
Advocacy groups are pushing the FTC to break up Facebook - wil_I_am_27
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/24/18195959/facebook-advocacy-groups-ftc-break-up-cambridge-analytica-scandal-data-breach
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porpoisely
"Advocacy groups" hired and funded by whom? There are lots of "advocacy
groups" demanding a lot of things. It would be interesting to find out why
theverge and other news companies selectively choose which "advocacy groups"
to promote.

Also, what about microsoft, netflix, amazon, twitter and most importantly
google? Also, what about humongous international banks? Or the
chemicals/agribusiness where 2 or 3 companies dominate the world's market.
What about the media? Where a handle of megacorporations own so much of the
market?

~~~
reaperducer
_Also, what about microsoft, netflix, amazon, twitter and most importantly
google_

Only have to break up one and the rest will fall into line.

 _what about_ ism

~~~
wahern
Fall in line how?

Other than Google, which clearly abuses (at times) their market power from the
dominance of Google Ads, Android, and Chrome, I have no idea what draws the
ire of all those other companies; not individually and certainly not as a
group.

I guess it's supposed to be something... something... social media...
something... privacy... something. But I strongly suspect it's just vague
anti-corporate sentiment, anxiety around our bitter political divisiveness,
and resentment over the excesses in the technology sector (e.g. brogrammers).

I'm no anti-trust scholar but I don't think the purpose and design of anti-
trust law is to resolve national cultural crises.

~~~
giornogiovanna
Microsoft is the poster-child of abusing market power, and Amazon isn't
exactly innocent on that front, either.

~~~
wahern
I do think Amazon is the new Microsoft. With AWS, Amazon figured out how to
embrace, extend, and extinguish the entire open source ecosystem. But AFAIK
AWS isn't yet acting anti-competitively. (And neither is Microsoft any longer,
for that matter.) I suppose maybe in the book publishing industry there are
strong anti-trust concerns.

But I don't think this is what people have on their minds. Few in the industry
question the consequences of moving to AWS. And most people--techies and non-
techies--use and enjoy Google Search, Chrome, and Android without qualms.
Nobody is shedding a tear for Bing, Firefox, or Yahoo, and in any event nobody
is arguing that Google unfairly muscled them out.

It's only when a service or technology implicates social media do people
really get fired up, and to a lesser degree the selling of mined personal
data. But the fact that people think of Facebook, Google, _and_ Twitter, plus
a litany of other tech companies with household recognition, should all be
punished betrays their logic. None of this behavior is anti-competitive; it's
not destroying markets; it's not transferring wealth. It's one thing to argue
personal data aggregation, mining, and selling should be more heavily
regulated (a la GDPR). But anti-trust has nothing to do with it, and I don't
see how splitting any of these companies up would substantially change
anything, let alone result in a net benefit. At least not under the pretense
of "fixing" social media, privacy, or fake news.

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root_axis
Break it up into what? All the problems of Facebook are inherent to Facebook
as a product, "breaking up" Facebook doesn't really fix anything.

~~~
chr1
Two facebooks that need to talk with each other (and new implementations) via
open and documented protocol.

~~~
traek
This is the worst case scenario for consumers.

An "open and documented protocol" is what led to the Cambridge Analytica
scandal; most people are not informed enough to properly manage permissions
and even if they were, the personal data of friends would necessarily be
available via this protocol. Posting something on this new platform-ized
Facebook would be akin to sharing with every app each of your friends has
authorized.

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wudangmonk
Are there any historical examples of this where the company in question was
not in charge or national resources or infrastructure that was paid by a
government?. All the bell, oil, railroad examples have this in common.

Short of the government making these companies the only government approved
ones in their respective fields I do not see how breaking them up would be
something that can be done. Even then the monopoly would only exist because
yet again the government created it.

~~~
reaperducer
_Are there any historical examples of this where the company in question was
not in charge or [sic] national resources or infrastructure that was paid by a
government?._

American Tobacco Company, for one. There are a number of others.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._American_Toba...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._American_Tobacco_Co).

~~~
wahern
American Tobacco was aggressively and successfully _conspiring_ with other
companies to maintain high prices. It's precisely such conspiracies to
restrain trade that are _specifically_ prohibited by the Sherman Act.

How is Facebook conspiring to restrain trade? With whom? Would breaking
Facebook up result in lower prices for using social media services? The
services are already free. Should people expect to get paid for posting
selfies?

Breaking up Facebook for its behavior would be like breaking up IBM for age
discrimination. It doesn't matter whether it's wrong nor even whether it's
illegal. It's neither the function nor intent of anti-trust law to break up
companies under such pretenses.

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ashton314
Are there any analogous corporate breakups in history? Any tech companies that
have been broken up as these people are suggesting?

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b11484
AT&T and Bell were broken up, but that was because it was a monopoly.[1] I
don't think Facebook is a monopoly though.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System)

~~~
evv
It does effectively have a monopoly on online identity. Organizations like
Uber and Airbnb depend on FB accounts for trust.

But I think the most effective way to take down the monopoly isn't by
regulating, because it may hurt consumers. Instead the government could help
make FB obsolete.

If people could "login with us.gov" instead of "login with Facebook", I think
most people would.

~~~
jerkstate
If there's any dependency it's a soft dependency. I don't have FB and I use
uber and airbnb.

~~~
evv
It may be harder as a host/driver, but you're right that they may have fixed
that dependency. Back in 2008, it was one of the main ways you could trust the
car or house that you're about to step into.

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nkingsy
It seems to me that US trust busting in the past was:

1\. Seen as radical at the time, and odious to all private industry. 2\. Able
to leave shareholder value somewhat intact because they were simply splitting
physical assets.

While I think 2 might be addressed by eg forcing Instagram/YouTube/etc to spin
off, 1 would require the election of radicals to high office. Our political
system has built in so many safeguards over the years to keep true radicals
out of office that I just can't see it happening. Trump promised many things,
but disruption of business was not one of them.

edit: What I see as more likely is regulations that preserve shareholder value
and enshrine these companies as utilities, erecting barriers to entry so high
that they become permanent monopolies, while (hopefully) slowly reigning in
the wild profits.

edit 2: Facebook's current share price basically values it as a utility
already, and given their slowing growth they might even lobby for such
regulation themselves to staunch the bleeding.

~~~
stcredzero
_1 would require the election of radicals to high office_

How does Theodore Roosevelt fit into this model? How does JFK/Johnson fit into
this model?

 _edit: What I see as more likely is regulations that preserve shareholder
value and enshrine these companies as utilities, erecting barriers to entry so
high that they become permanent monopolies, while (hopefully) slowly reigning
in the wild profits._

That's 180 degrees away from where I'd go. Change regulations to favor new
competitors arising. Right now, big tech companies seem to comprise a faction
which sometimes colludes to crush potential competitors.

~~~
nkingsy
TR was punted to the vice presidency to get him out of New York because he was
too radical. Johnson and JFK pushed through some of the most progressive civil
rights and anti poverty measures this country has ever seen. By today’s
standards all three would 100% be considered radicals, and were considered so
by their contemporaries.

Edit: I didn’t say what I want to happen, just what I thought was most likely.
Strange reason to downvote

Edit 2: I think Vietnam weighs heavily on LBJ and JFK. I personally lay that
on the feet of the military industrial complex coopting an inexperienced JFK,
and LBJ doing everything he could to see through his predecessors policies.

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JumpCrisscross
What’s the best one for a New Yorker to get involved with?

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basic1
Break up Google while you're at it.

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AimForTheBushes
More like Amazon

~~~
endofcapital
How about all three? Instead of everyone just picking their favorite platform
for dubious reasons and blindly adhering to that corp maybe we should just
bust them all up at once in one swoop, whether they are on your "team" or not.

Google is probably the most dangerous and abusive of the three today, but I
think Amazon is trying to steal that throne and will probably be much scarier
in a few years.

