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How does breaking up Facebook help fight misinformation, polarization, engagement baiting, objectionable content, etc?
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.
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 ro…
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.
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.
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.
personally, i'd prefer a sexually arousing answer to Google and Facebook.
personally, i'd prefer a sexually arousing answer to Google and Facebook.
Yeah breaking up monopolies is pretty arousing, not sure why the author thought it was "unsexy".
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 ro…