[HN Gopher] Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Fac...
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Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook
Author : colinprince
Score : 244 points
Date : 2021-10-15 12:46 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lareviewofbooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lareviewofbooks.org)
| tqi wrote:
| How does breaking up Facebook help fight misinformation,
| polarization, engagement baiting, objectionable content, etc?
| pessimizer wrote:
| You can do that by mass censorship. We already have massive
| squads of minimum wage people combing through every post on the
| web in order to delete things, so just pull that into a
| regulatory agency instead of letting social networks regulate
| themselves. We could call it the Department of Truth. If you
| want to scrub the internet, it's actually pretty easy. Put
| literal cops on every message board, make every board record
| ips and block VPNs, watch every tor node, root every phone.
|
| The only hard part is getting a majority of people to think
| that's a good idea, or at least to stay silent about it. If you
| look at history, though, it's actually not so hard. It'll
| probably happen eventually, although depending on your belief
| system, you might be upset at the administration that ends up
| with those abilities.
|
| This isn't about that, it's about allowing more room for
| competitors in the market. If there's any relation, it would be
| that facebook wouldn't be able to by itself dictate acceptable
| speech (against its will, of course; if facebook had its way,
| it would only censor posts about facebook.)
| keewee7 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Perhaps those aren't the problems this aims to solve
| tqi wrote:
| What are the problems then?
| throwdecro wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| That seems tautological. How does bigness harm consumers
| in this case?
| throwdecro wrote:
| > How does bigness harm consumers in this case?
|
| It's up to the book to make that case. My point is that
| the issues you describe (misinformation, polarization,
| engagement baiting, objectionable content) are not
| mentioned among the problems that trust-busting is meant
| to solve. Other problems are mentioned.
| bperson wrote:
| What if we just want to break up Facebook for our enjoyment?
| It's legal to do so and we can do it. I can't remember where I
| heard that argument. I think it was some tech CEO (or maybe all
| of them).
|
| > How does breaking up Facebook help fight misinformation,
| polarization, engagement baiting, objectionable content, etc?
| tqi wrote:
| I think that attitude is the root of our current political
| morass. The primary motivation is the desire to hurt those
| that we dislike/view as The Other, and we'll happily bend any
| logic or principles it takes to justify it.
| bperson wrote:
| I think your attitude allows Facebooks
| analyte123 wrote:
| "If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism?"
| p49k wrote:
| For starters, it would create a more level playing field to
| allow alternative products by companies with different values
| to flourish, rather than having them acquired before having a
| chance to become competitive.
|
| Look at WhatsApp, founded by an idealistic person whose product
| was shaped by his experience living under an oppressive
| government and who succeeded wildly under those values. But no
| one is going to turn down 14 billion dollars, so it gets
| absorbed and starts to slowly adopt the same scummy values of
| Facebook. That purchase clearly shouldn't have been approved.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I don't think our government cares about any of that. They've
| turned a blind eye to app-store extortion for the better part
| of a decade, and they've made it clear that persecuting a
| domestic company like that is the last thing they want to do:
| and of course it is. Our government has nothing to lose from
| Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon leading the pack. If
| anything, it makes their job a whole lot easier with relation
| to surveillance and regulation.
| protontorpedo wrote:
| I'm not even American and don't live in the US, but I can't
| see why any government would undermine it's own national
| companies when they are big players in the international
| markets, especially when facing competition from
| (potentially) state-backed competitors. Breaking up
| utilities? Sure, they operate only domestically, there's
| little to lose in terms of power projection.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| But TikTok is already absolutely enormous and would sweep up
| everything in the same way fb does. Breaking up Facebook also
| does nothing to change misinformation spread through Twitter
| and YouTube. The natural breakup points for Facebook also
| leave Facebook and Instagram in tact.
| [deleted]
| leecarraher wrote:
| my guess would be that it will allows other companies that
| offer competing services to compete against facebook's
| comparable service while not having to compete against all of
| facebook's services. Then the market can decide which features
| it prefers in each service, presumably not the ones listed in
| the op.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _How does breaking up Facebook help fight misinformation,
| polarization, engagement baiting, objectionable content, etc?_
|
| It reduces the influence that a monolithic Facebook can bring
| to bear against its critics in Congress.
|
| It also puts existential risk on the table. Fining Facebook out
| of existence is, presently, political suicide. Not only does it
| hit a massive slice of the electorate, it leaves them with no
| alternative.
|
| Shutting down one of several social media platforms, on the
| other hand, where user data is given a chance to migrate prior
| to the servers being turned off (but after shareholders have
| been wiped out), isn't out of the question.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| The problem has never, ever been that the legislature faces
| too much criticism. The "influnce" they have complained about
| for decades against them is red-faced anger that the scale
| dares to call them fat, that the mirror makes them look ugly.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Yes good point. If FB were less politically powerful, then
| they wouldn't be able to stop the good people in congress
| from regulating what people say on the internet. That would
| clearly solve the problem! The government has never been
| involved in spreading misinformation, so I don't see how this
| could go wrong.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if FB were less politically powerful, then they wouldn
| 't be able to stop the good people in congress from
| regulating what people say on the internet_
|
| Would encourage anyone thinking like this to pause and
| consider if this reaction is coming from a place of reason
| or a sense that they are coming for our team.
|
| If Mark Zuckerberg is the person you trust to protect your
| rights over our elected government, you've traded freedom
| for security and will likely get neither. Congress would
| love to pass laws restricting what people say on Facebook.
| Unfortunately, it can't because of the First Amendment.
| Facebook, on the other hand, is legally unconstrained.
|
| More pointedly, Facebook is fine if Congress tries to
| regulate speech on its platform. It can point to D.C. and
| take the blame off its back. What Facebook is _not_ fine
| with is Congress regulating all the other parts of its
| organization that it would rather remain hidden. In case it
| needs to be said, those parts aren 't working in your
| interest.
| truffdog wrote:
| It makes misinformation less legible to the press by splitting
| it up across silos.
| [deleted]
| NoGravitas wrote:
| 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...
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| 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.
| cheese_van wrote:
| 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?
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > 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-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.
| nathias wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| nathias wrote:
| 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.
| throwdecro wrote:
| > [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 wrote:
| 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...
| throwdecro wrote:
| This is a fantastic review. These books are going on my list.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| If we liquidate monopolies, we will have cartels.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| personally, i'd prefer a sexually arousing answer to Google and
| Facebook.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| Yeah breaking up monopolies is pretty arousing, not sure why
| the author thought it was "unsexy".
| klyrs wrote:
| 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.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| antitrust enforcement is fair pillow talk in my house
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I get goosebumps: https://pics.onsizzle.com/Imgur-1fbc96.png
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| 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-Capitalis...
| bumby wrote:
| One of the issues that I have with your analogy is that the
| monopolies you mentioned (roads, internet, rail) all have
| substantial physical assets that are tied to their monopoly
| power. For example, even without factoring in the cost of land,
| it can cost up to $700k per mile of rail track. These kinds of
| upfront costs are one of the major moats they have to keeping
| outside competitors from emerging. I'm not sure the digital-era
| monopolies discussed have this same type of barrier to entry.
|
| The internet example is a more interesting analogy to me
| because it seems to align more with a utility, which we're okay
| with having monopolies existing, albeit regulated, because of
| the greater efficiencies.
|
| So are social networks, online shopping, or search public
| goods? If so, should they be regulated because we think there
| is an advantage to having a monopoly in this space? If not,
| what are their barriers of entry that stifle competition?
|
| I don't necessarily don't think they shouldn't be broken up,
| but I'm trying to understand whether/how they fit into previous
| paradigms or if the monopoly paradigm is fundamentally
| different in this digital era.
| rndmind wrote:
| To piggy back on your comment...
|
| Free markets only exist because of regulation.
|
| It's regulation that allows actors to participate in good
| faith, and not get smoked by the huge whales and owners of
| exchanges, etc.
| dont__panic wrote:
| Devil's advocate question: I don't really remember my railroad
| history in the US, but I do know that railroads are so mediocre
| as to be barely usable these days.
|
| Does that have anything to do with weakening the railroad
| industry at a critical moment just before the automobile
| industry popped up and ate their lunch?
|
| Could we be risking a similar problem here with the successors
| to Facebook's social media, Google's internet search algos, and
| Amazon's shopping experience?
| adfrhgeaq5hy wrote:
| Well, duh. "Free market" does not mean "unregulated market". It
| requires that the market be free from monopolies and that all
| agents have complete information. Regulation and trust-busting
| are, in practice, required to bring about a free market.
|
| Co-opting the term "free market" was a fantastically successful
| bit of propaganda.
| publicpretender wrote:
| I agree. The idea should be "perfectly competitive" -- which
| could be very regulated.
|
| Noah Smith had a good article on this with links to economics
| papers and brief summaries:
|
| https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-economists-revolt
| hk1337 wrote:
| It could be that idea of a free market if everyone did what
| was right and not cheat, screw over, sabotage the competition
| to get ahead. You beat the competition by being better.
|
| We don't have that though, people are assholes, so we have a
| regulated market.
| adfrhgeaq5hy wrote:
| The problem is the system. Let us assume we have 99.9%
| moral people who never lie and never break the law even if
| they can gef away with it. Problem is the 0.1% have a
| competitive advantage. They will accumulate more wealth and
| power than the others. The others can either compromise on
| their morality or lose ground against their competition,
| maybe failing entirely. The amoral people will gain
| outsized power and will force others to sacrifice their
| values. The whole system can be corrupted by a tiny
| minority.
|
| I certainly do blame some individuals who are particularly
| vile, like Zuckerberg and Musk, but for the most part this
| is just what happens in competition.
| hk1337 wrote:
| > The problem is the system.
|
| The problem is the people. Everything else after that I
| agree with. For a completely free market to work 100% of
| the people would have to be moral, upstanding people.
|
| A completely free, unregulated, market is an
| anarchocapitalist's utopia. Like how a working socialist
| government is a utopia.
|
| Neither of those is realistic though, so we have a
| regulated free market.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Regulators are also people.
| maxwell wrote:
| Exactly, Adam Smith was no laissez-faire ideologue.
|
| https://gutenberg.edu/2013/03/adam-smith-was-no-laissez-
| fair...
| gshubert17 wrote:
| "Uncoerced market" or something, is closer to the meaning I
| seek.
| munificent wrote:
| "Free market" is a fine term. People just forget about the
| "market" part.
|
| A "market" isn't some natural emergent property of the
| physical or social world. They aren't formed by, like,
| volcanoes. A market, historically, is a space _defined
| deliberately by a governing body_ where traders are allowed
| to participate and where trade is allowed to occur _under a
| given set of rules_.
|
| It's suposed to be a free _market_ , not a free anything-
| goes-chaos-and-anarchy.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| A social network is a natural monopoly due to the network
| effect. It wouldn't make any sense to split it up. Regulating
| it like any other natural monopoly could make sense.
|
| Amazon is certainly not an online shopping monopoly. It's just
| a superior service. I can get a similar online shopping
| experience from Wal Mart and many others. If Amazon can offer
| us such good service through having its own big network of
| warehouses, drivers, etc. that's impossible with a bunch of
| smaller companies then I say let them be as big as they are so
| long as they don't egregiously abuse it.
| nathias wrote:
| >A social network is a natural monopoly due to the network
| effect.
|
| Thats exactly why it should be split up and regulated more
| heavily.
| annadane wrote:
| > A social network is a natural monopoly due to the network
| effect. It wouldn't make any sense to split it up. Regulating
| it like any other natural monopoly could make sense.
|
| They definitely need to take Whatsapp away from Facebook,
| though. Regulators only allowed it under specific conditions
| and Facebook violated those conditions
| Robotbeat wrote:
| What I want addressed is how we can bust these companies
| without making the experience worse for consumers or making
| things less efficient.
|
| A railroad that'd require a toll every mile because you split
| one company into hundreds wouldn't be viable. If I had to visit
| multiple web pages to get the same result as a google search,
| that'd also be bad.
|
| Amazon online shopping has a "monopoly" almost purely because
| the monopoliness makes it much easier and lower friction than
| trying to find an online store that is 1) somewhat trustworthy
| 2) consistent UI 3) ships in a reasonable time 4) isn't going
| to disappear (and importantly, already has my shipping and
| payment information). I regularly buy stuff online from
| elsewhere, but I use Amazon more often because it reduces the
| cognitive load by centralizing/standardizing everything.
| hippich wrote:
| I have come to a conclusion lately that there is no free
| lunch. You either optimize and increase risks (of system
| becoming monopoly like rail roads in the past, or busting
| like mortgage companies in 2007-8, government becoming
| tyranny, something like that) or you pay for inefficiencies.
| I think the free market is really about finding a balance
| between optimizations and risks. If the company is too
| optimized and carries significant risk - eventually, it will
| bust. If the marker is not efficient because of transactions
| volume - a larger company will inevitably emerge (and if it
| continues to grow - eventually bust)
|
| EDIT: what really worries people about monopolies is that it
| takes more than a generation to see these companies bust. And
| to, again, optimize it, we come up with antitrust laws... But
| any optimization, in my opinion, costs risks and never is
| free (as in lunch).
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| >> Amazon online shopping has a "monopoly" almost purely
| because the monopoliness makes it much easier and lower
| friction than trying to find an online store that is 1)
| somewhat trustworthy 2) consistent UI 3) ships in a
| reasonable time 4) isn't going to disappear (and importantly,
| already has my shipping and payment information). I regularly
| buy stuff online from elsewhere, but I use Amazon more often
| because it reduces the cognitive load by
| centralizing/standardizing everything.
|
| This is a firm being successful, not a monopolist. This is
| exactly what antitrust law shouldn't (and does not) punish!
|
| ~antitrust economist
| toast0 wrote:
| The railroad example would be solved by forming a single-
| purpose clearing house business to distribute the tolls,
| collected by the origin or destination carrier, among all the
| rail providers on the route. It's the same process in banking
| --- you can deposit a check drawn on any bank, and a clearing
| house process routes the funds. It's the same in public stock
| trading, you can use any brokerage, but almost all shares are
| owned by Cede & Co on the corporate books.
|
| You can split out payment and address retention easily:
| paypal and amazon both offer 3rd party checkout systems. If
| we're trustbusting Amazon, force that to be an independent
| company, offered on FRAND terms to all.
|
| I think you could probably seperate into three business the
| fulfilment included marketplace consignment store from the
| merchant fulfilled marketplace consignment store from the
| sold by amazon store. Although, since two of those share
| facilities, it might be a little tough. Perhaps, splitting
| off the store from the inventory makes more sense --- if
| Amazon is just one of the marketplace vendors and the
| marketplace is a separate entity, that eliminates some of the
| unfair practices (require marketplace vendors to share
| sources, contract sources directly to undercut marketplace
| vendors).
|
| You could also split off warehouses off into individual or
| regional baby-bell style corporations; vendors could send to
| whichever warehouses they like, the marketplace could choose
| which warehouse to use to fulfill orders, each warehouse
| could be reasonably independent.
|
| Shipping/delivery could clearly be made independent. AWS,
| too.
|
| I think the point of trustbusting is not necessarily to
| eliminate monopoly or dominant businesses, it's to reduce the
| scope of the monopoly such that dominance in one area doesn't
| become dominance in more areas. If there's a single purpose
| marketplace corporation, it may be dominant, but if it's
| prevented from controlling warehousing, shipping, and
| inventory, there's more room in those areas. After the
| breakup, you can still come back and do more to address the
| smaller areas, if they prove to be problematic under the new
| system.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| I'd press your claim of efficiency. As we are learning now,
| efficiency (in the JIT sense of the word) and robustness are
| a single sliding scale. Our global supply chain was a wonder
| of human achievement until it hit a snag, and now it's a
| complete mess.
|
| Using Amazon as an example - the larger they've grown,
| they've actually become less trustworthy and a worse
| experience for consumers. Amazon has been stricken with all
| the negative traits that American culture associates with
| "big" government - bad user experience, bloat, fraud, and
| arbitrary bureaucracy. I've naturally found myself wanting to
| use them less and less, the larger they've gotten.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| What's interesting about Amazon is they don't seem to have
| been any worse affected from supply chain issues than
| anyone else. At least not that I have noticed anecdotally.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Facebook, Amazon, Google were not the first, they were the
| best.
|
| But hey, since we are in pitch-fork mode, we can simply make up
| stuff to our fellow-brainwashed posters. How is this different
| from Q?
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Discounting Amazon's grip on the cloud computing sector is a
| mistake.
| SkeuomorphicBee wrote:
| > when a company has a monopoly on a network it stops
| functioning as a company and basically becomes a government.
|
| That is very aptly put. To go on a bit of a tangent, I would go
| even further and say that companies are always a form of
| government, even without a monopoly, but the addition of a
| monopoly just extends the power and reach of such individual
| government.
|
| In the modern capitalist systems, the collective of all
| companies together are the branch of govern that decide what
| will be produced and where-and-how people are going to work,
| all that under the checks and balances of the free-market and
| the official branches government. That is, an individual
| company is a form of tiny local government (not local in
| geography, but in scope) with the mandate to govern some
| aspects of the life of their employees (what they will be doing
| for 40h a weak), and the production of their particular
| products, being that mandate can be removed and transferred to
| other company by the free market.
|
| Now, I know that this metaphor I described is not a 100%
| perfect fit, if stretched to the extremes it will arrive at
| absurd corners where companies are nothing like governments.
| But then, no metaphor is perfect, not even the metaphor
| officially supported by the USA Judiciary branch, that
| "companies are people". They are only useful, and only fit in
| small contexts, and as such I believe "companies are
| government" is a very useful one and should be part of the
| discourse.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > 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.
|
| None of these things are a natural monopoly.
|
| Facebook only stays relevant by buying its competitors. You
| don't even need to break them up, just disable acquisitions.
| Then Instagram would be separate, WhatsApp would be separate.
| You don't even have to break them apart, just wait for the next
| one and don't let them buy it.
|
| Google is the biggest search engine but search isn't a natural
| monopoly. Their dominant position comes from all the vertical
| integration. Google owns YouTube and YouTube is featured
| prominently in Google Search results. To get Android/Google
| Play, OEMs have to use Google as their default search engine.
| To fix this you don't have to regulate the search results, just
| separate the search engine from the other companies, and stop
| allowing them to buy competing ad networks.
|
| Amazon doesn't really even have a dominant market position.
| They're not a railroad, they're Internet Walmart. They're just
| the biggest player in a highly competitive market. They have no
| capacity to significantly raise prices or people would
| immediately switch to any of their hundreds of competitors.
| Most of the complaints are from competitors butthurt that
| Amazon is keeping everyone's margins slim -- but that's what
| they're supposed to be doing.
|
| A railroad is a natural monopoly. You can't really break up a
| natural monopoly, so you have to regulate it, which is
| terrible.
|
| None of this tech stuff is like that. The problems here come
| from consolidation through mergers and vertical integration.
| They're unnatural monopolies with clear lines across which they
| can be broken up without long-term regulation. Just stop
| letting them buy their competitors.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Google isn't primarily a search engine. By revenue they're
| primarily an ad network.
|
| Ad networks naturally form monopolies. Ad matching algorithms
| can make better matches (more revenue per click and more
| desirable product for advertisers) the more ad campaigns they
| have to select from and the more display properties they have
| to publish ads to. It's a market extremely prone to winner-
| takes-all.
|
| I say this as someone who worked internally on an ad system
| which used to be one of Google's primary competitors. I
| specifically worked on projects intended to address these
| runaway network effects. It wasn't possible and the company
| exited the business (they actually tried to be a customer of
| google's because it'd be more profitable to just show their
| ads, but this was blocked on antitrust grounds ...)
|
| The monopolistic aspects of these entities aren't necessarily
| the customer facing products they market to the masses.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Ad networks don't naturally form monopolies. That's why
| Google had to buy the other ones. Anything will form a
| monopoly if you let every company in the industry merge.
|
| Just because something has a network effect doesn't make it
| a natural monopoly. The network effect means the network
| may need a minimum size in order to be viable, but that
| doesn't mean there can't be a dozen competing networks of
| that size that are all viable.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| It does, because the increased efficiency means ads are
| more profitable on the larger platforms. Bigger matching
| pools mean better conversion rates.
|
| Why would you spend more money to buy a less-well
| performing ad?
|
| Why would you display a less well paying ad on your web
| property?
|
| If you're doing search ads, you cannot fund the megawatts
| of infrastructure to keep pace with google if you're
| working with smaller margins. This is not theoretical -
| adwords/search has destroyed almost all of the
| competition, save those who have other ways of funding
| themselves.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Bigger matching pools mean better conversion rates.
|
| So the smaller networks would make less money than
| Google. Less money than Google isn't the same as less
| money than is necessary to run servers.
|
| And servers get cheaper as time goes on. The number of
| "megawatts" you need to serve a given number of ads is
| exponentially decreasing over time.
|
| > This is not theoretical - adwords/search has destroyed
| almost all of the competition, save those who have other
| ways of funding themselves.
|
| You can't ignore the companies they bought out when you
| say the others went out of business. They don't have any
| reason to buy a competitor that was just going to fail
| anyway, and they empirically have bought several
| competitors.
| wilburTheDog wrote:
| >Just stop letting them buy their competitors.
|
| And how would you stop them from simply replacing their
| competitors? From the article "Budding companies that resist
| being acquired are pruned through flagrant copying." Would
| you pass a law that said Facebook can't expand their business
| to do anything a competitor is doing? I can't see how that
| would fly.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Copying doesn't really work. WhatsApp was big before
| Facebook bought them. Just because you copy some feature
| they had doesn't mean anybody is going to move back. Having
| the feature first makes you better. Having the feature
| second only makes you the same.
|
| And the challenger has an advantage against a conglomerated
| incumbent because they can add features that reduce profits
| in ancillary markets the challenger isn't in. The incumbent
| won't want to copy that and cannibalize their other market,
| but the users want that feature so the challenger gains
| market share.
| Apes wrote:
| Amazon does leverage their position as market maker to
| undercut competition with anti-competitive practices though.
| They run data analytics to figure out what goods are the most
| profitable, then launch competing products and promote their
| own over the originals in their listings. Their monopoly
| gives them the ability to take over nearly any market they
| want at any time, with no consequences.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > They run data analytics to figure out what goods are the
| most profitable, then launch competing products and promote
| their own over the originals in their listings.
|
| Figuring out which products have high margins and entering
| those markets is an _increase_ in competition.
|
| Promoting their own listings is only a problem if the
| competitors can't reach those customers in any other
| reasonable way, which isn't the case because there are many
| other online retailers and it's quite feasible for a medium
| sized competitor to sell directly to the customer on their
| own website.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Of course. Trust-busting has always been part of liberalism.
|
| The idea of liberalism has always been to avoid monopolies,
| which government is just one form of. The government's role
| should be reduced to the minimum, police-army-justice-currency,
| and even the last one is up for a debate. So the government's
| role is to stay small, and make companies stay small enough.
|
| Unfortunately this flew away in 2001 wehn Microsoft had been
| condemned, but not sentenced, because after 9/11, USA needed
| their companies to reign upon the rest of the world. Maybe time
| has come to admit that US reigning on the rest of the world
| hurt the domestic market with too-large-monopolies, and maybe
| it is time to come back to a competition market.
| jeremydeanlakey wrote:
| "when a company has a monopoly on a network it... basically
| becomes a government."
|
| A monopoly functions like a government.
|
| Or inverted: a government functions like a monopoly.
|
| I find both angles interesting.
| mrkstu wrote:
| Generally a government is the entity with a monopoly on
| force. That is why things like drug cartels or the mafia are
| so poisonous to the body politic.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| I'm found of "a democratically elected government is the
| least bad monopoly". If you must have a monopoly, it should
| be a government. But if you can avoid a monopoly, do that
| instead.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| An important corollary to this is that monopolies should be
| isolated rather than integrated.
|
| Suppose we say the municipal water system is a natural
| monopoly, so we're going to have the government do it.
|
| Well, then the head of the municipal water system should be
| an elected position, so that if they're screwing it up,
| people can vote the bums out without having to remove a
| mayor or governor who might otherwise be doing a good job
| on some other issues and therefore be hard to remove.
|
| That's the biggest problem with federal elections. Each
| party does a different set of terrible things and you can't
| vote against one set of failures without voting for the
| other one when everything is integrated.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| That's the crux of the friction here. The old monopoly (gov)
| is being overrun by the new "monopoly" (tech). While it might
| not be a battle for the known universe, controlling the spice
| (i.e., attention, information, nudges, etc.) is definitely in
| play.
| dantheman wrote:
| A government is a monopoly on violence, and it uses that
| monopoly to demand payment.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| The only way these companies can generate sufficient revenues
| is through advertising. It really does not matter what moonshot
| projects they are working on. There is not enough willingness
| to pay for that "work" to sustain a business.
|
| The internet has value besides being a vector for advertising.
| This is more or less what the parent comment is suggesting.
|
| Who pays the cost of supporting the internet. Internet
| subscribers. We finance (a) the delivery of advertising, (b)
| creation metadata about our usage (e.g., empty POST requests,
| beacons, various forms of telemtry, etc.) and (c) uploading
| _our_ data to _their_ computers.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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.
| asiachick wrote:
| That road analogy fails pretty quickly. If we wanted to follow
| that direction then it would like owning a home where there are
| 20 roads directly in front of your house and you can choose any
| one of them but you keep choosing Apple/Amazon/Facebook/Google
|
| For example I just moved and had to buy lots of stuff. I
| ordered from Macy's, Walmart, Target, Wayfair, and Amazon.
|
| It's trivial to use Bing or Ducduckgo over Google. When a
| search engine starts doing better for me I'll switch.
|
| As for Facebook, plenty of people using other services to stay
| connected
| taurath wrote:
| Building another Facebook isn't hard, but the network effect
| makes it almost impossible. Then they have their acquisition
| team to ensure that anything that does make it through doesn't
| last long. The idea that they're out there competing on their
| own merits is silly.
|
| I think that's one of the big differences - they have a
| monopoly on the means of production (the userbase), which is
| less ephemeral than say owning all the steel plants and mines.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I know this is the inevitable and cliche pushback, but it never
| seems to be grappled with so it remains worth pointing out:
| none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to
| monopolies. There are lots of social networks (Twitter and
| TikTok are extremely successful, among others), lots of ways to
| search the internet, and lots of ways to shop online. The
| analogy with the railroads simply is not apt, their monopoly
| was so powerful because there was often no other way to get
| from point A to point B, so they had complete leverage. This is
| not the case for any of these companies you listed, there is a
| lot of competition in all these markets.
|
| But I also think there are major issues with the current
| configuration of the tech industry! They just aren't because of
| monopolies. It is not helpful to misdiagnose a real problem. It
| is not helpful to have only a hammer and call every problem a
| nail.
| stevetodd wrote:
| Remember that you are the product and not the customer for
| these companies.
|
| Google's customers are the advertisers who pay and (I'd
| argue) those who want to show up in search results. You have
| to either pay for ads or play their algorithm game to be
| relevant because of their monopoly position on search. It's
| basically the same story for Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.
| sanderjd wrote:
| But this argument still seems to rely on "monopoly position
| on search", when there are in fact a number of search
| engines.
| missedthecue wrote:
| And additionally, the switching cost for users to change
| search engines is literally zero. It takes all of 2
| seconds and opening a new tab.
|
| There are no contract cancellations or negotiating or
| payment loss. It costs zero dollars and zero time. Google
| owns a huge portion of search simply because they have
| the best product.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close
| to monopolies.
|
| Yes they are. Imagine that I imported alligators to
| Washington[0] and set up a gumbo resturant in Seattle. I
| would have a (local) monopoly on alligator meat. The fact
| that you can easily buy beef or chicken from any number of
| other places doesn't change this, it just means that my
| monopoly isn't particularly _relevant_.
|
| Similarly, Facebook has a monopoly on communication with
| people and groups that communicate exclusively via Facebook.
| You could go communicate with someone _else_ , just like you
| could go buy some _other_ kind of meat in the above example,
| but there is no competitor for communicating with the people
| you actually (for some reason) want to communicate with.
|
| The relevant question is whether Facebook's monopoly is broad
| enough to be relevant. Reasonable people might disagree about
| that. But there is no question that they _have_ a monopoly.
|
| > their monopoly was so powerful because there was often no
| other way to get from point A to point B
|
| In such a case, the fact that you could instead choose to go
| to point C by way of some other railroad, does not mean they
| don't have a monopoly on travel to point B. (Nor does your
| theoretical ability to walk to point B, or track down a
| Facebook user in real life and visit their house.)
|
| 0: I'm going to _assume_ noone has already done this.
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| No, Facebook is not a monopoly. Your gumbo restaurant
| example gets at part of the issue: you need to describe the
| market correctly at a bare minimum.
|
| Who are the competitors in the market OR, if there are
| none, why is the market definition you have offered the
| correct one?
|
| This is why the FTC lost their monopolization case against
| Facebook this January. Instead of offering a market
| definition, they made vague, hand-waving statements in
| their complaint which all revolved around it being
| "obvious" that FB was a monopoly. The judge was not
| persuaded.
|
| ~Antitrust economist.
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| Your analysis is correct, but the quality of antitrust
| commentary on this site is not that high! Neither Google nor
| Facebook is plausibly a monopoly.
|
| This does not mean that they don't occasionally do things
| which violate antitrust laws! They do. And they should be
| punished for such violations. But they aren't monopolies.
|
| ~Antitrust economist.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Exactly my take.
| politician wrote:
| When a system has two billion users, then it is the world's
| largest government. It really doesn't matter if it meets one
| nation's definition of monopoly.
|
| Facebook literally rivals the Catholic Church for
| participation. Zuck is literally the Pope of his own empire.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Well, not literally, but spiritually.
| mrkurt wrote:
| Antitrust is much broader than "monopolies". It's all about
| concentrated power. Saying "monopoly" is just shorthand for
| market power, it's not a binary definition.
| dahfizz wrote:
| "monopoly", "monopoly power", and "market power" all have
| related but very much distinct definitions.
|
| This is how the justice department defines them:
| https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-
| single-...
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| >Antitrust is much broader than "monopolies".
|
| Yes.
|
| > It's all about concentrated power.
|
| No, absolutely not. There are many activities which violate
| antitrust law which have nothing to do with "concentrated
| power". Nor is "concentrated power" something which is
| banned in antitrust law (because it isn't clear what it
| is!).
|
| ~ Antitrust economist
| sanderjd wrote:
| > _Antitrust is much broader than "monopolies"._
|
| I'm with you here.
|
| > _Saying "monopoly" is just shorthand for market power,
| it's not a binary definition._
|
| No, the word "monopoly" has an actual definition.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| You can waste time on semantics or you accept that
| practically everyone means "company that abuses their
| overwhelming market power to create friction in the
| market" when they say monopoly.
| sanderjd wrote:
| It isn't semantics. You want to use the word monopoly to
| mean something different than what it means. Feel free to
| make the more nuanced point about "abusing market power",
| but if you're building your argument around the word
| monopoly, you need to be using that word to mean what it
| means.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I mean I agree, just pointing out that you're not really
| convincing anyone here and complaining about this isn't
| very productive since you, I, and everyone else here
| understands what is meant.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I seriously doubt that's true. I'm sure I'm not
| convincing any of the people debating me in their own
| comments, but there are always other people reading the
| debate, who don't have as strong of preconceptions as the
| people commenting, and I suspect at least a few such
| people have thought to themselves "hmmm, yeah, he's
| right, those don't seem like monopolies". (I'm sure there
| are people being convinced of the opposite too.) It's a
| mistake to think the audience for a public discussion is
| limited to the people commenting.
|
| Edit to add: And to the "everyone knows what is meant".
| No, that's not true, lots of people have become confused
| by the usage of the word "monopoly" to describe the
| issues with big tech companies, through its pervasive
| usage in congressional hearings and media. Using
| confusing inaccurate language is not harmless, it
| confuses the debate.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Your layman definitions of monopoly do not matter when it
| comes to antitrust laws[3]:
|
| > _Courts do not require a literal monopoly before
| applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used
| as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable
| market power -- that is, the long term ability to raise
| price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is
| used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and
| durable market power._
|
| [1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-
| guidance/guide-a...
| awillen wrote:
| This right here. I own an e-commerce business, and I sell on
| Amazon, but I do about 10x the revenue on my own site that I
| do on Amazon.
|
| I'm in no way unique in this regard - for all of the talk of
| how much Amazon dominates e-commerce, the reality is that
| it's never been easier to successfully run your own
| e-commerce site (just look at Shopify's market cap).
|
| Sure, if you're selling totally commoditized goods that's a
| different story, but even there you've got substantial enough
| web presences from retailers like Walmart and Target that
| Amazon still can't reasonably be called a monopoly.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close
| to monopolies.
|
| I think it depends on what you consider "the market" to be.
|
| If I want to compare Amazon to the "Global Retail Market"
| (Amazon's preferred framing), then maybe they aren't in a
| monopolistic position.
|
| But I--as ab individual--don't participate in the Global
| Retail Market. I participate in the "online US retail" and
| "Pacific Northwest retail" market. So I don't get much
| benefit out of there being more competition to Amazon in
| France, so the "Global Retail Market" doesn't seem like it's
| always the right framing. For me, it's still the case that
| Amazon doesn't feel like a monopoly, but I could imagine
| areas where Amazon is much closer to being one of just a
| small number of options for many products.
|
| Similarly, I'm sure Facebook wants to be evaluated against
| _all_ communication media, but again I want to communicate
| with people in my immediate network. If 100% of my social
| network and business contacts used exclusively Facebook for
| communication, then from _my_ perspective Facebook might have
| a monopoly on my communication options (even if they have
| real competition in China from competitors).
|
| I'm not so convinced that we should just accept the broadest
| possible interpretation of "the market" that we should
| evaluate as the correct framing. From the perspective of some
| individuals, if there is only a single dominant option, then
| that person still needs to deal with anti-trust issues.
|
| It's similar to the way some of the major internet players
| will carve up the country into regions of fairly exclusive
| offerings. Across US broadband, the market may be divided
| amongst a number of different players such that it doesn't
| appear to be a monopoly. But when you zoom in to an
| individual municipality, it might be that there _is_ a
| monopoly at that level, and the competition that appears to
| exist in the "national market" is actual a union of separate
| monopolies (and other regions where there is actual
| competition).
|
| So, while I totally agree with you that under the legal
| definitions of monopolies, many of these entities are not
| there, under individuals _practical_ definition of
| monopolies, many of these entities _are_ monopolistic.
| sanderjd wrote:
| > _I think it depends on what you consider "the market" to
| be._
|
| It honestly doesn't. None of these are monopolies by any
| market definition.
|
| Amazon has _so many_ competitors: brick and mortar stores
| like Walmart and Target and Best Buy remain successful,
| online competitors again like Walmart and Target and Best
| Buy but also Ebay and in a different way Shopify and
| others, are also successful.
|
| Your argument is slightly stronger in the case of Facebook,
| but still very weak. Facebook's social networks have strong
| direct competition in Twitter and TikTok. Facebook's
| communication platforms have strong competitors in
| iMessage, SMS apps, Signal, Telegram, Discord, etc.
|
| I'm not 'accept[ing] the broadest possible interpretation
| of "the market"', I'm just not accepting hand-wavy non-
| definitions of "market" that only include a single company
| so that it can be called a monopoly by definition.
|
| Again, I think there are major problems and I favor new
| regulations for all of those problems. But what I don't
| think makes sense at all is redefining "monopoly" in a way
| that makes no sense, just because anti-trust law is our
| only extant tool for solving the problems caused by
| enormous tech firms.
| [deleted]
| munificent wrote:
| I think we need to be clearer by what "product" means when it
| comes to monopolies in the Information Age.
|
| In the Industrial Age, you had a monopoly on paperclips if
| the only way to buy a paperclips was through your company.
| But paperclips themselves are commodity-like: there are
| billions of them out there and each is more or less
| interchangeable with the others.
|
| Information products are not like paperclips. Each piece of
| information is _by definition_ unique, and its value to the
| consumer is predicated on that uniqueness. When you buy a
| picture frame from a store, the first thing you do is throw
| out the little paper photo that 's in it and replace it with
| yours. Why? The previous image was a picture of a smiling
| family. Isn't your goal with the product to have a framed
| photo of a smiling family? Why not just save yourself the
| trouble and keep the paper?
|
| Well, it turns out that the fact that you want a smiling
| photo of _your_ family is highly salient.
|
| Sure, there are lots of social networks. If I want to find an
| app that has humans on it that I can connect with, there is
| definitely no monopoly. But if I want to find an app that
| lets me connect with _my actual friends_ , then my choices
| are limited to exactly the social networks they actually use.
| If I want an app that doesn't just let me receive event
| invitations, but let's me receive _the actual invitations my
| real friends send_ , I sure as hell better be on that one
| particular app. That app has an iron-clad complete monopoly
| on those events.
|
| Almost every media or information company has thousands of
| micro-monopolies on various unique pieces of data. Our simple
| notion of trusts does not accommodate that concept. We need
| to update our thinking to the 21st century.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I find this argument pretty interesting. It seems like if
| social networks decide to adapt open protocols, it would
| pretty much kill it. Which wouldn't be the worst outcome
| out there.
| munificent wrote:
| _> It seems like if social networks decide to adapt open
| protocols, it would pretty much kill it._
|
| ...which is exactly why they never will.
| mywittyname wrote:
| You're right on the technicals, but the GP is right in
| spirit.
|
| It seems like society needs a term for the concept of a
| company accumulating far too much power, and that we need
| laws similar to anti-trust laws, that apply to these
| companies. This is an incredibly difficult problem to address
| specifically because FB is not a classic monopoly. I'm not
| even sure what it would mean to "break them up".
|
| Amazon, MS, Apple, and Google are all far easier to split up.
| Each company has logical seams to split at (i.e., aws/retail,
| gcp/search/android, itunes/devices, etc). You could split FB
| and insta, but that doesn't really curb FB's power and
| influence at all.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I agree with this. My point is merely that the current
| problems are a round peg that it is unwise to try to fit
| into the square hole of existing anti-trust regulation.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I was going to reply to the parent that we used to have a
| word for this, and that word is "monopoly", but apparently
| we now no longer have that shared definition, probably an
| intentional confusion bought at great expense by
| monopolists.
| dahfizz wrote:
| At no point has "monopoly" meant anything other than "A
| single seller". The confusion comes from people trying to
| steal that term to refer to "big companies".
| Supermancho wrote:
| > The confusion comes from people trying to steal that
| term to refer to "big companies".
|
| This is an oligopoly. Because companies are arbitrary
| constructs, it's a defacto monopoly by multiple sellers.
| The terminology is useful, but not in the sense that it
| is then end-all of qualification.
| dahfizz wrote:
| To claim big companies == oligopoly == monopoly is
| objectively wrong, and the opposite of useful
| terminology.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I truly feel like I just read a paragraph from 1984.
| You're tying yourself in knots to rationalize using
| language to mean something you want it to mean, but which
| it does not actually mean.
|
| Yes, oligopoly is a fine word to use, but you can't just
| wave your hands around to transmute that into monopoly.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > It seems like society needs a term for the concept of a
| company accumulating far too much power, and that we need
| laws similar to anti-trust laws, that apply to these
| companies.
|
| Our forebears have us covered! Antitrust became the popular
| term, but back in the Gilded Age, it was often referred to
| as anti-consolidation. I think that is an excellent term
| for it.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Inheritance. That's the term you are looking for.
|
| In many countries, we still tax it 65%, to ensure a one-
| time success doesn't become a "monopoly" of some families
| over generations.
|
| Likewise for companies. we can't tax them per generation,
| but the monopoly laws are here to dismantle them if they
| keep hold on a market without ongoing "coup de maitre" on
| innovation.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Isn't the term just "too powerful"? It seems to me that the
| reason we don't have laws against companies being too
| powerful is that most people don't think it's a big deal
| for companies to be too powerful, as long as they're not
| monopolies.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| If people thought an entity was "too powerful", then they
| would want a law against the entity, otherwise the word
| "too" does not mean anything.
|
| The reason there is no law against being "too powerful"
| is because it is a nebulous description that is not
| enforceable in a fair manner.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I kinda fundamentally reject the premise here. When I say
| that a sandwich is "too expensive", I don't mean that
| there ought to be a law against selling sandwiches for
| that price.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The context is dealing with the problem of the existence
| of a too powerful company. Dealing with a too expensive
| sandwich requires no laws.
| Stupulous wrote:
| If refusing to work with a company is impossible, it's a
| monopoly, right? Otherwise, you are free to respond to
| the too-powerful company the same way you respond to the
| too-expensive sandwich.
|
| If a company is using its power to do something harmful,
| write laws against the harmful thing, irrespective of how
| much power the company has. Illegalizing shadow profiles
| of non-users would be a good step forward, illegalizing
| them only for FB-sized companies would be less good.
|
| If a handful of companies are operating as a monopoly,
| that's already well-defined as an oligopoly.
|
| I think the only other situation where a company can be
| too powerful is if they get too much power over the
| regulators. I expect it's rare to get there without
| becoming a monopoly or oligopoly, but it's probably not
| impossible.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >If a company is using its power to do something harmful,
| write laws against the harmful thing, irrespective of how
| much power the company has.
|
| I agree, hence my explanation of why there are no laws
| against "too powerful" companies. It is not an actionable
| condition.
| bumby wrote:
| This isn't a new problem though. Anti-trust laws have
| been enforced previously without a strict definition.
|
| "Although the courts "have not yet identified a precise
| level at which monopoly power will be inferred"[1]
|
| [1]Section of Antitrust Law, Am. Bar Ass'n, Market Power
| Handbook 1920 (2005).
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Antitrust law is law against being too powerful.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Well yes but that term is too honest for its own good as
| a matter of opinion. "Too powerful" is an absolutely
| arbitrary standard with no desire for internal
| consistency. Which is exactly the opposite of what you
| want in laws.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I agree with what you're saying, but that's exactly the
| problem. I don't think the author of the source article
| _has_ a clear, internally consistent standard, and I don
| 't think any consistent standard exists that would tell
| you Google and Facebook need to be broken up but CVS and
| Costco don't.
| nitrogen wrote:
| 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.
| sanderjd wrote:
| 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.
| dont__panic wrote:
| 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.
| francoi8 wrote:
| The larger a company becomes, the more it should be
| regulated.
| bumby wrote:
| Larger in terms of what? Market share? Revenue? Profit
| margin? Staffing?
| romwell wrote:
| Yes.
| bumby wrote:
| All of the above or any one of the above? How would one
| measure how each of those contributes to market power?
|
| I can't tell if you have a reasonably thought out
| perspective based on your response or if it's just
| "corporations that are 'big' suck"
| supercanuck wrote:
| They most certainly are monopolies and we can see it in their
| behavior.
|
| What America is figuring out that, if the US Markets are
| going to remain uncompetitive, than Chinese companies that
| don't play by the same rules are going to outcompete these
| lethargic companies that don't want to get better but instead
| vacuum up all their competitors. This hurts American's
| technology advantage and competitiveness in the global
| marketplace.
|
| >Again, according to the complaint, Facebook chose to buy an
| emerging threat rather than compete, and announced an
| agreement in February 2014 to acquire WhatsApp for $19
| billion.
|
| >The complaint also alleges that Facebook, over many years,
| has imposed anticompetitive conditions on third-party
| software developers' access to valuable interconnections to
| its platform, such as the application programming interfaces
| ("APIs") that allow the developers' apps to interface with
| Facebook. In particular, Facebook allegedly has made key APIs
| available to third-party applications only on the condition
| that they refrain from developing competing functionalities,
| and from connecting with or promoting other social networking
| services.
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-
| releases/2020/12/ftc-s...
| sanderjd wrote:
| > _They most certainly are monopolies and we can see it in
| their behavior._
|
| This is not true for all the reasons I already pointed out
| in my comment.
|
| You can't just wish this away. You need some other theory
| of the case. I agree with you that all those things are
| bad, but those bad things just don't flow from _monopoly_ ,
| they flow from some other problem.
| supercanuck wrote:
| Take it up with the FTC and Tim Wu
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu) then, you
| obviously are more in the know than they are.
| sanderjd wrote:
| The FTC is free to make the arguments you and others are
| making here. I would bet you large sums of money that
| those arguments will not prevail. In fact I'm quite sure
| they won't bring cases using those arguments because they
| know that and don't want to be embarrassed. They will
| probably bring different arguments and also lobby for
| other regulatory changes, and I'm all for all of that,
| but they won't come to court saying "Amazon has a
| monopoly on e-commerce", because lawyers don't like it
| when judges laugh at them.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| The obvious problem with considering social network platforms
| as interchangeable competitors is that they... aren't
| interchangeable at all. A user can't pack up and go to a
| different platform because their _actual social network_
| (i.e., relationships between humans) is only accessible on
| one platform.
|
| For example, my colleagues are on Twitter but not Mastodon. I
| can't leave Twitter without leaving my social network. Why
| does Twitter own access to my colleagues? Why should we allow
| that to be a competitive advantage? It's certainly at-odds
| with the principle of innovation--you're not on a platform
| because it's more innovative than another platform, you're on
| it because they have a monopoly on your social network.
|
| Contrary to your claim, there's very little competition in
| these markets because corporate ownership of user social
| networks is _an enormous moat_. Not only can users not easily
| move to another platform, but advertisers can 't easily spend
| their money on some new platform because the new platform is
| much smaller in all likelihood.
| dahfizz wrote:
| This is a definition that is broad to the point of
| uselessness.
|
| Regardless of what program I use to communicate with my
| friends, that program is now a monopoly. Even if I coded up
| the website myself and my friends and I are the only ones
| to use it, that website now "owns access" to all my
| friends. It is absurd to label this website a monopoly.
|
| This is also not actionable. Once my friends and I all
| decide on a communication platform, that platform is a
| monopoly and must be broken up (?), by removing some of my
| friends from the platform (?). In that way, it would
| literally be impossible for me to have a platform where I
| can communicate with all my friends, because such a
| platform would be a monopoly and must be broken up by your
| definition.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 1. No one cares about monopolies on tiny markets.
|
| 2. It's perfectly actionable: open protocols separate the
| platform and the network.
| mikkergp wrote:
| The 'my colleagues are on twitter by not mastodon' example
| doesn't feel salient to me. The best example would probably
| be MMORPG's. Should people who play WoW have access to
| people who play FFIV? I guess the question would be is
| social networking more a communications utility like a cell
| phone or e-mail, or is it more of a recreational activity.
| Personally I've never felt like not being on facebook took
| access away from my friends the way not having a phone
| would. Oddly no one talks about LinkedIn being a monopoly
| which feels like a more substantive example, since not
| being on LinkedIn may impact job opportunities. But not
| being on facebook, instagram, or twitter feels more like I
| won't be able to recreate with my friends/family and less
| like I won't be able to communicate with them.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I think the MMORPG example is off for a few reasons:
|
| 1. The primary product of an MMORPG isn't access to a
| social network.
|
| 2. The social networks in these games is far smaller than
| social media platforms (we don't usually worry about
| anti-trust for tiny markets)
|
| 3. As you mentioned, social media platforms are
| communications/infrastructure, not recreation.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > 1. The primary product of an MMORPG isn't access to a
| social network.
|
| Exactly. You can switch to another MMORPG and find
| another level 29 healer to restore your HP, but if your
| mother only uses Facebook, it's much harder to switch to
| a different social network and find another woman who
| gave birth to you.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The question posed by the monopolies is not "are these the
| only options". But do these wield too much market power to be
| controlled by the market. That is, sure, Bing and DDG make up
| 5% of the global search, but is that enough. Yes, people use
| Twitter and TikTok, but does that replace the social graph of
| FB? Yes, I can buy directly online from many places, but if
| people are going to Amazon instead of Google to search for
| prices does it matter?
|
| So, my question to you, if every non-Google search engine
| published their formula for rankings, and SEO for going up
| all their rankings was mutually exclusive with going up in
| Google's rankings, do you believe any site would implement
| them?
|
| I doubt anyone would trade higher status on every other
| engine for lower status on Google. And in that case, they may
| as well be a monopoly.
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| > But do these wield too much market power to be controlled
| by the market. That is, sure, Bing and DDG make up 5% of
| the global search, but is that enough.
|
| This is exactly what antitrust law _should not_ punish.
| Google has a large market share of search _because it
| offers a good product_. Antitrust law should preserve
| competition without punishing success.
|
| People are free to use alternatives, including Bing. If
| they don't, that doesn't make Google a monopoly (which
| indeed in search they are not). It makes Google successful!
| (Though it is a successful firm which does occasionally
| violate antitrust laws in other areas and should be
| punished for that.)
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Google has a large market share of search because it
| offers a good product_
|
| No. Google has a large market share of search because it
| got in early, presented some synergistic products,
| heavily biased search results towards its own products to
| reinforce that, heavily gamed advertising bidding in its
| favor, placed anti-competitive requirements on hardware
| manufacturers of Android devices, and locked-in
| consumers' data so that competitors couldn't access it
| until it was forced by governments to allow consumers to
| download a copy.
|
| Google, and Alphabet, do not today offer good products. I
| can go on for hours describing many years-long problems
| with the product offerings; culminating in my complete
| non-use of Google as a search engine because its results
| are so poor, stopped using Google News because of its
| tracking and curation biases, stopped using Google Mail
| because of its inability to provide filters that
| automatically mark emails as spam, stopped using Google
| Drive because it actively prevents many features from
| working in Firefox, and ... well the list can go on but I
| have better things to do.
| oconnor663 wrote:
| I don't know what the formal definitions of any of these
| things are, but I assume (hope?) that it's important not to
| equate being successful with being a monopoly by
| definition. If Ford came out with an amazing new car
| tomorrow, and suddenly 95% of new cars purchased were
| Fords, we probably shouldn't initiate trust-busting action
| against Ford on that basis alone. We _want_ car companies
| to try to capture market share by making better cars.
|
| I don't know exactly how we contend with this definitional
| problem, but intuitively I think it should have something
| to do with prices and behavior. For example, if we were a
| fly on the wall in a Google exec meeting, we might be
| curious about whether they're jacking up the price of ads
| because they know no one can compete with them, or whether
| they're sensitive to charging more than their smaller
| competitors do. If they're _behaving_ like their
| competitors are a serious threat, then intuitively they 're
| probably not a monopoly, and it probably doesn't make sense
| to trust-bust them.
|
| But anyway I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know what the
| current thinking is about any of this stuff.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I don't know what the formal definitions of any of
| these things are, but I assume (hope?) that it's
| important not to equate being successful with being a
| monopoly by definition. If Ford came out with an amazing
| new car tomorrow, and suddenly 95% of new cars purchased
| were Fords, we probably shouldn't initiate trust-busting
| action against Ford on that basis alone. We want car
| companies to try to capture market share by making better
| cars.
|
| There's an important difference between "capturing market
| share" and "capturing _too much_ the market share. " If
| Ford's going to put its competitors out of business, turn
| them into niche players, or even just get into a position
| where it can rest on its laurels for a few decades, our
| primary concern is no longer making sure Ford can be
| rewarded. Honestly, I don't see the downside of regularly
| breaking up a #1 player with too much market share into
| successors that are the #2 and #3 payers (and forcing
| major shareholders to divest one or the other). I want
| companies to be competing to get to the top, but once
| they get there, give them a prize for their effort and
| send them back down.
|
| From my experience as a customer, Amazon's e-commerce
| operation hasn't improved much (e.g. their search is
| still as shitty as ever) and has arguably regressed in
| many ways (e.g. more shady products and fake reviews) in
| the last decade. That's pretty strong signal to me that
| they're not under enough competitive pressure.
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| > There's an important difference between "capturing
| market share" and "capturing too much the market share."
|
| No. Not in the economics of antitrust. There is no "too
| much market share" threshold. Unless consumer welfare is
| harmed there is no reason to complain that a firm is "too
| big."
|
| > From my experience as a customer, Amazon's e-commerce
| operation hasn't improved much (e.g. their search is
| still as shitty as ever) and has arguably regressed in
| many ways (e.g. more shady products and fake reviews) in
| the last decade. That's pretty strong signal to me that
| they're not under enough competitive pressure.
|
| So go elsewhere! That's how competition should work.
| Among your other alternatives are Walmart and Target,
| which have quite robust online operations.
|
| Amazon is not plausibly a monopoly.
| cornellwright wrote:
| Amazon's search is so bad that it's almost certainly
| intentional in order to get customers to look at more
| products. This is a great example of them using their
| monopoly power to increase their revenue to the detriment
| of consumers.
|
| For an idea of what it could be, try the search on
| electronic component distributor sites like Digikey[1]
| and Newark[2]. They are both improving their search in
| order to attract more customers benefiting all customers
| in the process.
|
| Try to find a 34 inch 1080p monitor with both VGA and
| DisplayPort inputs on Amazon and you'll find yourself
| reading hundreds of monitor product pages. If Amazon had
| serious competition you could probably find and buy one
| in 5 or 6 clicks, or easily determine that such a
| combination of features doesn't exist.
|
| [1] https://www.digikey.com/ [2] https://www.newark.com/
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| I'm skeptical that making users spend a long time trying
| to find the right monitor would actually be good for
| Amazon's revenue or that Amazon would intentionally
| optimize for it. If the typical user really experienced
| that struggle, many would probably give up without making
| a purchase.
|
| To hazard a guess, I'd speculate that apparent poor
| quality of search results is more likely Amazon trying to
| push customers toward items where Amazon earns more
| margin. The average customer probably just buys the
| first/cheapest result and isn't going to spend hours
| scouring the product pages. There's a lot of complexity
| in Amazon's relationships with suppliers, fee structure,
| and warehouses/logistics that could affect the revenue-
| optimizing search ranking but isn't obvious to the user.
| cornellwright wrote:
| Amazon deliberately leading users to a suboptimal product
| because they get more margin seems like exactly the sort
| of thing that competition should help to resolve (or at
| least limit). The fact that search is so bad is probably
| evidence of too little competition.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > suddenly 95% of new cars purchased were Fords, we
| probably shouldn't initiate trust-busting action against
| Ford on that basis alone.
|
| Antitrust law isn't about stopping people from
| accumulating a dominant position. It's about stopping
| people from using that dominant position to maintain
| itself or to spread to other areas. Ford produces the
| "Amazing Car" that everyone wants, costs $1, etc. great!
| When Ford uses an RFID reader to force it to only fill up
| at Ford Gas Stations antitrust steps in. The issue isn't
| that Google is the dominant search engine, but that it
| uses that to become dominant in ads. It's not that
| YouTube is dominant in video, but that uses that to
| encourage people to download Chrome.
| kfarr wrote:
| Yes Google was able to catapult YouTube playback pages in
| all Google search results after acquisition, just one
| example
| bmitc wrote:
| The Justice department has some good documentation.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-
| single-...
| bumby wrote:
| This is interesting because it defines monopoly and
| market power in terms of prices. How does the traditional
| monopoly definition fit when we're talking about "free"
| goods (to the general consumer) like FB or Google search?
| Is the thought that they exert too much power over ad
| pricing?
| sanderjd wrote:
| It doesn't fit. The point is that we need new regulatory
| language that does fit.
| bumby wrote:
| Is there a proposed new language/definition? The
| article's discussion still seems to be centered on price.
|
| "her paper highlights how the consumer welfare view of
| antitrust fails to curb the predatory pricing".
|
| I said it elsewhere, but I not against the idea of trust-
| busting, but the industry analogies typically brought up
| don't really fit. The closest I can find in general
| discussion is that the services are a public good, but we
| tolerate/promote monopolies in those sectors (like
| utilities).
| sanderjd wrote:
| Agreed. I don't think there are really any mainstream
| alternative proposals in the policy sphere, at least not
| that I've seen. I've seen technologists grapple with what
| might make sense, like Ben Thompson for instance, but
| they don't seem to have the ear of government actors.
| Which is why I'm so frustrated by the conflation with
| monopoly regulation. It is actively a distraction to the
| policy discussion. Every time they go to Congress, there
| is all this focus on "breaking them up", but it's all
| just really misguided and beside the point, and I blame
| the monopoly confusion for that.
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| This is a fascinating and unresolved question in
| antitrust economics, but explains why very few people in
| the profession think FB is a monopoly. And indeed - the
| FTCs failure to make a plausible market definition
| argument which showed why FB was a monopoly in that
| market is why the FTC got slapped by the judge in January
| of this year.
|
| ~Antitrust Economist.
| hardtke wrote:
| The monopoly is not on the consumer side, it is on the
| advertising side. Google and Facebook are the only companies
| that have access to data on basically every sale on the
| internet (almost every site that uses their ad tools reports
| back their sales). This data gives them a defensible duopoly
| on digital advertising.
| sanderjd wrote:
| This argument makes _way more_ sense, but it is also not
| well handled by existing anti-trust law and a much better
| response would be new regulation.
|
| Edit: It also doesn't speak to any of the issues with
| Amazon. (Also interestingly, Amazon's own advertising
| business is increasingly making this a tri-opoly.)
| spaced-out wrote:
| > Google and Facebook are the only companies that have
| access to data on basically every sale on the internet
|
| Amazon? eBay? WeChat?
| hardtke wrote:
| Sites report their data back to Google analytics and
| Facebook by implementing their pixels. People don't do
| this for Amazon, ebay, wechat.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Amazon actually does have a quickly growing ads business
| FWIW.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _But I also think there are major issues with the current
| configuration of the tech industry! They just aren 't because
| of monopolies. It is not helpful to misdiagnose a real
| problem. It is not helpful to have only a hammer and call
| every problem a nail._
|
| Yeah, the situation involves a contradictory litany of
| complaints. Google/Facebook/etc are terrible because they
| suppress free speech and terrible because they allow it.
| They're terrible because monopolize online advertising and
| terrible because they facilitate it.
|
| The purpose of breaking up a monopoly is to allow competition
| to facilitate the provisioning of whatever good a monopoly
| provides. Lots of people imagine breaking up or regulating
| Facebook will prevent the variety of abuses that we see. But
| if you look at the "competitive Internet", you can observe a
| sea of garbage in the form of endless popups, malware and
| eCommerce fraud. Things seem little more thought-out than "I
| want this to stop", which is hardly a recipe for constructive
| change.
| SkeuomorphicBee wrote:
| > The analogy with the railroads simply is not apt, their
| monopoly was so powerful because there was often no other way
| to get from point A to point B, so they had complete
| leverage.
|
| I still believe the analogy holds, just substitute
| geographical points A and B with person A and person B (or
| business A to potential client B), and the similarities are
| obviously clear. There is often no other way to get from
| person A to person B than to use Facebook, or from person C
| to D without Twitter, ... . Yes, there are various social
| networks, but there was also various railway barons. Just
| like the railway was not a single nationwide monopoly, but
| instead a series of smaller regional monopolies, a single
| social network is not an all encompassing internet-wide
| monopoly, but instead a monopoly lording over a subgroup.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| _> There is often no other way to get from person A to
| person B than to use Facebook, or from person C to D
| without Twitter, ... . Yes, there are various social
| networks, but there was also various railway barons_
|
| Is that really accurate, though?
|
| How many people use a single social network? And regarding
| market power, very few companies do their online marketing
| on a single social network; they usually have a general
| strategy that they deploy on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,
| etc.
| monetus wrote:
| Anecdote: facebook is the only social network where I am
| listed under my actual name. Until some highly adopted
| internet address book exists, the only option for many
| old friends to contact me is FB at this point.
| nitrogen wrote:
| My neighborhood's official presence is only on Facebook,
| apparently. I don't actively use Facebook, so I have no
| access to my group of neighbors.
| sanderjd wrote:
| There is absolutely other ways to get between those people
| in all those cases. That's exactly why it doesn't hold.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| You could also walk between point A and point B, but that
| doesn't mean that rail monopolies aren't a problem.
| sanderjd wrote:
| There are other _equivalent_ ways. Using iMessage is not
| like walking compared to Messenger, it 's just parallel
| railroad tracks.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Dividing your attention between two different messaging
| apps is more than twice as inconvenient/costly as having
| just one. If the first company to lay tracks could force
| later companies to charge double for journeys along their
| parallel tracks, then that would be a clearly anti-
| competitive situation.
|
| The situation is even worse with messaging apps than with
| railroads, though, since there is a coordination problem
| between customers/users of each service, rather than each
| customer/user being able to make their choice of service
| in isolation. It's very hard for a messaging service to
| compete if it requires users to ruin the experience of
| not just themselves but also at least one of their
| friends.
| sanderjd wrote:
| It is not worse at all. Have you ever seen the movie
| There Will Be Blood? The local railroad monopolies were
| used to drive competitors out of other markets, like oil,
| by cutting off the ability of those market participants
| to transport their products. Getting multiple messaging
| notifications from different apps is not anywhere within
| the same ballpark as this...
|
| It's really just so insane that the complaint being
| ascribed to monopoly power is that it's a tad
| inconvenient to use the many freely available competitive
| products. Yeah! That's what a market that isn't
| monopolized is like! There are lots of competing
| products, which is often less convenient than if everyone
| were using a single monopoly product!
| monetus wrote:
| Speaking in absolutes, you absolutely could go door to
| door and hope to find me, but for say, my class in
| highschool, FB would be their only reasonable way.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The railroads weren't total monopolies, they were just local
| monopolies. If you didn't like them you could just move
| somewhere else, to another place with a local monopoly. Which
| is not the same as competition.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Sounds like the current situation with broadband ISPs.
| bmitc wrote:
| I made a comment recently addressing these very things.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851867
|
| My contention summarized is that using market share as it has
| historically been used is not good, because these software-
| based companies can scale to much greater power than ever
| before whereas in the past, one had to gain significant
| market share to wield the same or even less power.
| dahfizz wrote:
| I think you and OP agree. Tech giants are clearly "too
| powerful" and need to be dealt with, but the traditional
| formulation of monopoly power is not a good way to deal
| with these tech giants.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yep! We do agree. I wouldn't have commented if people
| were saying "these companies have too much power" because
| I agree. But they aren't monopolies.
| rapind wrote:
| > none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close
| to monopolies
|
| Imagine thinking that google doesn't have a monopoly on
| search. That Amazon doesn't have a monopoly on selling goods
| online, etc.
|
| Now these companies do lots of other things that they don't
| monopolize, but they ARE monopolies in specific high value
| spaces and they leverage those monopolies in their other
| endeavours.
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| Facebook does not have a monopoly on social networking
| thou42o34324 wrote:
| I'm surprised you don't mention FAANG's egregious censorship.
|
| It's like we're living in some global Orwellian dystopia or
| some Communist dictatorship.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| The problem I have with "The Free Market" is that it is a
| platonic ideal. Going a step further, the whole concept of a
| Free Market was developed before the advent of the Network
| Effect and the kind of economy we have today. As such, I think
| defenders of the Free Market do not have adequate tools to
| address the kind of "monopoly" that Facebook/Apple/Google enjoy
| today because of their business models. Free Market competition
| works great on a small to medium scale. The idea that you have
| some competitive advantage and can capitalize on that works
| wonderfully, but not for things like social media and companies
| with a market cap of over a trillion dollars.
| throw63738 wrote:
| 18th century England had strict anti monopoly laws. For
| example canal owners could not operate their own boats. This
| type of centralization and monopoly acceptance came with
| railroads.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Another problem is that Facebook, Amazon, and Google get
| special treatment. There are explicit filters in WebKit (and
| probably mozilla) which allow special features for certain big-
| name companies. Also the App Store gives exemptions (e.g. VoIP
| notifications) to certain social apps. And most websites block
| crawlers but allow Google and Internet Archive.
|
| This IMO is a better argument towards anti-competitiveness. I
| absolutely get that there needs to be filters for certain
| privileges, but hard-coding them for big-name apps is not the
| answer.
| snarf21 wrote:
| We really need a funded and functioning SEC and FTC. They have
| failed us in the 21st century. However, breaking things up
| won't be a panacea. It worked in the past but even spinning out
| Instagram won't open up much space for an Instagram competitor
| given the existing network effects. To fix some of these
| issues, I think we need a tax on digital advertising revenue.
| Right now it is way too profitable to just create click-bait
| and rake in the money.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| The idea of taxing digital advertising revenue because it is
| too profitable as an antidote makes no sense on at least
| three different levels.
|
| 1. It being profitable is good for getting more people to get
| into the market. Taxing it by activity if anything
| discourages competition! 2. What does degree of profitability
| have to do with clickbait? Spamming isn't very profitable but
| it does generate some revenue so we are stuck with the crap.
| 3. The advertiser network's profit is entirely seperate from
| how much the individual end-point earns by showing them.
| dontblink wrote:
| I'd put in Microsoft in there. Their Windows (desktop OS)
| dominance needs to be reigned in and potentially spun off.
| sli wrote:
| > and online shopping for Amazon
|
| Not just shopping, but also AWS. It is functionally impossible
| to use the internet and not patron Amazon because of the
| ubiquity of AWS. It's not a monopoly because there are
| technically competitors, but the sheer scope of AWS reach makes
| consumer choice a practical impossibility.
|
| I do nearly all of my internet shopping away from Amazon, only
| resorting to it when there's no other choice. But nearly every
| website I visit is powered by AWS at some level, either
| directly (the site itself) or indirectly (one of the site's
| service providers). To my mind, this is something new(ish) that
| is monopoly-adjacent and needs to be taken a bit more
| seriously. Telling people not to use the internet, or to deeply
| audit every service they patron, is not a practical solution at
| all, even for technical users, nevermind the average non-
| technical user.
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| > But nearly every website I visit is powered by AWS at some
| level, either directly (the site itself) or indirectly (one
| of the site's service providers). To my mind, this is
| something new(ish) that is monopoly-adjacent and needs to be
| taken a bit more seriously. Telling people not to use the
| internet, or to deeply audit every service they patron, is
| not a practical solution at all, even for technical users,
| nevermind the average non-technical user.
|
| It isn't the job of antitrust law to make sure you don't have
| to use AWS.
|
| Also: AWS is not plausibly a monopoly at all. It faces
| competition from a number of other cloud providers AND
| doesn't have a particularly large market share in cloud
| services anyway.
|
| ~ antitrust economist
| ragnarok451 wrote:
| I was surprised by this too, but AWS only has 32% of cloud
| market share https://www.parkmycloud.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-
| vs-google-clou....
| spaced-out wrote:
| Back in 2018 it was nearly half, people don't realize how
| much market share they've lost in the last few years
| niuzeta wrote:
| Wow, what happened? Loss of 10+ percentage of market
| share is pretty huge. Or did the market simply expand
| that quickly?
| mmcdermott wrote:
| I've definitely run into companies in Amazon-adjacent
| fields of endeavor employing a "no AWS" rule.
| m_ke wrote:
| 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.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| 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.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Sean Carroll's Mindscape episode with Cory Doctorow covers this
| topic very nicely.
|
| https://youtu.be/bH9TqJtMmT8
|
| Or audio with full transcript:
|
| https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/10/21/69-c...
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| 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.
| gajeam wrote:
| 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-...) in the Boston Globe
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| Snapchat launched their Android app in 2012. Maybe stories
| landed in iOS before Android?
| graeme wrote:
| It's more that they didn't optimize for android cameras or
| invest any dev work in the app
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| 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.
| macmccann wrote:
| Yeah it was pretty well documented that Snap's behavior
| on Android (literally taking a screenshot of the
| viewfinder) was way worse than on iOS, and features like
| e.g. video would always come out on iOS before Android
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Yeah, it was essentially that kind of mistake. Like, it
| appears that nobody learned from Fb's mistakes (letting
| Orkut get a toehold in brazil before they moved there).
| ho_schi wrote:
| _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.
| allturtles wrote:
| I think it's even more wrong than that, and suffers badly from
| post hoc ergo propter hoc.
|
| How could the growth of answering machines be connected to the
| break-up of AT&T, which was about separating local from long-
| distance service? According to https://americanhistory.si.edu/c
| ollections/search/object/nma..., there were commercial
| answering machines being sold in the U.S. in 1960. The increase
| in the use of answering machines in the 1980s likely had a lot
| more to do with the emergence of cheap microchips and cassette
| tapes, which greatly reduced their cost.
|
| And what did the breakup of AT&T have to do with the creation
| of the first ISPs? Even before the breakup, anyone could create
| their own separate communications networks if they wanted.
| There were already commercial computer networks like TymNet and
| consumer proto-ISPs like CompuServe before the breakup and the
| breakup had no effect on them.
| Imnimo wrote:
| >How could the growth of answering machines be connected to
| the break-up of AT&T
|
| AT&T enforced a rule that you could not connect "foreign
| attachments" to the phone network, which included answering
| machines not made by them.
|
| https://dcchs.org/the-era-of-ma-bell/
| allturtles wrote:
| Per your linked article: "That began to change in the 1950s
| ... Following the D.C. Circuit's Hush-a-Phone decision, the
| FCC began establishing standards that would allow the sale
| and use of myriad devices on the telephone network, from
| answering machines, to fax machines, to computer modems."
|
| The break-up didn't happen until 1982.
| Imnimo wrote:
| Sure, but I guess I view the breakup as a process, of
| which that decision is just one step.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| > How could the growth of answering machines be connected to
| the break-up of AT&T, which was about separating local from
| long-distance service?
|
| I believe they are talking about AT&T's ability to impose
| rules over what devices could be connected to the telephone
| network, and how. That's one of the reasons that both early
| answering machines (like the one you linked to) and modems
| used acoustic couplers. It's true, though, that court cases
| had eroded how tightly AT&T could control what devices could
| be connected to phone jacks well before the breakup of the
| Bell System. Still, 1200 baud modems were only possible with
| a direct connection, and didn't become commercially available
| until the year after the Bell System breakup.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| 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.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| 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.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Again though, how would 2+ mini Facebook's make that better?
| klyrs wrote:
| 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.
| dantheman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| How are Google and Facebook considered trusts in this context but
| not Apple? I really must be missing something here.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| dontblink wrote:
| Apple should be broken up. But how? Maybe the AppStore needs to
| be independent?
| [deleted]
| maxwell wrote:
| Yeah, as Warren proposed.
|
| https://www.ilounge.com/news/elizabeth-warren-break-apple
| tehjoker wrote:
| 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.
| quotemstr wrote:
| 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.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Some men just want to watch teh world learn.
| verisimi wrote:
| 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?
| bmitc wrote:
| I haven't read the article yet, but I'd find such trust-busting
| pretty sexy.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 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.
| fallingknife wrote:
| 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.
| padobson wrote:
| 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.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| You should keep reading. It gets a lot better.
| novok wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yeah based on prevailing narratives it seems like trust busting
| is actually the sexy media answer, contrary to this article's
| title
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| [2019]
| smooth_remmy wrote:
| 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.
| handrous wrote:
| Take away their state-imposed advantage of _incorporation_ ,
| how about.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| > 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-
| tec...
| ncallaway wrote:
| 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?
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| I guess it could be, but I think his point is that from a
| libertarian angle, the government should be out of the
| picture as much as possible. And one of the biggest ways to
| do this is invalidating software patents which would remove
| some of the massive barriers of entry needed to compete
| against the Googles/Facebooks.
| ncallaway wrote:
| That makes sense. If the original complaint wasn't "busting
| trusts" is opposed to libertarian values, but rather "some
| of the existing techniques to bust trusts" is opposed to
| libertarian values, then this makes sense as the
| libertarian friendly approach to busting trusts.
|
| Thanks for that clarification!
| keewee7 wrote:
| 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.
| ilaksh wrote:
| 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.
| 1121redblackgo wrote:
| Could you elaborate or simplify what you are saying? I'm
| curious to know more but I don't think I understand
| Robotbeat wrote:
| If you mean cryptocurrencies or blockchain, you could hardly
| find a better argument for the efficiency benefits of
| centralization.
| serverholic wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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
| handrous wrote:
| I accept this as a compromise to my preferred solution of "make
| collecting & hoarding any personal data you don't strictly need
| to operate very, very illegal, and make using the data you _do_
| collect for anything but directly delivering a service to the
| customer--no 3rd parties, no ads, no using it to train ML
| models without paying the customer for the data _separately_
| with no ties to or requirement-of-consent for other services,
| et c.--also very illegal. "
|
| I don't like this as well, but it's pretty alright.
| Kalium wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > "We should work on making user privacy more private, not
| more portable." I don't understand this; can you explain?
|
| I focused on getting data _out_ of the FAANG Data
| companies. There would equally be regulations on getting it
| _in_. If you want to outlaw face recognition, you would
| make it illegal to add any data about facial
| characteristics. Or political affiliations, or porn
| history, etc. etc.
| VRay wrote:
| What's your plan for "anonymized" data that's all
| hilariously easy to de-anonymize? Example: https://www.ny
| times.com/interactive/2019/12/20/opinion/locat...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Have you mistaken me for someone with a 2,300 page
| legislative proposal all ready to go?
|
| Anyhow, in the spirit of HN working this out together
| (should we form a bipartisan Working Group for this?):
|
| Any data which, taken together, improperly identifies an
| individual may not be stored at all. I can't think of any
| reason why anyone outside of law enforcement needs this
| location information.
|
| How's that?
| zucked wrote:
| At the risk of sounding like a dimwit, because this is
| the edge of my mental abilities here - is the concept,
| then, that data _itself_ becomes a regulated asset? Such
| that no company, should they not desired to participate
| on your REIT-like scheme, would be able to collect "data"
| without it being akin to holding a regulated asset?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I appreciate the humility. So rare!
|
| I think that's it exactly. I suspect HIPAA is a model for
| this, although not a perfect one. It's like holding
| health data on large numbers of people -- you need to be
| registered & bonded, and you have to control access to
| it. Why is data on your friends & political beliefs any
| less sensitive than your health?
|
| I hope no one thinks I have a whole manual of how this
| would operate. That would be the result of a large group
| saying "This sounds interesting. Let's try to flesh it
| out."
|
| On the other hand, as I said: breaking up Ma Bell took 14
| years. Just saying "break up Big Tech" doesn't answer all
| the questions, either.
| da_big_ghey wrote:
| What do you believe to be a "legitimate" use for this
| data then once it his holding by such a company with
| register and bond? Most times somebody need to authorize
| data for HIPPA people just sign and say it is fine, why
| wouldn't this happen here? People become used to some
| site saying "this site needs access to your data"? How is
| there any difference except one more layer of
| indirection? Or perhaps I am misunderstanding your
| statements.
| jraph wrote:
| >> "We should work on making user privacy more private,
| not more portable."
|
| > I don't understand this; can you explain?
|
| handrous expressed my point better than me an hour ago
| [1] but I'll try to give an answer: I think we should
| focus on limiting data production / collection altogether
| rather than try to address data portability (re-using the
| term used in the first sentence of my parent comment).
|
| I agree that we could do both (limiting data production
| and move data elsewhere / regulate its usage). But I'm
| not quite sure the problem (privacy) is solved by just
| moving the data out from its direct users, even as a
| first step. The data is still "out there" and it's a
| liability. Your "Amazon Data" can be compromised, receive
| government requests and pieces of data requested by a
| FAANG company might as well be forever at this FAANG
| company as far as your guarantees of privacy are
| concerned. I see pieces of data as "tainting" those who
| access them [3]: as soon as someone accesses them, you
| can't rely on them forgetting these pieces of data. These
| pieces of data are no longer things you can rely on them
| _not having_.
|
| I can see that splitting Amazon in two parts "Amazon Data
| User" and "Amazon Data Provider" and forcing the former
| to pay the latter may disincentivize "Amazon Data User"
| to use your data too much, but it incentivizes "Amazon
| Data Provider" to sell it so I'm not quite sure where it
| leads. I also can't see "Amazon Data Provider" as working
| as an autonomous entity, so I'm not sure splitting quite
| makes sense.
|
| To be honest, I fail to understand this solution, to be
| convinced that it may work. (I'm not dismissing your
| idea, I'm curious and want to understand more!)
|
| edit: I'm all for some kind of HIPPA-like regulation as
| discussed in [2] however. Do you have an idea on how it
| would compare to the GDPR?
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28881937
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28882352
|
| [3] not unlike people who have read the source code of
| Windows cannot contribute to Wine because they are
| "tainted" forever.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| OK, thanks.
|
| > "I can see that splitting Amazon in two parts "Amazon
| Data User" and "Amazon Data Provider" and forcing the
| former to pay the latter may disincentivize "Amazon Data
| User" to use your data too much, but it incentivizes
| "Amazon Data Provider" to sell it so I'm not quite sure
| where it leads. I also can't see "Amazon Data Provider"
| as working as an autonomous entity, so I'm not sure
| splitting quite makes sense."
|
| Right now you have credit reporting companies (which are
| _hardly_ a model of right-thinking behavior, btw), but
| don 't they show that it's at least financially possible
| to split the data away from the data users (banks,
| lenders)?
|
| So I don't think the money objection holds up. A bank
| right now might _like_ to run ML on every credit card
| holder in the U.S., but that would either be impossible
| (Equifax just won 't give it to them), or ruinously
| expensive. So Amazon Data User just won't be able to do
| all the analysis they do now, or at least they'll be more
| parsimonious about it.
|
| Now, for the "taint" argument: rules like in legal
| discovery would have to apply. Amazon Data User has to
| swear that they don't have the data anymore, and we would
| rely on whistleblowers, subpoenas, and criminal penalties
| to enforce it. The fact that Jeff Bezos would go to jail
| ought to be enough incentive for Jeff to make sure it's
| gone.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Yup, one's data needs to become a first class citizen. I should
| be able to grant/rescind access of it at a moment's notice.
| Unfortunately I don't think we'll get there any time soon...if
| ever.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I should add here that Sec. of Energy Jennifer Granholm wrote &
| asked me something about it. No other major impact that I'm
| aware of.
|
| If your argument is "this would be complicated!" I'd say
| "compared to what? the 14-year case against AT&T? the case
| against Microsoft, which ended in no breakup?" Do you really
| think a breakup of FAANG would be any simpler?
|
| I spent several years at Google working with ads data. _By far_
| most of my work was with anonymous & aggregated data. In my
| proposal, that work, too, would require a license from the Data
| company, and the owners of that data would share in the profits
| from it.
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