Facebook being able to eat up any and every new form of social media is worrisome in its own right. This recent article in particular discusses some pretty solid points: https://stratechery.com/2017/why-facebook-shouldnt-be-allowe...
A long-running antitrust probe of FB or other tech giants might have a similar chilling effect on growth plans, even if the case itself doesn't result in big changes.
It isn't necessarily the best choice, but it is one choice. I'm not sure there's necessarily a much better one, either. It's a very big problem to try to wrap your head around.
[1]: I think you heard it here first, though I can't promise nobody else has come up with that. I haven't heard it before to my knowledge.
I really like the idea of essentially forcing federation protocols to be developed. E-mail was an overwhelming success -- we should look for ways to repeat that success with other aspects.
so ppl would be able to choose platform based on variety of variables like advertisements, data collection, looks, usability.... just an idea
[1]: https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/wiki/images/9/93/OStatu...
https://mediagoblin.org/news/tpac-2016-and-review-activitypu...
In 2003, Microsoft was ordered by EU to stop bundling OS with browser, media player and other software that seemed so important to them at the time. MS complied.
We look back now and think so what? The EU wasn't really wrong, so much as too focused on the issue-of-the-month.
Regulation of technology is necessarily painting in slow-motion with indelible paint using a broad brush.
We can't even compare to hypothetically breaking up Microsoft, because we could and probably still would have broken it up along product lines. Facebook is definitely more like Standard Oil in the sense that there isn't such a clear line to break the company up on.
Another difficult aspect of this problem is that the oil companies had physically distributed employees. Who is going to be assigned to the part of Facebook responsible for Florida? (Does Facebook even have any non-SV offices? Honest question, I have no idea.) The newly-created business to serve "the Southeast United States" without being located there is going to face some headwinds as the Baby Faces diversify. There's also some good questions around how to prevent one of them from simply winning in a way that a Michigan Baby Bell customer couldn't just decide to use Pacific Bell.
Break-up is a misguided approach. In the case of SO, it only served to make the consequently-more-highly-valued parts more acceptable to, and the whole more deeply integrated into society.
I think technology will again be the solution to today's evil-of-the-month. Which is not to belittle these real and important issues.
1) Publish open APIs that enable federation between Facebook-like services 2) Split Facebook.com into three companies - Facebook the infrastructure company, Facebook the we-sell-advertisements-to-our-users-plus-sell-unprocessed-user-data company, and Facebook the we-process-user-data-to-sell-insights-useful-for-advertising company. Establish legal walls between these companies to ensure that they only communicate with each other through their APIs. 3) Enforce federation by splitting the middle "we actually host users and their walls and their data" company along state lines and international borders, so that they are more beholden to local authorities and jurisdictions.
this would push up the costs massively. Every single state int he US requiring its own data centre. And what do you do if I have a friend in another state and share a post with them? who has the legal power to block that post?
Both states have the power the block - the state hosting the post may block the post from being posted on it's instance, and the state accessing the post may block the post from being seen. Again, because the API is publicly available, oppressive outcomes will probably result in competing solutions implementing the federated API and adopting more liberal administration.
Instagram Whatsapp Facebook the site, which is required to sell its user data to third parties (think large ad services) Facebook the advertising service, which buys userdata & advertising space from Facebook the site and sells it to third parties.
The final two separations are not particularly likely in my opinion.
We could do the same with Facebook. Force them to segregate out different demographics (maybe by continent)
An interesting question. The network effect - the requirement that users can interact with each other - obviously complicates it. Here are a few ideas, which could also be combined in some ways:
A. Eliminate the vertical integration: Infrastructure, UI, advertising, etc. I'm not sure that resolution, by itself, would sufficiently address the problems mentioned in the article.
B. Break it up horizontally, whether geographically or some other arbitrary way, and require they all follow open standards that allow interoperability. If you think of it, that's no different than the Bell breakup - they remained interoperable; people using one post-AT&T company could call someone on another.
C. Both A & B: Different companies could create different UIs, as one example, competing to provide different kinds of user experiences to different markets - one-size-fits-all probably isn't the best solution anyway, especially for an industry selling to every subculture on the globe. The same could apply to other layers, such as advertising: B2B analytics companies would compete to sell differentiated services to advertisers. (It would be essential, IMHO, that the new social network system provide users with opt-out, complete privacy - maybe they could sell their personal info to competing buyers of it.)
The more I think about it, the better it sounds. From this perspective Facebook seems like an awkward monopoly - trying to be all things, on so many layers, to all people and businesses, profiting from monopolistic control, and preventing what seems like (at first impression) the vast innovations that competition would bring if it was opened up.
My realization is this: There's no reason one company must run the entire social network for users to benefit from network effects. Plenty of systems provide network effect benefits without central control - the entire Internet and its protocol stacks, the web, email ...
How about making Facebook give all its data back to users? All the data, photos, metadata, social graph - all of it.
Open source the social graph and give the users their data... would that make sense? Or just create a security nightmare?
What would a break-up of Facebook look like? The most famous modern example is the breakup of Bell, but the infrastructure lent itself to a natural geographical split. It's not entirely obvious if a geographic split would work for FB, and it's not entirely obvious along what planes one could split up the company.