
Tim Wu thinks it’s time to break up Facebook - coloneltcb
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/4/17816572/tim-wu-facebook-regulation-interview-curse-of-bigness-antitrust
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freehunter
I use Facebook and I don't think that's going to change any time soon, but I
also used to develop against the Facebook API. I say "used to" because there
is nothing of value to get from the Facebook API anymore. Their data is now
entirely locked into Facebook and cannot be easily moved.

My site pulled local event data into an event calendar, since Facebook's
discovery of truly local events is shitty at best and useless most of the
time. These are all public events at businesses open to the public and the
businesses want more people to come. But now Facebook considers public events
posted by public-welcoming businesses to be too sensitive of information to
share, and that API disappeared overnight in April, with no advance warning
and no ability to get it back. It's gone. Completely gone.

Coincidentally, they now have their own app called Facebook Local that shows
events near you. I'm sure that has nothing to do with them shutting down that
API.

Break up Facebook.

~~~
patejam
Didn't Facebook just get yelled at by everyone for having too much information
available via the API? I don't think it's fair to be upset that they started
to lock down their APIs after that issue.

~~~
rosser
Too much information _about people_ , yes.

Business tend to _want_ the kind of information your comment's parent was
bemoaning being siloed up broadly available. People tend _not_ to want their
personal details treated that way.

FB locking that info away isn't about protecting those businesses; it's about
protecting their own position in the market.

EDIT: Explain to me, then, how Facebook "protecting" info businesses want
widely disseminated is in anyone but Facebook's interest. If I have a coffee
shop, and we're having an event, I don't _just_ want FB users knowing about
it, do I?

Treating this as a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" is disingenuously
specious.

~~~
jbob2000
The problem is that if you wanted to gather all the publicly available info on
businesses, you had to write a very complex piece of software to do it (screen
scrapers + web crawling).

But Facebook wrapped that all up into a tidy APi. You can gather information
about the world for a nominal amount. The Russians did it for a couple hundred
grand.

It’s not about _what_ the Facebook API serves, but about the ease of use and
scope of information. There’s a reason Google Maps delays satellite imagery by
years, we need the same when it comes to other forms of global data.

~~~
rosser
Can you explain how this is responsive to the question of whose interest
siloing this information serves?

If I want to take on the complexity of aggregating it, that's my choice.
Facebook isn't doing me some kind of favor by "helping" me not fall down that
rabbit-hole...

~~~
jbob2000
Sure, they silo’d it to protect national interests. Which in a way, protects
Facebook interests because countries would ban them if they didn’t take action
on this.

If you want to take on that complexity, go for it. Facebook was never trying
to help you with that.

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orev
The focus on tech companies seems to be, I don’t think a red herring, but
mostly misplaced when compared to the extreme damage being caused by other
companies. Oil, pharma, telcos (no, telcos are not part of the cohort of tech
companies being talked about here), all of whom are actually using the
platforms of the tech companies to deeply undermine the basis of Western
society by attacking the fundamental concepts of evidence and reason. Sure,
they’re using twitter to do it, but why not attack the source?

------
tynpeddler
The theory of internet monopolies stills seems nascent to me. Google is often
accused of being a search engine monopoly, but I would disagree because Google
doesn't get money from search, they get money from advertising. They use their
search engine as market research. The same thing is true of Facebook. A social
network isn't a business because no one pays for it. Advertising is the
business and the social network is the research arm.

This makes the charge that Google and Facebook are "inefficient monopolies"
pretty weak. First, they're not monopolies (yet). Together Google and Facebook
only comprise about 63% of online add revenue in the US, and that's not even
counting Amazon which is basically an online market where Amazon monopolizes
advertising on their own platform (among many other things). Saying that
Google and Facebook's dominance is bad for the consumer is weird, because the
average person isn't the consumer. Other businesses are the real consumers of
the tech giants's services and they still have plenty of leeway in how they do
business. Labeling the internet giants as monopolies feels weird because they
are not monopolies in the classic sense of oil, rail, telephone or even cable.
Those monopolies erected fences around their products that were very real and
very physical. Customers (people like you and me) really didn't have any other
options. The same can't be said of big tech.

Of course if you find the above arguments unconvincing, I understand why. When
you get right down to it people aren't as concerned about "tech as
advertising". What really scares the bejesus out of everyone is "tech as
media". TV stations used to be similar. They made their money in advertising,
and the audience were the product not the customers. But even tv stations were
local in scope, unlike the internet. If you wanted to watch TV, the local
stations were all you had. But with Google, nothing is yet stopping me from
going to DuckDuckGo. This is a real blow to the label of Google as a monopoly.
If Google is a monopoly, it's a kind that hasn't been clearly defined yet.

That brings us to the big problem. If you're going to break up companies, I
want there to be clear defensible reasons why. This article is frustratingly
vague in their motivation. Their claim that innovation is impossible in the
face of the tech giants seems a little disingenuous. Snapchat, Instagram, and
Whatsapp were very successful before they were bought. If the founders of
these companies were more interested in the conflict, they would have been
major threats to Facebook. Then they suggest "dirty tricks" as the source of
the tech giants's success, but they don't offer proof (outside of some vague
references to Amazon that they don't elaborate on). This article fundamentally
misunderstands what business the tech giants are in and then makes comparison
to history that don't hold up under even cursory scrutiny.

If you break up Google, search will get worse, so it would be nice if there's
a good reason why we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot. My biggest
concern is that the latest push to break up the big tech giants is fueled by
resentment from the American Left for what they see as tech's complicity in
allowing Russia to steal the election for Trump. While there is merit to that
idea, without clear evidence of collusion or malfeasance I don't think that's
a good enough reason to break them up.

~~~
touristtam
> But with Google, nothing is yet stopping me from going to DuckDuckGo

Sure but Google has been so successful that Googling something on the internet
is a thing, and most none tech oriented folks will revert to Google when doing
a websearch. It is a de facto in a monopolistic position in the search market
on the global scale when considering North America/Europe.

