81–90 of 184 posts
The attempt instantly becomes a political battle. The moment a politician takes sides, the other party opposes, and the initial politician's party backs him up. Politicians collect lots of money. There is then a highly politicized court case which the company drags out until there is a change of political power. Once political power changes, the government purposely sabotages their own case until the company wins.
Rather than trust busting, why not start with relaxing the federal laws which forbid the development of third-party applications? The limits on third-party apps are legal, not technical. It is not technically challenging to build an application that collects Facebook credentials and then presents alternative views and features. It could, for example, finally be possible to see a time-ordered view of your friends' pos…
"Forced open APIs" is an interesting idea in terms of actually bringing value to users - its almost on the level of nationalizing a company though in terms of being anti-business. Why Facebook would front the cost of running a service they can't monetize though is a big question.
Would trust-busting do any good? The main reason no practical alternatives to Facebook exist is the network effect. The main reason that competitors to Google don't do well is that people will just use the search engine that returns the most relevant results (unless your internet connection is censored). The only practical solution is regulating ethical behavior of these incomprehensibly powerful corporations.
The main reason no practical alternatives to Facebook exist is the network effect. Doesn't it creep you out that one company has a monopoly on the social graph? When we busted up Ma Bell, we basically put into place standards for interoperation. What if we had a law mandating social graph companies open themselves up for interoperation once they reach some critical threshold of size? Basically, the idea is that once…
Maybe we can get the EU to pass some data probability laws and force Facebook and Google to share...
Rather than trust busting, why not start with relaxing the federal laws which forbid the development of third-party applications? The limits on third-party apps are legal, not technical. It is not technically challenging to build an application that collects Facebook credentials and then presents alternative views and features. It could, for example, finally be possible to see a time-ordered view of your friends' pos…
Even if it were legal (which it should be IMO), I can't see anything other than a cat and mouse game happening where the primaries change their authentication patterns on a daily, hourly or minute to minute basis. Consider all the things that facebook does to mess with scrapers right now - every single letter in a div, multiples that are hidden, etc. Its a complete mess. "Forced open APIs" is an interesting idea in t…
Rather than trust busting, why not start with relaxing the federal laws which forbid the development of third-party applications? The limits on third-party apps are legal, not technical. It is not technically challenging to build an application that collects Facebook credentials and then presents alternative views and features. It could, for example, finally be possible to see a time-ordered view of your friends' pos…
Back in the day AOL was the Facebook. The first browsers were ehh, but the idea of owning your own domain really appealed to people and the Web killed AOL which is no longer around as the world’s centralized social network.
That’s what we are doing at https://qbix.com . Watch the video there. We are inspired by Wordpress which powers 30% of all websites - we just wanted to build a true alternative to Facebook, not just a blogging platform.
Example app: https://davosapp.com
PS: I see a few steady downvotes every time I suggest that we need an open source alternative to Facebook and link to meaningful efforts in that direction. I would definitely prefer to hear what is wrong with what I said, rather than silently downvoting.
Would trust-busting do any good? The main reason no practical alternatives to Facebook exist is the network effect. The main reason that competitors to Google don't do well is that people will just use the search engine that returns the most relevant results (unless your internet connection is censored). The only practical solution is regulating ethical behavior of these incomprehensibly powerful corporations.
> The only practical solution is regulating ethical behavior of these incomprehensibly powerful corporations Unfortunately, regulating ethics tends to lead us to exactly what is starting to happen... Even centrist and center-left commentators and journalists are starting to see some fallout from the gatekeepers of money/donations/subscriptions online. Most of it is far-right targeted, but there's some bleed and it ma…
Rather than trust busting, why not start with relaxing the federal laws which forbid the development of third-party applications? The limits on third-party apps are legal, not technical. It is not technically challenging to build an application that collects Facebook credentials and then presents alternative views and features. It could, for example, finally be possible to see a time-ordered view of your friends' pos…
Cute phrasing, but what this really means is "why not force anyone who develops a product to allow others to capitalize on it?"
> It seems premature to pursue trust busting action while we still have federal laws that encourage and cement the dominance of a single provider.
You mean "allow a product to exist as a unified product". "Provider" is 100% misleading language.
As talked about in this article, I think the main catalyst to increased anti-trust scrunity will be a mind shift away from the "consumer welfare" view of anti-trust. For the most part, big tech companies provide amazing service. I can't think of another industry that has a product as good as the tech companies of today have. Yes there may be some fakes on Amazon, and DDG in some use cases may be better than Google, b…
I was just watching an interview between Scott Galloway and Richard Kramer discussing if the big 4 will be broken up. An insight I hadn't heard before was that anti-trust in the US is based on consumer harm, and since consumers get services from these companies for free, by this measure there can't be consumer harm. However, if you consider the advertisers (who are actually funding everything) are the consumers, they…
Half the network is worth less than half of the original network.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if it were legal (which it should be IMO), I can't see anything other than a cat and mouse game happening where the primaries change their authentication patterns on a daily, hourly or minute to minute basis. Consider all the things that facebook does to mess with scrapers right now - every single letter in a div, multiples that are hidden, etc. Its a complete mess. "Forced open APIs" is an interesting idea in t…
Forcing open APIs isn't anti-business. It's pro-competition and pro-startup. The only thing it's anti- is big incumbents, which is the point.
Isn't fixing that the promise of distributed apps?
The moat that each tech company owns is its network. Rather than trust-busting these companies up into their different businesses, I think it would promote more competition to impose network interoperability requirements once the network is entrenched for too long. A useful example is craigslist: a company with virtually no innovation for decades that still dominates the classified listings space. Other companies tha…
You don't need new regulation; you just need to get rid of existing regulation. It is currently illegal to build third-party applications once the first party tells you to stop. Craigslist actually was involved in the court case that cemented this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc .