'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.

Comments

Microsoft looked like this too

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Just 15 years ago we were wringing our hands about Win-Tel stranglehold and how it was impossible for innovation to happen. How Microsoft making a vague announcement about some vaporware made venture capital disappear for fledgling companies. How it bundled and coerced PC makers to shut Netscape out and drove it to bankruptcy. How WordPerfect's painstakingly assembled drivers for every damned obscure printer in the world was taken away in one fell swoop by making every printer conform to Microsoft driver spec.

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.

Re: Microsoft looked like this too

[SuperKendall]

I came to post exactly the same thought - there's a reason for the old saying "The bigger they are, the harder they fall". I worry that if you break up either Google or Facebook the parts might be stronger than the whole and more destructive.

I also think we may see early signs of Google's fading a bit already, what with Amazon totally stealing the show on home assistants. Google's assistant is more powerful but I'll bet people use it less than Alexa, and it's less branded - a friend of mine has a Motorola Android phone and says "OK Moto" to activate the assistant, I don't even know if he knows it's Google powering it (or is it? Not sure myself).

Re: ". Facebook has simply copied its features."

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Um, Fuck Yeah?

[Snotnose]

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.

Google I see

[SlaveToTheGrind]

But Facebook? Innovation? Really?

Re:". Facebook has simply copied its features."

[geekmux]

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.