Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need 501 karma.
Thanks for answering my question instead of downvoting it!
You may find this page helpful, I know I did (In the sense that it let me better understand what all was going on).
FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
371–380 of 736 posts
Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#372Not sure if I am the only one feeling this way, but I hope for the death of facebook (at least in its current form). I feel they are a net negative for society and have done enough shady things to deserve that tag. Disinformation, election hacking, free basics (aka attempted non net neutral free internet in India) marketing it as a service to humanity. Zuck is undeniably smart but has failed time and time again to ma…
Giving people free access to wikipedia is so evil that XKCD made a comic about it: https://xkcd.com/548/
Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#373Not sure if I am the only one feeling this way, but I hope for the death of facebook (at least in its current form). I feel they are a net negative for society and have done enough shady things to deserve that tag. Disinformation, election hacking, free basics (aka attempted non net neutral free internet in India) marketing it as a service to humanity. Zuck is undeniably smart but has failed time and time again to ma…
1) FB is not negative for society. It's just a social network. Most people use it because they like it.
2) It's not good when governments swoop in and shut down / mess around with private business in general.
Of all the things the Feds could be doing, putting in privacy protections, Net Neutrality, protecting from scams would be much higher on this list.
Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
Either one is right or the market is irrational? Seems like by that logic one can never really be proven wrong.
You can be right, the market can be wrong, and then the market can crash before you can exit the position. Imagine, for instance, trying to get actual USD (NOT USDT!) for BTC when that fever dream ends.
You can get USD for BTC right now, you've been able to get if for nearly a decade and there have never been as many reputable exchanges as there are now.
Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
That same perspective shows that the industry has evolved since then. If FTC can't be held accountable for not predicting the future neither can Facebook. Of course, I don't believe this at all since anyone in the industry knew exactly why Facebook would buy Instagram, especially the FTC.
> If FTC can't be held accountable for not predicting the future neither can Facebook. Something tells me the FTC isn’t going to be amenable to “gotcha” arguments
Are we not holding the government to a higher standard than private companies now or what? The FTC's entire job is to do these types of analyses. It's unfortunate that we're so used to the government being dismally incompetent in every way.
Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no way to provide access to the social graph in a privacy preserving way. It's not okay to allow a third party to access the data your friends have shared with you without your friends consenting. Unencumbered API access to the social graph is exactly what led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and promising to restrict API access was part of Facebook's settlement with the FTC.
Meanwhile in the parallel universe, in Russia, VKontakte provides full API access to anyone who clicks the button to create an API app. You only need manual review if you want access to messaging from user tokens, and that's a relatively recent change. Somehow, this hasn't turned into a privacy nightmare in more than 10 years the API was available. I'm not defending VK — it does some increasingly user-hostile stuff t…
> Somehow, this hasn't turned into a privacy nightmare in more than 10 years the API was available.
How would you know?
Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not necessarily wrong. It's a long held truism that the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
If you're right about what the market should, rationally do, and it does something else, you were still wrong.
I think I successfully communicated, and I'm getting upvoted, but my wording was imprecise. Would that I could edit to add: "[...] if you thought that is what it would do."
Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#378When Facebook first went public, an older relative asked me if he should invest in Facebook. My only insight was being an internet user at the time and I said no, there was no reason that Facebook wouldn’t be another MySpace. Facebook's only value was their users and users were historically very finicky and moved around platforms at will. I argued that Facebook would make no money and wouldn’t be around in a couple o…
I still think you were correct, you just underestimated how long it would take for this to happen if the company was actually competent (unlike MySpace), and all the money that could be made in the meantime.
Facebook The Platform's userbase keeps getting older and less engaged, millennials and younger have largely shifted to instagram. Taken by itself, Facebook the platform doesn't have great looking prospects.
Instagram is the current hot thing, and is keeping Facebook The Company on the growth trajectory, but it too will suffer the same problem eventually.
Now that Zuck is under so much scrutiny, he won't be allowed to acquire the next hot social platform. When instagram isn't the "it" platform anymore, Facebook is doomed.
My prediction: if the US government does nothing, Facebook the company will slowly peak and then start shrinking over the next 5-10 years and the problem will start solving itself.
Their data moat becomes infinitely less valuable if the graph of users and engagement is a downward slope instead of an upward one.
Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#379Without A think tank for how fb should be split, this suit won’t succeed in court for no reason other than impracticality.
Without sustaining rules there is nothing stopping another fb from coming in the future.
Without rules and without a master roadmap, I can’t see the judge agreeing to this. Like sun tzu said the battle is won before the first shot is fired. And this is a losing battle.
Here is what I think of an ideal future. Platforms need to be separated and service providers need to be separated.
They can be one company but separate management with no influence between each other.
Messaging platforms can be separate with interoperability. As long as management is separate.
Facebook properties are a combination of friend network, share portal, news aggregator portal, ad display, ad filter, messaging platforms, data analyzers. And more than I care to know.
This is too much power under one management.
By splitting platforms from service providers seeking customers on those platforms, and allowing customers to disconnect from those platforms and move to other platforms, a large fracking sound will be heard.
Re: FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can be right, the market can be wrong, and then the market can crash before you can exit the position. Imagine, for instance, trying to get actual USD (NOT USDT!) for BTC when that fever dream ends.
You can get USD for BTC right now, you've been able to get if for nearly a decade and there have never been as many reputable exchanges as there are now.
The exchanges tend to "go down for maintenance" on any big price swing.