At some point, America decided that only horizontal monopolies counted, not vertical ones.

Many of our concerns about antitrust would be assuaged if regulators started keeping separate markets separate. Like banning content distributors from buying content creators. Or requiring platforms to provide third-party-friendly APIs. Microsoft got in trouble for trying to vertically integrate its browser into its operating system. But Facebook isn't likewise called to task for treating Facebook live streams differently than others.

Facebook acquiring Instagram is a perfect example.

Google is a harder one though because Google doesn’t rely upon network effects to the same extreme FB does — meaning, my dad’s search engine choice has no impact on me — but my dad’s messaging client absolutely does.

It’s relatively easy to start a new search engine — it’s close to impossible to start a new general purpose messaging system or social network — at least not one that survives.

Edit: a consumer group could have monopsony powers and be capable of negotiating concessions. Such as an open api.

Consumers have boycotted products in the past. Consumer pressure has worked against Facebook in the past.

I agree that it is an unlikely and difficult solution. I don't see an easy one.

It was mostly created, pushed and used by a group of progressive to go after their political opponents. Its well documented (even if people choice not to remember this part) that this was very much PR and protectionism of businesses that were afraid to be driven of the market by the larger more efficient companies. The first anti-trust law in US history for example was quite explicitly passed to restrict the centralised slaughter house industry from driving all the local butchers out of businesses)

The new interpretation that has been adopted requires that you can show consumer harm. I actually have credible evidence that people are getting overpriced.

> Many of our concerns about antitrust would be assuaged if regulators started keeping separate markets separate.

That is very easily said but practically impossible. And even if it is possible, it would be massively harmful because some of the largest changes in the history happened because or were at least massively supported by companies bridging, merging, combining, integrating different markets.

In fact what you describe is pretty much called 'Indian Socialism' a form of 'Socialism' that was very in vogue with British elites after WW2 and India served as a nice place to test this since many of the Indian leaders had an English education and agreed with it. They had a sort of 5 year plan that attempted to plan how many companies could be in what market requiring licences to go into or out of different markets.

Those licences were of course a perfect tool for the state bureaucracy to get bribes from all business people.

> Or requiring platforms to provide third-party-friendly APIs.

Again, said very easily. Have you considered what that would mean? It would mean government regulator would have to go threw each layer of the software and each application and define adequate rules about what sharing would mean. This is a political insanity specially in a democracy.

Now you could argue, that it should all be made by some loosely controlled government bureaucracy like the Fed. An API tzar but how that would end is pretty easy to see.

I would agree that it would make sense for government to support and insensitive the adoption of open standard that were created and adopted by people and companies in the market voluntary.

If you want to use state power to force companies to support open standards it can not be on a ad-hook bases. You would need to think about a specific general law that could be applied to everybody and that does not involve concrete technologies or companies. That would be pretty hard because I think once such a thing is written most people (at least in here) would oppose it.

It's very practical to say <content distributor> should not be able to buy <content creator>.

Likewise, it is practical to say <web site> cannot favor their product in feeds, search, app stores, etc. over competitors.

> Again, said very easily. Have you considered what that would mean?

Sure. To the extent that open standards support types of media, it's a solved problem. Displaying <img> tags has been a thing for decades, for instance. <video> tags are a thing now, as well. Facebook could be previewing external video the same way they preview their own. But their business model is to try to gain market share in the streaming video market, live and otherwise.

Do you remember all the democratic autrage about Net Neutrality. How everybody cried about how unfair it was.

Who are actually the exact people that get to make these choices. How do you enforce fair proceedings? How do you handle appeal? How do you do all this without making it fundamentally undemocratic?

Do you want a democratic vote to make these choices?

Do you want the Senate as a whole to vote on these issues?

How about a congressonal subcommity?

Do you want a largly unsuprivised undemocratic burocracy to just make these chocie by fiat?

The list of problems goes on. What is the legal bases for these effect and how do you punish people who don't follow the rules? How about the US not controlling the internet and if the US goes away from global standards it could massivly hurt the US as a industry standard.

These are real conceptual issues that have caused many issues in many of these ideas that people have where they assume that 'if only I could make these choice the way I want, it would be better for everybody'. However the outcome that you imagine is probebly not the outcome you are gone get, specially if you don't think about these issues.

Do you want a largely unsupervised undemocratic bureaucracy to just make these choices by fiat?

Hmm, well to me it seems like the that last option is the worst of the bunch. And that's what we get when we don't regulate at all - unsupervised, undemocratic, corporate bureaucracies making decisions that critically affect our lives. I don't need a perfect regulator, I just need a regulator because even in your worst case scenario for a regulator you've only tied what I already live under. To your net neutrality argument, your argument is essentially that instead of having a regulatory body in charge of net neutrality who then rescinded it, we should never have had that government body at all - to me that's just unconvincing, at least I got some years of net neutrality this way, better than none at all.

The list of problems goes on. What is the legal bases for these effect and how do you punish people who don't follow the rules? How about the US not controlling the internet and if the US goes away from global standards it could massively hurt the US as a industry standard.

Why do you need every detail of a plan to see if something is good? You want us to quote from law journals for you? Why don't you just admit you don't like the idea - don't pretend that if only we could lay out a plan you'd be for it, your disagreement isn't in implementation it's in foundation.

Your implaying that state burocracy and markets produce the same outcome. That is 100% false, as both systems have totally different feedback mechanism. It is a totally different thing if you are a open soruce standards commity that has to actually attrackt people rather then a burocracy that has no insentive to attrackt people.

The market process is guided by the choices of all the players, and this is why even in a bad case the deversity will be higher then in any government run situation. Standards can be overcome, thrown away, upgraded depending on the chaning needs people.

We already have the largly unregulated market and in that market we have lots of standartisation both completly open and industry standards. Open Source software is winning in many places. New spaces are being opened up for standards, like RISC-V. Yes its not perfect, but you have to realize that you are risking everything we have by giving some government burocracy (and a US burocracy at that) the complete power over the internet.

There are good and well studied reason why this approche is better then the political processes I have mentioned.

> Why do you need every detail of a plan to see if something is good? You want us to quote from law journals for you? Why don't you just admit you don't like the idea - don't pretend that if only we could lay out a plan you'd be for it, your disagreement isn't in implementation it's in foundation.

If you don't have even a basic idea what the scope and power of your policy is, how are you gone compare it to anything else? I am a consequentialist, if you can make a reasonable argument that your burocarcy can significantly improve on the current 'anarchy' approch then I'm happy to listen to your argument.

We actually do already have lots of government promoted standards, and if they are any indication then I would be running into a different direction as fast as I can.

What might be of larger concern is the IP licensing aspect. Users uploading video and indemnifying Facebook against their dubious claims of ownership is questionable. It's possible that what you suggest might run afoul of copyright concerns, as well as the business model reasons you so correctly point to.

If that's the larger concern, then why isn't it a concern for text or images?

Lots of photographers would love Facebook-enforced DRM for the wedding photos they haven't licensed.

No, it makes more sense to assume the concern is pursuing consumer and creator lock-in through vertical integration.

Perhaps I fail to understand the IP issues correctly. Users uploading wedding photos to Facebook that they claim they have the rights to is in the same category, legally, as the videos that users claim they own the rights to. Both get the same (lack of) concern.

That's my understanding, at least. Does your differ?

A monopoly means that you are the one major player in a certain market. It is in the word.

It is definitely possible that a company could have excess market power in a certain SEGMENT of their vertically integrated market, but that is still a horizontal monopoly.

Vertical integration isn't a threat to anybody as long as every segment of the market has competitors.

For example, maybe facebook has a monopoly on the social network part of their product. And maybe they shouldn't be allowed to use that excess market power for bad purposes.

Furthermore, since the parent company has removed its demand from the market, there is less money moving around. The less competitive businesses who contributed to the market forces keeping prices low end up folding or being vertically integrated into competitors. The market dies and the oligarchy strengthens immensely. Especially so because now startup competitors must have all segments of the market in order to compete.

If I was a lawyer, fighting FOR the company, I would literally use your exact same argument as for why vertical integration is a good thing.

Reducing costs, and making the market more efficient is a good thing, not a bad thing. Reducing prices is good, not bad.

However I'd argue the damning blow is that centralization makes efficient but fragile structures. Its why everyone hates a monolithic codebase.

I don't think you would want to argue that driving competitors out of business since antitrust legislation is partly designed to prevent that.

My understanding is that using the lowering of costs as an argument works when the government is concerned with consumers but not when it is concerned with competition. I think the US is the former while the EU is the latter?

The exciting, and refreshing, thing about the revitalization is that's its bipartisan in nature. The Bannon wing of the Republican party are targeting Google/Facebook for the perceived threat to conservative speech and likely because the companies are too liberal, the Warren wing of the Democrats are concerned with concentration in markets. The mainstream of the parties are more open to these arguments than ever before. A Republican attorney general opened an antitrust investigation against Google [3]. That's dangerous water to be in if you're Google or Facebook.

[1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2017...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/technology/missouri-googl...

I wonder why that was.

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...

For this particular case we have in hand antitrust policies and forcefully breaking Google and Facebook might be the solution. Same kind of issue however could rise even if there was no money or corporations involved at all. Think for example somebody suddenly purchasing Facebook, removing all ads and just running it as free social media site. The users would be still there and owner of the site controlling what they see.

To tackle the problem we should get more creative. One thing that comes to mind is progressive tax on user base (or based on number of people you reach). Making in financially unfeasible to create a platform that covers too large part of the population. I'll skip thinking about the practical problems in implementing this.

Ideal decentralized Internet solves this problem as we tear down the walled gardens. But what if people are too happy with the walled gardens. What if we just end up with another information monopoly - this time running in the decentralized network and outside the intervening hands of any government.

Currently, the Fediverse[1] exists through multiple free software platforms and online communities. (Like Mastodon[2])

This can and should expand to include Twitter/FB/others but that would go against their mantra of owning the platform to ensure maximum profits/rent-seeking and power over information. (Platform Capitalism[3])

[1]: https://medium.com/we-distribute/a-quick-guide-to-the-free-n...

[2]: https://joinmastodon.org/

[3]: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Platform+Capitalism-p-9781509504...

And then we take an active role in their management.

Notice the difference between the physical activity of helping to maintain these institutions and the physical activity of sitting at your keyboard and typing into an HTML form and hitting the submit button.

Look at what is actually occurring and not just at what is described in what you are reading.

But there are a lot of tradeoffs there too and some really chilling consequences.

The "chilling consequences" that you are imagining are as speculative as any other work of science-fiction that you've read online.

Ask yourself: where did you get the idea that creating new public institutions would have "chilling consequences"? Did you personally experience this in reality or did you read about it somewhere?

What are the chilling experiences that you've had with public roads, the postal service, or the hall of records that holds the deed to the private property you live on? Do these negative experiences align with the "chilling consequences" that you imagine with a public social media?

I think reading that sentence is enough to be bone-chillingly horrified, and nationalizing the necessary data is the first step towards making it inevitable

BUT, the people in power get to decide the course of the earth. It's humans all the way up. The hypothetical becomes real over time and when it gets here, it is too late to plan.

TLDR books are important

A similar situation arises with the public railways in many countries. Most railways are actually private — the big ones in Japan, the German railway, the various Italian railways. In Italy, multiple companies run trains on the same tracks with competing offerings.

Most of the major European “national” railways can run their trains on each other’s tracks. TGV can go directly to Milan in Italy, and makes multi-stop trips in Switzerland (Basel and then Zurich after crossing the border).

There is a defacto “European railway” that is centrally coordinated but not centrally owned.

It's interesting that facebook wants to be the world wide web, and if they pull that off, they'll have just eaten the one network and merged it into theirs.

Its as if the only way to compete with a network is to swallow it up by a bigger, more powerful network. Iterate that over 20 or 50 years. We're in trouble :(

It's easy to imagine a world where social media worked the way email already does: you'd pick your own provider, and they would interoperate with other providers through standardized protocols.

You can have one network that isn't run by one entity.

There is no evidence of a monopoly anywhere.

My message to the Chinese: you give us Taobao, we give you South China Seas. The nine-dashed line. All yours!

It really isn't because the free market ideology never grasped the full complexity of how our world actually works. It's a false ideology that rulers preach to the masses, see here for a talk on "the free market".

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

I'll give you an example of what happed to PC videogames. Over the last 20 years corporations have taken full control over PC videogame software by a campaign of propaganada and selling games where they fraudulently take advantage of the publics ignorance and irrationality to steal game software by rebranding this software mmo/online. It's a way to cheat the population of owning their own software.

Games like Overwatch and world of warcraft and diablo 3 all normalized basically taking freedom away from customers. Markets can't work in a post technological society because corporations have all the power in the relationship to force policies. The human brain never evolved to live in a high tech capitalist society which is why we now have videogame dystopia out in PC game land.

In the 90's we had full blown level editors and server executables, post mass high speed internet. Game companies can simply take the software hostage and chain it to a backend server committing fraud on a mass scale. No law or anti trust can prevent this shit since most people are too technology illiterate to comprehend how they are being defrauded.