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'Break Up Google and Facebook If You Ever Want Innovation Again' (theregister.co.uk)
Hal_Porter shares a report from The Register: If the tech industry wants another wave of innovation to match the PC or the internet, Google and Facebook must be broken up, journalist and film producer Jonathan Taplin told an audience at University College London's Faculty of Law this week. He was speaking at an event titled Crisis in Copyright Policy: How the digital monopolies have cornered culture and what it means for all of us, where he credited the clampers put on Bell then IBM for helping to create the PC industry and the internet. Taplin told his audience that he'd been moved by the fate of his friend Levon Helm, The Band's drummer, who was forced to go back on the road in his sixties, after radiation therapy for cancer. Helm died broke. Today, Taplin points out, YouTube accounts for 57 per cent of all songs streamed over the internet, but thanks to a loophole returns just 13.5 per cent of revenue. "That's not a willing buyer-seller relationship," he said, referring to the UGC loophole that Google enjoys, one not available to Spotify or Apple Music. But it isn't just songwriters and musicians who are poorly paid. The average person "works for two hours a day for Mark Zuckerberg" generating a data profile. Taplin pointed out that Bell held patents on many technologies including the transistor, the laser and the solar cell, that it agreed to license, royalty free, as part of a 1956 consent decree.
Taplin saw history repeated with IBM. Under the 1956 (again) consent decree IBM was obliged to unbundle software from hardware in the 1960s. But competition authorities again opened up an investigation in 1969 which ran for 13 years. Caution made IBM ensure its first microcomputer, the IBM PC, launched in 1981, was an open platform. IBM chose three operating systems to run on the first PC but clearly favoured an outsider, from a tiny Seattle outfit originally called "Micro-Soft." Then Microsoft got the treatment. "Every 20 years we have this fight -- and we're about to have it again," Taplin told the audience. Antitrust was necessary "not because they're too big, but because there's no market solution" to Google and Facebook. The barriers to entry are now so high nobody is going bust open the ad duopoly. Taplin cited Snapchat an example of a company that tried to innovate, but refused to take Facebook's buyout offer. Facebook has simply copied its features.
Taplin saw history repeated with IBM. Under the 1956 (again) consent decree IBM was obliged to unbundle software from hardware in the 1960s. But competition authorities again opened up an investigation in 1969 which ran for 13 years. Caution made IBM ensure its first microcomputer, the IBM PC, launched in 1981, was an open platform. IBM chose three operating systems to run on the first PC but clearly favoured an outsider, from a tiny Seattle outfit originally called "Micro-Soft." Then Microsoft got the treatment. "Every 20 years we have this fight -- and we're about to have it again," Taplin told the audience. Antitrust was necessary "not because they're too big, but because there's no market solution" to Google and Facebook. The barriers to entry are now so high nobody is going bust open the ad duopoly. Taplin cited Snapchat an example of a company that tried to innovate, but refused to take Facebook's buyout offer. Facebook has simply copied its features.
Then ...
Today we laugh at Microsoft. From the days of calling Linux cancer, it is adding Linux subsystem for Windows and porting MSOffice for free for Chromebooks below 10 inch screens.
So let us be more cautious.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They were. What kind of retarded argument is that?
The complexity of an invention doesn't correlate to it's value.
For example, the wheel... You fucking imbecile.
Took AT&T years to get the government's attention, but once it got broken up things took off. I remember in, shit, 80/81 I bought a GE flipphone I could plug into my phone outlet. I paid something like $80 for it, and didn't have to pay AT&T $10/month for a regular phone. Kept that damned phone for a good 10-20 years, until I could replace it with a wireless phone.
Alphabet/Facebook are months beyond needing to be taken down a peg, too bad government works in years/decades while FB/A work in months.
We know about portals, we know about time travel. We know the universe has unlimited energy. We know we can't get out of the game and that's the real reason we can't win or break even, because that would mean the game would end. Every life is it's own timeline. We just need to do the science behind it all. We are building ore and more intelligence to do all the work. Pretty soon those of us who aren't too stupid to live are going to want to sit back and watch the world burn.
My thoughts exactly.
We were so worried about Microsoft back in the '90s, even The Simpsons had to parody it in an episode. The highlights can be watched here and here, on YouTube, no less.
Microsoft is still around, of course. But when they stopped innovating, innovation didn't stop. Others just took over.
Gab documented the heck out of their interactions with both companies when trying to get their app approved. Google was better than Apple, but in the end they decided to pull it because racist language is tolerated on Gab, even though Twitter is littered with SJW-approved racism like blacks calling for violent crimes and even genocide against whites. Apple was just ridiculous; they at one point even hunted down bad language and were like "well, we found this one guy posting a few racist words so this is clearly a hate site so the whole app and site get the ban hammer."
So once again, tell us how Big Tech is on the side of the angels in promoting a free and open internet, market competition, etc.
But Facebook? Innovation? Really?
They have done all that is humanly possible to reverse innovation over the past decade with their ethicless ways (i.e. copy the other guy rather than invent. Make a fortune on exploiting people for all they are worth). I would add others, such as Amazon and Tesla, to the list. We are living in the digital dark ages, and ironically it's the tech companies themselves that brought us here.
They were. What kind of retarded argument is that?
The complexity of an invention doesn't correlate to it's value.
For example, the wheel... You fucking imbecile.
Radial tires capable of exceeding 200MPH are quite complex designs which also happen to be considerably more expensive than carving stone circles, you fucking moron.
As far as innovation, there's nothing mind-blowing about entertaining simpletons addicted to fucking Snapchat or any other clone of idiotware.
"Facebook has simply copied its features."
Yeah... maybe the bar for what we call innovation has gotten a bit ridiculously low. Real innovation takes more than a weekend and a case of Mountain Dew for a competitor to copy.
Bells labs, IBM, Microsoft and Apple are companies that at their core invented the technologies that we use. Google and Facebook have not really added the same level of technological advancement that Bell labs did for example. They are technology innovators not inventors. Breaking them up will not advance technology. Great ideas will.
There has been enough Internet "Innovation" in the last 10 years. I think it's fine if we stop for a while and let the humans catch up.
This is about Net Neutrality, truthfully. Net Neutrality supports the business models of an Alphabet or Facebook. The removal of it will bring them down to earth.
That is why this is going to happen now. Amazon is in the process of being tamed also, but differently - by state taxation.
Taxing global companies more in one country simply makes them move revenue through other countries.
It would be hard enough to just get consistency in the OECD countries, let alone the rest of the world.
But what about poor Levon Helm?
Taplin told his audience that he'd been moved by the fate of his friend Levon Helm, The Band's drummer, who was forced to go back on the road in his sixties, after radiation therapy for cancer. Helm died broke. Today, Taplin points out, YouTube accounts for 57 per cent of all songs streamed over the internet
LOL.
The Band was formed 38 years before YouTube existed and and sold many millions of albums. Levon Helm made far more money than the average person in his lifetime. If he died broke it had nothing to do with YouTube.
Taplin cited Snapchat an example of a company that tried to innovate, but refused to take Facebook's buyout offer. Facebook has simply copied its features.
If someone can put you out of business simply by copying what you are doing, maybe it means you're a shit company who isn't doing it very well.
In 1992 the great sin which brought the wrath of government and popular judgement against it was the inclusion of a web browser and multimedia software in standard operating system packages. For free. Google is largely free or marginal in cost. Google's parent company is leading the charge into super discounted medical devices for chronic issues. Facebook is free. I don't know what altruistic endeavors Facebook is involved in but they shouldn't have to justify their existence beyond the great demand which exists for their free platform.
thanks worthless slashdot editors.
Taplin cited Snapchat an example of a company that tried to innovate, but refused to take Facebook's buyout offer. Facebook has simply copied its features.
If someone can put you out of business simply by copying what you are doing, maybe it means you're a shit company who isn't doing it very well.
Snapchat has managed to rack up losses in the hundreds of millions for the last few years.
In their IPO filing, they stated they may never turn a profit.
Naturally, they valued themselves north of 20 billion dollars.
The problem is far larger than some company with an overinflated ego. The entire concept of valuation has turned into a fucking shitshow, and is completely devoid of common sense. If you want to blame something, blame the idiots who sustain that kind of fucking financial wizardry.
Facebook and Google have become way too powerful for the good of mankind. Both companies have tracking software on almost every website in existence. These trackers track people from their personal online travels to their business travels. There is not much these two companies don't know about most of us, and the rest they can easily deduce or buy from another source.
I tend to agree with a certain exiled Australian on what Google really is. I've been in IT for 20 years and quite a bit of that in IT security. Working for the largest business ISP in the country allowed me to see and learn things that I find unholy about these two companies.
People think they are getting something worth their data by dint of using these companies. You gain nothing by their use. You are the product. I decided long ago to not use anything made by Alphabet or Facebook. I block all of their trackers and websites from devices in my control. As a FreeBSD/OpenBSD user and proponent. I use Fastmail for my email needs and I pay to do so. There is nothing better I have found.
We are headed towards a world that is largely controlled by a few companies. I buy and support small software houses like Fastmail I use an iPhone because they are the lesser of the available evils. I'd use a flip phone were it not for the hideous text experience.
...as some have indicated, he should have been successful before the internet took off. What probably happened is, that like many artists he spent most of his money as fast as it came in and didn't invest any for a pension. There have been many argument for a reduction in the duration of copyright and maybe reducing the length of time artists have a lock on their music would incentivise them to invest in their retirement.
The internet is in any event a blessing and a curse for artists. On the one hand, it has lowered the value they can get for individual plays of their product, but on the other it has enabled them to reach the entire worlds population as a potential market.
Google and Facebook have secured their dominance through offering a product that most people like. Yes we do have concerns about what they do with their data, but both companies have done well by not being Evil as Googles unofficial slogan once put it. They didn't always succeed in not being evil, but by and large they haven't performed any actions which make you wonder whether their respective CEOs are the AntiChrist.
Also cited was the breakup/limitations imposed on Bell and IBM respectively due to their stranglehold on the technological market through patents. I would suggest this maybe highlights a problem with patents themselves, which have problem with their length in a market where innovation needs to be fast.
In summary, changing the system may be more effective than attacking individual companies that have got successful by playing the system. Reducing copyright to 25 years and patents to say 5-10 years would perhaps be one way of ensuring that innovation happens faster.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Taxing global companies more in one country simply makes them move revenue through other countries. It would be hard enough to just get consistency in the OECD countries, let alone the rest of the world.
I feel like we may never know as government is bought and paid for to *always* include loopholes. Even if some in government are really trying there are others who will sabotage it then revolve out of government to collect their paycheck. Taxes are mostly for the upper middle class and small to medium businesses. The rest pay little to nothing percentage wise.
As far as innovation, there's nothing mind-blowing about entertaining simpletons addicted to fucking Snapchat or any other clone of idiotware.
Nothing mind-blowing, yet Facebook still had to copy it...
Funny to see the devolution of communication, 1st there were social media sites like facebook, then twitter came along that limited you to 140 char, then snapchat where conceited twits just swap selfies with maybe a word or two caption. I can't wait to see what the next devolution is, maybe we will start posting grunting sounds?
He can simply upload his music into Youtubes content blocking system, select "block usage" instead of "monetize usage", and Google will block it for him.
The real problem here is that "monetize usage" won't tell him what percentage of the advertising revenue he's getting. If 13% of the money was all they could make from advertisers then that's as much as he will ever get, on the other hand if Google are taking 80% of that revenue then there is a market there for competitors to take 70%....60%... and so on.
So what's needed is for Google, ON AN ACCOUNT BY ACCOUNT basis, disclose the percentage of revenue they're paying out.
Overall they pay out the majority (they disclose this fact), but we know they pay out some companies 89%, and those companies get most of the views, so we know they pay out tiny amounts to most other accounts, giving an average 50.00000001%.
As an effective monopoly on video publishing, Google should be forced to disclose that data.
The sentiment is appreciated. But the truth is Google just began offering multi million dollar packages to AI researchers from Nvidia for just 3 years of work. There's plenty of competition in certain areas, and thankfully Bing exists to at least nudge Google search along. Snapchat was enough for Facebook to change nearly all of its properties just to compete.
Regulatory scrutiny might be in order. But software is much easier and cheaper to compete in than things with established physical goods and high cost to entry. Where's the articles calling for Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T being broken up? They're far more entrenched and rent seeking than either FB or Google.
Facebook is a service that exists solely because computer experts (us) have been to lazy about finally replacing Usenet and E-Mail with something that isn't an anachronistic piece of shite protocol & service. Do that and Facebook will go away. Mark Zuckerberg said it himself: He wouldn't want Facebook to be cool, he would want it to be ubiquitous. Like electricity or tap water. Just about the exact opposite of innovation, once it's established.
Anyone can see that Facebook as something like that isn't all that good. It's just notably better than E-Mail (no news here) for the largest part of humanity, I can't blame them. Facebook has actually *less* ads than email. And the once it does have are at least mildly useful to the users. Ponder that for a moment.
Snapchat crashed and burned because there is a cheaper more universal alternative that is orders of magnitude better. It's this thing called "websites" (remember that Snapchat wanted to make money replacing those), driven by an open standards group that these days to the most extent play ball with each other and actually *do* innovate (CSS Grid and Web Assembly - finally). Snapchat is never going to replace that without redoing the entire way the web works.
Google is a search engine, and a very good one. They actually innovate and have computing power that is unmatched by anyone else. They also have a measurable headstart in AI. And they've built the Facebook of operating systems, Chrome OS / Android. OS as a service. And cleverly implemented. Get all for free, we just get to watch over you. ... That is creepy, but it *is* innovative.
I presume Google will get into trouble once we have open source AI projects such as Open AI gain traction on easily available hardware that can run it at the users discretion. Implement the algorithms and spread it on FOSS clients and you can reduce Googles influence significantly. Firefox just vaulted back on to the stage and could be a facilitator of something like this a few years further down the road. Have enough context/AI driven popups wearing on your nerves and eventually someone will get back to dusting off some FOSS mobile OS. Long story short: Google will have to innovate in one way or the other on a regular basis to uphold it's value proposition. And they do. Searh engine algorythms updated regularly, Android, Chrome, Chrome OS, Cloud Computing, AI as a service, cheap feasible VR, ... pretty innovative if you ask me. I'm still hooked anyway. ... Though I did stear clear from Chrome OS after a short tryout.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Break up the patent and copyright monopolies. Google and facebook are not relevant to innovation they just take advantage of the inequitable distribution of IP rights.
How does a company lose hundreds of millions of dollars when their product is pictures and text?
THAT DISAPPEAR NO LESS.
IF YOU'RE SPENDING TOO MUCH JUST SAY NEW FEATURE THE SNAPS GO AWAY SOONER NOW, BAM, LOWER SERVER COSTS.
I get that building an electric car or 3D printing organs is going to eat up money, but FFS, how do silicon valley types piss money away on shit that in no way should qualify as "tech?"
I suppose they have managed to create a need tthey cannot fill.
I don't know, when just two or three companies have such a big chunk of the online space, government forcing a break up may be the only option. Three-quarters of online traffic goes through just the top two companies, CompuServe and Prodigy. Oh sorry, not anymore. Those companies went away when someone else offered something better. Three quarters of online traffic flows through AOL and Yahoo. No sorry it changed again. Yahoo has been beaten out by Altavista, and AOL is the main ISP. Fuck it's hard to keep up. You say Altavista, the mighty Altavista is gone? So it's AOL and who that run the whole internet now? What? No AOL? Dang the government should has done an amazing job breaking up all the online powerhouses.
"Under the 1956 (again) consent decree IBM was obliged to unbundle software from hardware in the 1960s."
i wonder... maybe if ibm made the software for ibm pc it would be better, microsoft is notoriously sloppy with software.
Marketing and advertising. There is nothing special about Facebook or Snapchat. Its all about market share and holding the plebs attention.
I'm using a midget prostitute to scratch them.
I have to agree with this sentiment. In fact, it's not Facebook's fault by any means they were successful with copying features from Snapchat. In addition, if people truly are concerned with Facebook's dominance they must understand the most valuable resource is the human mind. The act of tapering off Facebook will need to come from within the company itself. The employees will need to share the sentiment that Facebook must be broken up and only then can smaller players compete. There's a concentration of capital and brilliant people at Facebook. Zuckerberg cannot run this monolith company by himself. It takes a group of people to keep any company in power including Google. Therefore, my conclusion is not writing some law that restricts Facebook or Google from growing. They are not at fault for doing things so well. If anything, their large amounts of capital allow them to bully the little guys, but try change will come from within. It's hard to say whether this will happen because most of the brilliant people are given insane amounts of cash and have devoted lots of time to building these money making systems. To leave this on a positive note, no 1 company will dominate the globe forever. This will be impossible. Apple will one day fall and so will Google and Facebook. That's the beauty of capitalism and the free market - we will see some group of people find a different way of providing to the masses.
Yeah, my experience is M$ is fully entrenched. So much so that no one even questions it any longer.
And I only put in the drop of 1% to account for Macs on the back of iPhone customers.
Because Facebook has a war chest sufficient to copy EVERYTHING and still not really feel a pinch.
When you have enough money to bet on everything you canâ(TM)t lose, but Facebook owns the house so they always win regardless.
Their customers are the people buying adds and in Google's case people with advertising space. They are the only players. I can't buy adds anywhere else because it is just to hard to find any other sellers. Likewise no group of sellers are going to actually hire a sales person, will just use Google. There are no patients or intellectual property here. The market has converged to a standard and that standard way of buying and selling ads is now Google. Facebook got in before the door slammed shut. You can't innovate around these two Titans. They have all the advertising money and an entire generation thinks everything on the web should be free. So unless you have another funding model, I don't care how amazing your snap chat is, or how cute your tweets are, you had better get a different revenue model than advertising because that one is owned by Google and Facebook.
Even in a more modern scenario, of course, poor artists is always YouTube's fault. Never the music industry's slavery contracts and the RIAA's mob attitude for years.
> . The only use I have for Windows is filing my S-corp taxes one per year, and I use a VM on my Macbook for that.
I've used Taxact.com for my S Corp for many years. I use Linux, and just recently started using Mac some. I'm sure other sites work just fine too. You don't *need* Windows for taxes.
Since my business was network security and I had root access to many customers' servers, nearly 20 years ago we decided Windows wouldn't be allowed on our network, and I've yet to have any need for it whatsoever. It's never even been an issue at all. The one thing I do use Windows for is I now work for another company that uses MS SQL, so using Microsoft's SQL client is convenient. Even that one use is going away as the company has decided MS SQL is unsustainable, so they'll need to switch to Postgres or MySQL / MariaDB.
Shut down Facebook.
Since Google is evil tell them to not be evil once again.
And maybe split it up. Or part of it. Or whatever.
Doesn't that already exist?
There is a place known as Europe, where they have people who know how to innovate
There is another place known as Japan, where they also have people who know how to innovate
And in Argentina, Korea, Australia, Singapore, Brazil, China, Africa ... people there also work hard in developing interesting ideas
We guarantee a massive monopoly: government.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
What he says is: musicians aren't compensated enough, Facebook makes money off our information, and therefore we need to break up Google and Facebook for innovation.
Breaking up Google or Facebook might contribute to innovation, and breaking up some companies in the past helped in some ways, but that doesn't make musicians and innovation tied in any way.
The entire economies of the West are now owned by the banks.
Who owns most of the companies stocks? USA, Eurozone, Japan?
Banks.
Who owns the most real estate in USA, Europe, Japan?
Banks.
What does this result in?
A planned economy. We have a planned economy now, and the banks print money into the stock markets to grow it or contract it.
We all know how planned economies end? Collapse.
This has been possible through the illegal consolidation of the financial systems and markets into monopolies such as FANG.
This happened because the laws are being ignored to rape and pillage the real economy outside of Wall Street/Banks and these go directly into politicians pockets.
The people you get to pick from to elect.
We don't even have a democracy in this sort of system, which many people are starting to figure out.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I donâ(TM)t know what this guy is talking about? There is still plenty of innovation, big companies like Google and Facebook have the capital and resources to do this. They also invest in smaller companies and purchase them to help expand new ideals. I do think having giants directing innovation can be a bit restrictive but in the end this is how technology innovation works.
Most small businesses are in this situation. There was a time when small software companies dreaded the call from Microsoft: they'd get an offer to buy the company, and if they didn't accept it then Microsoft would ship a competing product that they were able to throw more engineers at and a lot more marketing money at.
The problem with Facebook and Microsoft as competitors here is that they already typically have access to a superset of your customers. If you were developing Windows software and Microsoft wanted to compete with you, not only were all of your customers already their customers, but all of your potential customers were as well. This put them in a far stronger position than you, even if they were developing the product from scratch. Facebook is often in a similar situation.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
What this reporter is really saying is that two entities are eating all the ad money, and nobody else can make any ad money if current trends continue.
Which is why the government should demand interoperability just like they did with instant messaging, email, etc....
Government did what ? Which government ? In which country ?
And let's look at interoperability :
Now that Google is blocking server-to-server XMPP fedaration (and not even using XMPP internally, only as an interface for client), is there a single interoperable instant messaging ?
- Google's Talk/Hangou/whatever it is going to call next week, once it gets merged into the next beta experiment
- Facebook's Messenger.
- WhatsApp (also in facebook's possession, but not even interoperable with the other facebook instant messaging system).
- Snapchat (strongly popular among a very young generation)
- Microsoft's Skype
etc.
Every single instant messaging system is an isolated silo, with no way to send message accross.
SMS are the only interoperable thing, and that's not as much due to government decree as it is due to it being a telecom standard that existed and was interoperable from the beginning with, and lots of companies (mostly in Europe and Asia) saw "inoperable" as a potential selling point ("You can now send SMS to your gand-ma, even if she's in a different country and thus very likely on a different network") rather than a drawback (as in the US. "Want to exchange messages ? Then you need to move all your friends on the same network as you").
Even the only systems that ARE currently operable - e.g.: Microsoft's Skype for Business and Cisco - are only so because they are business software designed to work on interoperable industry standards (SIP and XMPP, respectively) that predate them and onto which the company only have bolted they branding.
And regarding e-mails:
Yes, same situation : it's basically interoperable, not because of some recent government law, but because from the beginning they were industry standards a long time ago back in the age of "internet across universities", long before service providers even existed, long before companies such as Google suddenly became mastodons on the market.
Imagine if suddenly a small upcoming service provider arrived saying "yes, we do offer some mailing system, but it's a different one and not compatible with what everybody is currently using", or if Google began this way with their mail system (although currently some of their "spam filtering" borders on becoming so).
They wouldn't have attracted any interest, just like a phone company giving you a phone line that only works with their system
(although in several countries, there ARE actual law design to fight potential such abuse by a big telco refuse to interconnect with smaller ones).
If your friend list and your posts carried from service to service then people could use competing services without lock-in. At the very least they should allow some sort of aggregation service that sits on top of facebook and other social media services. Google doesn't really have the lockin, there is plenty of competition, it's easy enough to switch to bing, duckduckgo, etc... if people found them more useful. Amazon is probably the hardest to break up. It's lockin is economy of scale and convenience. It's really hard for someone to go head to head with amazon but I once thought that about ebay so anything's possible.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
.. which is why I was delighted when Apple decided to use PowerPC for its products, and was equally hacked off when they dropped it again. But then ARM happened, so it's not all bad. Intel still has meaningful competition; does Google? Facebook? Amazon?
Funny to see the devolution of communication, 1st there were social media sites like facebook, then twitter came along that limited you to 140 char, then snapchat where conceited twits just swap selfies with maybe a word or two caption. I can't wait to see what the next devolution is, maybe we will start posting grunting sounds?
Plus the words are being replaced with emojis.
First, Levon wasn't given songwriting credit, so he didn't get royalties from most of his work with The Band (this was actually a huge argument that helped break them up). Making YouTube pay higher fees would have done absolutely nothing for him and he still would have died broke.
Breaking up Google and Facebook wouldn't change that. A single payer health care system that isn't based on greedily exploiting sick people for as much profit as possible probably would have gone a long way toward preventing Levon from dying broke, but of course that's not being argued for here.
While the point you raise is a good observation the examples are not really equivocal to the current situation. Note that I'm not advocating for a government breakdown of the companies, but it's a fact that both Google and FB have a much tighter hold of their respective markets than say Altavista or AOL ever had because of the amount of usage data they have access to. I mean as far as search engines go, there's really no possible way of starting a service that could efficiently compete with Google at this point. The sheer volume of searches means they can optimize the search results far better than any of their competition, which is why pretty much no-one is even trying, and why Bing & al are a universal joke.
With FB it's an even tighter lock because you can't move people from FB to a competing service individually. That is, even if someone creates a social media service that I prefer over FB, me moving to it from FB will be useless unless a significant portion of my friends also move there. Without the circle of friends, the 'social' in social media is gone and the service is useless no matter how awesome it may be. And since for the majority of users FB 'does the job', it's at this point very hard to convince most people to switch to another nearly identical service. FB has actively taken measures to lock down their userbase by involving historical features of all kinds. This is why you see all these old posts that it suggests: 'On this day X years ago, you shared this", "You and X became friends on this day N years ago" etc. This, as well as all the gazillion of 'apps'/games is all the kind of stuff that cannot be moved from facebook to another platform and silly as it may sound it counts. There's a notable scaling benefit to having a large and widely used social media site, obviously for the advertisers/data miners but for the users as well. I mean, it should be indicative of just how much of a monopoly they have that even Google kinda gave up on Google+ after they realized no matter how much they try to force it people will not be shifting to use it. They even had the significant advantage of saying to people 'hey if you have a google account you don't even have to sign up you can just start using it", and it still didn't take off because for the majority of consumers who're on FB they gain no additional benefits by starting to use another identical service with less users and none of their data.
The ecosystem of the net has changed quite rapidly and is no longer in a similar state than it was say at the turn of the century or even 10 years ago. It's switched from a service many people use every now and again to state where most western people are essentially online 24/7 via smartphones, so the early age of heavy competition in for example search engines and social media has passed. It's the age of machine learning now, so it means whoever has the data, makes the rules. It's why steam dominates the PC digital sales market despite containing unbelievable amounts of garbage and has rather shitty customer service: they have insane amounts of data on sales and what people are playing which they can use to target sales/ads and discounts to people that are likely to buy. It's why there are no real competitors to Youtube even though many content creator
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Snapchats infrastructure is not worth that much. I read around 20 million $ . The money is spent mostly on advertising and brand building to attract users.
Breaking up doesn't help as long as there's no alternative. The problem is not Facebook or Google, the problem is that the lack of an open standardized decentral alternative. There's DIASPORA* and perhaps that can become a real solution, but for now it lacks traction and openness. But especially, it lacks the generality and neutrality of real established Internet protocols. Eventually an open solution will pop up, it always will, but it's going to take a lot time and patience.
0x or or snor perron?!
omg another facebook addict old fart's brain fart... srsly go die old man.
Twitter was just moving SMS messaging from phones onto the web for public consumption, with the same character limits.
Without a wheel, moving a load will be difficult. A simple wheel that lets you go 1 MPH has significant value compared to no wheels at all. A tire capable of exceeding 200 MPH is just a bit of extra entertainment compared to that.
"End software patents if you ever want innovation again"
FTFY
The money is spent on advertising and desperately trying to find a way to make money from disappearing photos.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
But hey, at least you get 70 new emojis to write with now ;-)
That's it! We've discovered the next big thing. Emojis with grunt sounds. Also, we make as many emojis as possible. You start with five, and then every month add five more. Everyone will wait, drooling, for the next batch from Egruntjis to come out, so that they can be the first to send their friends the "pile of dog poop that goes pphrhrr"...
Yes, which was stupid, the only reason we had a 140 character limit on SMS was because we were cramming a text message into a control message. By the time we completed building SMS the space had already shrunk anyway, so we added extensions. MMS wasn't created because someone wanted to send files, it was created because we ran out of space for the SMS messages and had to find a different way to use that feature we had already promised. So now you have to bring the phone up on to a bearer channel just to get the SMS out.
Both Google and Facebook are FAR too useful to the US Government for keeping track of all things people.
There is no way they're going to give up those platforms.
If someone can put you out of business simply by copying what you are doing, maybe it means you're a shit company who isn't doing it very well.
Putting it differently, if you receive a buyout offer that exceeds the cost of copying your work, and you say no, you're an idiot. They wanted to put a high value on their user base rather than their code, but I don't think they understood them very well.
In the USA AT&T had a near monopoly in telecoms in the USA, and were using it to extend to other industries, but were not broken up until 1984 ...
IBM had a near monopoly, the PC was a little, temporary, side project that was done quickly with off the shelf parts (including OS), IBM never thought it would last and so didn't really put any effort into it ... it was open simply because it was cheaper that way ... it succeeded because it was open not because it was IBM ...
These are not comparable to Facebook and Google ... Facebook has a single product, which may disappear overnight, Google is expanding to related industries, but is not hitting people with lawsuits to stop innovation
what he is really saying is that on-line advertising is now run by two companies who are doing it really well, and they are underpaying record companies for work other people did ....
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
If someone can put you out of business simply by copying what you are doing, maybe it means you're a shit company who isn't doing it very well.
Which is why China beat the west.
1. Google and Facebook start Gcoin and FBcoin cryptocurrencies, respectiviely.
2. G and FB generate and pay content providers (people who search with G; people who post on FB) a small amount for each use of or post to their system.
3. Require advertisers to use Gcoin and FBcoin when purchasing advertisements.
4. Watch Gcoin and FBcoin appreciate
Rinse and repeat for any other ad based website
I'm pretty sure Facebook's Poke app was out before Snapchat. It was a neat thing. It let you send photos, video, or text that lasted only a few seconds. It never caught on, then Snapchat came out and got popular. They simply added the feature into its mobile and messenger apps.
Break them up with extreme, vicious, dire prejudice. They are doing so well because they have support no company deserves. Ever wonder why Alphabet is called Alphabet? The traitors in the federal government are mocking you.
If someone can put you out of business simply by copying what you are doing, maybe it means you're a shit company who isn't doing it very well.
Yeah. Tell that to Borland and Lotus.
Look at OpenStreetMap for example. It's already pretty good, and with some serious investment of resources (and access to traffic data) it could attain Google Maps quality within a couple of years. If this was the result of some anti-trust activity by the US government - great.
As for Google - a public, transparent governance of a no-censorship, no "user protection" search engine with sufficient resources to get Google-quality results (ignorintg the facts that those have deteriorated over the past several years) would be great.
As for Facebook - just make some of their backend systems FOSS and chuck the rest, it's useless garbage to FB users (as opposed to advertisers). In fact, forcing FOSSing of much of Google and Facebook's infrastructre may a good idea overal.
Taxing global companies more in one country simply makes them move revenue through other countries.
It would be hard enough to just get consistency in the OECD countries, let alone the rest of the world.
I feel like we may never know as government is bought and paid for to *always* include loopholes. Even if some in government are really trying there are others who will sabotage it then revolve out of government to collect their paycheck. Taxes are mostly for the upper middle class and small to medium businesses. The rest pay little to nothing percentage wise.
Agreed. The excuse given that they will simply move revenue is addressable. Basically it is just a version of, "But if we fix that issue that allowed mass slaughter, it won't do anything about most other cases so we should do nothing."
In short it is yet another bullshit strawman.
The problem with Facebook and Microsoft as competitors here is that they already typically have access to a superset of your customers. If you were developing Windows software and Microsoft wanted to compete with you, not only were all of your customers already their customers, but all of your potential customers were as well. This put them in a far stronger position than you, even if they were developing the product from scratch. Facebook is often in a similar situation.
And this type of shit is exactly what got Microsoft in trouble in the late '90s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
When IBM introduced the IBM PC, built with the Intel 8088 microprocessor, they needed an operating system. Seeking an 8088-compatible build of CP/M, IBM initially approached Microsoft CEO Bill Gates (possibly believing that Microsoft owned CP/M due to the Microsoft Z-80 SoftCard, which allowed CP/M to run on an Apple II. IBM was sent to Digital Research, and a meeting was set up. However, the initial negotiations for the use of CP/M broke down; Digital Research wished to sell CP/M on a royalty basis, while IBM sought a single license, and to change the name to "PC DOS". Digital Research founder Gary Kildall refused, and IBM withdrew.
IBM again approached Bill Gates. Gates in turn approached Seattle Computer Products. There, programmer Tim Paterson had developed a variant of CP/M-80, intended as an internal product for testing SCP's new 16-bit Intel 8086 CPU card for the S-100 bus. The system was initially named QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), before being made commercially available as 86-DOS. Microsoft purchased 86-DOS, allegedly for $50,000. This became Microsoft Disk Operating System, MS-DOS, introduced in 1981.
Wikipedia-DOS
They're just a data harvesting company that offers stupid games to people to get them to keep volunteering up data that they then go and sell to the highest bidder. What would you break them up into? The free games can't exist without the revenue from the data harvesting, and people won't keep volunteering up their data for free if they are only looking at text.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Or you are a company that is part of a duopoly or monopoly with most if not all of the user base and any threats are easily fought off by cloning features.
Ummmmm, just saying.
Add Amazon to that list. Just saying.
TL;DR: Butthurt liberal arts major is jealous of the success of actually intelligent people who work at big companies that drive the modern world.
Sorry, buttercup, but it turns out that making pretty pictures and churning out modern "art" just isn't very valuable. You're only half a step up from a pan handler-- but at least the pan handler isn't a pretentious douche like you and doesn't try to weigh in on subjects that are way over his head.
Now you and your "popular" friends can just go prance around in the woods or whatever it is that you do.
Meanwhile the intelligent people of the world will be busy not being retarded.
Should we vote for it?
AOLs strangle hold on the market many people thought AOL was the internet.
If anything social media is a devolution for humanity. I bet we would have already been colonizing the galaxy if it weren't for all these people stuck inside their computers all day.
Make the Internet nerdy again
Innovation is an illusion. Everything must iterate over everything that came before.
I don't see Facebook as a replacement for Usenet, but rather a replacement for Myspace, which was a replacement for Geocities, which was simply a way for a person to make a personal web page and have an internet presence without assistance (i.e. having someone else build it for you, owning a domain, etc...).
It has since poured a ton of "features" into it, the most prominent being ads in an (successful, if not in magnitude of the IPO worth) attempt to monetize it. However if you recall those terrible Geocities sites with the flashing ads, not so different.
Only if you send an MMS. The vast majority is sent over the control channel (in 2g).
Every time someone comes out with something innovative, Google or Facebook buys it.
The going rate is 20 billion USD.
How is that stifling innovation?
There should be an upper limit to the amount of employees corporations can have. And no corporation should ever be allowed to own another corporation.
Maybe it means software patents have some purpose, and whatever you're doing isn't innovative.
Invent something non-trivial.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Why is the Reg targeting ads? Google and FB monopolize search and conversation, but whenever I look at the NoScript and Privacy Badger lists for a web site what I see are ad networks and trackers. Dozens to hundreds of them.Yes, Google and FB are often on the list, but they're a small piece of the total. So while I agree that Google and FB are too big to last, it's not because of ads.
Our government currently uses Facebook and Google to help track its citizens (here in the US at least). If anything, I could see them stepping in at some point in hopes of pushing the two companies together to make it easier to track citizens. There is a greater than zero but less than ten percent chance they'd step in to attempt to break either company up. And even if they did, the tracking portions would remain intact because it's a godsend when attempting to control and monitor the sheep in the herd.
This end to the summary seems to completely undermine the thesis. He's saying they innovated and nothing was able to stop them. They innovated so much that someone even had to copy them.
I haven't used Snapchat and whatever part of Facebook copies them, so I'm not familiar with the details, but isn't that what's he's saying about Snapchat? That they innovated? I don't get where the "we need to break them up" part is coming from. At least in the summary, he makes an excellent case for why we don't need to do anything to Google and Facebook.
If I click through to the article, will I read that Snapchat actually didn't innovate anything, and therefore didn't get copied? Is the summary simply wrong or goes with some other article that rebuts this one?
This user is CREIMER sockpuppet. See his normal account "cdreimer" had been modded down to terrible. Why?
-Making a steady stream of shitposts with amazon referrer links. If he can just pique your interest enough to follow his amazon link, then he'll collect a small percentage of the money you spend for the next 24 hours. He netted a whopping $3 a day off this scam and was quite proud of it.
-Constantly talking about child marriage. Underage Mexican girls are "about getting the most bang for your retirement dollar" and frequent use of the phrases "Underage sweet thing" and "Child brides are as American as apple pie". These are CDREIMER quotes he feels we've unfairly taken out of context so he's recently taken to his blog to explain that he means 16 year old Mexican girls marrying 50 year old american engineers, with village permission. He insists this is a popular romantic paring in the media there and it's every 16 year old mexican girl's dream to marry a fat old 50 year old aspie engineer!
So please mod down Anonymous Cashews and complain about creimer to slashdot management feedback@slashdot.org
I would suggest not replying to him like a normal person either.
This user is CREIMER sockpuppet. See his normal account "cdreimer" had been modded down to terrible. Why?
-Making a steady stream of shitposts with amazon referrer links. If he can just pique your interest enough to follow his amazon link, then he'll collect a small percentage of the money you spend for the next 24 hours. He netted a whopping $3 a day off this scam and was quite proud of it.
-Constantly talking about child marriage. Underage Mexican girls are "about getting the most bang for your retirement dollar" and frequent use of the phrases "Underage sweet thing" and "Child brides are as American as apple pie". These are CDREIMER quotes he feels we've unfairly taken out of context so he's recently taken to his blog to explain that he means 16 year old Mexican girls marrying 50 year old american engineers, with village permission. He insists this is a popular romantic paring in the media there and it's every 16 year old mexican girl's dream to marry a fat old 50 year old aspie engineer!
So please mod down Anonymous Cashews and complain about creimer to slashdot management feedback@slashdot.org
Hey remember when you referred to Mexican Child Brides as "underage sweet things"
Man that was weird. What a werido
You forgot Amazon and Microsoft.
Amazon has cornered the cloud computing market soon to be retail and EVERYTHING, and Microsoft still has the desktop OS market cornered.
And the question I keep having is, how do you run an industrial society using people who cannot use human language?
Break up the three branches of government if you ever want freedom again.
who is google and facebook?
i know windows and linux...google and facebook...gimme a minute...lemme bing it.
Attach a wooden wheel to one of those North Korean ICBMs, let's see how fast it goes, and who considers it to be entertainment THEN...
I think I might go home and build this tonight. I'll be rich beyond the dreams of avarice!
I suppose I'll have to cut you in. 2% sounds fair. You'll still be rich :)
Break Up Google and OUTLAW Facebook If You Ever Want Innovation Again
There, that's better.
My fellow citizens are largely to blame!
Face it: We are too stupid, in general, to fight off corporate control if we are voting for the likes of Trump, and then NOT correcting our mistakes urgently!
Folks need to start standing up for what is truly RIGHT for society, not just for the self.
WAKE UP, people. WAKE the fuck UP!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
"If someone can put you out of business simply by copying what you are doing, maybe it means you're a shit company who isn't doing it very well."
If you have enough fiscal leverage, certainly you can.
Microsoft has been doing that since the 1980s. Sell out to us or we will just roll your software into the OS and eliminate your market.
NRRPT/RCT
Apple will fall from what exactly? Domination of the Mac and iOS market?