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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

#271

Post by sanderjd »

bumby wrote: post #266
sanderjd wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't fit. The point is that we need new regulatory language that does fit.

Is there a proposed new language/definition? The article's discussion still seems to be centered on price. "her paper highlights how the consumer welfare view of antitrust fails to curb the predatory pricing". I said it elsewhere, but I not against the idea of trust-busting, but the industry analogies typically brought up don't really fit. The closest I can find in general discussion is that the services are a public…

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 they go to Congress, there is all this focus on "breaking them up", but it's all just really misguided and beside the point, and I blame the monopoly confusion for that.

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

#272

Post by sanderjd »

dane-pgp wrote: post #261
sanderjd wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other equivalent ways. Using iMessage is not like walking compared to Messenger, it's just parallel railroad tracks.

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 ascribed to monopoly power is that it's a tad inconvenient to use the many freely available competitive products. Yeah! That's what a market that isn't monopolized is like! There are lots of competing products, which is often less convenient than if everyone were using a single monopoly product!

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

#273

Post by consumer451 »

NoGravitas wrote: post #174
spacemanmatt wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

antitrust enforcement is fair pillow talk in my house

I get goosebumps: https://pics.onsizzle.com/Imgur-1fbc96.png

Holy crap.. how is this even close to related?

Interpretation 1: Any regulation = communism

Interpretation 2: Communism is a good thing, even given all evidence to the contrary.

Interpretation 3: ... ?

Can you help me out here please?

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

#274

Post by [deleted] »

sanderjd wrote: post #46
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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#275

Post by int_19h »

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #232
tablespoon wrote: post #151

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…

> There's an important difference between "capturing market share" and "capturing too much the market share." No. Not in the economics of antitrust. There is no "too much market share" threshold. Unless consumer welfare is harmed there is no reason to complain that a firm is "too big." > From my experience as a customer, Amazon's e-commerce operation hasn't improved much (e.g. their search is still as shitty as ever)…

The "consumer welfare" standard is a fairly recent (1980s) reinterpretation, and the switch to it happened because of large business lobbying. The original intent of American trust-busting laws was very much to prevent capturing so much market share that competition becomes irrelevant.

https://promarket.org/2019/09/05/how-robert-bork-fathered-th...

And that original interpretation was what worked on the original monopolies (oil etc). The sooner we get back to that, the better.

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

#276

Post by bsder »

sanderjd wrote: post #46
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…

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 definitely a monopoly.

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

#277

Post by skybrian »

munificent wrote: post #233
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…

I think we need to be clearer by what "product" means when it comes to monopolies in the Information Age. In the Industrial Age, you had a monopoly on paperclips if the only way to buy a paperclips was through your company. But paperclips themselves are commodity-like: there are billions of them out there and each is more or less interchangeable with the others. Information products are not like paperclips. Each piec…

Many of us have accounts on multiple social networks, and we are often connected to the same friends in multiple places.

I think that may be part of the problem, though. We don’t replicate our contact lists very often, and in part that’s because we use each social network for different purposes and would prefer to have different connections on each one.

For relatives and close friends, you probably have multiple ways to contact them including older technologies like email and phone. For other people you might not bother to keep contacts up to date.

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

#278

Post by ilaksh »

1121redblackgo wrote: post #208
ilaksh wrote: post #37

People should educate themselves about decentralization technologies. That's really the direction for resolving these issues. And the first thing you will realize when you start to study them is that in a way the name 'decentralization' is misleading because they are actually the best ways we know of to keep holistic systems. But we get that without the actual physical or organizational centralization and at the same…

Could you elaborate or simplify what you are saying? I'm curious to know more but I don't think I understand

Google, Facebook and Amazon are popular because they are platforms with large networks. They are a one-stop shop.

The problem is they are marketplaces (for information, goods or ads) where they compete in the same space that they own, and they own most of that space as private for profit companies when what they are doing is more like a public utility at this point. But one that completely takes advantage.

What we can do is build platforms to replace them that are actually public using decentralized technologies. For example, much (of course not all) of what Amazon does is connecting people to a very large database of products and making it convenient to buy them.

We could replace that with cryptocurrency and a distributed database or something similar. Such as Ethereum and IPFS or OrbitDB and some related trchnologies. Not saying it's easy or there aren't technical challenges, but they are not insurmountable and the benefits are obvious.

There are open decentralized networks like SSB or Matrix, and a few peer-to-peer ones that may ultimately work out better.

For search and advertising, look at things like YaCy as a potential starting point. But really we have no reason not to explore new and existing distributed protocols for search and information exchange other than sheer laziness. And there is a fair amount of really useful research. But we are lazy.

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

#279

Post by vntx »

dont__panic wrote: post #162
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…

Open protocols and interop seem like a very good goal to aim for. I'm curious how geographical lines would work for Facebook -- would you end up with one Facebook per country? And would we still end up in a situation where you need to have a Facebook account to participate in things like Marketplace or community groups? Personally I would want to be able to host my own tiny Facebook instance that I control. Ideally I…

Can’t you already do this? Host your own social networks, I mean. Of course, the hard part is getting others to join it. Isn’t that why protocols like Matrix and decentralized social media platforms like Mastodon were made? So you could communicate with anyone you wanted to on any other platform as long as they implemented the open protocols.

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

#280

Post by throwawayapples »

What about Apple?

Apple and Google completely control their app stores on their respective platforms.

That means that reaching mobile users means dealing with either both of those two, or (if you want to brave the PWA nightmare, especially on Apple), telco gatekeepers to send notifications to your users (note the new 10DLC requirements and massive fines/fees if you simply want to send SMS notifications to your users)

These are absolutely trusts. They are cartels that control access to their networks.

Not that G/FB controlling most of the ad space isn't concerning, but G/Apple are actually the ones that are the gatekeepers for any other apps that would present mobile ad alternatives.

You want to do something new and interesting in the ad space -- or in any mobile space? Nope. You can't, unless both Google and Apple approve your app.

Google and Apple are killing innovation through their arbitrary, capricious, and selectively enforced app store "guidelines", and their excessive tax on any purchase, regardless of the purpose.

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