I fully agree. Adding to this: I think there should be an interface/data divide. Facebook has created an entirely new market by aggregating specific data into a public space. Their only innovation is their interface; every single byte of data they collect from there is not theirs. They did not produce it, they do not own it.

The only new legislation I'd like to see enacted is for these social media and data aggregators to be split into two companies: the interface company, which would exist to serve their interface, and a data utilities company, which would exist to serve the data they don't own. This would open their data market for hacking upon, in the spirit of what you suggest and enabled by the repeal of the legislation you've outlined.

The only way towards greater freedom is to make the world freer.

I think this is roughly the approach that Liz Warren et all have been suggesting, roughly some sort of platform/participant divide. Applied to amazon it means they can't sell 'amazon basics' products, applied to Apple it'd mean something like they can't offer their own first party apps with higher priority, and applied to Facebook, it'd be exactly along the lines you've pointed out.

Harks back to the antitrust action splitting train lines from steel producers in the 1920s. You need steel to make rail, and you need rail to transport steel, and the steel barons got rich by integrating across these two domains and giving themselves massive discounts compared to participants who were only in one industry and not both.

I'm not sure exactly what the details or enforeement would look like here but I do think it's an interesting line of thought. One thing Matt Stoller says with respect to antitrust legislation is that every company is a unique situation and should be handled as such.

I too would like to see more of the internet as public infrastructure, but your second paragraph implies you'd be against regulation?

How would any third-party client win the inevitable arms race this would initiate and what would stop your system from re-centralizing? Also how would any infrastructure become 'public' when it can't marshall the public interest or allocate resources via legislation?

> I too would like to see more of the internet as public infrastructure, but your second paragraph implies you'd be against regulation?

Yes, I believe we lost the public nature of the internet by adopting regulation like the DMCA.

> How would any third-party client win the inevitable arms race this would initiate and what would stop your system from re-centralizing?

Attrition. Facebook would have to realize at some point that they can't stop their client from being reversed and can't prevent clones from popping up. Right now, they can stop that, but they stop it with laws not with technology. Without that protection, Facebook could never keep up with the whole internet collectively reverse engineering their apps out in the open. Also FB engineers would know that being on the DRM team is a waste of time and nobody would want to do the work.

> Also how would any infrastructure become 'public' when it can't marshall the public interest or allocate resources via legislation?

As another commenter pointed out, I shouldn't have used the term "public infrastructure" when referring to the internet, because it's largely privately owned and not regulated as a public utility, which is true.

What I mean is that if you're going to open up a public web server and publish a free app in an app store, I should be able to interact with your servers however that app does it without committing a crime. And I should be able to publish my own app that interacts with your servers too, without your claim to intellectual property standing in the way.

I think this would cause companies like Twitter and Facebook to lose their entire market, but the core of the service would be maintained by the community of people interested in the service.

So for example, if there were 10 Twitter clients allowed to exist and be above-board companies, and they captured 80% of the Twitter client market share, then there could be a serious push to invent or adopt a new protocol to serve their users and de-federate Twitter themselves if they don't want to go along with the protocol.

I think that's a really solvable technical problem and all the privacy activists would have great reason to pick up an editor and join the fight. But as it is now, regulation has made that type of activity illegal, because it would infringe on Twitter's rights.

My interpretation of their suggestion is that the third party apps are merely a UI wrapper built on top of Facebook that removes ads or enforced privacy, and that building such a wrapper is currently illegal. Such a wrapper wouldn't be subject to centralization since there's no network effects, the network effects still lie with Facebook.

It's easy for social media companies to break third party clients on a whim, or ban the users. I don't think any legal gray areas are the problem. You'd have to force companies to allow third party clients if you want them to be viable on most platforms.

It's actually only easy for them to stop this because reverse engineering their code, extracting secrets, and then selling a product with those secrets is forbidden by law.

Doesn't that only apply to copy protection code? And you don't need to get into reverse engineering to make a client.

Bunch of good points here, I appreciate you for writing it up. I'm really interested in this space in general and I don't know what the perfect solutions are.

One thing I'm cautiously interested in is the anti-corporate action taking place in China over the last couple months. From my view on the sidelines as an American, the Chinese Politbureau seems to have just up and deemed certain profitable business models counterproductive for their view of society, and just laid down the hammer to say that those companies can't be profitable anymore. Specifically they did this for private test-prep/tutoring companies--they have to be nonprofits now.

I think the US doesn't have the state capacity or the political will to do something quite so hard hitting. Maybe we say that ad companies can only have X percent profit margin, and above that their tax rates increase? Force companies to invest their earnings in non-ad technologies? Not exactly sure.

Speculation aside, I like your point about a 3rd party ad-free facebook client. This mirrors what another commenter mentioned about the platform/participant distinction. This could mirror the antitrust action taken against Microsoft in the 90s, maybe we say that facebook has to open up their internal APIs such that third party people people should be able to make their own clients.

The weird thing here is that the client app isn't really facebook's business model, right? The marketplace facebook creates is to their ad buyers, the users are subjected to that on the back-end. Maybe the ad marketplace should be made public in some way? Could imagine at least forcing the ad marketplace to operate like a 'lit' exchange where bids and offers are visible by all participants. Not sure what this would actually solve though.

It's been said before but Facebook should've never been allowed to buy Instagram.

More concretely there's room for small incrementalist pieces of legislation which could help shift the landscape in beneficial ways, like Australia's laws forcing social media networks to pay news media sites for their content. [0]

Matt Stoller's not perfect but I like a lot of his stuff on antitrust news, some links below [0] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/australia-forced-google-a... https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/facecrook-dealing-with-a-...

Ah, you're so close ;)

Thanks for taking the time to reply, these discussions are much more interesting on HN than anywhere else on the internet.

Your line of thinking really drives me crazy because I feel like we're so close to agreeing. The horseshoe is almost touching in this thread.

I don't know enough about China to know if their societal engineering efforts are considered successful, but I do know enough to see the parallels to the regulatory solutions that you're floating.

I think these are all well intentioned but terrible ideas:

> can only have X percent profit margin

Profit margins can be engineered with creative accounting. You can't practically do this.

> Force companies to invest

I don't even know how you would force a company to invest in something. Generally you'd tax or subsidize them, but in either case you're disrupting market forces.

> maybe we say that facebook has to open up their internal APIs

This would actually help the situation in the short term, but it's still not a good idea. Facebook would continue asserting intellectual property rights on the data they serve and entrench them as a public utility. The goal here should be to create an environment that's hostile to Facebook by protecting them less.

> forcing the ad marketplace to operate like a 'lit' exchange

The ad marketplace doesn't need to be transparent, because Facebook can't actually compete for attention if they lose government protection of their IP or government protection from the harm caused by their UGC. If Facebook didn't have these protections, we wouldn't need to worry about the marketplace because their business would fail.

Though Facebook is currently in a position to easily commit undetectable fraud on ad buyers. The low quality of their market should be another reason to not use Facebook. The reason we don't have a transparent and competitive ad market is because Facebook gets to decide the rules for their marketplace.

> Facebook should've never been allowed to buy Instagram.

I don't think they should have been prevented from buying Instagram. If they didn't own them, they'd just share data anyway for mutual benefit. Who owns the stock is separate to me from the abusive products they produce.

> forcing social media networks to pay news media sites for their content

News media sites are their own problem, but they shouldn't get a special carve out for being paid to be indexed. If they don't want their content public on the internet, they shouldn't publish it. Once they do, they should assume it can be liberally indexed/mirrored/redistributed.

I think we'll ultimately see blockchain solutions take over the space, because fundamentally they work and are an unstoppable technology.

It's also possible that all these regulations don't have any of their intended effects, but are still successful in crippling Facebook by making its operation very restricted. In other words, use regulation to make Facebook a worse product, to the point where the users organically leave.

The best outcome would be if we simply got rid of all these silly intellectual property protections and let the chips fall where they may. That would end a lot of media companies, but it'd be better than the problems they've caused.

A good outcome is that social media companies eventually lose their users organically, through some combination of onerous regulations that can't apply to decentralized projects, and new technologies that don't fit their business model simply being better.

A bad outcome is if governments adopts social media in official ways, it becomes essential to government business and therefore gets regulated into permanence. This blurs the line between what it means to have a Facebook account as opposed to an internet connection. That's probably where Facebook will take us if they can write the regulations. Maybe to vote or do some other government business, I'll need to let Facebook verify my identity, which will be fine, because it's totally regulated and normal.

I've read a lot of posts on HN about the "aha" moment of people using metamask for the first time. I think we're going to see a new wave of internet technologies that obsolete things like Facebook and Twitter very quickly. They might also be way more damaging and worse, but they won't be companies and they won't be able to be regulated. I'm not sure how that plays out, but we'll figure it out when we get there, because that's where we're going.

>>As I see it, these companies are using public infrastructure when it suits them.

I agree with everything you've except what's quoted above. How is FAANG using public infrastructure, when private companies own everything from the undersea cables to the servers?

Ah, I see the confusion there. I meant public like "public ipv4 address", not a governmental "public utility".

I see. I think you meant to suggest that public accessibly to information is made relatively one-sided (to Facebook's advantage) by the DMCA on top of the software protection schemes employed by FB & co.

Yes, exactly.