
Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up - adventured
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-technology-www/father-of-web-says-tech-giants-may-have-to-be-split-up-idUSKCN1N63MV
======
asaph
> “If you put a drop of love into Twitter it seems to decay but if you put in
> a drop of hatred you feel it actually propagates much more strongly. And you
> wonder: ‘Well is that because of the way that Twitter as a medium has been
> built?’”

How exactly is breaking up the tech giants going to solve this problem?

~~~
alexandercrohde
Suppose tech companies were no longer legally allowed to use the network
effect (i.e. they had to provide open-access to their public data via API).

Then this would enable alternative front-ends on twitter.

This would then enable me to filter messages by positivity, or whichever
criteria I choose (e.g. non-Russian-bots, non-shills).

This is turn would then change the whole ecosystem. It would remove the
perverse incentives of outrage-attention machine.

~~~
nine_k
I think that people have an (almost) unalienable power, very strong, and
pretty underused.

It's the power of walking away.

If you find an environment toxic, leave it, and ask your friends to leave it,
too. Yes, you have to research alternatives first, and make compromises, at
least temporarily.

Lately this somehow worked for Facebook. I bet they are going to see that on
their bottom line.

So, if you dislike the outrage machine, _leave it_. Consciously ignore it. Do
not retweet, do not link to tweets (instead, quote worthy tweets, they are
short).

If enough people did that, and migrated elsewhere, that would be noted. Speak
to companies in the language they understand, that is, the language of money.
Their money comes from your attention spent on their property. Vote with your
dollar — the dollar not spent by online advertisers for your eyeballs that are
not there.

~~~
dkonofalski
This is the part that I don't understand. Facebook, in the grand scheme of
things, is still an incredibly new development for people. Most users (at
least those who abide by the age limit) have spent most of their lives _not_
being on Facebook. What grand utility does Facebook provide that makes it so
difficult to stop using it? I cancelled my Facebook account a few years ago
and the only time I ever even thought about it was when I'd try to sign in to
services (like Spotify) that were linked to my account at one time and it got
reactivated through that. I'd have to login and cancel the account again.

What is it about Facebook that has suddenly and inexplicably turned it into a
necessity for people when they lived for so long without it? It's not like a
cell phone or other technology that has massive utility. Most people don't
even communicate via Facebook (from what I hear). They just post divisive
nonsense.

~~~
nostrademons
Facebook (along with Google, Amazon, EBay, AirBnB, Stripe, etc.) get their
strength from the long tail. I had deleted it off my phone and logged out on
desktop, but then I heard (via email from my sister, who heard it on Facebook)
that my aunt was in a coma and my cousin was posting updates on Facebook. That
was enough to bring me back. And my cousin posts updates on FB because it's by
far the easiest way to distribute news to everyone who cares without worrying
if you're forgetting someone.

I'd assume a lot of casual FB usage is similar. There's 90% outrage posts,
political stuff, memes, ads, chain letters, people sharing glamor shots of
their vacations - and 10% pics of the grandkids, reconnecting with long-lost
friends, networking into chance opportunities, and birth/wedding/death
announcements that you wouldn't otherwise see. Missing out on the good 10% is
a sufficiently large incentive that people put up with the bad 90%.

~~~
philote
I'd argue that communication via email can work just as well as FB. It's a
little harder to "opt in" to updates, but with spam filters and other email
features, it seems like it can be a lot less noise to have to filter through.
But this is coming from someone who doesn't use FB.

~~~
nostrademons
It works on a small scale with a group of people who regularly communicate
with each other. That's how I organize most of my social events - e-mail a
bunch of friends and say "Hey, wanna get together on Saturday?"

It fails when groups are larger or more loosely attached. In my cousin's case
- my dad was one of 10 brothers and sisters (many with their own spouses), I
have 16 cousins on that side (again with spouses), 3 half-cousins, 10 cousins-
once-removed, 1 cousin-twice-removed, and there's a tendency for at least one
person to feel offended if they don't get the news when everybody else gets
the news. It's somewhat understandable that my cousin would want a broadcast
medium rather than trying to remember all that.

Or as another example - a friend of mine died recently, and I found out
through FB. I hadn't been in touch with her for several years, since before
she got married, I'd never met her husband, and he certainly didn't have my
e-mail. Still, I appreciated knowing, and passed on that info to other mutual
friends, who also appreciated knowing. That's the long-tail; in my parents'
generation, they might've found out at some reunion 30 years in the future,
long after the funeral has passed and people are done sharing memories &
photos.

------
noetic_techy
I agree. Having trillion dollar valuation companies dominate the internet is
akin to letting Standard Oil dominate a resource, or monopolies dominate the
emergence of railroads. You have to recognize these technological emergence's
when they occur, because typically they will be unlike anything we've seen
before. I would argue Social Media is one of those emergence's. Smartphones
arguably another.

Ideally, I would like to see tech giants split into 3 companies, with 2/3
residing outside of SV so as not to be subject to the group-think of that
region. This coming from someone who grew up in the heart of SV, got into
tech, and eventually left.

~~~
bepotts
Silicon Valley is responsible for most of the world's innovation, so as a
consumer I'd rather we not dictate where firms wanted to set up shop.

~~~
notacoward
Silicon Valley is _not_ responsible for most of the world's innovation. Not
even within tech. If the internet started any one place it was at BBN around
Boston. The web started at CERN. Microprocessors started at Bell Labs and
Texas Instruments. Cellular phones started at Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia.
Amazon's up in Seattle, next door to Microsoft, and even Facebook is an
import. SV isn't even a player in biotech, clean tech, materials science, etc.
The cult of Silicon Valley is getting ridiculous.

~~~
JKCalhoun
You're not going back far enough though — personal computers, the transistor,
microprocessor....

~~~
noir_lord
Liquid Crystal Displays at the university of a former fishing town in the
north of the UK (my home town) [1].

[1] George William Gray -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_William_Gray](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_William_Gray)

------
arendtio
I am not sure, but sometimes I think splitting the companies is not even what
we need. Instead, companies with > $1 billion annual revenue should be bound
by law to built federated platforms and provide the software to participate in
such a network.

I mean, you could split up Google into Search, Youtube, and Mail. But in the
end, Youtube would still use Analytics and provide Search with all the data
they need for their Ad business and Mail would use the Ad tech from Search.
With Facebook, it is mostly the same story.

Federated Systems, on the other hand, let you build a distributed network of
providers where no provider has all the data in one place, and you can choose
which provider you want to trust (or if you want to be provider yourself).

~~~
WC3w6pXxgGd
Why do you trust governments so much?

~~~
bilbo0s
To be fair, all sides trust the government.

We're trusting the government to go in and _properly_ split up a company. Or
you're trusting the government to _properly_ regulate a company.

The people who don't trust the government, don't want the government to take
_ANY_ action. They believe the market will solve the problem.

~~~
vlunkr
So all sides trust the government except for the ones that don't

~~~
bilbo0s
And the ones that don't, have not stated their position in this discussion.

So all sides presenting in this discussion, trust the government.

------
pinewurst
In 1940, Lee de Forest, (semi-self-proclaimed) Father of Radio, sent an open
letter to the National Association of Broadcasters in which he demanded: "What
have you done with my child, the radio broadcast? You have debased this child,
dressed him in rags of ragtime, tatters of jive and boogie-woogie."

------
ilovecaching
> “If you put a drop of love into Twitter it seems to decay but if you put in
> a drop of hatred you feel it actually propagates much more strongly. And you
> wonder: ‘Well is that because of the way that Twitter as a medium has been
> built?’”

No, it's human nature. Stop blaming companies for the imperfections of the
human race. If you put us into large groups, we will inevitably gossip,
bicker, argue, and kill each other. We've been doing it literally since we
were banging rocks and sticks together.

The delusion that technology feeds us, and it is especially potent in America,
is that there is some higher power leading us all to be terrible people
online, and that technology should be able to fix the problem.

But technology _can 't_ fix the problem. We are the problem. We also evolve
incredibly slowly, and we're competing against technology that evolves in a
matter of decades. We are too inflexible as a species to be compatible with
the social effects of technology.

~~~
davemp
This is incredibly fatalistic.

Why can't technology be created with human nature in mind? Forms of democracy
with checks and balances became so dominant because it acknowledged the
deficiencies in human nature.

We can certainly blame companies for producing bad/harmful technology just
like we can blame forms of government for producing bad outcomes for its
citizens.

\---

On a side note, based on influence and entrenchment, comparing FAANG companies
to governments actually seems more appropriate that I initially thought.

~~~
ilovecaching
> Forms of democracy with checks and balances became so dominant because it
> acknowledged the deficiencies in human nature.

And those systems have tons of flaws as well. Have you seen the voter turn out
in the U.S.? How many Americans are making informed voting decisions.

You're shifting the blame back to the technology. I get it, as a technologist
we'd like to think it must be a mistake in the product. But the reality is
that our idealistic notions of how the world should be do not match the
capabilities of human nature.

~~~
davemp
Compare the U.S. government to Feudalism or a similar form of government--not
the U.S. government to Utopia. You're not seeing the point.

This is actually the exact opposite of idealism. Try to account for the
reality of human nature in systems and they will have much better results for
the humans they affect.

------
choko
"But social media, Berners-Lee said, was still being used to propagate hate."

This is one of the side effects of an open web, and one I feel we should live
with in the interests of freedom. The only alternative of which I am aware is
to police speech through some kind of authority. I'm not sure that there is an
authority in existence that I would trust with that level of power.

In a perfect world, we would be able to de-platform those that incite violence
against others (for any reason), but we can't even come to an agreement on
what that means. Some people argue that criticizing a marginalized group is
hate speech and further argue that hate speech is violence. Should some people
be shielded from valid criticism because they identify as a certain group?

It sounds like a simple concept, but the more you explore it, the less simple
it becomes.

~~~
gambler
_> This is one of the side effects of an open web, and one I feel we should
live with in the interests of freedom. The only alternative of which I am
aware is to police speech through some kind of authority._

I strongly believe this is nor correct. You can mitigate a lot of this stuff
through better design, without censorship. Most important point: Open Web is
the idea that people can find info they're looking for, not that anyone on the
web can bombard everyone else with information. Modern social media is
optimized for the latter. Algorithms chose for you, and they chose badly, and
you have no control over it.

Jaron Lanier has a lot of talks about incentives and why current social media
is bad for you. His hypotheses seem plausible.

~~~
choko
That just means the person writing the algorithm becomes the authority. As we
recently saw with Amazon's hiring practices, algorithms have bias as well.
Granted, a better designed system might not have made this mistake, but since
humans designed it, can it ever be perfectly unbiased?

Without actual censorship (which I'm against) the offending material still
exists, but would only be found by those who seek it. I do like that approach
personally, but I don't think it would be enough to satisfy many people who
prefer to eradicate offensive speech through authoritarian measures.

------
zackkatz
I suggest the title be changed to remove “Father of Web”.

“Tim Berners-Lee says…” is better.

~~~
gist
I actually have a big issue when the news runs stories like this to begin
with. They would do the same btw if Woz said it or any other well known
person. Sure the fact they can tag on 'father of the web' gives a strong pull
but that is part of the problem. His thoughts on this aren't any more
important than thousands of others that nobody has ever heard of. This is a
total 'news as entertainment' story. And this has nothing to do with whether I
agree or disagree with what he is saying. I just don't like prominence given
solely based on some prior achievement which quite frankly has no bearing on
what he is saying today.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I agree that his opinion should have no bearing on the way that the modern WWW
is run - but considering he invented the platform I think his opinion is
interesting and well worth hearing when it didn't turn out the way he
originally envisaged.

~~~
gist
> I think his opinion is interesting

Hence 'entertainment', right?

> when it didn't turn out the way he originally envisaged

Sure but who cares if that is the case? And he didn't imagine and invent the
modern web nor did he even popularize it or put much effort into making it
what is is today.

By his statements I take it that he is jealous that he feels that he has not
played a bigger role in what happened after his 'invention' (which was based
on a great deal of work prior to his involvement). Many of us used the arpanet
in the 70's not to mention the US Government's involvement. Honestly (and
nobody will agree I am sure) if there was no conflict with Russia the Internet
would not exist (most likely).

And I am not seeing what he had a vision for any more than solving some simple
issue he saw which was:

> Instead, it was hard work, the experience of working in computer science and
> an attempt to overcome the frustrations of trying to share information with
> colleagues and students

That is not the web today or even close to it and for that matter it wasn't
the web even in 2000 or 1998.

------
flyGuyOnTheSly
>Before breaking them up, we should see whether they are not just disrupted by
a small player beating them out of the market

Like Youtube, Instagram, or WhatsApp perhaps?

Jokes aside, I don't see how an internet giant who is flush with cash and data
in 2018 would fail to see the next biggest thing and acquire it before it grew
large enough to knock them off their pedestals.

~~~
m_ke
Yes, Google, Apple and Facebook know more about these startups than the
companies themselves.

Google has an insider look at all of your metrics, your market and your
competitors through the combination of search, Gmail, Android, Google play,
maps, YouTube, Google analytics, adwords and Google Ventures.

Same goes for Facebook and Apple. On top of that they are the gatekeepers to
the main platforms and can kill you if you refuse to play along.

~~~
amdelamar
They totally are gatekeepers. And don't forget Microsoft too.

They own the horse-racing arena, and have a horse in every race too.

------
virmundi
Some might need to be split, but he’s looking at the wrong platforms. Gab is
demonitized. The financial platforms won’t allow them to transact. The app
stores won’t allow them to install. All this because a loon sent bombs.
Twitter and FB have a history of allowing terrorists to communicate, but they
are the darlings of the left so the are left alone. Break up the financial
platforms if the government must break up someone.

------
wowamit
I strongly believe we need to tread extra cautiously while observing what
these companies do with the internet. They would like to have their own walled
sections of the internet where they define the rules and govern the policies.
It started with URLs first (facebook.com was the internet for many). It is
shifting to whole top level domains - Google’s usage of “.new” for example.

I agree that the best solution will be to reduce the concentration of power.
However, it is extremely complex to implement. There are too many parameters
in play, both technological and political. It would be important to not let
these walled premises build until we have the solution.

------
themagician
They really don’t.

They don’t have monopolies on anything and there is no high barrier to entry
to compete, they are just really popular. Facebook is far more akin to Kim
Kardashian than Ma Bell or Standard Oil.

You don’t need Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or any of that other crap. In
fact, it turns out if you stop using them nothing bad happens to you at all.
I’m many cases your life is better and you actually end up more connected to
your friends and family.

Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon however… now those are some real problem companies
that pose real dangers.

~~~
stochastic_monk
AT&T is a tech giant in precisely the same sense that Google is.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Some people have no choice but to use ATT, it's the only way to get internet
into their home. I can do everything I need to without Google, but not ATT.

~~~
AlexandrB
> I can do everything I need to without Google, but not ATT.

I'm betting that you actually cannot. If you blacklisted Google's domains many
sites would be inaccessible or broken due to reCaptcha, Google-hosted
fonts/scripts, or ad-blocker blockers.

~~~
lotsofpulp
That's true, but it feels different than owning the only telecommunications
cable going into homes. I would actually classify wired and wireless internet
providers as utilities since the capital costs are so enormous it's impossible
for a new supplier to enter the market, but that may apply to Google too.

------
mattmaroon
I don't think you could break them up in any meaningful way. What would you
break Apple up into? The company that makes iPhones and the company that makes
iPads?

Or Facebook? Two social networks that get half of the population each?

Breakups only make sense for vertically integrated companies. I guess you
could break up Google (it's already done so itself to some extent with the
Alphabet reorg) but not in a way that's meaningful, other than maybe requiring
advertising to be its own company.

Also it neglects the fact that their biggest asset is their domain name.
Google.com might be worth literally trillions of dollars. How do you break
that up?

If anything, I'd argue the government could regulate Facebook since it's
basically a natural monopoly, much the way it does the NFL or basic utilities.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _What would you break Apple up into?_

Apple the device manufacturer and iTunes (or whatever) the streaming content
service provider.

> _Or Facebook?_

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp.

> _I guess you could break up Google_

Alphabet makes this easy. YouTube, Cloud Compute and the other things.

> _it 's basically a natural monopoly_

Natural monopolies don’t have to acquire potential competitors to protect
their flanks. Facebook minus Instagram would be very different today.

~~~
mattmaroon
Neither do the people above. Apple isn't acquiring any other phone makers.
Google isn't acquiring any other search engines.

The breakups you suggested would make them slightly smaller companies but
wouldn't solve any of the problems. the problem with Google if there is one is
that it's the only search engine anybody uses. It's 90% of the market. Taking
away YouTube doesn't change that.

Instagram isn't really a competitor with Facebook. Facebook would still be an
effective Monopoly. Same with apple without iTunes.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Instagram isn 't really a competitor with Facebook_

Of course it is. Facebook is losing certain demographics to Instagram. If they
were separate companies, Facebook would be under far greater shareholder
pressure.

~~~
mattmaroon
I don't think that's true. I think Facebook is losing customers due to its own
downsides, and Instagram is gaining customers on its own Merit. I don't think
that there is a zero-sum competition between the two

~~~
craftyguy
> I think Facebook is losing customers due to its own downsides, and Instagram
> is gaining customers on its own Merit

You literally just proved the point of GP.

------
kyledrake
Let's start with the companies that voted for EME DMCA first. I'm sure TBL
would be happy to release the list from the secret vote they had for it at the
W3C.

Seriously, it's bad optics going around and criticizing everybody else for not
holding power accountable when you don't have your own house in order. When it
came time to stand up to this power, Tim actively defended their interests. I
suppose most people have already forgotten about it, but I never will, and
neither will my friends that could go to jail for trying to research the
security of binary crap in people's browsers.

------
mattlondon
> "Before breaking them up, we should see whether they are not just disrupted
> by a small player beating them out of the market"

How long do you wait to see if this happens?

E.g. MySpace was _the_ social network back in the day. When was the last time
you even heard/thought about MySpace let alone even visited the site? Did we
wait long enough for MySpce to die on its own, or should we have acted sooner?
Does it matter either way? We've had a couple of recent examples too, like
Snap that looked like the unasailable Neu-Facebook a year or two ago, but now
is crumbling and losing users rapidly - should we have broken up Facebook
before that happened to Snap? Does it matter either way? Facebook is now
losing users in western countries too - should we act now to break it up, or
wait to see if it is "doing a snap" and will die on its own?

The point I am trying to make is that competitors come and go on the
incredibly open and incredibly egalitarian internet that Berners-Lee helped to
popularise with WWW. Making arbitrary decisions about _when_ to break up a
company without relying on anything apart from hand-wringing "think of the
children!"-ism seems unlikely. What would the metric be? Revenue? DAUs? I cant
think of a meaningful way to measure when a company is too big and is not
going to be disrupted apart from hand-waving and sensationalism-based
approaches.

Facebook has no _control of the internet_ as such. Sure they are pervasive but
if people stop visiting Facebook, the money dries up. They can profile as much
as they like but if there are no eye balls viewing those perfectly targetted
ads then there is no money coming in - Facebook cant use their "control" of
the intenet to force you to go view their ads no more than Google can use its
"control" of the internet to force you to view their ads. You have choices on
what to visit. Just like no one chooses to go to MySpace any more.

The solution - as always - has been an ad blocker, rejecting 3rd party
cookies, signing out of facebook & google, switching from Google/Facebook
services to alternatives (e.g. DuckDuckGo is a good and viable replacement to
Google Search; Firefox is a good and viable replacement to Google Chrome,
talking to people is a good and viable replacement to Facebook).

~~~
ajvs
Your solutions are not enough because Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp -
they buy out new social media so they're always in control.

In Europe at least everyone uses WhatsApp and no-one texts anymore - they're
too pervasive to avoid.

~~~
mattlondon
Just dont use them, like you dont use MySpace. There is nothing forcing people
to use them, and nothing outright preventing a new competitor.

WhatsApp was a startup competitor at one stage too - it competed well enough
to grow big enough to compete with Facebook & Google. Sure Facebook brought
them out, but what is to stop the next WhatsApp? Likewise MySpace was too
pervasive not to use at one point too, yet look at what happened to that when
this little cool new thing called Facebook appeared.

Basically it comes down to user behavior, not any explicit "control" that
Facebook et al have over individual's use of the internet.

------
rchaud
I wish it could be made more apparent to people that Twitter and FB are not
mediums for communication, but mediums for marketing broadcasts.

Everyone with a significant following (let's say 100,000) is selling
something. Software, home goods, consultants with online courses, meme pages
angling for a TV deal, something.

Yes, you can still use it to communicate with a core group of people whose
tweets you enjoy. You can also do that on Slack, Discord, even phpBB forums,
all of which grant the user more permissions to use the tool as they like.

~~~
notacoward
> Twitter and FB are not mediums for communication, but mediums for marketing
> broadcasts.

Why not both? There are plenty of people having legitimate, personally
meaningful conversations on both. There are plenty that use both for
marketing. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

> You can also do that on Slack, Discord, even phpBB forums

...except that people mostly _don 't_. They seem better able to discover and
maintain their online friendships and communities on the bigger platforms, for
whatever reason. They went into the market and they chose. Who are you to
second-guess them?

~~~
rchaud
> They went into the market and they chose. Who are you to second-guess them?

The users are the ones second-guessing themselves. If all was fine and dandy
on Twitter, there wouldn't be harassment mobs and people wouldn't be
complaining.

Decisions are not set in stone forever and aren't made with perfect
information. What seemed like a good choice then may be sub-optimal now that
users understand some of the design decisions that led Twitter to gravitate
towards a marketing broadcast platform.

------
baccheion
In my opinion, 43 (1 CEO + 6 managers/executives + 6 * 6 individual
contributors) is the optimal employee count. It becomes a still-reasonable 259
(1 CEO + 6 executives + 6 * 6 managers + 6 * 6 * 6 individual contributors) if
reality is factored in. Any company larger inevitable becomes a stagnating
drain. That is, one way to somewhat clip power and improve overall
(intracompany and economic) efficiency may be to limit company size to a
maximum of 259-585 employees.

~~~
sas2000
ok this is the hottest take in here

------
edejong
Tim, you made the web fundamentally client-server. Servers have urls, can be
indexed, have centralising power. Clients do all the work: run the code,
render the page, be subservient. Clients do not have urls, cannot be indexed
and cannot communicate among each other (gRPC excepted). Don't you agree this
design has massive centralisation as a side-effect, and how can we fix the
design?

~~~
exhaze
He's actually been working on solving that exact problem:
[https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936/exclusive-tim-
berners-l...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936/exclusive-tim-berners-lee-
tells-us-his-radical-new-plan-to-upend-the-world-wide-web)

~~~
choko
It's interesting that he is pushing the decentralization concept while at the
same time decrying hate speech on the web. Wouldn't a non-centralized version
of the web make it harder to police said speech?

As a disclaimer, I am not advocating the policing of speech in any way and am
against that concept.

~~~
macintux
It's not clear that he's decrying hate speech so much as decrying the
amplification effect on it that the current state of the tech world enables.

------
krupan
I know I'm really late to this discussion, but what we really need[1] is the
kind of control over our feeds (whether facebook, twitter, insta) that we have
over our email inboxes. With email you can set up filters and labels and
redirect your mail where ever you want. Or you can just hit the big SPAM
button on stuff you never want to see. Why doesn't social media offer this?
Especially with twitter, I'd love to follow some people for their tech tweets,
as long as I could filter out their trump tweets. It should be super easy to
do that, yet none of the social media platforms offer it. Have we been asking
for it?

1\. I'm not for regulation, but for us customers (yeah, yeah, we are the
"product" not the customer, whatever) to demand this

------
davidwparker
He also said:

    
    
      “Before breaking them up, we should see whether they are not just disrupted by a 
      small player beating them out of the market, but by the market shifting, 
      by the interest going somewhere else,”
    

edit: formatting

------
twblalock
If you break up the big platforms today, you'd need to do it again in 5 years.

Big platforms exist because centralization is convenient for users. If they
disappeared new ones would be created, for the same reason the original ones
were created in the first place.

I have yet to see a proposal for a federated platform that appeals to average
people outside of the HN/open source community. And even if you could solve
that problem for social media, how would you come up with a federated
replacement for something like Google search or Amazon shopping that is
anywhere near as good?

------
dreamcompiler
Let's be careful here. In 1984, AT&T was a monopoly and was forced to break up
its local operations into seven regional companies (the "Baby Bells"). Guess
what? Over time, the seven slowly merged back together, with one --
Southwestern Bell -- eventually subsuming all the rest. Southwestern Bell then
bought what was left of AT&T corporate and renamed itself "AT&T" and here we
are again.

It would be a shame to break up the tech giants only to allow them to slowly
merge back together again.

------
sharemywin
* You need to un-bundle features. identity from social feed from storage

* require data, interaction and reputation portability.

\- be able to search for a user on twitter by their facebook username(if the
user agrees).

\- be able to request a transaction or feedback is transferable to other
platforms if both users agree.

\- look up john smiths reputation on amazon is 5 stars.

* Transparency around security, transparency around pricing and income from your data and an ability to pay to opt out.

\- get an invoice we made $30 this month display ads to you.

\- $4 from Statefarm, $2 from viagra etc.

* ability to delete data from a service.

------
_cs2017_
I'm hoping he provided some rationale about why Microsoft, Google, and Apple
should be split up. The way the interview is quoting just a couple sentences,
it's hard to tell.

If there's nothing besides the quote below, I'd consider this an extremely
weird and weak argument:

> What naturally happens is you end up with one company dominating the field
> so through history there is no alternative to really coming in and breaking
> things up. There is a danger of concentration.

~~~
bostonpete
Right -- he makes this "one company" comment and then follows it up with a
list of 5 companies that are dominating...

------
john37386
Maybe these social networks could be manage by the community. A bit like HN.
Here if you post crap, people can downvote your crap to the bottom so that no
one can see it.

If you want to be seen and red, you need to post quality and gain reputation.
People with bad reputation will slowly lose visibility.

It might not work, but clearly it seems that quality is a prime factor on HN
and it's one of the reason why I trust more HN than any other social network.

~~~
ar-nelson
This is the result of manual moderation, not community voting.

Reddit relies on voting, and it doesn't have the same level of quality. With
the exception of subreddits with well-thought-out rules and moderators who
consistently enforce those rules.

------
majani
I think the main issue that has allowed the likes of Google and Facebook to
grow to a dangerous size is the ability to scale globally with minimal
resistance from other countries. As time goes by, I start to realize that
China's great firewall may have had some visionary thinking behind it, and
other countries may follow suit in future to enable their citizens to take
part in the digital revolution.

~~~
balozi
I'm sorry, but yours is supremely paternalistic analysis borne of a believe
that your fellow citizens are too stupid to have agency or act in their own
interests.

And there is nothing visionary about China's great firewall since aristocrats
have been trying to control the surfs since time immemorial by controlling
communication. There is a reason antebellum slave owners did not want their
slaves to learn how to read.

~~~
macintux
> aristocrats have been trying to control the surfs

This humorous typo brought to mind the anecdote of King Canute and the tide.

~~~
balozi
Hehehe...yeah, happens sometimes. Thanks for catching that, fellow serf.

------
hn_throwaway_99
When he talks about maybe waiting to see if things change and another company
comes along to disrupt the big boys, I feel this has pretty much already been
proven impossible. The big boys will just buy you. YouTube, Android,
Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. all represented serious potential challenges to
Google and FB, and they were just acquired.

~~~
rezeroed
No buying companies once you're above a certain size.

------
sfilargi
No, we don't need the companies to split up.

What we need is a truly distributed Web. Web X.

Imagine a web where all the servers are just something like torrent nodes(or
IPFS nodes). Ever user uses an Agent that just stores and retrieves encrypted
chunk bytes to the servers.

No central point of control => No dominance, no monopoly, no censorship.

------
perseusprime11
If we fundamentally think big tech is bad, splitting them up will make the go
much faster and it can get worse. Big companies move slower than smaller more
nimble companies. The answer is not splitting up but just make them
accountable for KPIs that are good for society.

------
marvelous
I wonder if a fix to many "too big to fail" and "winner takes all" market and
public/private power imbalance issues, isn't simply this: mandatory split up
beyond a certain size.

------
partycoder
If they split up then Tencent and Alibaba would take their place.

------
brookhaven_dude
How about we deal with ISPs and the telecom cartel first?

------
gaius
I would be pretty surprised if most of the MBA-bro management at any FAANG had
even heard of TBL, let alone gives a stuff about what he might say.

------
nakedrobot2
They don't have to be broken up, they need to stop being morally bankrupt.

Nothing about Facebook's size dictates that they needed to:

\- Allow their platform to be abused by misinformation campaigns, because it
pays well (thereby allowing Trump to win)

\- Allow hate groups to flourish

\- Allow anti-vax groups to grow and flourish

\- Allow nutty conspiracy groups to flourish

\- Help dictatorships with their genocide

It's simply because they are morally bankrupt by design and by culture.

------
0x262d
it's silly to try to split up tech companies. look at AT&T; it was tried, now
it's basically un-split up. they exist in natural monopolies and their service
benefits from monopoly anyway.

it's also silly to try to regulate them. they have a fundamental incentive and
nearly unlimited resources to do bad things, such as profiting from spreading
hate via advertising, but also protecting their ability to do things like that
by capturing regulatory agencies. look at attempts to regulate banking and how
that has worked.

services like web search, email, internet access, and social media are clearly
valuable and important, arguably necessary. they also get massively distorted
and damaged in private markets. these are not lemonade stands; capitalism is
an extremely bad model for natural monopolies. they should be publicly owned,
run, and developed, in the federated, open model suggested elsewhere. anything
else is fooling yourself about what is possible or beneficial.

as an addendum: yes this would require a massive renewal of democratic control
over everything involved in this in order to make it work. unfortunately there
aren't other good solutions.

------
Rafuino
If Vint Cerf had said this as a Google guy, it would be a bit more news
worthy.

------
__initbrian__
the article mentions wait for them to be disrupted. but how can that happen
when they seem to acquire any threat?

------
quadcore
Have we ever broke up a software company?

~~~
maxxxxx
Microsoft's growth got restricted successfully around 2000. all it took was to
make their life a bit more difficult.

------
jillesvangurp
In general, the current trend of value accumulating in companies with more
revenue than the GDP of most countries, is something that is killing
diversity. Capitalism with one monopolist is not that much better than
communist style centrally run planned economies. Both are inefficient and
ultimately self serving.

However, instead of breaking up companies, maybe it is better to constrain
their ability to accumulate this much power and wealth. Big companies are
treated way too nicely by governments. They get to dodge taxes, ignore
regulations, lean on smaller players in the market, lean on politicians to
look the other way or legislate in their favor, hoard patents, kill off
competitors with unfair behavior, etc.

Just level the playing field and restore competition.

------
dreamdu5t
Sounds like Tim Berners-Lee needs to take a break from Twitter and Facebook.

------
yuhong
I think I just posted an Ask HN about a similar topic.

------
throwaway487548
It it could be essentially the same procedure as splitting of Standard Oil,
then, obviously it is good idea.

Why should an ordinary joe like you and me care about FAANG shareholders?

------
arminiusreturns
They shouldn't have been allowed to get as big as they are in the first place.
Where has the DoJ been on anti-trust/anti-monopoly laws? I'm guessing going
through the revolving door. That's why those laws are there, because busting
up a monopoly after the fact is much harder than preventing it from merger and
acquisitioning it's way to that monopoly in the first place.

~~~
avaika
How do you imagine companies shouldn't be allowed to grow? "Oh, you already
have X customers, you can't get X+1. That would be a monopoly"?

~~~
arminiusreturns
That's not what I said. Antitrust/anti-monopoly laws have a strong basis, and
it's certainly not "you can't grow". You are attacking a strawman.

------
TimJYoung
I think the solution may lie with changes to, or removal of, Section 230 of
the CDA:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act)

I suspect that forcing those that host 3rd party content/discussion to
actually moderate and control the discussion will keep the size of such online
communities smaller, which is good. Or, they will simply need increase revenue
so that they can properly moderate them. Either way, the toxic nature of a lot
of the internet goes away pretty quickly, and companies will be forced to
clean up their act.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I think the solution may lie with changes to, or removal of, Section 230 of
> the CDA

[...]

> I suspect that forcing those that host 3rd party content/discussion to
> actually moderate and control the discussion [...]

CDA Section 230 was largely adopted to _encourage_ active moderation, since
without it active moderation made a host a “publisher” rather than a mere
“distributor”, which triggers strict liability for a number of violations for
which a distributor would only have knowledge-based liability.

~~~
TimJYoung
Yes, but is it being _used_ that way ? Everything that I've seen has indicated
that service providers use this law to play it both ways: they actively
control what users see through algorithms, but then claim that they are
(largely) not responsible for the moderation of questionable content. IOW,
they are not just a passive distribution point for information, and, in many
cases, actively control the flow of information. Doesn't that intrinsically
make them a publisher ?

~~~
dragonwriter
> Yes, but is it being used that way ?

Yes, most hosts have and enforce (though imperfectly) content rules as they
would be disincentivized from doing without CDA 230.

> Everything that I've seen has indicated that service providers use this law
> to play it both ways: they actively control what users see through
> algorithms, but then claim that they are (largely) not responsible for the
> moderation of questionable content.

That's not playing it both ways.

> IOW, they are not just a passive distribution point for information, and, in
> many cases, actively control the flow of information.

Yes, the _entire point_ of CDA 230 is to allow them to actively moderate
without becoming strictly liable for all content, since without that allowance
they would be disincentivized from moderation. Removing CDA 230 would _not_
encourage active moderation, it would make active moderation a gateway to
unmanageable liability.

> Doesn't that intrinsically make them a publisher ?

Yes, without CDA 230 it would, restoring the “if you moderate content at all,
you must succeed in capturing every bit of user-submitted illegal content or
be fully liable as if you had deliberately originated it yourself” rule that
was in place before CDA 230 (with the added challenge that there are more
content regulations now than before the CDA was adopted), which is not
something that promotes moderation, it promotes either no moderation or no
user content hosting at all, leaving moderated hosting for operators outside
of US jurisdiction.

~~~
TimJYoung
I think we're talking past each other here (I understand what CDA 230 is
_supposed_ to do, I'm referring to how its been used/interpreted).

Here is, perhaps, a better version of what I'm trying to say:

[https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_comments/2...](https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_comments/2018/08/ftc-2018-0048-d-0023-151008.pdf)

Edit: the section re: 230 is towards the end.

Frontline just covered some of this with respect to FB, also.

