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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
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
YouTube is a pretty big deal when it comes to speech and culture. And they have proven to be extremely irresponsible in managing it.
Also consider Android. I have multiple news feeds (their news app and Google Now) where they control which articles I see. In fact I rarely install non-Google apps on my phone because I just don't have the time to dig around for the "best" app in a category.
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.
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