Here's how I would counter: What many of these Congresspeople understand is business. And these are technology companies, but ultimately, they're companies using illegal business strategies. Congresswoman Jayapal explained for instance, how Google's ad market is effectively an example of insider trading, because Google controlled the buyer side, seller side, and the exchange itself, drawing on her experience with Wall Street. Technology didn't matter there, but business did.

And more intriguingly, the most common response from the tech CEOs there was "I don't know". If there's one really good case for breaking up big tech, it's that nobody running them understands the details of the operation well enough to be responsible for it. Their business models have bad effects on society that their CEOs don't know about. Their businesses make illegal decisions that their CEOs can't vouch for.

Big tech is a runaway train.

You can't fight fire with fire and you can't fight scale with scale. The solution to these problems lies in eliminating the advantages of scale so that operating on a national or international level becomes an expensive liability, but competing on a local market is affordable and practical.

Companies in the US and China, for example, can scale immensely because they have such huge, single markets in which to mature. They pay a one-time cost per entry and then have no real obstacles from expanding to the full capacity of that market.

I don't know much about how the EU works in this regard, but I imagine it's much more difficult for a European company to reach the full European market. Aside from legal obstacles, they have to face barriers from language, culture, history, and other things, I'm sure. It's an ideal setup for a collection of small-scale operations in a healthy market... Or it would be, if US and Chinese companies weren't able to scale so easily and then expand out of their own borders into the EU.

I tend to wonder if there are ways to bring similar barriers to the US. There aren't enough natural barriers, but perhaps we could create artificial barriers that will re-enable competition.

That doesn’t mean I dont want oversight. I think there may be a role for regulation in the public interest, but blindly chopping YouTube up into a hundred geographically separated chunks would be unbelievably dumb. Is ‘competition’ really going to compensate for the loss of convenience? There have always been competing video upload sites, but people go where the scale is because they like the scale. They want the scale. It has value to them.

The same goes for the App Store. I’m a happy Apple customer. I like the App Store and I think it works well, but I’m not entirely against government scrutiny of how it operates, in principle. Yes I’m concerned Apple could abuse its power, but killing the App Store or mandating by law that Apple has to implement policies that will tear the App Store into bits benefits me how? Will it make it easier for me to find and install Apps? Will it improve their quality? Will fragmented app stores make it easier for developers to connect with customers and earn revenue? I’m not convinced.

The problem was never the scale of the company. If YouTube was instead 100 different companies, there would still be a total of 49 years worth of video being uploaded every day which nobody would have the resources to review. Each company would have 1% of the video but also 1% of the revenue and the cost would be just as insurmountable.

The scale of the company prevents meaningful competition, that's the issue, not necessarily that they can't affordably review the 49 years worth of video.

That problem in particular isn't really one that competition would solve, because it's fundamentally a demand for censorship, and more competition would make censorship harder. Which is maybe a good thing anyway.

The biggest problem there is that all the hosts want you to use their search and do what they can to get in the way of any third party turning them into a dumb pipe. But this is where some kind of P2P service could really have an advantage, because it doesn't have to care about that -- let it be a dumb pipe on purpose and it wins, because there are a thousand companies who would love to be in the video search/discovery business and not have to pay the cost of hosting the videos or worry about a centralized third party host locking them out next week.

The Constitution of the USA prevents states from erecting barriers to inter-state commerce, so I suspect if there were legal barriers, they would have to be at the national level.

Therefore, I highly doubt any legislation would ever be passed for this. (even though it may end up being much better for the consumer)

I feel like for that to happen a much deeper cultural transformation in how we share information and global inequalities would have to come as well. The reason there's so much content in english is not because it's been constructed solely by authors who speak english natively (albeit probably the most common native language amongst blog authors, etc), but because many authors feel like they have to write it in english in order to speak to a broader, global audience.

A fragmented market prevents competition, so I don't understand what you're trying to say. Like with your friendly local cable company.

There was a memory etched in my mind of a clueless Congressman questioning the General Counsel of Alphabet/Google in a committee hearing (perhaps during the SOPA fiasco). The congressman said something to the effect of "Google can do anything! They store a copy of the entire internet. Why can't you just identify all of the copyrighted material and not show it without approval?"

I was dumbfounded by how this grown man seemed to think Google basically ran on "tech magic" and how little comprehension he seemed to have for what intellectual property is and how it's registered/identified.

You don't think banking is dysfunctional? Banking is one of the most privacy-invasive industries in existence, the rules are the reason the internet runs on advertising because they make it nigh impossible to make a functioning anonymous micropayments system and companies that try to innovate with e.g. a debit card that keeps your account balance invested in securities get booed off the stage by incumbents who don't want the competition.

There are a lot of legitimate things to complain about with banking and its regulations but despite the many misconduct scandals in banking they are still better than unregulated parabanks. The scandals haven't been in the form of "and the head ran off with all of the money and nobody can find it or them".

Regulations certainly could be improved in multiple directions but dysfunction is not a binary.

What kinds of improvements would improve the state of banking today that don't also throw the baby out with the bathwater?

I think for tech, "monopolies" are natural and they stem from the lack of investment needed by the consumer which allows us to choose the best/coolest product at every moment.

For tech it makes more sense to have 1 search engine, 1 social platform, 1 video sharing platform. If cars were easy to change as you wish, I think everyone will gravitate towards a single car brand.

Even my deliberately stupid as possible answers like "Turn away visitors once they get above 200 million connections with a landing screen" and "register Youtubes A-Z with seperate data bins and watch traffic migrate in a daft social experiment" are better answers than any I have seen from users of the talking point.

Specifically in the case of YT, as an extreme example, if all video available online in a country had to be moderated by a human, YouTube couldn't operate at it's current scale. It doesn't have a right to skip those regulations because of it's scale.

If a company can't scale and still comply with regulations the answer isn't automatically to get rid of the regulations. The inverse is also true, if a society decides that a company operating in a given environment has to adhere to new regulations, being so big those regulations fundamentally affect your business model doesn't excuse the company from complying.