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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.
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.
But Facebook? Innovation? Really?
Microsoft's dominance in the PC market was never really dislodged.
Microsoft has gone from 97% to 89% of the desktop market. That is still dominance, but the "non-Microsoft" portion has more than tripled since its nadir. But more importantly, "the desktop" doesn't matter as much anymore. Most people use their phone or a tablet as their main computing device.
It is easier than ever to avoid Microsoft products. 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.
On the flip side of that, every major phone brand, particularly Samsung, Google and Apple, all have photo/email/sms/cloud apps, but moving from one to the other is a pain in the a**, so most people pick a brand and just stick with it. In this case competition looks good on paper but in reality it's vendor lock-in.
Which is why the government should demand interoperability just like they did with instant messaging, email, etc.... 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.