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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

#81

Post by bperson »

tqi wrote: post #75
bperson wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if we just want to break up Facebook for our enjoyment? It's legal to do so and we can do it. I can't remember where I heard that argument. I think it was some tech CEO (or maybe all of them). > How does breaking up Facebook help fight misinformation, polarization, engagement baiting, objectionable content, etc?

I think that attitude is the root of our current political morass. The primary motivation is the desire to hurt those that we dislike/view as The Other, and we'll happily bend any logic or principles it takes to justify it.

I think your attitude allows Facebooks

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

#82

Post by spaced-out »

ragnarok451 wrote: post #55
sli wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and online shopping for Amazon Not just shopping, but also AWS. It is functionally impossible to use the internet and not patron Amazon because of the ubiquity of AWS. It's not a monopoly because there are technically competitors, but the sheer scope of AWS reach makes consumer choice a practical impossibility. I do nearly all of my internet shopping away from Amazon, only resorting to it when there's no other choi…

I was surprised by this too, but AWS only has 32% of cloud market share https://www.parkmycloud.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-clou... .

Back in 2018 it was nearly half, people don't realize how much market share they've lost in the last few years

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

#83

Post by sumtechguy »

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…

The problem was even lets say AT&T was willing to put BSD on pc style hardware they were wildly overpricing it. If you were dead set at that time having a PC you could kit one out for ~2k which was respectable for the time. Yet then AT&T would come along and say 'oh you want BSD? 20,000 please, oh and that PC you got well it does not work correctly with it you need to buy a different set of kit that is 8x the cost, plus a 40k per year support cost'. AT&T is and was a phone company through and through. I have worked at the leftovers of another one. They only care about one thing, number of lines hooked up. Their sales staff and training is all about that. How can software sell me more lines. It is one of the metrics that they look at. A few thousand PC sales? A blip on the balance sheet and probably not really worth investing in because it does not sell more lines. Phone companies are laser focused on that.

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

#85

Post by Nasrudith »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #71
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…

Isn't the term just "too powerful"? It seems to me that the reason we don't have laws against companies being too powerful is that most people don't think it's a big deal for companies to be too powerful, as long as they're not monopolies.

Well yes but that term is too honest for its own good as a matter of opinion. "Too powerful" is an absolutely arbitrary standard with no desire for internal consistency. Which is exactly the opposite of what you want in laws.

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

#86

Post by stevetodd »

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…

Remember that you are the product and not the customer for these companies.

Google’s customers are the advertisers who pay and (I’d argue) those who want to show up in search results. You have to either pay for ads or play their algorithm game to be relevant because of their monopoly position on search. It’s basically the same story for Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.

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

#87

Post by mrkurt »

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…

Antitrust is much broader than "monopolies". It's all about concentrated power. Saying "monopoly" is just shorthand for market power, it's not a binary definition.

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

#88

Post by jraph »

Kalium wrote: post #69
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 love the idea of data portability and data dividends. I love it dearly. It gets at what are by far the most critical principles here - data sovereignty and data value. So it is with a heavy heart that I similarly always find myself deeply concerned by the security implications of such a world. As soon as you create data import and export functions, we will collectively realize that most people both have absolutely…

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 request personal data is to be avoided: it should be hard to know where to find someone's data.

Instauring data dividends would risk encouraging people to share personal data because it could benefit them financially, and that we probably want to avoid as well.

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

#89

Post by Nasrudith »

snarf21 wrote: post #50
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…

We really need a funded and functioning SEC and FTC. They have failed us in the 21st century. However, breaking things up won't be a panacea. It worked in the past but even spinning out Instagram won't open up much space for an Instagram competitor given the existing network effects. To fix some of these issues, I think we need a tax on digital advertising revenue. Right now it is way too profitable to just create cl…

The idea of taxing digital advertising revenue because it is too profitable as an antidote makes no sense on at least three different levels.

1. It being profitable is good for getting more people to get into the market. Taxing it by activity if anything discourages competition! 2. What does degree of profitability have to do with clickbait? Spamming isn't very profitable but it does generate some revenue so we are stuck with the crap. 3. The advertiser network's profit is entirely seperate from how much the individual end-point earns by showing them.

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

#90

Post by adfrhgeaq5hy »

hk1337 wrote: post #70
adfrhgeaq5hy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, duh. "Free market" does not mean "unregulated market". It requires that the market be free from monopolies and that all agents have complete information. Regulation and trust-busting are, in practice, required to bring about a free market. Co-opting the term "free market" was a fantastically successful bit of propaganda.

It could be that idea of a free market if everyone did what was right and not cheat, screw over, sabotage the competition to get ahead. You beat the competition by being better. We don't have that though, people are assholes, so we have a regulated market.

The problem is the system. Let us assume we have 99.9% moral people who never lie and never break the law even if they can gef away with it. Problem is the 0.1% have a competitive advantage. They will accumulate more wealth and power than the others. The others can either compromise on their morality or lose ground against their competition, maybe failing entirely. The amoral people will gain outsized power and will force others to sacrifice their values. The whole system can be corrupted by a tiny minority.

I certainly do blame some individuals who are particularly vile, like Zuckerberg and Musk, but for the most part this is just what happens in competition.

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