention and deliberately preserve their niches. So splitting them up might make a

In Facebook's case they own some of their biggest potential competitors for attention and deliberately preserve their niches. So splitting them up might make a difference. But if not, requiring an open network akin to the telephone system with standardized protocols might make a difference. AT&T was split on geographical lines, so maybe FB could be as well, and the regionals would all have to interoperate with open protocols that would allow for regional competitors.

dont__panic 5y ago
Open protocols and interop seem like a very good goal to aim for. I'm curious how geographical lines would work for Facebook -- would you end up with one Facebook per country? And would we still end up in a situation where you need to have a Facebook account to participate in things like Marketplace or community groups? Personally I would want to be able to host my own tiny Facebook instance that I control. Ideally I could even invite friends and family to share my ad-free self-hosted instance with a chronological newsfeed setup.
- vntx 5y ago
  Can’t you already do this? Host your own social networks, I mean. Of course, the hard part is getting others to join it. Isn’t that why protocols like Matrix and decentralized social media platforms like Mastodon were made? So you could communicate with anyone you wanted to on any other platform as long as they implemented the open protocols.
sanderjd 5y ago
For what it's worth, I think splitting up Facebook makes very little sense, but that requiring open protocols would be an excellent direction. A big reason I have a problem with the "monopoly" framing is that it limits the options for how to fix it to pretty much just this "break it up" idea, which isn't the right tool for the job.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  Splitting Oculus, Instagram, and WhatsApp kind of makes sense.
  - sanderjd 5y ago
    I agree, but that's not actually what people are mostly thinking about when they say to split up facebook. They mean facebook itself. But it's not clear what that even means to most people.
delackner 5y ago
I see geographical splitting being pushed in a few places, but this is a really anachronistic vision of what would really benefit consumers. Even back in the phone days, regional monopolies didn't turn out to be a net win. It just meant that each of those new mini-monopolies dominated their region. The right way to think about this is what kind of splitting would produce the most competitive landscape. We have a really successful example in the way that ISP competition has played out in various markets. The US has regional ISP near monopolies in gigabit fiber, since the infrastructural outlay is so expensive. This is analogous to the moat FB has from building a vast and deeply connected network graph. The ISP outcome has been that the US mostly pays extraordinarily high prices for substandard service. Other countries have avoided this trap by regulating the enforced splitting of the network itself and the service provider. Since building out the physical network (the fiber, or the friend graph) is extremely hard, great that is a natural monopoly. Maybe you might get a couple of huge players, but the barrier to entry for new players is nearly insurmountable. Each network graph / fiber provider is required by law to offer access to their network to third party service providers who you can contract with to provide you internet service over the network. Japan for instance has this setup, with a handful of players that have built national (or regional) fiber networks, and when you buy service, you have a split bill. Part of it goes to pay for access to the physical network. The other part is to pay for an ISP that is routing your packets over the network. I think this is the proper solution for FB. Break the company apart between the network graph provider, and the CLIENT layer. Let third parties provide their own friend graph client with features that people want. Then you would see a flowering of competition as people feel free to try the client experience they prefer. * How about chronological news feed? * no ads, but paying your interconnect cost by making you pay a subscription * fine grained control of how many stories you ever see from specific over-talkative people. * delivering a subset of your friends' stories only on keyword-matched topics / hiding all stories that match specific topics. I am not hopeful the technologically illiterate people writing the decisions will understand this though. Geographic splitting is nonsensical for a graph that is inherently global.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  I don't think geographical partitioning is necessarily the right approach, but it would at least force an interoperability/federation protocol to exist, which could (as it did in the phone networks, and as you suggest for clients) allow competing clients and networks to interface with the original network.

dont__panic 5y ago

Open protocols and interop seem like a very good goal to aim for. I'm curious how geographical lines would work for Facebook -- would you end up with one Facebook per country? And would we still end up in a situation where you need to have a Facebook account to participate in things like Marketplace or community groups? Personally I would want to be able to host my own tiny Facebook instance that I control. Ideally I could even invite friends and family to share my ad-free self-hosted instance with a chronological newsfeed setup.

vntx 5y ago
Can’t you already do this? Host your own social networks, I mean. Of course, the hard part is getting others to join it. Isn’t that why protocols like Matrix and decentralized social media platforms like Mastodon were made? So you could communicate with anyone you wanted to on any other platform as long as they implemented the open protocols.

sanderjd 5y ago

For what it's worth, I think splitting up Facebook makes very little sense, but that requiring open protocols would be an excellent direction. A big reason I have a problem with the "monopoly" framing is that it limits the options for how to fix it to pretty much just this "break it up" idea, which isn't the right tool for the job.

nitrogen 5y ago
Splitting Oculus, Instagram, and WhatsApp kind of makes sense.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  I agree, but that's not actually what people are mostly thinking about when they say to split up facebook. They mean facebook itself. But it's not clear what that even means to most people.

delackner 5y ago

I see geographical splitting being pushed in a few places, but this is a really anachronistic vision of what would really benefit consumers. Even back in the phone days, regional monopolies didn't turn out to be a net win. It just meant that each of those new mini-monopolies dominated their region. The right way to think about this is what kind of splitting would produce the most competitive landscape. We have a really successful example in the way that ISP competition has played out in various markets. The US has regional ISP near monopolies in gigabit fiber, since the infrastructural outlay is so expensive. This is analogous to the moat FB has from building a vast and deeply connected network graph. The ISP outcome has been that the US mostly pays extraordinarily high prices for substandard service. Other countries have avoided this trap by regulating the enforced splitting of the network itself and the service provider. Since building out the physical network (the fiber, or the friend graph) is extremely hard, great that is a natural monopoly. Maybe you might get a couple of huge players, but the barrier to entry for new players is nearly insurmountable. Each network graph / fiber provider is required by law to offer access to their network to third party service providers who you can contract with to provide you internet service over the network. Japan for instance has this setup, with a handful of players that have built national (or regional) fiber networks, and when you buy service, you have a split bill. Part of it goes to pay for access to the physical network. The other part is to pay for an ISP that is routing your packets over the network. I think this is the proper solution for FB. Break the company apart between the network graph provider, and the CLIENT layer. Let third parties provide their own friend graph client with features that people want. Then you would see a flowering of competition as people feel free to try the client experience they prefer. * How about chronological news feed? * no ads, but paying your interconnect cost by making you pay a subscription * fine grained control of how many stories you ever see from specific over-talkative people. * delivering a subset of your friends' stories only on keyword-matched topics / hiding all stories that match specific topics. I am not hopeful the technologically illiterate people writing the decisions will understand this though. Geographic splitting is nonsensical for a graph that is inherently global.

nitrogen 5y ago
I don't think geographical partitioning is necessarily the right approach, but it would at least force an interoperability/federation protocol to exist, which could (as it did in the phone networks, and as you suggest for clients) allow competing clients and networks to interface with the original network.