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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

#311

Post by Supermancho »

dahfizz wrote: post #201
Supermancho wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The confusion comes from people trying to steal that term to refer to "big companies". This is an oligopoly. Because companies are arbitrary constructs, it's a defacto monopoly by multiple sellers. The terminology is useful, but not in the sense that it is then end-all of qualification.

To claim big companies == oligopoly == monopoly is objectively wrong, and the opposite of useful terminology.

"big companies" were in quotes because there was context. This implies "too big to fail" or "big enough to trigger antitrust talks", et al.

Collusion often results in this, which is not a dejour monopoly, but a defacto monopoly. Collusion isn't even strictly necessary. Endstage capitalism naturally selects the winners who stay on top. It's a simple concept taught in beginning economics.

"big companies" == oligopoly == monopoly is exactly what people mean when talking about worrisome "big companies", without the commensurate analogies.

A monopoly is about perspective which is about scale not some subjective definition (like sanderjd endlessly trolls about). Legal systems all over the world combat real/threatened monopolies (eg the CCP recently acted unilaterally) in various forms. Whether you think it's a useful reasoning to group companies and use a specific term is irrelevant. I sincerely hope you can understand that.

Good luck with whatever.

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

#312

Post by dane-pgp »

sanderjd wrote: post #272
dane-pgp wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dividing your attention between two different messaging apps is more than twice as inconvenient/costly as having just one. If the first company to lay tracks could force later companies to charge double for journeys along their parallel tracks, then that would be a clearly anti-competitive situation. The situation is even worse with messaging apps than with railroads, though, since there is a coordination problem bet…

It is not worse at all. Have you ever seen the movie There Will Be Blood? The local railroad monopolies were used to drive competitors out of other markets, like oil, by cutting off the ability of those market participants to transport their products. Getting multiple messaging notifications from different apps is not anywhere within the same ballpark as this... It's really just so insane that the complaint being asc…

> Have you ever seen the movie There Will Be Blood?

Nope. Have you ever read the article "Facebook is censoring links to competitor social network Tsu and deleting old mentions"?[0]

> There are lots of competing products, which is often less convenient than if everyone were using a single monopoly product!

If I drive a Ford then it doesn't inconvenience me if someone else drives a Honda. This is equivalent to a market where messengers use an interoperable protocol, like email. The "less convenient" world you are describing is one where some roads can only be driven on by Ford cars, and others only by Hondas, causing people to choose their destinations based on which make of car they have.

[0] https://boingboing.net/2015/11/06/facebook-is-censoring-link...

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

#313

Post by sanderjd »

bumby wrote: post #281
sanderjd wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I don't think there are really any mainstream alternative proposals in the policy sphere, at least not that I've seen. I've seen technologists grapple with what might make sense, like Ben Thompson for instance, but they don't seem to have the ear of government actors. Which is why I'm so frustrated by the conflation with monopoly regulation. It is actively a distraction to the policy discussion. Every time th…

What do you think is a better way to frame the policy discussion? I assume they use the monopoly angle (perhaps in a misguided fashion) because it is a tried-and-true template for regulating corporations with too much power.

Yes, that is why, but they are wrong.

A better framing would be to focus on specific problems: "Facebook owning both facebook.com and Instagram and both Messenger and WhatsApp give them too much market power in social sharing and messaging, so Instagram and WhatsApp should be spun back out", "Amazon should not be able to use sales metrics of other platform sellers to inform their own product development", etc. Identify market issues, figure out regulatory language that speaks to those issues.

But "big companies are monopolies that must be broken up" is unhelpfully reductive.

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

#314

Post by sanderjd »

dane-pgp wrote: post #312
sanderjd wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not worse at all. Have you ever seen the movie There Will Be Blood? The local railroad monopolies were used to drive competitors out of other markets, like oil, by cutting off the ability of those market participants to transport their products. Getting multiple messaging notifications from different apps is not anywhere within the same ballpark as this... It's really just so insane that the complaint being asc…

> Have you ever seen the movie There Will Be Blood? Nope. Have you ever read the article "Facebook is censoring links to competitor social network Tsu and deleting old mentions"?[0] > There are lots of competing products, which is often less convenient than if everyone were using a single monopoly product! If I drive a Ford then it doesn't inconvenience me if someone else drives a Honda. This is equivalent to a marke…

You are seriously overemphasizing the import of very minor inconveniences. The world doesn't owe you a maximally convenient well integrated instant messaging ecosystem!

I think it's very lame that Facebook would censor links to a competing site (if that is indeed what they're doing, which I'm happy to stipulate), but Facebook is not in any way the only way for people to see links to that site. Contemporary society provides that site a ridiculously giant number of ways to get the word out. There are lots of other sites where people can share the links, they can buy ads in articles, they can optimize to appear in search results, they can encourage people to share by word of mouth in messaging, email, and real life, they can buy billboards or ads in subway cars or lots of other things. I am not exaggerating when I say that it has never been easier to get the word out about something. That doesn't mean it's easy, it's just that it's always been hard and it's much easier now. This is why advertising has always been big business.

The Facebook of today didn't exist when Facebook was new. How did they ever get the word out and get engagement? They figured out other ways! Facebook is just not a necessary component of spreading the word about a new site. It's very useful, but also very possible to route around it.

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

#315

Post by sanderjd »

stale2002 wrote: post #293
sanderjd wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't semantics. You want to use the word monopoly to mean something different than what it means. Feel free to make the more nuanced point about "abusing market power", but if you're building your argument around the word monopoly, you need to be using that word to mean what it means.

> mean something different than what it means. Literally this is semantics. Literally, you are arguing about the definition of a word. So yes, by definition, you are quit literally arguing about what a word means, which is semantics. That's what the word "semantics" means.

This is fair enough, but by saying "you're just arguing semantics", the implication is that it does not matter what words are used and what they mean. And I described why I do think it matters (in summary: the use of the word monopoly for this argument really does confuse people about what the problem is). So I'm debating semantics, yep, but in my view, I'm not just debating semantics.

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

#316

Post by [deleted] »

rapind wrote: post #255
sanderjd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is the inevitable and cliche pushback, but it never seems to be grappled with so it remains worth pointing out: none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies. There are lots of social networks (Twitter and TikTok are extremely successful, among others), lots of ways to search the internet, and lots of ways to shop online. The analogy with the railroads simply is not apt, their mo…

> none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies Imagine thinking that google doesn’t have a monopoly on search. That Amazon doesn’t have a monopoly on selling goods online, etc. Now these companies do lots of other things that they don’t monopolize, but they ARE monopolies in specific high value spaces and they leverage those monopolies in their other endeavours.

[deleted]

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

#317

Post by sanderjd »

bsder wrote: post #276
sanderjd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is the inevitable and cliche pushback, but it never seems to be grappled with so it remains worth pointing out: none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies. There are lots of social networks (Twitter and TikTok are extremely successful, among others), lots of ways to search the internet, and lots of ways to shop online. The analogy with the railroads simply is not apt, their mo…

> none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies Let me propose a different way to think about it. Can I do task and prevent company from capturing any value from it? Can I post my own video online and prevent YouTube from capturing any value? The answer is "No." Some jerk will post it to YouTube and a whole bunch of views will go over there and Google will capture ad revenue on it. That's de…

This thought experiment has nothing to do with what a monopoly is.

See, I think people have been using this term without any actual definition of it for so long that people are actively confused by what is and isn't a monopoly. People have said focusing on this word is "just semantics" but it isn't because people really aren't sure what it means.

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

#318

Post by throwaway09223 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #251
throwaway09223 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does, because the increased efficiency means ads are more profitable on the larger platforms. Bigger matching pools mean better conversion rates. Why would you spend more money to buy a less-well performing ad? Why would you display a less well paying ad on your web property? If you're doing search ads, you cannot fund the megawatts of infrastructure to keep pace with google if you're working with smaller margins.…

> Bigger matching pools mean better conversion rates. So the smaller networks would make less money than Google. Less money than Google isn't the same as less money than is necessary to run servers. And servers get cheaper as time goes on. The number of "megawatts" you need to serve a given number of ads is exponentially decreasing over time. > This is not theoretical - adwords/search has destroyed almost all of the…

No, this isn't true. The hardware necessary to run a competitive search engine increases over time on a massive scale because the size of the internet grows faster than the price of hardware can fall.

This is why search engines have consolidated into Google and Bing. It is not currently possible to create a search engine.

> The number of "megawatts" you need to serve a given number of ads is exponentially decreasing over time.

This is completely backwards. This is not theoretical, this is a fact. Please understand that I spent half a decade building bigger and bigger datacenters because the rate of infrastructure expansion to keep pace with growth is absolutely massive.

> You can't ignore the companies they bought out when you say the others went out of business.

They did not buy out their primary competitor. I have an insider view here and while I can't share the details I can say that you really have no idea what you're talking about.

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

#319

Post by toast0 »

rsj_hn wrote: post #287
toast0 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But now you just have two monopolies, and have not solved the problem of lack of competition in either video or search, which is ostensibly what you use to justfy these actions. The problem is not really a monopoly (or at least market dominant position) in one business, it's using that dominant position to gain dominance in other businesses. So, you split out the obvious things: youtube, search, adwords, media ads,…

Yeah, I'm fine splitting youtube and google and even adwords. I don't think any of the rest are viable businesses, TBH. However I don't think this will solve the issues raised in the original article or the general issues with monopoly. People used to think that Microsoft had an unfair monopoly with its browser because of bundling. Well, Chrome took over market share pretty easily when it released something better. I…

> Well, Chrome took over market share pretty easily when it released something better.

It certainly didn't hurt that they promoted the hell out of it on all of their market dominant properties. (As well as the, then common, practice of paying to have it included it in freeware downloads of all kinds; which to your point is more subsidy than anything else)

I can see your point about R&D. When a company is more profitable/less competitive, there is an ability to do more of the open ended research that can lead to great things that aren't closely related to the company business. But does that justify the lack of competition that results? The consumer harm is difficult to quantify, of course, because consumers are generally not paying in dollars for these services; but maybe search competition would result in fewer ads and a more clear separation between ads and found content, which may be more useful. You could also consider that to some degree, advertising costs drive up the price of goods sold through those ads, and therefore the lack of competition in ads may cause consumer harm in that way (but, of course that's a tenuous argument, a lot of companies will spend their ad budget regardless)

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

#320

Post by nitrogen »

sanderjd wrote: post #250
nitrogen wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Facebook's case they own some of their biggest potential competitors for attention and deliberately preserve their niches. So splitting them up might make a difference. But if not, requiring an open network akin to the telephone system with standardized protocols might make a difference. AT&T was split on geographical lines, so maybe FB could be as well, and the regionals would all have to interoperate with open p…

For what it's worth, I think splitting up Facebook makes very little sense, but that requiring open protocols would be an excellent direction. A big reason I have a problem with the "monopoly" framing is that it limits the options for how to fix it to pretty much just this "break it up" idea, which isn't the right tool for the job.

Splitting Oculus, Instagram, and WhatsApp kind of makes sense.
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