Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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...