Should The US Government Break Up Google, Twitter, and Facebook? (siliconvalley.com) 302
The Bay Area Newsgroup reports:
Political momentum for a crackdown on Silicon Valley's social media giants got a boost this week when a state attorney general said he would tell U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions next week that Google, Facebook and Twitter should be broken up. Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry wants the federal government to do to the social media firms what it did to Standard Oil in 1911, according to a Louisiana newspaper report Tuesday... "This can't be fixed legislatively," Landry told the paper. "We need to go to court with an antitrust suit." He or another high official from his office will next week present the break-up proposal to Sessions... Landry, president of the National Association of Attorneys General, had spent months with his colleagues probing what they described as anti-competitive practices by Facebook, Google and Twitter, according to the paper.
CNET reports: On Friday, Bloomberg reported it had obtained a draft of a potential White House executive order that asks certain government agencies to recommend actions that would "protect competition among online platforms and address online platform bias." The order, reportedly in its preliminary stages, asks US antitrust authorities to "thoroughly investigate whether any online platform has acted in violation of the antitrust laws."
CNET reports: On Friday, Bloomberg reported it had obtained a draft of a potential White House executive order that asks certain government agencies to recommend actions that would "protect competition among online platforms and address online platform bias." The order, reportedly in its preliminary stages, asks US antitrust authorities to "thoroughly investigate whether any online platform has acted in violation of the antitrust laws."
This won't work long term. (Score:5, Interesting)
All of these sites depend on pure mass to be useful to users. They don't want to have to be members of four different Facebook analogues. Break them up, and users will eventually flock to one site, and we are back where we started.
And how will this work? You get assigned to FB1, your wife to FB2, etc? Will you be allowed to leave one site for another? It is just unworkable.
Re:This won't work long term. (Score:5, Interesting)
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There should be an equivalent government service, as an essential service to allow citizens to communicate with each and government, a to create a legitimate public record. An anonymous service using avatars but the users should be registered and identified and that record protected by law requiring search warrants to access.
Beyond that, social media fads. Social media sites are only as big as they market themselves to be, fake users, barely active users, fake clicks, fake responses, straight up fabricated
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Re:This won't work long term. (Score:4, Interesting)
And, as others have noted, why do the likes of Apple and Microsoft that also leverage big data from multiple business units get a pass?
Re: This won't work long term. (Score:2, Funny)
Here is how you split up Twitter. You divide all its employees into groups of 140, and each group becomes its own separate company.
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They're not as good or prevalent at it. Same reason why auditors will raise a one hundred million dollar discrepancy, but not a hundred dollar one.
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You could be a member of four different Facebook analogues and not even know it, if they all used the same content syndication standards.
Re:This won't work long term. (Score:5, Insightful)
The workable solution would be a vigorous enforcement of antitrust regulations. Government does routinely prevent mergers and acquisitions on antitrust grounds; it should not be too hard for them to bar Facebook and Google from gobbling up new start-ups in order to nip nascent competition in the bud.
Yes, but not for those reasons (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually didn't find any insightful comment that addressed the political reasons they are trying it now. Really bad, even dictatorial, reasons.
Anti-trust is a better reason, but I think there should be some improvements in the rationale. Here's my suggestion:
Pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation to make it natural for monopolies to reward themselves by reproducing rather than just growing like insane cancers. Implementation is simple: Progressive taxation of profits based on market share. If a company becomes too dominant, it actually can increase its retained profits by dividing itself into competing companies. The fundamental goal should be to seek at least 3 to 5 competitors to choose from in each market niche.
In the cases of legitimately natural monopolies the high taxes should pay for careful regulation of the monopoly and research to break the monopoly. DSAuPR, atAJG.
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Re:This won't work long term. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This won't work long term. (Score:5, Insightful)
Break them up, and users will eventually flock to one site, and we are back where we started.
Which is exactly what happened to AT&T. Most of the Baby Bells have been rebundled into what is now Verizon. Breaking up monopolies only works if the government routinely intervenes in business acquisitions to avoid new monopolies from forming.
Try making them a regulated monopoly (Score:2)
Ontario Hydro (the electricity monopoly in, well, Ontario) is limited to doing one of three things: generating (one company), long lines (another) and delivery (a third, sometimes replaced by a local monopoly like Toronto Hydro).
It can't sell you kettles and refrigerators anymore: the old Hydro Store is no more.
Its still something of a pain, due to diseconomies of scale, but it's not actually going to change an election or get you swatted (;-))
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I'm mildly familiar with the power routing and balancing problem, and it's horrible, far worse than problems like finding a valid dependency tree for libraries *. (It's due for another look, preferably by our AI overlords, as humans find it hard (;-))
Over and above being supervised to death, they have the normal diseconomies of scale that big companies have, such as the late delivery of software to do their billing.
What they don't do is negligently threaten people's lives and elections. It's a trade-o
Re:This won't work long term. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the first thing I thought about when I read the title. If you just broke them up they would eventually reform under a new name a decade later when nobody cared. Instead of breaking them up it would be better to just regulate them as a public utility.
Granted, having a bunch of senile old farts attempt to regulate something like google or facebook appeals to me about as much as having a blind man shave my ass with a bolo knife.
Re:This won't work long term. (Score:4, Insightful)
No the problem is ultimately that the government doesn't have the slightest interest in this. We are talking about breaking up Facebook now, but only 4 years ago greenlighted a huge mega billion dollar acquisition of WhatsApp. That went through the regulator at the time, as does every merger and acquisition.
The government most definitely can already with the existing regulations prevent these mega companies from forming monopolies, but they just don't do it. Facebook has acquired 3 companies this year alone with zero opposition. What makes anyone think they will be broken up?
Re:This won't work long term. (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes anyone think they will be broken up?
Honestly, not a thing. Everything you have pointed out is truth. Over the past decades they have had plenty of opportunity put a stop to the baby bell merging and facebook/google getting so big. The real truth is they just have no interested in doing so. To much money flowing in one direction and they don't want to kill that tit.
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35 years later we're still better off than we were. Seems like it "worked" to me. Even if it entirely goes back to what it was, it was a good run. Just repeat the process.
Now someone tell me why we shouldn't break up the banks.
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Well, you could forbid people from leaving for X years. Then the FBs broken up would either have to create open communications protocols (open to others by law), or risk having everyone go to some other site. Then let people start moving back and forth, so they compete.
Alternatively, you could break it up so FB, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. are separate companies. Or, you cou
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Lets start with ISPs and cellular companies (Score:4, Insightful)
Its a direct conflict for a cable company to be your ISP. So lets split that up first since there is a clear line
Social networks have no honor, so need a right to privacy bill to protect the users and ban ghost tracking of those who dont use it
Why Twitter? (Score:2)
I can understand Google and Fecesbook but why Twitter?
IMHO a better solution would be stop allowing "de facto" common platforms to censor people that goes against their political ideology. Business should be free from politics. (Yeah, I know, a pipe dream, but we need to start somewhere.)
Breaking them up won't solve anything. Your data will *still* be sold. Instead of 1 company selling it, it will be ~3x more.
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Re:Why Twitter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. You have a right to free speech. You do not have a right to use my printing press to exercise it.
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Unless you happen to belong to a protected group
And everybody does; at least everyone who has a race, sex, age, etc.
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"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." - George Orwell
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Unless your printing press is a cake and icing.
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Unless your printing press is a cake and icing.
Cake icing shops are free to censor their output. They're not free to choose their customers based on sexual preferences. Admitedly there is some cross-over, in that refusing to make a wedding cake showing two men holding hands amounts to discrimination, unless they also refuse to make such cakes with bride and groom toppers.
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47 USC 230(c)(1) [cornell.edu]
47 USC 230(c)(2)(A) [cornell.edu]
I'm missing the part that says "you may choose only one."
Yes, they can. It says so right in the very act that you're discussing.
Re:Why Twitter? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Why Twitter? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is getting really old: for the 637236th time - different rules apply to a business deemed to have a monopoly or a near-monopoly position in the market they operate in.
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Breaking them up won't solve anything. Your data will *still* be sold. Instead of 1 company selling it, it will be ~3x more.
This. What's needed is regulation backed up with action, not splitting things up.
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Break them up! (Score:4, Funny)
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It did work on AT&T. Prices dropped dramatically.
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And when they say social networks are too big and need to be broken up, are they really including Google Plus in that category.
I mean, I'm sure the Google Plus guys and their 3 users are flattered, but three is an odd number and can't be broken up fairly. I bet they didn't think of that.
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Betteridge got it right, again. Facebook, Twitter and Google all have viable alternatives that are easy to access, the fact that few use them is irrelevant. Also, there is little standing in the way of people setting up their own alternatives to all of these platforms. There are things that need investigating at Facebook and Google but I know of nothing warranting breaking them up.
Before you condemn me, I hate Facebook, think social media is scourge on society. However, it seems like more than anything else that this is just sour grapes over how these private businesses conduct themselves. There is an argument to be made for the social good but it defies every argument put forth by Republicans over governments interfering with businesses. If you want to do what's best for society then you also need to behave consistently.
Hypocrisy, thy name is Jeff Landry.
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Gab is just one of many alternatives. Nobody is stopping them from existing, they just aren't helping them to exist because they are violating their ToS for their various services. There are many other social networking apps in their app stores.
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The best solution would be to mandate data sharing and portability. If my friend wants to use Facebook and I want Bookface then they should talk to each other and we should be able to communicate.
Make it like email, where you can choose your provider more or less freely.
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Remember when application protocols were defined by academics in public RFCs?
For one, they started out the idea that there was no globalized central data repository -- that there would be multiple data repositories, requiring both client-server and server-client protocols. And that there would be multiple software implementations, so just define a protocol and let people implement it as they saw fit.
Now it's all designed for central monopoly data storage and a single source for software from the same peopl
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Someone who knows more about this than me should write an RFC for social media data interchange.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well one thing that should have been done is stopping them from buying up the competition, something that Facebook seems to do a lot and the others too much.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't disagree but a Republican congress did nothing to prevent any of this. Their objections are entirely new which seems to indicate sour grapes rather a genuine regulatory objection.
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If you want to do what's best for society then you also need to behave consistently.
You can do both by looking at everything in front of you case by case objectively rather than painting it with the red or blue brush. That is not hypocrisy, that is the government working, something that hasn't happen in a while.
Disney (Score:4, Insightful)
Disney needs breaking up.
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So do banks, ISPs and other giants who have abused their position.
The current governing party has increasingly abdicated it's responsibilities and blocked others trying to perform their own for the last 40 years. Time to vote them all out.
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Certainly the largest banks should be broken up. There was talk at the beginning of the Great Recession that they posed too much of a systemic risk. The Feds never did anything about them and now Trump is their lapdog...my apologies to the honorable dogs.
Audit their data (Score:2)
I am coming from the perspective of abuse of collection/collation (they know things about us that we do not know that they know) and then how they use that data (often to someone else's advantage). These are aspects of privacy, but more than is generally understood by the term 'privacy'.
The audit would need to be carried out by people who are: trusted, independent and not bribeable (I wish). Their audits should be made public. The audit could mean one or more of:
No need (Score:2)
Meemaw and peepaw are on Facebook, mom is on Pinterest, the kids are on Instagram and great-granddad is on Myspace and his girfriend on 2.Life.
Better idea (Score:2)
Revised Fairness Doctrine (Score:2)
Just resurrect the Fairness Doctrine and apply it specifically to these companies.
just relocate (Score:2)
Perhaps they'll just relocate to a certain emerald isle kind of like a certain fruit-themed company did.
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Which is why we'll need an EU-like agreement to prevent companies from running to the weakest jurisdictions.
Simply require them to hold to the law (Score:3)
My understanding is that they cite themselves as being publishers under the law in some contexts and effectively communications companies in other...
and as is typical they change their identification depending on what is most convenient for them.
Publishers for example are responsible for their content and communications companies have "safe harbor".
Publishers can police their content and communications companies cannot unless there is a legal violation.
So if Google is a publisher they are liable for all content on their service personally and cannot cite safe harbor.
If Google is a communications company then they cannot remove content from their services unless it violates the law.
Simply doing that would solve most of the current shit show.
Google would reflexively be forced to be a communications company because the publisher condition imposes too much overhead to be practical. That would remove the concern that google is biasing content. End of argument.
Literally just apply the law and don't let them change their identification. They can choose whichever they like. Totally their choice. And then then apply the law. Done.
Yes and no (Score:2)
Yes to Google. They've got their hands in too many pies. Force them to be broken into the search engine/Gmail, Android & Chrome, YouTube, and all the other shit they do. No to Twitter and Facebook, because all they do is their websites. If they get into anything outside of that, then force them to spin off those other units.
Generally, I'd say that any large corporation ought to be broken up if they are involved in multiple connected enterprises. But if their business is just one thing, then no.
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According to https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org], Facebook has bought up 71 other businesses including competitors such as Instagram, Oculus, and Whatsapp. As long as they're buying up the competition, they're too big.
Thank God! (Score:3)
I would suggest that all posts on Facebook and Twitter be funneled through a trustworthy group of House of representatives members, and they who know what is good and right can stop anything that they know is not good from ever being posted, and on repeat offenses, exercise a second amendment solution on the guilty party.
But Americans - this is not enough. Our dear leader tells us every day about the terrible lies the media tells about him.
We must extend the telling of only the truth to all forms of media, and merciless crushing of those who would bear false witness, and God will reward America once again.
Even better, shut down all media liars immediately, and set up a Government run Ministry of Truth..
Oh......what.... hold on...
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Please don't give them ideas.
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Did you make this same argument when they wanted to break up AT&T? Did it work out that way?
I suppose to be fair the government does listen to your phone calls via the NSA, but only secretly and illegally and they do it to all social media as well already.
Google yes, Facebook maybe, Twitter no (Score:4, Interesting)
What would a broken-up Twitter look like? They only have the Twitter network itself, and Periscope, and 99% of the company is Twitter. Splitting them up would still leave Twitter being just as big and problematic. Trying to split the Twitter network won't work - everyone will just switch to one of them. Even if you try to do it on national or regional lines, half the accounts I follow are foreign so I'd end up using them (or more likely, an aggregation service), and then you're right back where you started.
Facebook has some more substantial products besides their core Facebook. There's WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus... I'd love for Oculus to go independent, the main reason I refuse to buy their hardware is that they're owned by Facebook and are thus guaranteed to turn evil at some point. A breakup here would actually do something. I'm not sure it's a good idea, but it's not completely unproductive like a Twitter breakup.
Google is too big. Search, GMail, Android, Chrome, Chromebooks/ChromeOS, Youtube, Drive, Docs, Pay, Play, Plus, Blogger, AppEngine/Cloud, Waze, Project Fi... the network effect is huge and it's clearly anticompetitive - and I didn't even list Alphabet's separate holdings, which include Waymo and Google Fiber. They need to be broken up. They're already anticompetitive as hell.
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Trump would shit a brick.
just strip them of legal protections (Score:5, Interesting)
Google, Facebook, and Twitter currently enjoy legal protections against copyright infringement, defamation of character, and other kinds of legal issues because they claim that they are just redistribution information with no editorial control. Obviously, that is a sham.
The solution is simple: remove legal protection from these companies and hold them responsible for anything that appears on their web sites.
No breakup needed, the problem will take care of itself with a few lawsuits.
Re:just strip them of legal protections (Score:4, Insightful)
The person criticizing the EU for "criminalizing speech" earlier this week is now advocating for criminalizing speech -- so long as it is merely the courts destroying mechanisms for distributing speech at the whims of private interests.
You truly are an idiot.
Hint: remove legal protection from those companies and you must remove them from all companies. And then you can kiss your ability to post insanity like this goodbye. Nobody will be willing to pay copywriters and attorneys to review your material, so the internet will turn into an electronic version of a newspaper -- usatoday.com -- minus any comment mechanism.
And it will be glorious... /s
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Yes they will, and they do it now. They're called algorithms. That's the crux of this issue: they weigh their algorithms. Don't weigh the algorithms and you're providing a public forum. Weigh them and it's no longer public. Tweak the system to actively hide users while fooling them into thinking they have posting abilities and it becomes propaganda.
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No, they don't [recode.net]. They're called immense staffs of human reviewers. If you're lucky, an algorithm automatically flags a subset of material without so many false positive that you overwhelm your Phillipino workforce.
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No, merely opening them up to civil lawsuits.
No, I'm merely suggesting implementing what is already law: you enjoy those legal protections if you don't exercise editorial control.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter should lose those legal protections because they have started exercising editorial control.
N
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That's a heck of a double edged sword there. Small sites would never get their comment systems off
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As long as they don't exercise editorial control, they'd enjoy the same protections as they do now.
The problem with Google etc. is that they exercise editorial control yet still demand protection from lawsuits.
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Liable is not. All three of those companies produce output that is not 'customer' created.
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Not sure breaking them up will work. (Score:2)
It'll be like AT&T.
Eventually, weak sisters will die off and the remainders will agglomerate back into a whole.
A better option would probably be some form of Internet Bill of Rights, backed by outsized fines where the minimum amounts start at "ruinous" and move up from there.
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Again, I don't think breaking them up will help.
They'll continue the bad behavior.
But now they'll say "See! You have OPTIONS!"
They'll all still be the same authoritarian sociopolitical monoculture behind the screen though.
So NOTHING will change.
Instead of being booted from a dozen different platforms like Alex Jones, you'll be booted from TWO dozen, or maybe three dozen.
And Microsoft and Amazon (Score:2)
Why just those three? Microsoft didn't suddenly become a cuddly teddy bear and Amazon is well on its way to full evil too. Or don't break up any of them. Just don't play favorites, and try to serve the greater good.
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Duh. Landry is a Tea-Party Republican. This is just a way to combat the perceived liberal bias of these companies.
In other words, the Fairness Doctrine was censorship, but this is A-OK because it is in a Republican cause. See how the alt-right idiots right here are lapping it up.
It's their own fault (Score:4, Insightful)
Being a company isn't the problem.
Once you've become a behemoth of a company who can manipulate popular opinion on a whim, now you're no longer just a company. You're either an ally or an adversary depending on the beliefs of the CEO, or how deep your pocketbook is. The Party in power loves these platforms as long as they are useful to them. Once they're not, we start seeing calls to break them up because of how much influence they wield over the population.
This is why it's dangerous to allow media giants to consolidate. You're putting an awful lot of power into the hands of too few people. In effect, we're letting a very few subtly influence how the majority thinks. I shouldn't have to explain how dangerous that is.
Here in the US, there isn't any neutral news anymore. They're propaganda channels for Team Red or Team Blue. You absolutely cannot watch the news without some sort of political bias inserted somewhere. ( Which is why I quit watching it at all )
So, yes. There are a lot of companies that need to be broken up and forbidden from ever becoming one again. Media companies, Content Provider / Content Delivery, Telecoms, Banks / Investment Houses, etc.
The problem is these same companies wield an awful lot of influence and money over the very people who should be regulating them.
( Why would I break up a company that will help my team win the next election ? )
Which is why they still exist at all in their current form.
Why Twitter? (Score:2)
Google makes a bit more sense, but still, what would you break it up into? Would you separate youtube from search, would that really affect things? What about Alphabet as a whole? Regulation and investigation would make more sense.
But Facebook, Facebook is an easy yes. Facebook is trivial to break up into Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp. They're a
When its all political? (Score:2)
And Apple & Intel? And Amazon & eBay? Mi (Score:3)
Where does it stop? Why some but not all? Who decides? What is the core legal rationale?
Seems to me like a huge politically driven can of worms... a slippery/slimy slope to oblivion.
The Google "Monopoly" (Score:4, Insightful)
During Standard Oil's heyday, a consumer wanting to escape from the monopolist's grip would've had to drill for oil himself and build his own refineries.
If you were a Windows user and wanted to kiss Microsoft goodbye, you still had to remove Windows from your hard drive and buy/download/compile all your apps for your preferred alternative OS, if at all possible.
Escaping the Google search engine monopoly, according to my latest information, requires the following steps:
1. launch browser
2. type "bing.com" into the address bar
3. hit "Enter"
This has to be the cutest "monopoly" in the history of antitrust legislation.
This is politically motivated (Score:4, Insightful)
Based on a narrative that Facebook, Twitter, et. al. are engaged in an alleged campaign to censor conservative voices and opinions, and to suppress news that supports a conservative narrative.
The more cynical might observe that these companies are large contributors to Democratic candidates for office, and that this is an attempt at retaliation.
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If a company hasn't done something wrong, the government has no business doing anything to them.
Sorry to burst your bubble but companies can get around the law or engage in lawless behavior before policies of the state can catch up leading to all sorts of disasters. Right now technology has undermined american dogma's like accountability in markets. The videogame industry being a prime example, the internet allowed US videogame companies to steal videogame software because their customers cannot reach these companies. So they can forcibly defraud users without their consent because users would nee
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I have no idea what you're talking about regarding videogames.
Could you give some specific case?
In the 90's, pre internet, game companies had to give you all the files - the complete software when you bought a game. So in the late 90's CEO's came up with a fraudulent scheme to get naive and irrational public used to the idea of buying games you don't own or control because they knew most people were computer illiterate. Like how they took Ultima rpg's in development and reballed them Ultima online, to get the subscription money, aka paying monthly for a game you never own. MMO's were the plot to
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You could have a setting that by default only allows apps from the Apple store but if you want you can load from other stores.
United States v. Microsoft Corp. (Score:2)
If you're looking for anti-competitive and customer intrusive behaviour, you don't need to look any further (and they've been convicted of it besides).
Replying to "What about Microsoft?" (Score:3)
I think the government is not well-managed, either. It would be a mistake to think that the government would know what to do to correct the problems. At least that is true of the U.S. government we have now.
Those companies need better management. A long time ago I had a long discussion about Google management with a mid-level Google manager. The manager said that "Google has more money that it knows how to spend". Also,
"well-defined purposes are easier to manage" (Score:2)
That makes sense to me. However, "break up" is not a good way of expressing "limiting management to divisions that are easier to manage".
Also, I see no evidence that the U.S. government is, at present, capable of a careful, thoughtful arrangement of divisions.
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Re: What about Microsoft? (Score:2)
Boeing and Lockheed-Martin are PART OF the government. It's pure legal fiction that says they're "private" companies.
Re: No. Just make TAKING private info illegal (Score:2)