Rivals aim to document Facebook, Google strong-arming

https://www.axios.com/competitors-document-facebook-google-practices-antitrust-snap-c59039fa-6392-4848-a7da-92038c73e97a.html

by lalmachado • 7 years ago

72 19 7 years ago

axios.com

shartshooter• 7 years ago

Let’s assume for a moment that Facebook and Google we’re clearly monopolies that needed to be regulated. How would that work practically? Does the justice department and federal courts have people capable of understanding the nuances of some of these companies or are we going to end up with CEOs reminding senators that iPhones aren’t made by google?

lithos• 7 years ago

The same could have been said of steel and rail barons.

jdblair• 7 years ago

Yes, the justice department and federal courts have domain experts who understand the nuances of the tech industry. You are conflating elected officials (Senators) and the staffers in the justice department who are experts in their fields.

The real danger is regulatory capture: the experts come from industry and will design regulations to favor the industry. The best remedy would be to break the companies into pieces rather than try to craft rules for how the behemoths should behave. For example, Instragram and Whatsapp can pretty obviously be split from Facebook. At Google, YouTube, mobile, search and even advertising could be split into separate companies.

MaupitiBlue2• 7 years ago

Right. Just like the FAA.

anticensor• 7 years ago

Instagram cannot be taken out (due to backwards horizontal integration), WhatsApp, maybe. The correct solution for FB is revoking its business license with a very short notice period.

goatinaboat3• 7 years ago

Well, same as Standard Oil or Bell, break them up. Make Google sell off YouTube, GMail, Google Cloud, Android etc and just be a search company again. End all integrations between them to prevent further abuse.

tracer42012• 7 years ago

And gmail, Google Cloud, and Android are different organizations in one company. What’s the line? Having too many products? Do we break up other companies too? I’m trying to tease apart the logic here that makes tech companies a special case.

Notorious_BLT• 7 years ago

As a user of several of those services, that sounds awful.

toast0• 7 years ago

Google can't realistically sell those. Anyone who would reasonably buy those is going to fit in the same mold of too much concentration. They would need to spin them off.

chillacy• 7 years ago

Sometimes I can't tell if the break them up rhetoric is out of a desire to see things improve with competition or a desire to stick it to the big bad tech companies.

merricksb• 7 years ago

Different article about same topic, discussed previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21048093

MaupitiBlue2• 7 years ago

Snapchat - It’s a camera app, and it just makes sense to have the functionality in FB. Sorry, don’t care.

AppNexus - An ad manager? Not sorry, don’t care.

VEVO - Big Music. Not sorry, don’t care.

I’m keeping an open mind about wether Google and Facebook need to be broken up, but if these are the most egregious examples they could come up with, it’s going nowhere.

tonytheliger• 7 years ago

"I’m keeping an open mind about wether Google and Facebook need to be broken up"

Haha I'm sorry, are you in charge of breaking up Google and Facebook, or are you just someone commenting on news.ycombinator from a desk job?

dang• 7 years ago

Could you please review the site guidelines and follow them when posting here? We're looking for thoughtful, substantive comments in HN threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

camgunz• 7 years ago

You might not care about the businesses themselves, but anticompetitive activity undermines the entire economy and depression and corruption thus ripple through our society. Most people believe either in economies controlled by democratic governments or free market economies. Almost no one believes in monopolistic capitalism (likely because it's a pretty bad idea).

gremlinsinc• 7 years ago

Someone should make a documentation site that aggregates and ranks data showcasing 'monopolozing/market-controlling' behavior that stifles competition.. Like Spotify/Apple's issues.

Maybe have the offending company, company offended, estimated $$ lost as a result of offending company's market control.

Then if you're a govt official you could filter by whoever you're looking into at the moment, and if you click on apple:spotify for instance you'll get aggregated reports/news articles about the two and their competitive battles.

Rivals aim to document Facebook, Google strong-arming

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