It seems a bit much that we ask for companies to constantly grow and simultaneously ensure they never pass 70% market share.
Not to mention that in this capitalist society, messaging services are incentivized to grow at all cost because user-base is the best fuel for monetization. Holding onto XMPP federation like Google did in XMPP's final years of relevancy would be suicide; you would be helping your competitors while gaining nothing.
To your point: if you're the CEO of a company, and the shareholders are pushing you to capture market share, you're quite inclined to do it. Especially since capturing market share makes it more likely your company will stay profitable or become profitable, even absent shareholder wishes. Which works until/unless you reach the point where you've gotten the combination of skill and luck and circumstance that means you end up with a monopoly market share, at which point "we" (where we == the non-shareholder general public) start posting about how your company has taken over the market and the government should declare you some combination of "common carrier" or "utility" or "out of business".
How can a new search engine - or email service, for that matter - compete with Google's servers? How can a new social network compete with Facebook having all your friends already on it? How can a new encyclopedia compete with Wikipedia's vast store of volunteer-checked knowledge? How can a new operating system compete with the fact that everyone already knows hw to use Windows?
It's not impossible, but an incremental improvement won't do it; you need to be massively better than the default to overcome the sheer advantage that comes from being the default.
Of course everyone (on HN) says "Oh, well not me." Everyone who complains about users think that everyone needs to be Richard Stallman and only connect with the internet by faxing HTTPS requests and then reading forum threads printed off of a dot-matrix printer.
In reality anyone who is using a smartphone or modern software is pushing AGFAM to be bigger and more consolidated and anyone who doesn't totally blow open one of those segments is a wannabe, trash or should just join one of those.
I mean Apple is the richest company in the world but they choose to compete in very niche markets, and hasn't actually completely dominated a market since the iPod even though they easily could with their massive stockpiles of money.
Instead of trying to bend the Internet to the point of breaking, Google could just... not do that. They could focus on putting the industry best ads in the industry best search results, running the largest video streaming service, sell a wildly successful mobile OS, and have the best online office suite without all of the other terrible things they do as a corporation.
They're already the best at basically everything, so they got bored and now need to burn their reputation like it's kindling. It's pointless.
Its often brought up, that corporations and the economy have to keep growing ... but is it really necessary? Why can't both achieve some steady state equilibrium within a system of finite resources?
Who does that? Why do you have to have 'too much market power' to succeed? If google was 1/10 its size, it'd still be successful.
If users voluntarily subject themselves to mistreating, then I don't see why governments should intervene.
Which is stupid because
1) the average user/consumer wallet is 3/10ths of nothing in terms of economic voting power.
2) the average user/consumer can only vote for stuff which exists, and google has done a great job of making sure that there are no competitive alternatives
In this case you're "paying" with your data, which has even less voting power because you can't even opt out of that payment just by not using their services. You'd pretty much have to stop using the internet entirely.
Unfortunately many people have bought the stupid 'regulation=bad 100% free market is best' rhetoric which is totally crap for everyone except the really big fish. There's just no incentive for big corporations to 'not be evil' without the artifical incetive of being regulated and punished for treating their users shittily.
Huh? You can use Firefox, Bing and another email provider.
In addition to replacing chrome, search, and gmail, drive, maps, calendar, youtube, allo, duo, keep, hangouts, etc, etc you must also:
- Never send/receive email to/from anyone else with a gmail address. You're still providing your data even if this one won't affect you directly.
- Block third-party tracking on websites and advertisements which are basically everywhere now, or somehow avoid the websites with tracking. That's assuming this is even possible, and remains possible. Yes there's uMatrix/uBlock et al, but there's also Admiral and Instart Logic et al, and no way to confirm that the measures you're taking are working.
- Settle for alternative services with different and/or inferior experiences. This is hard even if the alternatives are perfectly usable and of comparable quality. Google wins because it has stuff that is more convenient than the alternatives, and usually better quality.
- Don't use Android, the mobile OS with something like 80-90% market share which also happens to be the lowest cost option for a decent smartphone. Oh, you use a ROM without play services? Captive portal detection still contacts a google server to check for internet access and I don't know if there's other stuff like that baked in.
- Know enough to question your trust in google in the first place.
So through a buttload of effort and some domain specific knowledge you can exercise some percentage (probably less than 100%) of your wallet vote which was worth 3/10ths of nothing to begin with. You have to be a tech-savvy idealist to go through with it, and that demographic is never going to be big enough to force a massive corporation to self regulate against their own best interests.
Making sure a consumer's data reaches no part of a given company sounds highly impractical.
What you describe is an extremely broad scope of "opt-out". By your definition, you couldn't opt out of any company without very detailed knowledge of the company. For example, whenever you make a purchase, or just walk into a store, that data ends up in multiple parties' hands.
I doubt there is precedent for using antitrust law to allow consumers to make such refined choices. How useful would it be to silo the world in such a way?
We're not privy to the amount of data being collected within companies. Even if you break up one company that collects data, what's to stop 100 others from doing the same, particularly those in other countries?
We're talking past each other. Your "them" is Google. My "them" is every company, many of whom do not announce the extent of their data collection.
If breaking up Google means going after every company that collects too much data, then I suggest we first (a) take a look at how much data companies are collecting and then (b) consider where we draw the line. Doing (b) before (a) would be acting uninformed and rashly.
The point is users are never going to have the power to force un-evil behaviour because the business model of data-mining companies (all of 'them', not just google) relies on social manipulation and exploiting weaknesses in human nature. Government regulation is the last resort, sure, but for this kind of business (and especially for the big players) it should be pretty damn clear by now that there is no other viable option.
Me: that train has left the station. When you have monopoly power (70%-98% of market share) the governments should return Google and Whatever Corp to not being evil.