Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook

I've long desired a separate "Events" product, like what Facebook provides, but not associated with Facebook. Messenger and Whatsapp could be separate. Groups and Ads could also be separate. Those are horizontal cuts. I'd also cut two verticals, Identities from below, and Feeds from above. Common protocols could allow smaller players to enter the field in all of these distinct markets.

>> "We should work on making user privacy more private, not more portable."

> I don't understand this; can you explain?

handrous expressed my point better than me an hour ago [1] but I'll try to give an answer: I think we should focus on limiting data production / collection altogether rather than try to address data portability (re-using the term used in the first sentence of my parent comment).

I agree that we could do both (limiting data production and move data elsewhere / regulate its usage). But I'm not quite sure the problem (privacy) is solved by just moving the data out from its direct users, even as a first step. The data is still "out there" and it's a liability. Your "Amazon Data" can be compromised, receive government requests and pieces of data requested by a FAANG company might as well be forever at this FAANG company as far as your guarantees of privacy are concerned. I see pieces of data as "tainting" those who access them [3]: as soon as someone accesses them, you can't rely on them forgetting these pieces of data. These pieces of data are no longer things you can rely on them not having.

I can see that splitting Amazon in two parts "Amazon Data User" and "Amazon Data Provider" and forcing the former to pay the latter may disincentivize "Amazon Data User" to use your data too much, but it incentivizes "Amazon Data Provider" to sell it so I'm not quite sure where it leads. I also can't see "Amazon Data Provider" as working as an autonomous entity, so I'm not sure splitting quite makes sense.

To be honest, I fail to understand this solution, to be convinced that it may work. (I'm not dismissing your idea, I'm curious and want to understand more!)

edit: I'm all for some kind of HIPPA-like regulation as discussed in [2] however. Do you have an idea on how it would compare to the GDPR?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28881937

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28882352

[3] not unlike people who have read the source code of Windows cannot contribute to Wine because they are "tainted" forever.

> none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies.

Yes they are. Imagine that I imported alligators to Washington[0] and set up a gumbo resturant in Seattle. I would have a (local) monopoly on alligator meat. The fact that you can easily buy beef or chicken from any number of other places doesn't change this, it just means that my monopoly isn't particularly relevant.

Similarly, Facebook has a monopoly on communication with people and groups that communicate exclusively via Facebook. You could go communicate with someone else, just like you could go buy some other kind of meat in the above example, but there is no competitor for communicating with the people you actually (for some reason) want to communicate with.

The relevant question is whether Facebook's monopoly is broad enough to be relevant. Reasonable people might disagree about that. But there is no question that they have a monopoly.

> their monopoly was so powerful because there was often no other way to get from point A to point B

In such a case, the fact that you could instead choose to go to point C by way of some other railroad, does not mean they don't have a monopoly on travel to point B. (Nor does your theoretical ability to walk to point B, or track down a Facebook user in real life and visit their house.)

0: I'm going to assume noone has already done this.

I’m skeptical that making users spend a long time trying to find the right monitor would actually be good for Amazon’s revenue or that Amazon would intentionally optimize for it. If the typical user really experienced that struggle, many would probably give up without making a purchase.

To hazard a guess, I’d speculate that apparent poor quality of search results is more likely Amazon trying to push customers toward items where Amazon earns more margin. The average customer probably just buys the first/cheapest result and isn’t going to spend hours scouring the product pages. There’s a lot of complexity in Amazon’s relationships with suppliers, fee structure, and warehouses/logistics that could affect the revenue-optimizing search ranking but isn’t obvious to the user.

I dunno I find the idea of trust-busting pretty sexy. I remember learning about how we broke up a lot of the oil and rail conglomerates in the early 1900s as a high schooler and I thought it was so cool that government could step in and prevent really bad things that would otherwise never be prevented with unregulated capitalism. In today's climate for whatever reason the break-in-case-of-emergency glass around trust-busting seems to be unbreakable, which is sad I think. I don't get how we got here, but I bet it's a long paragraph with the words "lobbyist" and "corporate political donations" appearing numerous times.