
Steve Bannon Wants to Change How the Law Treats Google - gmays
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/steve-bannon-google-facebook/535473/?single_page=true
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erikpukinskis
I find the idea of breaking Google and Facebook up under antitrust law kind of
intriguing.

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closeparen
You could plausibly separate some of Google's verticals, though most that
aren't ads would probably go away (GMail, etc).

How could Facebook be partitioned? Will the government decreee that we must
use separate social networks for text vs. images vs. video vs. events?

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Broken_Hippo
"How could facebook be partitioned?"

I've considered this, and I think only mild partitioning would be effective.
For example, separating Instagram from facebook instead of integrating it
further. This would do nothing to the site itself, though.

My solution would be to have facebook be more willing to work with other
social networking sites. Right now facebook is like a telephone company that
only allows folks to talk to others on the same network.

Minimally, the chat programs would need to communicate with each other, even
if they didn't share all features (still needs to be very useful). Further
changes would be things like allowing other social networks to view "public"
things one posts or being able to friend across platforms.

This is unlikely to happen, though, if it is possible at all. I'm assuming
that a standard would need to be agreed upon and they'll be quite the fight
from facebook. Not to mention the sheer amount of work it would involve
upfront or at least I'm assuming, as I'm one of the non-tech folks that are
reading here.

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zakk
Indeed, separating Facebook as is would be close to impossible.

However, a first step would be imposing FB to expose all features and user
data using an open protocol to be defined.

That would be a good thing on its own, given that it would make possible for
other networks to federate with Facebook. (And when you think about it, it's
much closer to the usual Internet, think of SMTP, BGP... A monolithic service
like FB is actually the exception!)

Moreover, it would set the ground for splitting Facebook into two (or
possibily more) federated networks.

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tw04
This would be such a trainwreck if enacted in the way Bannon wants. That being
- he wants the ridiculous unsubstantiated drivel on his website to be given
the same priority in searches as _ACTUAL_ journalism. You know "to be fair".
Because, for instance, someone searching for the history of the earth should
be greeted by Bible passages being treated as a valid alternative theory to
dinosaurs.

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ilaksh
One of the challenges is to separate out our group identification from our
worldview, different aspects of our worldviews, and our support of individual
policies from all of the above.

We can agree with Bannon about competition problems but disagree about some
weird religious ideas or whatever.

A typical belief is that there is just a plain trade off between centralized
planning and decentralized less organized entities. Given our technical
capabilities, this is a false dichotomy. Beyond models like the public
utility, we can replace the function of many of these companies with modular,
versioned software that can provide platforms and protocols that are holistic
on a common level but also easily evolved and without central control. Think
P2PSemanticSearch, BitTorrent, Ethereum, Bitcoin, IPFS, TaxiProtocol,
RetailIntegrationFullfillmentP2P, etc. with something like a decentralized npm
for ease of deployment, integration and iteration.

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Cookingboy
>This means they would get treated less like a book publisher and more like a
telephone company.

Huh..how about we start treating cable companies more like telephone companies
first?

I see the argument for more anti-trust regulation against FB and Goog, but
considering how this administration views Net Neutrality the irony and
hypocrisy is beyond absurd here.

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RichardHeart
Google owns or nearly owns: phone, search, email, maps, web video, banners,
working:desktop, cars, fiber, social, chat, vidchat.

What don't they own? How is this centralization healthy?

If you let your company reach 90 percent monopoly, and the entire world uses
you every day, and the entire world relies on you...You are a utility.

Google's monopoly has lead to censorship in youtube, no customer service for
any of their products unless maybe you pay 100k a year, maybe someone will
answer the phone.

Through adwords they take a percent of all web commerce and make sure to mix
up the results so you have a reason to pay. The only place you can get traffic
that isn't them is amazon, and that's jumping from the pan into the fire.

Inb4: Government is worse, whole world doesn't have net, better them than 4
evil corps, stick with devil we know, etc.

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woodandsteel
Bannon lays out his basic worldview in this talk at the Vatican. It is pretty
kooky

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-
banno...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-
the-entire-world?utm_term=.ulAaBbz2ye#.hlrq1j370W)

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johnsmith21006
A guy that is part of a group that drove a car into innocent people and hates
anyone that is not a white, hetro male wants to break up Google and FB and it
is something actually discussed on HN?

Really?

