Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by curryst » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 3:31 AM UTC

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…

> Information products are not like paperclips. Each piece of information is by definition unique, and its value to the consumer is predicated on that uniqueness.

A piece of information is not unique. You and I can both know that 2+2=4. We probably both know what the president looks like.

That's the complication.

There's nothing preventing you and your family from being part of multiple social networks. There's nothing stopping a site from being listed in both Google and Bing. None of that information is necessarily unique.

Here's the real rub. Whether or not your friends are on multiple social media networks isn't controlled by Facebook; it's controlled by your friends.

I think it's going to be really hard to argue that Facebook has a monopoly because people use them and refuse to create accounts elsewhere. Facebook isn't taking away your choice to connect with your friends, your friends are. The accounts are free, and Facebook isn't going to ban you for having a Mastodon account.

I still think we need a more open environment. I just think we need a new concept for what's happening instead of trying to logically torture the situation to fit a heavily abstracted notion of a monopoly. And then we need to ban that concept.

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

#332

Post by delackner » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 6:03 AM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #156

mywittyname wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I see geographical splitting being pushed in a few places, but this is a really anachronistic vision of what would really benefit consumers. Even back in the phone days, regional monopolies didn't turn out to be a net win. It just meant that each of those new mini-monopolies dominated their region.

The right way to think about this is what kind of splitting would produce the most competitive landscape. We have a really successful example in the way that ISP competition has played out in various markets.

The US has regional ISP near monopolies in gigabit fiber, since the infrastructural outlay is so expensive. This is analogous to the moat FB has from building a vast and deeply connected network graph.

The ISP outcome has been that the US mostly pays extraordinarily high prices for substandard service.

Other countries have avoided this trap by regulating the enforced splitting of the network itself and the service provider. Since building out the physical network (the fiber, or the friend graph) is extremely hard, great that is a natural monopoly. Maybe you might get a couple of huge players, but the barrier to entry for new players is nearly insurmountable.

Each network graph / fiber provider is required by law to offer access to their network to third party service providers who you can contract with to provide you internet service over the network.

Japan for instance has this setup, with a handful of players that have built national (or regional) fiber networks, and when you buy service, you have a split bill. Part of it goes to pay for access to the physical network. The other part is to pay for an ISP that is routing your packets over the network.

I think this is the proper solution for FB. Break the company apart between the network graph provider, and the CLIENT layer. Let third parties provide their own friend graph client with features that people want.

Then you would see a flowering of competition as people feel free to try the client experience they prefer. * How about chronological news feed? * no ads, but paying your interconnect cost by making you pay a subscription * fine grained control of how many stories you ever see from specific over-talkative people. * delivering a subset of your friends' stories only on keyword-matched topics / hiding all stories that match specific topics.

I am not hopeful the technologically illiterate people writing the decisions will understand this though. Geographic splitting is nonsensical for a graph that is inherently global.

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

#333

Post by ho_schi » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 9:00 AM UTC

allturtles wrote: post #106

ho_schi wrote: post #15

As Wu and others have rightly pointed out, the straightforward Chicago School standard overlooks, among other things, the stifling effect monopolies can have on innovation. As a case in point: when AT&T was broken up in 1984, a torrent of new products came on the market, everything from the first answering machines to early ISPs. This is a oversimplification and wrong. AT&T was controlled by the government until 1984…

I think it's even more wrong than that, and suffers badly from post hoc ergo propter hoc. How could the growth of answering machines be connected to the break-up of AT&T, which was about separating local from long-distance service? According to https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nma... , there were commercial answering machines being sold in the U.S. in 1960. The increase in the use of answering…

Yes. Regarding technology, the US is not the only country in the world. Answer machines and wireless phones where introduced worldwide be many companies around that time. Technology evolved at that time quickly, transistor usage in consumer devices. For example at that time phone lines where controlled in Germany by the state owned "Deutsche Bundespost" (similiar to USPS) and there were a lot of heated debates between Chaos-Computer-Club (CCC) and them about what to connect to the lines or not. Finally CCC won through the privatization of Deutsche Post. Did they? A mere pyrrhic victory. The new private owner of the cable lines restrict what to connect so thightly by there marketpower that the same problem from late 80ies emerged again in 2010ies. We have now extra laws which requires free usage of modems and routers. The private companies still try to make it as hard as possible. The only company which makes it easy for the average customer to get a contract without a modem at all is "Deutsche Telekom" (a smaller successor company of Deutsche Bundespost). In other terms, it seems that well minded regulation is required in terms of peoples need. It may is a surprise but the same problem with "what can I connect" emerged with state owned companies, one big monopoly or multiple private companies.

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

#334

Post by NoGravitas » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 12:42 PM UTC

spacemanmatt wrote: post #321

consumer451 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My take on this is, we can't be surprised if the entire spectrum of anti-capitalists show up to cheer-lead for stronger anti-trust enforcement. I don't think the GP was trying to conflate enforcement with communism, rather trying to notch a hypothetical victory benefiting their cause.

Your interpretation is correct. Also, pillow talk.

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

#335

Post by nitrogen » Mon, Oct 18, 2021, 10:41 PM UTC

delackner wrote: post #332

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…

I see geographical splitting being pushed in a few places, but this is a really anachronistic vision of what would really benefit consumers. Even back in the phone days, regional monopolies didn't turn out to be a net win. It just meant that each of those new mini-monopolies dominated their region. The right way to think about this is what kind of splitting would produce the most competitive landscape. We have a real…

I don't think geographical partitioning is necessarily the right approach, but it would at least force an interoperability/federation protocol to exist, which could (as it did in the phone networks, and as you suggest for clients) allow competing clients and networks to interface with the original network.