FTC wants to break up Facebook

[atomheartbevo 89,828]

5 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I get that "everyone" hates Facebook but that alone can't be the reason they are broken up. It would seem that any argument has to be centered on how they use their Instagram and Whats App data tie-in to harm either users or maybe ad buyers.

Agreed, but those are the easiest things to do.

I think we need a European-style GDPR against larger platforms (which would resolve the data abuse), and I think it needs to be strictly enforced, and I also think they need to crack down on the spread of false information in some manner.  That runs against my view that they should be treated like a platform, but if a CNN or Fox News or whatever were acting as a platform spreading the kind of crap that people on FB do, they'd be in trouble, even if it was only civil.

5 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I'm not really sure how Whats App works itself into the conversation about breaking them up. Isn't it just another chat tool? 

Basically, only it's private/encrypted/used around the world/etc.  It's also a chance to hurt Facebook without dissolving FB itself.

 

[Onboard 2.0 9,083]

5 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I get that "everyone" hates Facebook but that alone can't be the reason they are broken up. It would seem that any argument has to be centered on how they use their Instagram and Whats App data tie-in to harm either users or maybe ad buyers.

I'm not really sure how Whats App works itself into the conversation about breaking them up. Isn't it just another chat tool? 

My guess ? Somebody didn't get a confirmation on their friend request.

[HoustonHorn 1,062]

4 hours ago, workswithseed said:

Like I said before, they're supposed to be a platform. How are those things thier fault? How is he supposed to resolve millions of people's issues? The only thing I really disagree with is the selling of personal information. 

This is literally Facebook's model. This is the only reason for the platform to exist.

[0xdeadbeef 1,652]

The IBM and Microsoft antitrust cases say hi.

 

For those to young to know any history, here's a blurb from some random internet page:

Quote

In January 1969, the government began a sweeping antitrust investigation into IBM's dominance and attempted to break it into smaller companies that would compete against one another.

The 13-year investigation, which required IBM to retain 200 attorneys at one point, fizzled in the early '80s as the computing landscape shifted from mainframes to personal computers. The government abandoned the tainted effort entirely in 1982, as clones of the IBM PC eroded Big Blue's dominance.

 

A billion dollar company will always have more and better lawyers. 

Edited December 10, 2020 by 0xdeadbeef

[Nice Guy Eddie 13,528]

1 hour ago, TwiceHorn said:

Amazon has a monopoly on what though?  What is the market they have monopolized? Selling shit?  Walmart sells shit.  Target sells shit. Costco sells shit.  They all sell shit online.

I don't believe that anti-trust has to be with only being a true monopoly.  Doesn't it have something to do with unreasonable competition? 

Amazon could be tempted with potential illegal behavior as they exclusively own the selling platform and they compete with others that selling on that platform.  

Let's say that TwiceHorn is basically the only person that sells Product X on Amazon. Let's forgot about IP aspects. It's just a generic product. You buy Product X from a Chinese manufacturer and sell it on Amazon.  Amazon has full understanding of demand for Product X. At some point as searches and sales increase on Amazon, the Amazon platform side of the business informs the AmazonBasics division that they should start selling Product X at a lower cost than you can. 

You're screwed. You built a market for your product and then Amazon took it away from you. Which by itself isn't illegal. But is it fair competition that AmazonBasics is entitled to perfect information that the Amazon platform may keep from other sellers? (to be clear, I don't know what info Amazon does and doesn't share with anyone)

 

[atomheartbevo 89,828]

7 hours ago, DaggerHorns said:

Social media platforms like this have done nothing but increase division, shame free speech, value and repeat meaningless opinions, increase suicide, decrease face to face personal communication, and support lies.

Zuckerberg has never been more than a dork running a platform. That has always been the root of the problem.

First, let me say that I rubbed out quite a few to your avatar, which shows my age.

"Social media platforms like this have done nothing but increase division, shame free speech, value and repeat meaningless opinions, increase suicide, decrease face to face personal communication, and support lies."

That broad brush could paint everything going back to BBSes.  Speaking of your avatar earlier - I am old enough that I came up through BBSes, Usenet, etc. in the 90s.  I saw a lot of this same shit that we see on Facebook, only it wasn't available to a mainstream audience - there had to be a little bit of technical savvy involved in coming across that stuff, to find it in the alt. groups, or the obscure BBSes.

I saw it move onto internet sites/forums in the late 90s/early 2000s, including through MySpace, GeoCities, etc.  and it started hitting a much more mainstream/non-techy audience.

Fun fact:  MySpace started less than a year earlier than Facebook.  At one point, Rupert Murdoch bought it to take on Facebook.  Yet, with all of Murdoch's resources, they couldn't figure out how to make MySpace compete with Facebook, because they didn't understand just how simple/uncomplicated Facebook was, and how good of a job it did at connecting people.  MySpace focused on glitz and stupid shit.

And nothing is stopping twitter from starting their own FB - they could easily toss in a little home page aspect for profiles pages.

Facebook is useful, even if you only think it will only  "increase division, shame free speech, value and repeat meaningless opinions, increase suicide, decrease face to face personal communication, and support lies." 

I've used it connect with relatives around the world, connect with childhood friends, stay in touch with buddies who were deployed overseas, and so on.  I have seen it radicalize relatives and friends though, including that qanon batshittery, so I'm not oblivious to that aspect.

Facebook is a platform.  Like I said, government needs to finally give the American people something like the GDPR, and they need to come out.  That would cut FB off at its knees.  FB also needs to be prevented from allowing it to be used to deliberately spread fake news and hate (which they are finally starting to do, albeit half-assed).  That's a helluva lot harder to do, without stepping on people's toes and rights.   Aunt Edna should be allowed to post her theories on JFK, but when Aunt Edna organizes a group to go harass other people, or uses FB to harass other people, there's a line that's crossed.

Give us a GDPR, shine a light on the violent/racist/hate groups that FB harbors, basically shine a light on FB and on advertisers until FB cleans its act up.

GDPR, and a better TOS for FB would clean up a lot of the problems people bitch about.

Edited December 10, 2020 by atomheartbevo

[TwiceHorn 31,557]

1 hour ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I don't believe that anti-trust has to be with only being a true monopoly.  Doesn't it have something to do with unreasonable competition? 

Amazon could be tempted with potential illegal behavior as they exclusively own the selling platform and they compete with others that selling on that platform.  

Let's say that TwiceHorn is basically the only person that sells Product X on Amazon. Let's forgot about IP aspects. It's just a generic product. You buy Product X from a Chinese manufacturer and sell it on Amazon.  Amazon has full understanding of demand for Product X. At some point as searches and sales increase on Amazon, the Amazon platform side of the business informs the AmazonBasics division that they should start selling Product X at a lower cost than you can. 

You're screwed. You built a market for your product and then Amazon took it away from you. Which by itself isn't illegal. But is it fair competition that AmazonBasics is entitled to perfect information that the Amazon platform may keep from other sellers? (to be clear, I don't know what info Amazon does and doesn't share with anyone)

 

My post wasn't completely serious.  It was meant to underscore how important the market definition is to a Section 2 case and how difficult it can be to define the market.

See my earlier post for brief discussion of monopolization (Section 2) and restraint of trade (Section 1) antitrust cases.

Both the Google and Facebook cases are primarily Section 2 cases, IIRC.  

[52-80 19,264]

Facebook steamrolled MySpace and Friendster because of momentum. 
 

and the momentum wasn’t because of some killer feature or deliberate design choice  like being cleaner,  but a serendipitous fact - that it was for college.edu domains only. 
 

i didn’t want to see the riff raff. I only wanted to connect to and communicate with and cyberstalking hot coeds. 
 

so it grew and grew, with the tech-savviest demographic of that time, and then they eventually opened the flood gates

[TwiceHorn 31,557]

4 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I don't believe that anti-trust has to be with only being a true monopoly.  Doesn't it have something to do with unreasonable competition? 

Amazon could be tempted with potential illegal behavior as they exclusively own the selling platform and they compete with others that selling on that platform.  

Let's say that TwiceHorn is basically the only person that sells Product X on Amazon. Let's forgot about IP aspects. It's just a generic product. You buy Product X from a Chinese manufacturer and sell it on Amazon.  Amazon has full understanding of demand for Product X. At some point as searches and sales increase on Amazon, the Amazon platform side of the business informs the AmazonBasics division that they should start selling Product X at a lower cost than you can. 

You're screwed. You built a market for your product and then Amazon took it away from you. Which by itself isn't illegal. But is it fair competition that AmazonBasics is entitled to perfect information that the Amazon platform may keep from other sellers? (to be clear, I don't know what info Amazon does and doesn't share with anyone)

 

This would generally fall under the category of predatory pricing, which is a Section 1 violation.  I don't believe that's actually alleged in any of these suits.

[Buzzrock 14,948]

90s BBS systems and Facebook are night and day. Barely comparable in terms of the business model. BBS is software, Facebook is an algorithm for data mining and monetization. 
 

But as has been said that’s not reason enough to break them up. 

[52-80 19,264]

9 minutes ago, Buzzrock said:

90s BBS systems and Facebook are night and day. Barely comparable in terms of the business model. BBS is software, Facebook is an algorithm for data mining and monetization. 
 

But as has been said that’s not reason enough to break them up. 

If the spirit of the law is designed to be anti-monopolistic, and FB through its own platform and subsidiary services (Whatsagram) has a monopoly on user data [which it likely does], then isnt that reason enough to break them up?

 

They know what any individual look like, where they live, their relationships, their preferences, their tendencies and proclivities, their income, their status -- and more than apple or microsoft or ibm or anyone else -- they know that stuff, that is not monopolistic?  even forgetting the fact that they wield that as currency to enrich themselves.

 

Forgetting the fact that that information may not have been volunteered by the individual themselves.  If Facebook scans through mom's contact list and finds an entry labeled as "Son", and she posts a photo to instagram captioned  'family photo', and she maybe says in a whatsapp message to her friend 'dave my son got his accounting degree today'... and through the phone number, image recognition, text sniffing,  and all sorts of cross-platform cooking tracking, it knows everything about Dave who is not a user of that service.......... should it be allowed to do that, without Dave's consent?

[Al_4_ISU 12,500]

13 hours ago, 52-80 said:

Facebook steamrolled MySpace and Friendster because of momentum. 
 

and the momentum wasn’t because of some killer feature or deliberate design choice  like being cleaner,  but a serendipitous fact - that it was for college.edu domains only. 
 

i didn’t want to see the riff raff. I only wanted to connect to and communicate with and cyberstalking hot coeds. 
 

so it grew and grew, with the tech-savviest demographic of that time, and then they eventually opened the flood gates

As someone who was in college when Facebook started, this was 100% true.  MySpace is where the white trash you grew up with congregated.  Accessing Facebook was a sign of your "superiority".  Lulz.

[Buzzrock 14,948]

38 minutes ago, 52-80 said:

If the spirit of the law is designed to be anti-monopolistic, and FB through its own platform and subsidiary services (Whatsagram) has a monopoly on user data [which it likely does], then isnt that reason enough to break them up?

 

They know what any individual look like, where they live, their relationships, their preferences, their tendencies and proclivities, their income, their status -- and more than apple or microsoft or ibm or anyone else -- they know that stuff, that is not monopolistic?  even forgetting the fact that they wield that as currency to enrich themselves.

 

Forgetting the fact that that information may not have been volunteered by the individual themselves.  If Facebook scans through mom's contact list and finds an entry labeled as "Son", and she posts a photo to instagram captioned  'family photo', and she maybe says in a whatsapp message to her friend 'dave my son got his accounting degree today'... and through the phone number, image recognition, text sniffing,  and all sorts of cross-platform cooking tracking, it knows everything about Dave who is not a user of that service.......... should it be allowed to do that, without Dave's consent?

For sure, I was not arguing that there is no grounds to break them up. 

[Samson's Wig 3,194]

The reality is we need new laws to handle the privacy and data mining issues.  We're woefully behind the rest of the world on this front, in large part because these companies we're discussing, along with the insurance industry, completely control our government.