
Zuckerberg threatens “major lawsuit” if Warren tries to break up Facebook - koops
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/10/1/20893133/mark-zuckerberg-elizabeth-warren-facebook-sue-us-government-tech-breakup
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m-p-3
Who would go down without a fight if the government tried to break up your
business? Just the logical next step of escalation.

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sunstone
This a little like waving the red flag at the snorting bull. Not a lot of
upside.

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m463
Could the message be to the other bull? (wallstreet)

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wpdev_63
Well if warren wanted to breakup a tech monopoly it would be amazon retail and
aws which subsidizes their business.

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anonuser123456
What is the evidence for such a claim?

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sieabahlpark
AWS is the money maker

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Phillips126
From someone with zero knowledge of this process of breaking up large
companies (example: Instagram and Facebook), how would that work exactly?
Obviously the company would split and become two entities - but what then? How
do the finances work? Each business becomes independently run and cannot
affiliate with each other? Are there protections against "freebie" services,
for example Facebook providing free services/data sharing to Instagram where
it may be a paid feature for other companies?

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bradhe
Would anyone expect anything else?

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lonelappde
How is that a "threat"? If someone threatens to decimate your company, of
course you'll fight hard to save it.

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thorwasdfasdf
We're used to a world of such clear division and fighting between the 2
parties: democrats and republicans.

But, The irony here is that it's democrats that are threatening to break up
facebook and yet facebook is deeply democratic/liberal.

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pixelbath
How can you even claim that "Facebook" is deeply democratic/liberal? You could
say the same about HN, and I've seen quite a few sharply pro-conservative
comments posted here.

Anecdotally, the amount of far-right loose-with-facts garbage being posted to
Facebook was the primary reason I stopped using it.

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Ill_ban_myself
I think this misconception stems primarily from the 2008 Obama campaign where
groundbreaking work was done directly by Obama's campaign staff using social
media for outreach and organizing. This was largely driven by open and direct
channels of communication to Facebook staff and the hiring of Facebook co-
founder Chris Hughes and his work with the campaign.

In retrospect I think the relationships built between the Democratic party and
Facebook were more about Facebook the company dipping its toe into the wider
world of lobbying and the personal relationship of Chris Hughes to LGBT issues
and his partner's burgeoning political career. It had less to do with
Facebook's Executive staff having deeply held Democratic values or entrenching
corporate values that align with the Democratic party and was driven more by a
desire to see favorable economic policy for the company.

In the years since we've seen almost 0 movement by political campaigns to
pursue this kind of outreach short of your typical ad buys. I think Democratic
candidates realized that they were funneling huge amounts of time and money
into a service that is actually a competitor. A competitor that is more
regulated and less scary than what modern political parties actually track,
retain, and use to target their base.

I wonder if Warren isn't getting as much grass roots traction in large part
because she hasn't realized that what Facebook does is chump change compared
to the operation she needs in place to win.

Let's see how far a candidate gets who takes a similar stand against
LexisNexis and threatens to cut off their H-1B visa rubber stamps.

The modern political campaign is basically a startup on the scale of Facebook
but your verticals are online, email, direct mail, text, calls, and door to
door sales. Oh, and you have physical offices in 50 states, your CEO is
perpetually out of office on the road, your sales model is largely B2C, the
unpaid interns outnumber the poorly paid full time staff by 100:1, your runway
is a couple of months, and you have to completely pivot the company to an
entirely new business model 1 month before your IPO (GOTV).

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perl4ever
I think people for some reason overlook the historical coincidence that the
Obama campaign came along only two years after Facebook was open to the
public.

I don't think that any other explanation of why they are associated can be
meaningful, when it was the first presidential campaign that could work with
them, and the last one where it could be groundbreaking.

