> It seems like society needs a term for the concept of a company accumulating far too much power, and that we need laws similar to anti-trust laws, that apply to these companies.

Our forebears have us covered! Antitrust became the popular term, but back in the Gilded Age, it was often referred to as anti-consolidation. I think that is an excellent term for it.

In Facebook's case they own some of their biggest potential competitors for attention and deliberately preserve their niches. So splitting them up might make a difference. But if not, requiring an open network akin to the telephone system with standardized protocols might make a difference.

AT&T was split on geographical lines, so maybe FB could be as well, and the regionals would all have to interoperate with open protocols that would allow for regional competitors.

Open protocols and interop seem like a very good goal to aim for. I'm curious how geographical lines would work for Facebook -- would you end up with one Facebook per country? And would we still end up in a situation where you need to have a Facebook account to participate in things like Marketplace or community groups?

Personally I would want to be able to host my own tiny Facebook instance that I control. Ideally I could even invite friends and family to share my ad-free self-hosted instance with a chronological newsfeed setup.

Can’t you already do this? Host your own social networks, I mean. Of course, the hard part is getting others to join it. Isn’t that why protocols like Matrix and decentralized social media platforms like Mastodon were made? So you could communicate with anyone you wanted to on any other platform as long as they implemented the open protocols.

For what it's worth, I think splitting up Facebook makes very little sense, but that requiring open protocols would be an excellent direction. A big reason I have a problem with the "monopoly" framing is that it limits the options for how to fix it to pretty much just this "break it up" idea, which isn't the right tool for the job.

Splitting Oculus, Instagram, and WhatsApp kind of makes sense.

I agree, but that's not actually what people are mostly thinking about when they say to split up facebook. They mean facebook itself. But it's not clear what that even means to most people.

I see geographical splitting being pushed in a few places, but this is a really anachronistic vision of what would really benefit consumers. Even back in the phone days, regional monopolies didn't turn out to be a net win. It just meant that each of those new mini-monopolies dominated their region.

The right way to think about this is what kind of splitting would produce the most competitive landscape. We have a really successful example in the way that ISP competition has played out in various markets.

The US has regional ISP near monopolies in gigabit fiber, since the infrastructural outlay is so expensive. This is analogous to the moat FB has from building a vast and deeply connected network graph.

The ISP outcome has been that the US mostly pays extraordinarily high prices for substandard service.

Other countries have avoided this trap by regulating the enforced splitting of the network itself and the service provider. Since building out the physical network (the fiber, or the friend graph) is extremely hard, great that is a natural monopoly. Maybe you might get a couple of huge players, but the barrier to entry for new players is nearly insurmountable.

Each network graph / fiber provider is required by law to offer access to their network to third party service providers who you can contract with to provide you internet service over the network.

Japan for instance has this setup, with a handful of players that have built national (or regional) fiber networks, and when you buy service, you have a split bill. Part of it goes to pay for access to the physical network. The other part is to pay for an ISP that is routing your packets over the network.

I think this is the proper solution for FB. Break the company apart between the network graph provider, and the CLIENT layer. Let third parties provide their own friend graph client with features that people want.

Then you would see a flowering of competition as people feel free to try the client experience they prefer. * How about chronological news feed? * no ads, but paying your interconnect cost by making you pay a subscription * fine grained control of how many stories you ever see from specific over-talkative people. * delivering a subset of your friends' stories only on keyword-matched topics / hiding all stories that match specific topics.

I am not hopeful the technologically illiterate people writing the decisions will understand this though. Geographic splitting is nonsensical for a graph that is inherently global.

I don't think geographical partitioning is necessarily the right approach, but it would at least force an interoperability/federation protocol to exist, which could (as it did in the phone networks, and as you suggest for clients) allow competing clients and networks to interface with the original network.

The larger a company becomes, the more it should be regulated.

Larger in terms of what? Market share? Revenue? Profit margin? Staffing?

Yes.

All of the above or any one of the above? How would one measure how each of those contributes to market power?

I can't tell if you have a reasonably thought out perspective based on your response or if it's just "corporations that are 'big' suck"

I agree with this. My point is merely that the current problems are a round peg that it is unwise to try to fit into the square hole of existing anti-trust regulation.

Isn't the term just "too powerful"? It seems to me that the reason we don't have laws against companies being too powerful is that most people don't think it's a big deal for companies to be too powerful, as long as they're not monopolies.

If people thought an entity was “too powerful”, then they would want a law against the entity, otherwise the word “too” does not mean anything.

The reason there is no law against being “too powerful” is because it is a nebulous description that is not enforceable in a fair manner.

This isn't a new problem though. Anti-trust laws have been enforced previously without a strict definition.

"Although the courts "have not yet identified a precise level at which monopoly power will be inferred"[1]

[1]Section of Antitrust Law, Am. Bar Ass'n, Market Power Handbook 19­20 (2005).

I kinda fundamentally reject the premise here. When I say that a sandwich is "too expensive", I don't mean that there ought to be a law against selling sandwiches for that price.

The context is dealing with the problem of the existence of a too powerful company. Dealing with a too expensive sandwich requires no laws.

If refusing to work with a company is impossible, it's a monopoly, right? Otherwise, you are free to respond to the too-powerful company the same way you respond to the too-expensive sandwich.

If a company is using its power to do something harmful, write laws against the harmful thing, irrespective of how much power the company has. Illegalizing shadow profiles of non-users would be a good step forward, illegalizing them only for FB-sized companies would be less good.

If a handful of companies are operating as a monopoly, that's already well-defined as an oligopoly.

I think the only other situation where a company can be too powerful is if they get too much power over the regulators. I expect it's rare to get there without becoming a monopoly or oligopoly, but it's probably not impossible.

>If a company is using its power to do something harmful, write laws against the harmful thing, irrespective of how much power the company has.

I agree, hence my explanation of why there are no laws against "too powerful" companies. It is not an actionable condition.

Well yes but that term is too honest for its own good as a matter of opinion. "Too powerful" is an absolutely arbitrary standard with no desire for internal consistency. Which is exactly the opposite of what you want in laws.

I agree with what you're saying, but that's exactly the problem. I don't think the author of the source article has a clear, internally consistent standard, and I don't think any consistent standard exists that would tell you Google and Facebook need to be broken up but CVS and Costco don't.

I was going to reply to the parent that we used to have a word for this, and that word is "monopoly", but apparently we now no longer have that shared definition, probably an intentional confusion bought at great expense by monopolists.

At no point has "monopoly" meant anything other than "A single seller". The confusion comes from people trying to steal that term to refer to "big companies".

> The confusion comes from people trying to steal that term to refer to "big companies".

This is an oligopoly. Because companies are arbitrary constructs, it's a defacto monopoly by multiple sellers. The terminology is useful, but not in the sense that it is then end-all of qualification.

I truly feel like I just read a paragraph from 1984. You're tying yourself in knots to rationalize using language to mean something you want it to mean, but which it does not actually mean.

Yes, oligopoly is a fine word to use, but you can't just wave your hands around to transmute that into monopoly.

To claim big companies == oligopoly == monopoly is objectively wrong, and the opposite of useful terminology.

"big companies" were in quotes because there was context. This implies "too big to fail" or "big enough to trigger antitrust talks", et al.

Collusion often results in this, which is not a dejour monopoly, but a defacto monopoly. Collusion isn't even strictly necessary. Endstage capitalism naturally selects the winners who stay on top. It's a simple concept taught in beginning economics.

"big companies" == oligopoly == monopoly is exactly what people mean when talking about worrisome "big companies", without the commensurate analogies.

A monopoly is about perspective which is about scale not some subjective definition (like sanderjd endlessly trolls about). Legal systems all over the world combat real/threatened monopolies (eg the CCP recently acted unilaterally) in various forms. Whether you think it's a useful reasoning to group companies and use a specific term is irrelevant. I sincerely hope you can understand that.

Good luck with whatever.

Monopoly means one seller in the same way that a spherical cow has no friction.

When modelling monopolies economists posit one seller that can set the price because it's simple. Similarly, perfectly competitive markets have an infinite number of competeing firms.

In the real world, monopoly has never been as black and white as that e.g. if someone was granted a monopoly on selling salt, that didn't immediately strike anyone selling salt with a lightning bolt, it just meant you couldn't build an actual business on it since you could hit legal issues.

Similarly, people accused of being monopolies argue that the "market" is bigger (do planes and trains compete for long distance travel?) in a way that is fuzzy and human.

But the bigger issue is how do you tell the difference between someone who doesn't understand something, and someone who refuses to understand something? People pretended that climate change wasn't happening for 3 decades and counting to protect big corporations, so really there's no limit to what their influence can buy.

Inheritance. That’s the term you are looking for.

In many countries, we still tax it 65%, to ensure a one-time success doesn’t become a “monopoly” of some families over generations.

Likewise for companies. we can’t tax them per generation, but the monopoly laws are here to dismantle them if they keep hold on a market without ongoing “coup de maître” on innovation.