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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

#191

Post by handrous »

AlbertCory wrote: post #56

I wrote this [1] four years ago. It shows how to break up FAANG by making their biggest asset, their data, transparent and regulated. And you would get a check from it. Imagine your consuming history on Amazon in a company by itself, you own dividend-paying shares, and if you don't like their policies, you can take the data elsewhere, or keep it private. Anyone who wants to use it, including "Amazon" itself, has to p…

I accept this as a compromise to my preferred solution of "make collecting & hoarding any personal data you don't strictly need to operate very, very illegal, and make using the data you do collect for anything but directly delivering a service to the customer—no 3rd parties, no ads, no using it to train ML models without paying the customer for the data separately with no ties to or requirement-of-consent for other services, et c.—also very illegal."

I don't like this as well, but it's pretty alright.

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

#192

Post by cheese_van »

I don't much feel I have a dog in this fight since I don't use social media. So I am curious, how has Facebook harmed you and what would it take to make you whole?

I think Amazon is a different animal, and probably a different conversation. So...

How has Facebook's market penetration harmed you?

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

#193

Post by Imnimo »

allturtles wrote: post #183
Imnimo wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How could the growth of answering machines be connected to the break-up of AT&T AT&T enforced a rule that you could not connect "foreign attachments" to the phone network, which included answering machines not made by them. https://dcchs.org/the-era-of-ma-bell/

Per your linked article: "That began to change in the 1950s ... Following the D.C. Circuit’s Hush-a-Phone decision, the FCC began establishing standards that would allow the sale and use of myriad devices on the telephone network, from answering machines, to fax machines, to computer modems." The break-up didn't happen until 1982.

Sure, but I guess I view the breakup as a process, of which that decision is just one step.

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

#194

Post by handrous »

smooth_remmy wrote: post #53

Instead of trust busting these companies, the libertarian answer to them would be to invalidate their patents. Google partially remains a search monopoly because of its search patents - of which it has many. If the state invalidates its patents and then moves out of the way, other competitors will naturally become successful. There is no need to break up companies. Just take away some of their state-imposed advantage…

Take away their state-imposed advantage of incorporation, how about.

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

#195

Post by HWR_14 »

oconnor663 wrote: post #122
HWR_14 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question posed by the monopolies is not "are these the only options". But do these wield too much market power to be controlled by the market. That is, sure, Bing and DDG make up 5% of the global search, but is that enough. Yes, people use Twitter and TikTok, but does that replace the social graph of FB? Yes, I can buy directly online from many places, but if people are going to Amazon instead of Google to search…

I don't know what the formal definitions of any of these things are, but I assume (hope?) that it's important not to equate being successful with being a monopoly by definition. If Ford came out with an amazing new car tomorrow, and suddenly 95% of new cars purchased were Fords, we probably shouldn't initiate trust-busting action against Ford on that basis alone. We want car companies to try to capture market share b…

> suddenly 95% of new cars purchased were Fords, we probably shouldn't initiate trust-busting action against Ford on that basis alone.

Antitrust law isn't about stopping people from accumulating a dominant position. It's about stopping people from using that dominant position to maintain itself or to spread to other areas. Ford produces the "Amazing Car" that everyone wants, costs $1, etc. great! When Ford uses an RFID reader to force it to only fill up at Ford Gas Stations antitrust steps in. The issue isn't that Google is the dominant search engine, but that it uses that to become dominant in ads. It's not that YouTube is dominant in video, but that uses that to encourage people to download Chrome.

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

#196

Post by arrosenberg »

mywittyname wrote: post #63
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…

You're right on the technicals, but the GP is right in spirit. It seems like society needs a term for the concept of a company accumulating far too much power, and that we need laws similar to anti-trust laws, that apply to these companies. This is an incredibly difficult problem to address specifically because FB is not a classic monopoly. I'm not even sure what it would mean to "break them up". Amazon, MS, Apple, a…

> It seems like society needs a term for the concept of a company accumulating far too much power, and that we need laws similar to anti-trust laws, that apply to these companies.

Our forebears have us covered! Antitrust became the popular term, but back in the Gilded Age, it was often referred to as anti-consolidation. I think that is an excellent term for it.

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

#197

Post by arrosenberg »

Robotbeat wrote: post #42
camjohnson26 wrote: post #9

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…

What I want addressed is how we can bust these companies without making the experience worse for consumers or making things less efficient. A railroad that'd require a toll every mile because you split one company into hundreds wouldn't be viable. If I had to visit multiple web pages to get the same result as a google search, that'd also be bad. Amazon online shopping has a "monopoly" almost purely because the monopo…

I'd press your claim of efficiency. As we are learning now, efficiency (in the JIT sense of the word) and robustness are a single sliding scale. Our global supply chain was a wonder of human achievement until it hit a snag, and now it's a complete mess.

Using Amazon as an example - the larger they've grown, they've actually become less trustworthy and a worse experience for consumers. Amazon has been stricken with all the negative traits that American culture associates with "big" government - bad user experience, bloat, fraud, and arbitrary bureaucracy. I've naturally found myself wanting to use them less and less, the larger they've gotten.

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

#198

Post by cornellwright »

tablespoon wrote: post #151
oconnor663 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what the formal definitions of any of these things are, but I assume (hope?) that it's important not to equate being successful with being a monopoly by definition. If Ford came out with an amazing new car tomorrow, and suddenly 95% of new cars purchased were Fords, we probably shouldn't initiate trust-busting action against Ford on that basis alone. We want car companies to try to capture market share b…

> I don't know what the formal definitions of any of these things are, but I assume (hope?) that it's important not to equate being successful with being a monopoly by definition. If Ford came out with an amazing new car tomorrow, and suddenly 95% of new cars purchased were Fords, we probably shouldn't initiate trust-busting action against Ford on that basis alone. We want car companies to try to capture market share…

Amazon's search is so bad that it's almost certainly intentional in order to get customers to look at more products. This is a great example of them using their monopoly power to increase their revenue to the detriment of consumers.

For an idea of what it could be, try the search on electronic component distributor sites like Digikey[1] and Newark[2]. They are both improving their search in order to attract more customers benefiting all customers in the process.

Try to find a 34 inch 1080p monitor with both VGA and DisplayPort inputs on Amazon and you'll find yourself reading hundreds of monitor product pages. If Amazon had serious competition you could probably find and buy one in 5 or 6 clicks, or easily determine that such a combination of features doesn't exist.

[1] https://www.digikey.com/ [2] https://www.newark.com/

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

#199

Post by Barrin92 »

I don't buy this 'against bigness' argument at all, similar to the 'surveillance capitalism' critiques of Zuboff that are so popular. The central thesis is just plain wrong. Large tech firms aren't (most of the time) rent-seekers. They're competitive and innovative, and centralization is not prohibiting innovation, it's enabling it because in our information-based systems the limit to how large an effective institution can be has gone up. Aggregation of data improves efficiency. We have enabled a much larger degree of planning.

Arguing for trust-busting to solve our problems to me sounds like arguing for a return to artisanal-craftsmanship when faced with the negative effects of modern capitalism. The issues may be identified correctly, the solution is anachronistic and going into the wrong direction.

Instead of attempting to returning to some anarchy of an idealized free-market and opposing large corporations and government, which effectively just means you're going to be sidelined and irrelevant, the goal needs to be to figure out how these big tech mega-structures can be aligned with the interests of the public.

Google isn't a robber baron, the analogies just fail. The only thing they're robbing are other industry oligarchs while users get everything for free.

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

#200

Post by zucked »

AlbertCory wrote: post #104
jraph wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should work on making user privacy more private, not more portable. If it does not exist it does not need to be ported. A piece of data which has been put somewhere is there forever . It cannot be moved, only copied. And we should disincentivize data collection by making it worthless or costly, so only the strict minimum to make something work is collected. edit: and having a central place where companies can requ…

> "We should work on making user privacy more private, not more portable." I don't understand this; can you explain? I focused on getting data out of the FAANG Data companies. There would equally be regulations on getting it in . If you want to outlaw face recognition, you would make it illegal to add any data about facial characteristics. Or political affiliations, or porn history, etc. etc.

At the risk of sounding like a dimwit, because this is the edge of my mental abilities here - is the concept, then, that data _itself_ becomes a regulated asset? Such that no company, should they not desired to participate on your REIT-like scheme, would be able to collect "data" without it being akin to holding a regulated asset?
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