> They really aren't

They really are? The back and forth is tedious.

The questions I have are,

1. What is the issue? (if multiple issues, start over one at a time please) 2. Once you decide the role of Government (which is still in flux), can it even apply to this issue? 3. Does it serve the public interest to nationalize this company to address that issue?

So the answer is no. We don't have a working definition of the role of government in the US, so there's no point continuing. It's rather simple to me, but I'm conservative (you don't disrupt livelihoods aimlessly in hopes it all works out).

The idea that you would break up a company to address an information aggregation problem is idiotic. I can see how this pans out....now we have N companies with the information. Some of the issues can't be addressed with brute solutions from the past...or it wouldn't be something to talk about at all.

The new problem here is that the centralization is pretty much the core value of these companies. Breaking them up would destroy that value. A way around is to first standardize and open all the protocols on which they internally operate, and then split them. But you could say that the standardization is in a way an indirect nationalization. If email was run by a company, it would easily be amongst the richest companies in the world.

centralization isn't the problem, bundling is.

advertising with communication.

privacy with contact management

web index with advertising.

content creation and distribution with advertising marketplace.

product distribution with product marketplace with eCommerce store.

Data storage with advertising

...the list goes one.

I think they need to be forced to integrate with open standards and open contracts.

1. identity management

2. data storage & privacy individual, group, and public level.

3. Data graphs

4. open standards for apis with an api broker

5.

Here's a nice writeup on Stratechery advocating reasonably for #2 and #3 in the context of Facebook. I thought it was a good read:

https://stratechery.com/2017/manifestos-and-monopolies/

> Secondly, all social networks should be required to enable social graph portability — the ability to export your lists of friends from one network to another. Again Instagram is the perfect example: the one-time photo-filtering app launched its network off the back of Twitter by enabling the wholesale import of your Twitter social graph. And, after it was acquired by Facebook, Instagram has only accelerated its growth by continually importing your Facebook network. Today all social networks have long since made this impossible, making it that much more difficult for competitors to arise.