Bill Gates: Don't Break Up Tech Giants, It Won't Stop Anticompetitive Behavior (zdnet.com) 172
dryriver shares a report from ZDNet: Speaking with Bloomberg, Microsoft co-founder Gates said it is better to regulate big tech companies. Breaking them up will simply result in two companies indulging in bad behavior. "I don't know the last time a company was broken up but you have to really think, 'Is that the best thing if there's a way that a company's behaving that you want to get rid of?' Then you should just say, 'Hey, OK, that's a banned behavior,'" said Gates. "Splitting a company in two and having two people doing the bad thing, you know that doesn't seem like a solution," he added. Gates said it was a "pretty narrow set of things" where a break-up would be a suitable solution. "I was naive about this but that was a long time ago and I didn't realize that as Microsoft gets successful we'd come under scrutiny and we went through our thing back in the 1990s and that's made us more thoughtful about this kind of activity," he said. Gates also told the Financial Times that fossil fuel divestment has had zero impact on emissions.
Don't break them up (Score:2)
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I think what he meant was break them up (except Microsoft.)
We have come far since the 1990s. Of the big tech companies, Microsoft is the smallest threat.
Re:Don't break them up (Score:5, Insightful)
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There's nothing wrong with telemetry. The problem is that MS doesn't allow users to turn it off.
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Funny you are saying that on a tech oriented site. It's a problem that they don't allow common users to turn it off easily but they don't stop people from doing it.
Why not both? (Score:3)
Just execute their founders!
Break up the company, break up the founders and the CEOs!
Personally, I'm fond of the idea of using trains for the physical breaking up.
Have one part of the body attached to one railroad car and the other part to the other car. Then decouple them.
But I guess a guillotine would work too...
As for ole Billy... He just keeps spouting nonsense these days.
He's 63. His brain is officially mush. He should go away somewhere warm, spend money and wait for death.
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Break up the company, break up the founders and the CEOs!
Have you even seen how these degenerates function? It's like breaking up starfish, you just doubled or tripled your problem as each chunk grows back into a functioning parasite. Nuke them from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
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Please stop picking on 6-digit account numbers, it's numerist.
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Folks with a 6 digit account may and should remember the news shared and discussed on ./ about the horrible acts of anticompetitive behavior, lying under oath and ultimately, conviction of that monopoly abuser company. So your comment comes off as quite weird and misguided. This doesn't mean I identify with the style of discourse here, despite the strong emotions evidenced; one could control his wording. And so could you. Because your accusation is off; at that time period, and after that, a lot of people i
Re: Why not both? (Score:2)
The parent post contained little of value to the discussion. I was there, first PC purchase 1992 when I was tasked with integrating it with an AS400. I don't see any point in continuing to vilify Gates, the world has moved on, and invective about him says more about the poster, than it does about W. Gates.
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As someone with a 4 digit ID I'm not sure I agree. I think on this board people looked down at working for MS but mostly people were very excited about working there. Even if you hated their product their campus is fucking amazing.
Anyway, yes MS was and still is shit and I really have no problems with any verbal abuse the company receives. I do think they have some great employees though so I hope people will seperate the company and its leadership from the working folks there trying to do well.
Wait, what? [Re:Why not both?] (Score:3)
....Or, you've bought a low-digit slashdot account and to lend some elder-statesman credibility to your ranting...
Wait, what? That's a thing? You can sell Slashdot accounts for actual dollars?
I think I have an old /. account around somewhere with a low number from back in the dark ages (can't remember if it's six digits)-- haven't used it in a decade or so, but maybe I could dig up login credentials on some ancient backup...
just for my reference, how much is it worth?
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End the legal protections from punishment for the company's misdeed for the CEO, Board, AND shareholders and start locking these sick people up, that'll be a good start
Re: Don't break them up (Score:2)
I think what you mean is, "get rid of limited liability".
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He would know... (Score:5, Insightful)
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innocent only because they lost miserably in the phone market. They still use telemetry in their demented PC world.
He's not wrong... (Score:2, Insightful)
Where did the split into the Bells get us? He is correct on this point.
If you split up Facebook, then what do you split them into? Two companies that compete in the same spaces? Seven? This simply cements the Facebook model as the one that "works," when the premise is that it is fundamentally broken. Incentivize acting like a good citizen.
Rules and competition not government breakups.
--
It is better to be alone than in bad company. - George Washington
Re:He's not wrong... (Score:4, Insightful)
Also Standard Oil. But in both those cases, the split was dealing with a monopoly by splitting it geographically into lots of local monopolies, then letting them merge again a few years later into a few big companies that go on to compete with each other nationally.
Re: He's not wrong... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: He's not wrong... (Score:2)
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It sounds like a massively over engineered piece of kit. I guess you also like the Juicero juicers?
Re: He's not wrong... (Score:3)
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As an engineer, there's elegance in exact opposite - goods that work just as well as designed, and not any better. Which results in costs to manufacture the product to be optimal.
Any idiot can over engineer a piece of hardware to stupid levels using far more resources than needed. That takes little expertise. The expertise is to build the product that is just good enough, using just enough resources to make it just good enough.
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AT&T wasn't about to lose the rental value of a device just because someone used it to bash in someone else's skull.
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Re: He's not wrong... (Score:2)
And don't forget.. (Score:2)
The 'we know enough secrets about politicians/reporters and their families to destroy them if they step too far out of line' company...
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If you don't like it you're free to not use their software.
And yes, that means you'll miss out on the value they could deliver you.
But you don't have a right to another person's labor or use of their property.
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Doesn't help with anything. Facebook is well documented to run shadow profiles on people who are not using their services. Exacerbated by the fact that their software comes preinstalled and not possible to uninstall on many phones sold today.
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Please compare the 'power' of Facebook to make people an offer to the real power of government to murder people.
Also, Facebook doesn't steal any data, they copy, you don't lose access to that data, so it cannot be theft.
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The shadow profiles are of people who don't use Facebook, or who did and deleted their accounts. If you ever hit a site that has a Facebook ad, social media functionality, etc., and you didn't block that ad or function, they have a shadow profile on you. They're also good at tying new IDs to existing shadow accounts, so deleting your cookies doesn't work for long.
Re: He's not wrong... (Score:2)
Unless you then regulate it, the social company is just going to start selling ads and become the new Facebook. The ad company will go out of business.
Re:He's not wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
Where did the split into the Bells get us? Are you crazy? It got us everything we have today. AT&T would not let any equipment not made by them connect to the phone network. When they were finally broken up and their monopoly on the network broken, hundreds of vendors produced thousands of phone products and the race was on to produce what the consumer wanted.
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And now we all carry always-on/real-time location/activity trackers. Guess we really showed them!
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It got me 15 years of paychecks from a competing telephone company.
Break up what? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Social media could do with breaking up, especially Facebook.
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But into what? That's the part that never seems to get answered. You could make them divest Instagram and What's App, but you still have the core behemoth that realistically can't get broken up. There are no geographic boundaries you can impose, you can't make them spin off their ability to post photos and links because none of those businesses could actually survive on their own. Even if you take the smart-alec "Good!" response, someone else will pop up to do exactly the same function, quite possibly the e
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It's not like Ma Bell that sat on all sorts of technology for decades that had a virtual monopoly.
I don't know if you are referring to Facebook or AT&T having a "virtual monopoly".
For the record: AT&T has real, state granted monopolies in portions of most states.
Yes, sure, regulate them (Score:5, Insightful)
That way, through regulatory capture, the existing giants can make sure the burdens on any new competitors are so severe that their monopolies are secure forever.
Re:Yes, sure, regulate them (Score:5, Informative)
That way, through regulatory capture, the existing giants can make sure the burdens on any new competitors are so severe that their monopolies are secure forever.
This is the real issue. Regulatory capture is a big step on the path to monopoly.
What regulation is needed is clear and simple regulations about what data is allowed to be collected without people's explicit knowledge and consent. With an emphasis on pretty much no data, so that it is clear that anyone spying on you without a warrant or an explicit time limited and narrowly scoped agreement from you is committing a punishable crime.
Not seven layers of corporate bureaucracy and reporting without meaningful restriction so that only a company with 50 lawyers and a 30 million dollar legal compliance department can exist and compete.
The Zuck is already breakings them thingz (Score:2)
It was his motto for over a decade : Break stuff faster and fail harder.
So go for Bezos or Benioff with their egocentric mammoths.
Well, won't work just now... (Score:4, Interesting)
Now we're basically living in corporate capture paradise (translation: the eighth circle of hell).
But when there's an actual government in place eventually, perhaps after the Baby Boomers have shifted out - I wouldn't mind seeing more corporate charters revoked entirely and assets seized to cover non-investment debts.
Investors work on the basis of risk. Everyone else working to earn a living should get paid first when a company screws up big enough to get the corporate death penalty.
I agree that just splitting up a group of truly bad actors expecting them to properly compete over time is just asking for history to repeat itself. Same with any kind of in-place recognized utility monopoly status if it leaves the worst actors still in charge and able to shift funds to themselves in any way.
If you're needing to demolish a condemned bit of predatory business stagnation, then do so - perhaps auctioning the rights to the previous assets on the basis of a more stringent corporate license to anyone that wants to perform that role in a less predatory manner.
Or, you know, if it's something like Payday Loans, just trash them all, replace them with actual regulated banks, perhaps requiring debtors to pass real college courses in finance and debt instead of infinite fees for statistically normal failures. It would be interesting to see CEOs sitting in class because they went with a bankruptcy strategy.
Ryan Fenton
He's not wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)
And Microsoft is a good example of why a breakup... and indeed, all of the whinging over "big tech"... is unnecessary and stupid.
Sure, we all remember when Microsoft was the 800lb gorilla crossed with Atilla the Hun. And yeah, at the time, I was outraged too when they bought themselves a republican president to make their antitrust penalty go away. And they should probably still be punished for that last bit.
But, in hindsight, history has shown that the antitrust trial, and the ordered but aborted breakup, were unnecessary. Microsoft's dominance was not broken by government action. It was broken because of the very nature of the tech industry. Microsoft was brought low because they were blindsided by Apple and Google, having been so focused on Windows and Office that they simply could not see that mobile and web services were going to become the future. And tech is FULL of these events. Microsoft themselves got to be dominant in the first place by punching out Apple and IBM.
And speaking of Apple... they went from being nobody, to the king of the hill, to a has-been, to "who?", to about-to-be-bankrupt, to "the iPod company", to "the iPhone company", to the most valuable company *EVER*. And, last time I looked, they've been eclipsed in the market cap and are on their way down vs. the competition. Facebook? They're probably the most vulnerable of all to simple market forces. But social media is subject to the fickle whims of what is considered cool. Remember MySpace? They were once the giant that Facebook is now. Everybody who was anybody was on MySpace. Then, one day (And who even knows why?) it became uncool. And within a year, everyone had left for Facebook and you could almost see the tumbleweeds if you every logged back into MySpace. And before MySpace, everyone was on tribe.net. Before Tribe, it was Frindster. And before Frindster, we all had our Livejournals.
So yeah... while I'm no fan of the house of Gates, credit where it's due. He's right on this one. And personally, I'm of the opinion that the whole anti-techie hysteria is just that: hysteria. It is manufactured outrage designed to deflect attention away from the true problems in our society.
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" Remember MySpace? They were once the giant that Facebook is now. Everybody who was anybody was on MySpace. Then, one day (And who even knows why?) it became uncool. And within a year, everyone had left for Facebook and you could almost see the tumbleweeds if you every logged back into MySpace. And before MySpace, everyone was on tribe.net. Before Tribe, it was Frindster. And before Frindster, we all had our Livejournals."
Never heard of any of those things. I think what you are doing is called "projecting
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You've never heard of myspace? How old are you , 12? Shouldn't you be in school?
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Did you say that Microsoft is unnecessary and stupid? Agree, most definitely. Software tech would be 10-15 years beyond where it is now if Microsoft had never existed. A pox upon its pustulent walking corpse.
Re: He's not wrong. (Score:2)
He's wrong. (Score:2)
Re:He's not wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft set computing back about 20 years, IMO, between terrible licensing restrictions, support of crappy architectures and languages, and of course simply scaring new companies out of entering the market. All because it wasn't broken up when it needed to be. The fact that it possibly (only possibly) doesn't need to be broken up now doesn't get those lost decades back.
And personally, I'm of the opinion that the whole anti-techie hysteria is just that: hysteria. It is manufactured outrage designed to deflect attention away from the true problems in our society.
Given how much of our society is based on technology I'm not convinced you can separate the two. Social media has encouraged, or at least facilitated, polarisation which in turn is the root cause of an awful lot of social and political ills today.
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Re: He's not wrong. (Score:2)
A horrible tyrant? Compared to who? Alexander? Julius? Cyrus? They all killed countless numbers of people in the name of civilization and conquest. What makes Ghengis so "horrible"?
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Social media has encouraged, or at least facilitated, polarisation which in turn is the root cause of an awful lot of social and political ills today.
Only online. I step outside into my community and everyone gets along just fine regardless of online BS. It's only the social media nobodies and the TV talking heads having fits over things. Yeah there are some blue hair face mask wearing milk shake tossing losers out there but they aren't a product of this, those types have been around since the 60's and are just a by product of mental illness and activism. People looking for trouble have a way of finding, social media is just a tool they use now along wit
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Apple is a bad example for your argument.
For a time, Microsoft kept Apple afloat precisely because it was worried about antitrust.
Re: He's not wrong. (Score:2)
Or because they wanted Office to become a de facto standard on Mac.
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This line of reasoning is a bit like claiming that a railway crossing without the auditory warning and
Re:He's not wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
When did Microsoft lose their dominance? They're so dominant now that they can basically sell ads as part of the operating system in Windows 10. Their licensing system is just short of Oracle's in terms of onerous terms.
About the only thing you can say is that they didn't *also* dominate search, mobile phones and social media, but they do have a big chunk of the video gaming market. It's an open question how many of these failures were the result of Microsoft's vision and business execution, and how much was constraint from the last anti-trust trial, and how much was customer wariness of another Microsoft near monopoly.
Were Bill Gates is wrong is that a broken up Microsoft would have lost anti-competitive opportunities. The logical split with Microsoft was operating systems, server software and desktop applications. With those no longer part of the same company, none of those new companies would have any incentive to prop up the other. Office on Linux and Mac at parity with Windows OS. Exchange on Linux and FreeBSD at parity with Windows. Windows doing all kinds of things not necessary to prop up Office or Server applications, possibly even releasing a desktop for Linux.
It's also reasonable that each would have been better to software buyers, especially operating systems and server software, because those buyers would have choices.
Listen to Gates for advice on monopolies is ridiculous. He's beyond the ability to provide anything that isn't biased by his own battles with the government and his personal investment in Microsoft.
Re: He's not wrong. (Score:2)
I haven't worked at a company in over a decade where anyone earning salary was using MS products. MS has fallen far, but they have much further to fall.
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"I'm not sure you can classify 78% of the desktop OS market as being "brought low""
I'm sure the management of Nokia thought something similar a year after the iphone when they still have 90% of the phone market sewn up.
Re: He's not wrong. (Score:3)
Anti-trust isn't there to give you the feel-goods at sticking it to the man. It's there to stop monopolistic abuse. And since MS is not a monopoly, that proves Ashcroft right.
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Anti-trust isn't there to give you the feel-goods at sticking it to the man. It's there to stop monopolistic abuse. And since MS is not a monopoly, that proves Ashcroft right.
That's literally the opposite of what the court found, but ok
The most urgent case here.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Is about the whole buying and selling data of users without consent or knowledge, evil megacorporations that people don't even know they exist, supercomputers to extract even more data from data.
That is a thing that actually need regulation if not outright banning because it is creating those awful services and monopolies and all the jazz.
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This is nothing new. Listen to George Carlin's skit from the 1980's about the phone company.
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Back then was just a bunch of crooks, not an gigantic market that runs pretty much all the online corporations.
Re: The most urgent case here.. (Score:2)
Really? The phone company wasn't a "gigantic market that runs pretty much all the online corporations?" Sure, the definition of online has changed, but the analog is nearly perfect.
Here's why it would be a mistake (Score:2)
The Billy... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, at least this time he is talking about something he actually knows something about.
What is this fascination of the Americans with the "wisdom" of business people? Neither of these people studied anything related (say, philosophy) or has a good track-record of prediction in political or social spheres, and typically a spotty track-record of prediction in economics and technology (i.e. hits and misses).
Why do we think Bill Gates has any more wisdom on anything than the guy with the hot dog cart? All we know for sure is that he once had a success in making a company highly successful that he could start with his parents money and that got a lucky break early on. We can assume that he has a higher-than-average chance of repeating a similar performance under similar conditions. Every other assumption about his words being any more deep than that of any random guy on the street is illogical.
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Why do we think Bill Gates has any more wisdom on anything than the guy with the hot dog cart?
Because despite being retired and giving tons of money away he still managed to make 16 billion this year. The guy pushing the hot dog cart can go fuck himself in that regard.
It won't stop them (Score:3)
Because we're incompetent at breaking up monopolies. Break up the Bells, turn them into regional services plus AT&T. Then the regions merged, and AT&T merged with them once the regulations around long distance carriers was rolled back.
When there is money to be made there are representatives for sale. Nothing we decide in this democracy sticks as long as we have greedy, immoral people representing us.
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And yet, thanks to the breakup, it was still legal to buy your own telephone even after they merged.
Re: It won't stop them (Score:2)
We're all fuct! Totally fuct! We should all just give up!
Look at the AT&T breakup (Score:5, Informative)
There is an excellent book out there titled "The Rape of Ma Bell: The Criminal Wrecking of the Best Telephone System in the World" that explains why the AT&T breakup was actually BAD for consumers (and how the US went from having one fairly strongly regulated mostly-good-for-consumers monopoly in the form of AT&T to the bunch of totally unrelated anti-consumer monopolies we have now).
Most of the pressure for the AT&T breakup came not from anyone who thought it would somehow be good for consumers or make the system better or cheaper but from competitors like MCI Communications and Sprint who wanted access to offer long distance phone services to the general public and from competitors to Western Electric who wanted to sell more phone equipment.
Re:Look at the AT&T breakup (Score:5, Insightful)
People pay less for better service now than when ATT ran everything, so nobody needs to read a book to know that you're wrong.
You used to have to pay a fee just to connect non-Bell equipment to your phone line.
If you think things aren't better now for consumers than they were then, you're reading the wrong books. Try something that wasn't written in crayon.
Re:Look at the AT&T breakup (Score:5, Insightful)
That book was written in 1988, just 6 years after the breakup was ordered and only 4 years after it took effect. There is no way anyone at that time knew if this would be a good or bad thing. Most people had never heard of a modem before, the internet was still ARPANET, and pay phone booths were really cool. Today we see things completely differently than this guy did in 1988. Check out this Amazon review which summarizes it well:
As a long term Bell System employee when divestiture took place in 1984, I was pre-inclined to really like this book...as although good did come out of the breakup (mostly faster rollouts of emerging technologies), lots was lost, especially at the expense of customers who had to become knowledgable in telecommunications as they worked their way through different vendors whenever they had a problem.
But...26 years after divestiture, this book is really dated. It accurately depicts some of the issues in the time immediately after divestiture...most of which are no longer valid. So if you want to read a book as a historical reference into divestiture and the immediate ramifications, have at it. BUT:
Bottom line, I felt that the authors were spending a lot of time justifying their own actions and beliefs...and I was predisposed to like it! Someone who wasn't a Bell System fan to begin with? Don't waste your time, you'll just get aggrevated.
article summarized (Score:2)
Article summarized:
Doting former overlord of notoriously evil Big Tech monopolist megacorp says: government should not stomp notoriously evil Big Tech monopolist megacorps, public should just bend over and take it.
Don't arrest murderers, it won't stop murder (Score:2, Funny)
Okay Bill, you twat.
No magic bullet (Score:3)
While i do think that splitting up monopolies might sometimes be a good thing, i do also think one should be very careful doing so, and that there is no magic silver bullet that suddenly stops anti-competitive behavior.
It reminds me a bit of our country in the 90's. There was this widespread believe that competition would reduce overall prices for consumers. There was also the believe that privatizing public-owned companies would cut costs, because companies that didn't strive for profit-maximization would inherently work less efficient. Those beliefs were broadly carried by both left and right sides of the political spectrum.
In effect what happened was - they privatized -and enforced competition on- the postal delivery market. 20 year later and we are starting to see that 2 postmen walking the same trip does not reduce costs - it doubles it. And to prove - our stamps are twice as expensive as the stamps in the USA - and that's only nation-wide. Europe-wide stamps are 3 times the price of a stamp in the USA.
Same happened to our healthcare system. Healthcare insurance got privatized, also for the 'social-public' health insurance, hospitals got privatized and commercialized. What do we see 20 year later? Our insurance rates went up from about $70 monthly to $150 monthly, and that's even without the employer's contribution to health insurance which also roughly doubled. And those numbers are already corrected for inflation. We seen hospitals going bankrupt, patients from one day to the other suddenly transported to other hospitals in the region.
The list goes on and on, telco's, banking system, etc. The only result of the privatization was that there was more profit to be made for business-oriented people. The dream of working more efficient stayed for what it was - an illusion. Same for the dream of reducing costs and prices.
The healthcare system complains about administrative overhead - they spend as much as 50-70% of their time on administration instead of helping patients. The public looks with respect to the British healthcare system as they do one thing well: doctors do just their job: helping patients, at costs less than half of ours.
Another pain is schooling and universities - universities have to sell their soul in order to raise funds. Students sometimes do plain work instead of a scholarship where the primary goal is learning something. Research is driven by market demand, not by scientific insights. And it made universities less independent. I'm not necessarily against universities getting 3rd party funding, but their integrity should be warranted.
Competition works when there is a 'normal' market of offerings and demands. It'll work fine for luxury products. It won't work for 'markets' where 'customers' don't have a choice. A patient needs care. A letter needs to be sent. State-owned postal services, banks, hospitals and insurances are not necessarily a bad thing.
More thoughtful (Score:2)
"I was naive about this but that was a long time ago and I didn't realize that as Microsoft gets successful we'd come under scrutiny and we went through our thing back in the 1990s and that's made us more thoughtful about this kind of activity," he said.
Rough translation: nowdays we spend more money on lawyers being thoughtful about how we can be more brazen about it than we used to be whilst being less accountable for it than we used to be.
He's completely missing the point of breakups (Score:5, Interesting)
He's turned to philanthropy, which is nice, especially after leading his company through the most anticompetitive, convicted behavior of modern times, "choking Netscape's air supply", bundling etc. etc. - it'll take a while for him to be credible again.
This comment about "two bad guys instead of one" misses so many other effects about a breakup:
- Two (or three, or five) smaller entities are easier to regulate, as they individually have much lessened lobby power, and are easier for oversight (clearer regulatory targets; clearer communication evidence among collaborating firms; transparency etc.)
- Not all of the two (or five) smaller entities will be in a monopolistic position, which in turn will regulate their behavior
- If they're still bad, it's OK to lose one of them (eg. to lawsuits etc.) because they're not too big to fail
- The possibility of breakup can be a huge deterrent to begin with, and breaking up one entity eg. Amazon (to market operator vs. merchant vs. cloud provider) will show to others that it can happen to them too
Probably there are another ten arguments like these.
So Bill Gates, here, erects a fishy strawman and then debunks it, doing so with the shallowest argument.
Again, I'm glad that he's trying to redeem some of his and his company's misdeeds with philanthropic work, wishing him well!
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His foundation feeds software he still has a HUGE stake in, right into the hands of schools and children only to tie them to the platform. To this day I still run into people who fight using any other word processor software other than Microsoft Word or presentation software or spreadsheet software. That is how well it works by indoctrinating children into th
lobbyist (Score:2)
Don't break them up, let the government regulate them.
I'm sure there will be enough lobbyists lined up to explain which rules to implement that will have the least possible effect on their workings.
That's not how capitalism works (Score:2)
Unmanaged capitalism's natural end state is monopolies. "Fighting the competitor" is natural in capitalism, and that results in both good of "competition results in better products and lower prices" and "competition results in suppression of competitors to prevent them from developing better products and lower prices".
What you do with capitalism to reap its benefits without letting it succumb to its natural tendencies is manage it to disallow formation of entities big enough that their anti-competitive prac
No it won't but there is a way. (Score:3)
It is the friend of consumers world wide. They are called regulations. Like 'socialist' medicine its been made the boogeyman of solutions. Its good for the individuals and bad for the communist dictatorships we call corporations.
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Create alternatives. (Score:2)
There is a lack of a legal basis or rationale to break up or over regulate the online giants, due to the fact there is alternatives to using them. The fact is facebook and so on want to be regulated to create regulatory lock in, and a breakup would simply result in a bunch of mini-facebook spawn that would behave in the same way anyway and inherit the toxic culture of the parent. Instead people should create their own independent means of doing what they need, completely independent of facebook, not things
It didn't work with telcos (Score:2)
When Sell System was broken up into RBOCs, eventually Bell Atlantic became dominant. They then merged with (engulfed rather) NYNEX and lo and behold... we have Verizon. Which, while they have competition, is pretty damn dominant.
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^^ Bell ^^
fossil fuel divestment has had zero impact ... (Score:2)
On emissions.
No kidding... since that is not the reason you break up a trust... in fact it is the opposite reason.
You break up a trust to increase competition and economic activity.
You would think a brilliant mind like Gates would know that.
Youve got to be kidding... (Score:2)
They strongarmed the DOJ into an agreement that they give away $20 million dollars worth of their software to schools which essentially cost them nothing and indoctrinates youth into their tech... their punishment was to get advertising. It's a big part of the resurgence in MS software in business today as those kids are entering the workforce.
Since then there have been the abuses pushing out edge, windows 10 upgrades, telemetry, etc. Yes, third parties chipped at their market share in areas but it shouldn'
he would say that (Score:2)
So sure, don't break them up he says. Use regulation instead he says. Worked for Microsoft.
Didn't someone call him a snake oil salesman?
LoB
Got it: Break them up (Score:2)
Understood.
Break them up with a hammer.
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Ah shucks, thanks for that.
Re: (Score:2)
Not a free market capitalist, I see. You should stop reading Marx and listening to FOX, bad for you.