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Breaking Up Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook Could Save Capitalism, NYU Professor Says (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader shares a VentureBeat report: If you want to get an idea of how quickly sentiment has shifted against U.S. tech giants, just listen to NYU professor Scott Galloway. [...] "After spending the majority of the last two years of my life really trying to understand them and the relationship of the ecosystem, I've become 100 percent convinced that it's time to break these companies up." It's an audacious claim from anyone, even more startling coming from someone who has been such a close and bullish observer of these tech giants. Yet for Galloway, it is clear that the four companies have simply become too big, and too powerful. "The premise of my book is that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are our new gods, our new source of love, our consumptive gods," he said. "And as a result of their ability to tap into these very basic instincts, they've aggregated more market cap than the majority of nation's GDP ... I think these entities are more powerful than any entity, with maybe the exception of China and the U.S."
[...] Galloway said he wasn't making his argument based on many of the current emotional outcries against the companies, though these are important to note. And he proceeded to list what he considers to be these giants' numerous sins. "There are reasons to be angry at them," he said. "They basically power fake news ... So the notion that our platforms have been weaponized by the intelligence unit of a foreign adversary was initially responded to by Facebook as crazy, that we were crazy for thinking that. Then we found out it was millions of people, and now we're finding out it was hundreds of millions of people who were exposed."
[...] Galloway said he wasn't making his argument based on many of the current emotional outcries against the companies, though these are important to note. And he proceeded to list what he considers to be these giants' numerous sins. "There are reasons to be angry at them," he said. "They basically power fake news ... So the notion that our platforms have been weaponized by the intelligence unit of a foreign adversary was initially responded to by Facebook as crazy, that we were crazy for thinking that. Then we found out it was millions of people, and now we're finding out it was hundreds of millions of people who were exposed."
What does Microsoft have a monopoly on?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Determine what a safe market share is, set an exponential growth in corporate tax by percentage over that share.
Determine which goods and services are best considered 'infrastructure' where competition is counter-productive, and have the government take them over - ideally while farming out the actual work to contractors in accordance with the first rule.
Now look at Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc... how do you break up such things when the whole point of them is that they provide a single interface? Consider search and social media (over a certain market share) to be infrastructure, nationalize it, and have a government central interface that combines regional providers. And deal with the idea that instead of a corporation deciding what is acceptable to do with your personal information, you now have a government making those decisions.
I'd argue that chopping companies up will reduce their influence on government, and remind the government that their 'shareholders' are voting citizens, and that ultimately so long as you don't elect a tyrant you'll be better off.