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A comment on We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself. Parent comment

Re:We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself by jerf on Sunday November 19, 2017 @10:45PM (#15737619)
One option would be to Just Do It, just break the company up along that sort of arbitrary line, and expect that that will push the Baby Faces [1] to be forced to communicate with federation protocols, which could also let others in to play too. One would imagine a condition of the breakup would be that any such federation protocol that was developed could not privilege the Baby Faces amoungst each other.

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.

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Re:We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself by dwaltrip on Sunday November 19, 2017 @10:52PM (#15737646)
I think this is definitely a very interesting line of discussion for this problem.

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.

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Re:We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself by em3rgent0rdr on Sunday November 19, 2017 @11:01PM (#15737681)
What about developing federated protocols by 'just doing it'.
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Re:We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself by s286912 on Monday November 20, 2017 @12:07AM (#15737937)
How about creating a open standard for social media,i.e, open API so that no matter what platform you use, you can connect to ppl on other platforms. This should introduce more competition in the market without creating a loophole to regulate internet.

so ppl would be able to choose platform based on variety of variables like advertisements, data collection, looks, usability.... just an idea

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Re:We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself by uoaei on Monday November 20, 2017 @01:34AM (#15738223)
Creating standards is the easy part, uptake is a whole other beast.
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Re:We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself by daveid on Monday November 20, 2017 @09:18AM (#15739984)
Mastodon uses ActivityPub and has over a million users
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Re:We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself by fabianhjr on Monday November 20, 2017 @01:02AM (#15738108)
OStatus[1] and ActivityPub[2][3] already exist.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/wiki/images/9/93/OStatu...

[2]: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

[3]: http://activitypub.rocks/

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Re:We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself by em3rgent0rdr on Monday November 20, 2017 @07:40AM (#15739479)
cool...last I heard about MediaGoblin (a self-hosted YouTube/flicker media-sharing clone), they were trying to implement ActivityPub so that MediaGoblin instances could be federated. However, I haven't seen any updated news from them in over a year.

https://mediagoblin.org/news/tpac-2016-and-review-activitypu...

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Re:We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself by bencollier49 on Monday November 20, 2017 @02:14AM (#15738352)
This is actually quite an excellent idea, and one which hadn't occured to me before. Forcing federation by giving a deadline for a split (plus open API) seems like a very sensible solution - it preserves the free market and creates an opportunity for new entrants.
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Re:We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself by lovemenot on Monday November 20, 2017 @08:03AM (#15739591)
Today's critical problem soon becomes yesterday's yawn.

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.

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Re:We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself by jerf on Monday November 20, 2017 @08:42AM (#15739790)
I think that's a valid point on its own, but attacking Microsoft's browser was attacking their future belief about where things were going and preventing them from colonizing a space that may become popular in the future. Actually breaking up Facebook is a different proposition; we'd never be able to tell it wasn't necessary because the post-breakup world would be too different for us to ever know that.

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.

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Re:We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself by lovemenot on Monday November 20, 2017 @08:56AM (#15739863)
Microsoft never stopped self-believing throughout the Ballmer era. Certainly not as a result of any EU ruling.

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.

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