Facebook Leak Shows Its Preparations to Fight a Government-Ordered Breakup (engadget.com) 50
Engadget reports:
Facebook is under intense regulatory pressure, and it appears to be bracing itself for the worst. The Wall Street Journal says it has obtained a document outlining Facebook's defense if the government orders a breakup that would unload Instagram and WhatsApp. The social media giant would reportedly argue that a split would be a "complete nonstarter" based on officials' past actions — or lack thereof.
According to the leak, Facebook would contend that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp passed FTC scrutiny without objections, leading it to pour massive amounts of money into both projects as it integrated them into its operations. A breakup would require spending billions and running separate systems that reduced security and hurt the user experience, Facebook would claim.
Facebook has declined to comment on the apparent leak. In the past, it has pushed for extra regulation (albeit limited) in place of a breakup.
According to the leak, Facebook would contend that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp passed FTC scrutiny without objections, leading it to pour massive amounts of money into both projects as it integrated them into its operations. A breakup would require spending billions and running separate systems that reduced security and hurt the user experience, Facebook would claim.
Facebook has declined to comment on the apparent leak. In the past, it has pushed for extra regulation (albeit limited) in place of a breakup.
non paywlled source (Score:1)
what? (Score:2)
Engadget is paywalled?
Re: what? (Score:1)
Not first in line (Score:5, Interesting)
If Facebook is broken up, it will be after Google. While Facebook's behavior is terrible, the amount of influence they exercise pales in comparison to Google. And the level of wrong doing they perform is nothing to the extreme abuse that Amazon commits to their labor force and sellers.
I can only assume FB's plan will have plenty of advanced warning as two much bigger fish are fried.
Re:Not first in line (Score:5, Interesting)
as two much bigger fish are fried.
I fear they're going after FB because, while big, it's a fish that still fits on the plancha. Google, Amazon, Akamai, Microsoft... are probably so big, so powerful, so well in cahoots with the government, and have managed to makes themselves so unavoidable to the various federal agencies and the military as to be virtually untouchable.
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Facebook is not necessary to most people, but Google probably is necessary. I do not need Facebook for work. I might be a bit stuck without Google, though I know there are alternatives.
Whatever the importance of these vast corporations, a message needs to be sent that they are not above the rule of law. I am not sure how well that will work, when the corporations have more money and better lawyers than the government.
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I think Facebook is similar but NSLs mean Facebook can't talk about how much the government depends on their surveillance and of course, the government doesn't want anyone to know how intrusive (and enabling of fascism) it is.
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It really depends on whether you think civil war is worth avoiding. The problem with Facebook is that it creates a global filter bubble and politics has gone to war on it. The obvious solution would be to put the government in charge of Facebook and change your political system to a one party system. That way you can easily avoid civil war. Breaking up Facebook and trying to do something about the abuse of filter bubbles seems far too difficult. The rich would then be permanantly in charge of the conduct of
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Yeah, peace would be assured like in Belarus.
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Megatron? Is that you?
Peace through tyranny isn't actual peace. It's a nice slogan for a cartoon character, but can't work in the real world.
Re:Not first in line (Score:4, Interesting)
Google's issues are mostly around Android and promoting their own products. There is YouTube but so far we haven't seen any real evidence of deliberate bias, only incompetence.
Facebook on the other hand actively helps fuck up our democracies and violate our privacy. Breaking it up will be on very different grounds to Google and is really uncharted territory. Monopolies, anti-trust, we can do that but "misuse of personal data" and "threat to democracy" are afflictions of the modern age.
Close all Facebook operations entirely (Score:5, Interesting)
Nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
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Nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Someone on here had a nice idea a while back to load up a C-130 with horse manure and use it to bury Facebook headquarters and Zuckerburg's house. I for one welcome manure from the sky for this purpose.
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I would pay to see that!
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By the way, horse manure is not poignant enough. I would use a mixture of chicken dung and this liquid dung that many cows on farms produce.
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By the way, horse manure is not poignant enough. I would use a mixture of chicken dung and this liquid dung that many cows on farms produce.
Mixed with a few barrels of Liquid ASS.
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And then a replacement will take over Facebook.
Same old arguments (Score:5, Interesting)
reduced security and hurt the user experience
Virtually all monopolies that have gotten the Sherman Act treatment have put forward the very same arguments. If anything, it almost demonstrates that FB is a monopoly.
Re:Same old arguments (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, Facebook has a pretty good argument:
Facebook would contend that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp passed FTC scrutiny without objections
Over the last 20-25 years the government has completely failed to do its job and has allowed almost all mergers and acquisitions to proceed, all of which have been harmful to consumers and has resulted in a massive concentration of power into the hands of a few companies.
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You do know that our elected critters are on the payroll of the very companies they're supposed to regulate on our behalf, right?
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Indeed. Your privacy is very important to many companies. They need as much of it as they can get.
Breakup? (Score:2)
How would one 'breakup' Facebook? All users starting with letters A-F go to Facebook1, all users G-L to Facebook2, etc.?
Making Facebook divest Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. won't solve any meaningful problems. They'll still be ad mongers, tracking everyone and selling user data; the only change might be that advertisers would have more pricing leverage. I'm really certain that is not why the slashsnot crowd is interested in this topic.
What, exactly, would "breaking up" Facebook look like?
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Yeah, Tom's probably been out of work for 10 years!
they are NOT pushing for regulations (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm no fan of Facebook, but I see no reason why they should be broken up if we leave Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon alone. Really? What's Facebook doing that every single other tech titan isn't? Playing dirty, buying out potential competitors and smothering them if they won't sell, integrating everything they can into their locked ecosystem... the list goes on and on.
They're ALL doing it. There's a lot of talk about changing and updating anti-trust laws to deal with this. I'm not sure how it will work. It will break the business model of every one of the FAANGs. Maybe that would be a good thing, maybe not. Either way hoo boy there would be a lot of collateral damage. Be careful what you wish for.
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I don't even know what Google's been up to lately, but it would not shock me at this point if they had a moon-based laser pointed at the Whitehouse.
Compared to those guys, Facebook's an amateur. The regulatory entities that everyone else has captured and seem to be more or less immune to, might actually be able to go toe-to-toe with Zuckerberg.
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But please don't underestimate the power or potential for harm that Facebook have. Just think back to what Christopher Wylie has already explained Cambridge Analytica were able to do with a tiny fraction of the data that Facebook hold.
Put it like this: based on their analy
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Failed businessman (inherited 500 mil, grew it to 800 mil in 2 decades. WAY below average)
Serial liar (verified)
Doesn't seem to care he's caught at lying or is incapable of perceiving it. Either way, pretty bad.
Shamelessly nepotistic
Barely capable of reading
Incapable of holding an intelligent conversation.
The list goes. Somehow, half the country is perfectly fine with this.
In any case, I'm think
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The "current guy" got to be President thanks in large part to wholesale voter manipulation. Negative ads kept thousands of potential Democratic voters away from the polls. Lies and spin were able to nudge un-decided's in favour of the current guy.
The result? The biggest national-scale cluster-#### since records began...
Tax??? (Score:3)
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I’d rather get a slice of the money FB earns bedause of me. 90% would do nicely.
We need social network interoperability (Score:2)
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If TikTok is bad then what does that. make FB ? (Score:1)
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Don't be silly. It's only evil when other countries do it. Just like breaking encryption. /s
We're the good guys, see?
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All those idiots have disposable income and are allowed to vote.
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Regulations (Score:1)
Regulations ALWAYS help big companies. Can the little guy afford to comply with a mountain of useless paperwork and various esoteric standards compliance?
As for breakup .. I don't agree with it -- users will be severely inconvenienced when suddenly they can't contact their friends because they got assigned to a different service. If you don't like your privacy invaded don't use those platforms. That said, users should voluntarily ditch WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple iMessenger, Skype, Telegram etc. and
Baby FaceBooks (Score:2)
Like Baby Bells, would be a good investment in the long run. Of course the CEO of the giant Amoeba never wants to split, but it's great for everybody else. Also, "Baby FaceBook" sounds like a gangster, which is just perfect.
claims (Score:2)
spending billions and running separate systems that reduced security and hurt the user experience, Facebook would claim.
one partially true claim and two complete falsehoods. So, par for the course in modern politics.
I get more and more disgusted by the world we live in, but maybe it's always been like that and I just become more aware of it.
After Amazon (Score:5, Interesting)
Oculus should also be broken away (Score:5, Informative)
They are on the road of becoming the perfect mass data collection juggernout regarding lots of intimate aspects of their users lives.
Facebook knows that and dumps serious money into it because of that, and hence the change of terms of service in the direction of mass data collection.
How? (Score:1)
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Here's a thought: just tell Zuck and his buddies, "You created this tangled mess in the first place. You figure out how to untangle it, or the money train stops at the next station".
I bet if they saw they couldn't BS their way out of the situation, they'd have a workable solution on the table in a matter of weeks, if not sooner.
Simple fix for the whole industry- (Score:3)
Tax data at rest. You want to build a massive trove of personal information on every man woman and child on the planet, and then charge tickets to advertisers--- fine. It's to late to stop that train, and ending the practice would put far to may people out of work.
Taxing the underlying data on the other hand, now this de-incentives every clown and pony show on the internet from collecting every scrap of user data they can, it assigns a monetary value to the data-sets the giants have duped the dumb into providing, it forces declaration of exactly what is in these data-set (and if they are inferred, implied, or actual hard data points) and finally gets the giants paying taxes. All wins for the people.
We know the more data you have, the more valuable it becomes, and the fresher is it, the better it tastes. Data sets are extremely valuable assets. It's time we start treating them as such.
Tax the data, and attach criminal liability to leaking it.
Or we can just allow personal people to claim ownership of their own data and take it back. Fat chance of that.