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Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook

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Re: Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook

#91

Post by shereadsthenews »

puzzle wrote: post #78
shereadsthenews wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acquisition by Google is the only reason YouTube exists. If they had to pay for their networking they could not have survived (Google owns its own fiber and doesn't pay anyone for transit). If you are taking a consumer benefit angle I don't see how you conclude that Google should have been prevented from buying YouTube.

That sounds plausible at first, but is inaccurate on multiple levels. By early 2006, YouTube had substantial peering in place. It's easy to prove: they talked about their programs at NANOG ( https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog37/presentations/bill.no... ). Without those, they would have folded already. They were acquired by Google only at the end of the year. Google doesn't own all of its fiber. Also, some ISPs have…

YouTube had some peering but not enough. It was a massive cash incinerator.

Re: Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook

#92

Post by stcredzero »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #79
twblalock wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if we had a law mandating social graph companies open themselves up for interoperation once they reach some critical threshold of size? If we open up Facebook's data to other companies, what makes you think those companies are willing and capable of securing the data and respecting user privacy? Facebook having all of that data is bad enough. Requiring Facebook to share it with other companies would not make t…

For one, where sharing of data is concerned, none of this is about forcing Facebook to give your data to some random third party that asks for it. It is about you as a user being able to demand from Facebook that they make your data (or some selection of it) accessible to some third party of your choice. But also, and maybe more importantly, interoperation does not really necessarily require any sharing of data. Thin…

But also, and maybe more importantly, interoperation does not really necessarily require any sharing of data.

DRM actually has a potential for societal good. We should make companies like Facebook subject to DRM around our data. DRM is subject to the same asymmetry as privacy. Privacy for individuals is a societal good, in contrast to governments and big public companies, which should be as transparent as possible. Likewise, DRM used by big companies and organizations against individuals is bad for individuals and societies. However, DRM used on behalf of individuals to protect them from big companies would be a societal good.

Re: Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook

#93

Post by leetcrew »

Barrin92 wrote: post #39
40acres wrote: post #4

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 can't think of another industry that has a product as good as the tech companies of today have. The first step towards saner attitude towards tech is stopping with this glorification of tech. With the exception of Google or say wikipedia, who have made knowledge accessible in unprecedented manner, modern technology companies (the name is imprecise, because it is really just digital technology) have not as much im…

> Slack, one of the most valuable companies in recent years, is a reskinned IRC that eats more RAM.

in a certain sense you're not wrong, but this is almost infamous-Dropbox-comment level of missing the point. IRC is a great technology and is pretty useful if you only need to communicate with other tech nerds. it's not a very inviting technology to lay users and businesses though. on the client end, the default config exposes your IP address (at least, this was the case when I last used mIRC). on the server side, you need at least one person who actually understands how IRC works to configure it and keep your communications secure. for a fee, slack takes care of all this for you. it's also a lot easier to share stuff that isn't text over slack.

Re: Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook

#94

Post by extra88 »

jpollock wrote: post #26

"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." Since the RBOCs were local monopolies, it wasn't the breakup which resulted in the opening of the network. They didn't have competition until 1996, when the local loop was unbundled, allowing CLECs to appear. The tradeoff was that if they could demonstrate local competition, the…

They had competition for long distance service from MCI and the like after the 1984 breakup.

Re: Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook

#95

Post by feanaro »

x220 wrote: post #14
roguecoder wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason for that is because they have been allowed to build a walled garden. Interoperable protocols would allow other companies to innovate on an equal playing field. Indeed if we follow the Bell example, the networked platform could be forced to be separate from those who profit off of it.

Can you name some successful interoperable protocols used by social networks that allow for meaningful innovation and updates? All I can think of is Agora* (which no one uses) and IRC (which hasn't added nontrivial features in a very, very long time).

Yes, Matrix " rel="nofollow">https://matrix.org>.

Re: Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook

#96

Post by Impossible »

40acres wrote: post #4

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…

The problem with this is a lot of acquisitions that become massive look like toys originally. At the time of acquisition, Instagram was a joke, people (including myself) thought FB overpaid. There are some great comments in this NYT article (https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/facebook-buys-instag...) and the original Hackernews post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840).

You can see this playing out now in comments about autonomous vehicles, AR/VR and blockchain. No regulators would have blocked Facebook's Oculus acquisition because virtual reality was basically a non-existent market at the time. If in 10 years we're all wearing Facebook owned AR devices someone else will make the same claim "they have too much power we should have never let them make hardware", but there is an equal chance that we're not and no one cares.

You could advocate that big tech should not make acquisitions, and also attempt to regulate internal R&D and product development, but I think then you're making the case that these companies need to be maintenance mode zombie utilities that can't adapt. Its easy to block an acquisition that has immediate anti-trust issues, and hard to block an acquisition that might have issues after 5-10 years of company funded R&D...

Re: Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook

#97

Post by naravara »

bilbo0s wrote: post #25
naravara wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The main reason no practical alternatives to Facebook exist is the network effect. You could have said the same about AT&T. When they broke it up, they split it into distinct entities. There is no reason we couldn't split it back up into Instagram, WhatsApp, and its other various apps. It also has tons of individual functions and features that are only bundled together because of path dependence. The Marketplace, th…

> You could have said the same about AT&T... No you couldn't have, you could use your telephone to call any other telephone on the planet. Even if AT&T did not own the wires. THAT is the behavior we have to stop. Breaking up tech companies does nothing to solve that problem. Silos need to be made illegal if you want to stop the tech companies. (And even if you make silos illegal, good luck keeping your social network…

>No you couldn't have, you could use your telephone to call any other telephone on the planet. Even if AT&T did not own the wires.

What? The telephone exchange (run by Bell) had to actually make the connection for you. If you were not paying them for phone service your calls weren't getting connected. And they owned the entire vertical stack for phone service, from producing the handsets to leasing/selling the phones to owning the wires and operating the exchanges.

There were numerous reasons why it was just not viable to have an alternative business to AT&T. They owned all the infrastructure and it would have been impossible for any upstart to compete because you just can't build rival infrastructure overnight, and nobody wants to have a second-rate phone service.

Breaking it up IS how they solved that problem, for a little while, until technology moved ahead of the regulations and began consolidating again.

>That's another one of the fundamental problems not addressed by break ups. Privacy.

Break ups don't address climate change either. What does any of this have to do with the price of tea in China?

Also, if your social network isn't the same business as your search engine, why would they be sharing data with each other? This objection of yours makes no sense.

Re: Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook

#98

Post by naravara »

B-Con wrote: post #87
kauffj wrote: post #67

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…

> Rather than trust busting, why not start with relaxing the federal laws which forbid the development of third-party applications? 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 "all…

>Cute phrasing, but what this really means is "why not force anyone who develops a product to allow others to capitalize on it?"

. . . why not though? I don't see how permitting monopoly rents in perpetuity is an economically or socially desirable outcome.

Re: Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook

#99

Post by yonran »

kauffj wrote: post #74
yonran wrote: post #68

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 .

We could go back to the world where the AIM vs. MSN Messenger Chat Wars were legal (https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/). But reverse engineering APIs required an adversary with deep pockets, so I don’t think that is sufficient. We need an explicit regulation that a company’s monopoly over its network doesn’t last forever, just as patents are not forever.

Re: Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook

#100

Post by krrrh »

yonran wrote: post #68

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…

What you're proposing would institute CL as a de facto utility in perpetuity with an API that innovated at the rate of the old Ma Bell. It may be true that craigslist dominates "classified ads" in a lot of markets, but there has been a constant chipping away at their marketshare by marketplaces unbundling various aspects of the service and doing it better. It's hard to believe, but prior to AirBnB & VRBO people used to actually go to the craigslist page for the city they were visiting and laboriously respond to classified ads. We're all better off that these companies were forced to innovate enough to gain marketshare, rather than just applying for read/write access on a glorified 1990s-era bulletin-board.

This graphic is out of date, and even just a cursory look at it reveals dozens of firms that are missing, but we should maybe be thankful that craigslist has decided to focus on a low-cost, low-revenue model for so long:

https://medium.com/@Mohsin585/unbundling-craigslist-eb592ff2...

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