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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."
Breaking up Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook could save capitalism
Says Scott Galloway, NYU marketing profressor
Sure, that worked great for Ma Bell. Fortunately, we succeeded in getting rid of Bell Labs, and replacing it with Verizon and the falsely-named AT&T. Definitely saved capitalism.
Everyone was exposed.
So, punishing success will save capitalism? Removing the incentive to succeed will simply encourage people to... well, not succeed.
I get what he's saying about Facebook and Google (not that I agree - by I understand the argument), but Apple and Amazon? Those are not social networks, or search engines, to shape opinion. Sure, Apple does limit what goes in their store, and Amazon has made a few bad TV shows, but they seem unrelated.
From this I deduce he simply doesn't like large companies, and is fishing for excuses.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Last time I checked, aren't monopolies bad for capitalism, and by extension, bad for a national economy in general? Am I right? All the above-named corporations have de-facto monopolies. Add Microsoft and AT&T to that list, by the way, just for starters; there are many others, too.
While we're at it, how about we repeal the decision to consider corporations to be 'people' in the eyes of the law, and also ban them from contributing to political campaigns. In fact, I'd prefer that all campaign funds come from a neutral source, so no corporations or rich individuals can influence politics.
It's funny that he didn't mention Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs,.....you know, the banks that fucked up the economy and then got a big government handout for their illegal actions.
You want save capitalism, break them up and jail their bosses.
The content providers aren't the problem. All our troubles lie with the service providers. That is the monopoly and collusion we have to break up. We open up that market, provide real P2P service with no single point of failure such as your present day ISP, and everything else will fall into place.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Of all of them I think the only one that can actually affect "capitalism" (and is to a certain extent) is Amazon.
I think the problem with breaking up these companies is that it doesn't resolve the fundamentals that permitted them to come into being in the 1st place.
Breaking them up just means that it will happen again in the future unless we change was made it possible to begin with.
At least not in the article (I didn't watch the video). These companies are not the same. Facebook controls 'views' and advertising. Google controls 'search' and advertising, but of course there are alternatives for search. Amazon controls sales and delivery. Apple provides widely used, but not dominant, phones and computers.
Trying to make an argument that they're collectively the same is flat-assed wrong. And size itself is not a sufficient justification for government intervention.
Amazon, Google and Facebook arguably have potential monopolies in their markets, but each does have competitors. Apple clearly has viable competitors in each of its markets.
But hey, this guy gets to go around making bogus arguments, and probably collects nice speaking fees as well as a lot of clicks and publicity.
Capitalism needs socialism in order to avoid becoming like Somalia. The same is probably true in the other direction as well. Too bad that people that think that radicalized version of these two are silver bullets that solve everything.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Through their sheer size and political connections, they bought up half of Village in NYC that was available for development.
If you want to break stuff up start with oil companies and banks- companies 'too big to fail' that have already failed and become even bigger. These companies crush innovation, control our elected officials and pretty much run the world as they please.
...omphaloskepsis often...
then by definition you are destroying capitalism, not saving it. Not that I think that's a bad thing - it's simply important to replace capitalism with something better, not the something-worse represented by the companies in question.
I also find it interesting that Galloway decries the "new gods", yet seems totally unaware that they are the logical and inevitable outcome of capitalism. Also, the irony that he himself worships the "old god" called Capitalism seems totally lost on him.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Apple has a smaller share of the smartphone market than Android. Has Google prevented anyone from coming up with a superior search technology? Is Google forcing Mozilla or Apple to make Google the default search engine? Google is capturing everything it can about all of us, but have they ever sold that information, or let it loose through negligence? I can think of several government agencies which have compromised private data more than Google ever has.
Facebook might be another story. They've lied repeatedly to their users about what information they're collecting, but given the platform's popularity, it doesn't seem that their users care. If you're not paying for a service, and the provider of that service lies to you, what are your damages?
Amazon is the worst offender. They intentionally lose money, and they use their market clout to enter new markets and drive existing competition under so they can capture marketshare, and so we assume they will raise prices once the competition is gone. Isn't this just like the semiconductor dumping of the '70s?
I don't like that Amazon rules online shopping, I don't like that Google rules search, but should we really break companies up just for being successful? If that's what's best for the consumer, maybe I could see that, but not when the notion is coming from a single academic rather than the public or their representatives.
If you break them up then they can be replaced by Huawei, Samsung, Tencent, and Baidu.
Is that a better outcome?
Why not save the DNC by breaking it up into 5 parts (just like the 2 parts right before the Civil War)?
Then we can save Hollywood by blowing that up into pieces also.
Teachers unions, CNN, the UN, the IRS, the FBI, and the NEA.
Don't forget NYU !
Milton Freedmen stated the USA is already 47% socialist and that was before the last communist prez was sworn in. Nearly all of the top performing companies make it and then make it BIG by/with large contracts with the government or other special treatment.
and telecom (anyone remember the John Oliver bit where he showed AT&T had bought up all the Bells they'd been forced to break off from?).
All I can say is good luck. You're trying to fix something that's fundamentally broken. It didn't work when we did it to AT&T. Better to regulate and live with the reality of mega-corps than to pretend you can break up these kinds of large power structures.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What does Microsoft have a monopoly on?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Capitalism cannot be saved any more than a tadpole can be saved after it has turned into a frog. What we have today in the US doesn't resemble capitalism. We have a crony corporatism on meth. It's what capitalism looks like when it metastasizes.
This was all predicted, by the way, by a little-known 19th century German economist named, Karl Marx.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Microsoft is the only technology company in existence that has barriers to entry under its direct, monopolistic control
And what would those be? Operating Systems? Development Environments? Hell, software in general? None of those... there are plenty of competitors in those spaces. What exactly are you talking about?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
You can easily shop stuff from other places than Amazon, unless it's actually made by/for Amazon. Various business or industry systems running on PCs are bound to MS' platform, though, and switching to something else is more difficult than switching to a new bakery for your morning croissants. The network effect sucks in this case.
Ezekiel 23:20
I've argued in the past that Microsoft would be worth more as separate companies. At least separate the OS company from the Apps company, so they are free to make competitive apps on Linux and Mac. (Yes, they already port Office to Mac). As for as XBox, the convergence between Windows and XBox is probably a good thing; I look forward to Windows PCs and XBox consoles becoming indistinguishable, and to being able to play XBox games wieh a gaming mouse and keyboard.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
So, to make a google competitor, he should all put up with sub par search engines for the sake of what?
What's the business model for maintaining a free OS and web browser, separate from using it to leverage ad sales?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Now we are in a totally different era. It is extremely difficult for any foreigner is just move in and live in the USA, legally. Even illegally one risks life, limb and liberty to move in here.
On the other hand, any Tom, Dick or Harry, of Ching Ling or Ramanathan Murugappa or Aziz al-Burkati or Omonomo Boborossa can set up a company and do business in America. We break up our monopolies, we still be under monopolies, except this time the monopolies are based in foreign countries.
They are the only ones who can keep foreign monopolies at bay. We should find ways to tame them, contain them but not cripple them so much foreign companies come and take our market.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Automation, post-scarcity effects, and a finite world put a hard limit on its lifespan as a system that could hope to serve a majority of humanity.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I don't find the definition of "moran" in the dictionary. Perhaps you meant "morons"? Ah, the irony.
I agree that almost-monopolies are not good because of reasons, but why these?
I think it's much worse that one single company is controlling half of the worlds beer market or that companies like Nestle have the food market cornered. And even if we restrict us to tech companies: Has the Microspft OS monopoly changed since everyone was concerned about that?
bickerdyke
Apple, Google, and Amazon all have multiple products and divisions that can easily be broken off and split into separate entities.
But Facebook is still just Facebook, you can't break it up without major changes to the product itself.
I stole this Sig
So because these companies are so large they allow fake news to control the population?
Where is the data that shows the fake news actually impacted anything?
This idea that a bunch of trolls can target a population and sway their ideas assumes people are really dumb animals.
Are we not better than that? Can we not think for ourselves? Or have we dumbed down our schools and failed to teach critical thinking to the masses?
If that is the case we are lost already and breaking up corporations because they are successful will not solve the problem.
Apple is not that big. And plenty of competition in the form of pc and android
Third largest company in America by revenue, ninth largest in the world.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"they've aggregated more market cap than the majority of nation's GDP"
- This seems like either a misplaced apostrophe or a math fail. US GDP is something like 4 times their combined market caps.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Sure, but Walmart has 3 times the revenue of Amazon (and that includes AWS in Amazon), so I don't think that's what he was on about.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
He's basically parroting George Soros. Now it makes sense.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news...
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Let's break up the jumbo eternal company... you know companies like Amazon, because they were never a startup.
Sheesh... professor of what?
The fact that those big companies didn't exist and now exist prove the "professor" wrong. He's wrong about what he said, and I don't think he understands capitalism at all. What is he teaching???
gods? Really? Amazed. People will ditch these "gods" (I even hate to use his word here) for new "gods", they always do... oddly enough, that's closer to capitalism, which I"m just going to say it, clearly he's against it.
Corporations are people, right? So then why can they own other corporations?
If they're driven out of business by anti-competitive practices, you can't shop there.
Amazon is on the cusp of becoming the largest retailer *and* media company *and* (cloud) computing company
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
This is completely silly. How many times do we need to stand at this point of history? Haven't we been here before? Several times?
Stop trying to address the symptoms of our broken system, and fix the system itself so this stops being a problem we face again and again.
If you want monopolies to not be a thing, then you need to change a lot more than just busting up monopolies as they inevitably pop up again and again.
This is reaching into the insanity regions of stupid. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Doesn't happen. Learn from the past, stop repeating it.
On the surface, say Apple looks like a tightly focused widget (phones, tables & computer) company, but look a little deeper and you see them using their monopoly positions to capture new markets much like Microsoft did with the browser business before they were forced to open up the desktop. In Apple's case their music business is tightly integrated into their product as is their back-up storage business. Apples does not provide an API so that others can provide music for their music player and ios does not have an API to allow you to select any cloud storage company. These interfaces would be easy to write. Just look at their mail client. They are abusing their dominant position on the phone to force/coerce you into paying to use their ancillary services. DOn't think me an APple hater as I am writing this on a Mac and have an iPhone in my pocket. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, etc are just as guilty of abusing their monopolistic positions and will also need to have their hands slapped or have the whole company dismembered from time to time. Don't worry they will keep growing and be able to abuse their position again. Creating unfair sustainable advantages is what most MBAs seem to do. Capitalism will survive a little adult supervision.
Pretty sure banks and Wallstreet are causing more damage than the companies listed in TFA,
Capitalism was never meant to be a vehicle for companies to become this big and powerful. Government intervention does that. Capitalism actually requires companies to find it too hard to continue and break up before they get that big. Of course this doesn't work for any corporate board member or executive, so they get all the protection they ask for.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
They have more money than the UK, Canada, and Ireland all together, sitting in a BANK ACCOUNT. A company that can do that is big enough already and feels no need to grow.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Personally, I think duckduckgo is better than google, so I use it. That's the point here really: people are already free to use the search engine they want, and he's not satisfied with that consumer choice and wants to force his own ideas on people. Not good.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Let's break up China and the US too.
Ridiculous.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
Good answer, government's role in slapping a monopoly is exactly what you point out, using your current dominant position (IE profit engine) to subsidize wiping out companies in another area and then taking over that area. And as you point out, they often grow back. AT&T is almost back to where it was before it was split into 7. Basically back to 2.
Most phones are not Apple phones - so not only are they not leveraging a monopoly here, they're not even leveraging a dominant market position. Amazon doesn't have a dominant position in retail (Walmart is much large), MS wasn't on his list, but most computers run Android, not Windows. Facebook I can see, but their near-monopoly is the result of consumer choice - would you remove consumer choice? In the name of what?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
There was huge oppostion to doing this to Microsoft 20 years ago and not doing it didnâ(TM)t work out well for the public interest or Microsoft. I suspect that similar results will happen with these companies. Theyâ(TM)ll collapse from the inside, much like Microsoft did from a combination of no vision and no hubris.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
On Windows ... the OS, not the thing you look out from.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The debate about breaking up large companies is compelling and important to have, but start by taking away their power over congress so that any remedies that are reached can have teeth. That's Lawrence Lessig's "Lesterland" argument, which I was recently introduced to, and have bought into.
Windows Phone.
Good catch
So, they banked a lot of money. That does NOT mean that a breakup is warranted. A vast majority of that money was earned selling just one product, the iPhone. Imagine that the iPhone was their only product. How, King Solomon, do you intend to split that baby? If Apple was split, there would still be a sub-company with the iPhone making billions. Splitting Apple has no merit. They make just a few different devices that all work together by running the same software.
I also don't see how splitting Facebook (a social network, of which there are many) is beneficial to anyone. Don't like them? Great! Go to a different website. There's no monopoly here either. They are not stopping anybody from competing on the open net.
Desktop-installed office productivity suites for enterprise.
If the cable/teleco companies keep consolidating and strangling access to the internet how long do you think you will have any choice on what product you can buy? I'm old enough to remember Ma Bell and having no choice who I got my phone from.
Their barrier to entry is owning the ability to run Windows applications - which are still the lion's share of desktop apps. None of the competitors can reliably do that. Munich - for all their efforts - ultimately caved to that barrier as well. Of course, politics (and perhaps a touch of bribery) contributed there too. But seriously, after what? 10 years, they still had problems dealing with existing Windows apps for which there was no suitable substitute.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
I recall that during the Microsoft antitrust suit, someone pointed out that if you broke Microsoft into 4 pieces, the next day 4 salespeople from very large companies would be calling on every business customer, each pushing a still-dominant product/service.
What does Microsoft have a monopoly on?
Microsoft still has an abusive monopoly on desktop operating systems.
Yes, Rick, you are right. Would you please check out the pod for me?
Best goddamn book review platform (/.) for an author - everrrr.
Nothing more, keep moving.
Operating systems, last time I checked?!
I never suggested a breakup was warranted. But AC's claim that "Apple is not that big" is wrong. Apple is quite large.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
But what does any of that have to do with the companies named, in this decade? None of those companies looks like it's leveraging market dominance for shady ends, except maybe Google in putting it's own products first in search results (allegedly - though I believe it).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
_Airlines_ are not. We've let the major airlines buy out their competitors left and right, leading to a lot less competition. But that wasn't natural. There was a lot of incompetence on the part of several airlines (bad fuel contracts come to mind) and a few went tits up. Normally you'd see some new competitors in the wake of those shake ups, but we've stopped enforcing anti-trust laws making it far too risky. If we'd crack down on anti-competitive pricing you'd see some new airlines, but fat chance of that.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The government cannot break up a company because it doesn't like their message or news. That violates the 1st Amendment.
It is certainly of interest to investigate the industrial scale government-sponsored astroturfing of lies, and to try to call it out and even stop said governments. But you cannot punish a company (or any person or group of people) for struggling with this.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
When you say "more money" what do you mean? No self respecting country in the World has a positive bank balance. On that basis, I've got more money than the UK, Ireland and Canada. In fact I've got a lot more money than the USA.
If you are talking about annual revenue, the UK government by itself has over £700 billion and the GDP is over £2 trillion. Apple's revenue is less than $300 billion.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Apple does not have a monopoly in anything.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
To a certain degree, this doesn't matter. Especially where banks are concerned, because each corporation, no matter how byzantine, files for bankruptcy independently.
It such a world, when the stock market tanks, and the wizards of Wall St say "we the profits coming, but the losses caught us off guard, help Obi Wan Greenspan, you're our only hope" we can sit back and let the micro-container corporations die on the vine one by one, until enough blood is let to finally get the f-f-f-financial message across that profits and losses are joined at the hips.
This is a simple property of corporations as legal failure boundaries. All the barnacles in Byzantium don't change that one, simple, elementary, essential, free-market fact.
Bankruptcy law makes capitalism fundamentally anti-symmetric (failure has a fixed absorbing boundary, but success does not). The power of mitigating this enormous systemic artefact, even in relatively small ways, should not be flipped the bird.
By money I mean the size of the entire economy.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Though I've met a few, I'm yet to encounter — or even hear about a professor, especially in New York, who would sincerely wish to "save Capitalism".
Most of the academics work for the government — either directly or via government-provided grants — and thus inevitably lean Left.
I strongly doubt, this professor's concern for Capitalism's well-being is genuine — especially, since he proposes authoritarian methods to "fix" it.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
is to actually teach it. It's the best form of government the world has ever seen and the most successful. Way better than socialism where we redistribute the hard work of people to people who don't want to work. In this system ANYONE can go from not a dime to being one of the richest people in the world. I can remember when I didn't have a dime to my name. Today it only is getting better and better. I'll probably break a million in a year this year thanks to Trump being in office.
We need to fix this country big time. Get rid of the crazy leftists in the Universities and schools. The ones that think they're entitled and teach kids to be offended over nothing. We should bring bullies back. They served a vital role in the world. Say something stupid, they'd correct you. Without that we're seeing stupid shit in the streets.
Their products are devolving to the point of creating barriers to entry to themselves, yet their monopolistic power is so great that they still don't lose market share. I own licenses to office 365 and still use OpenOffice as my default because it doesn't crash nearly as often. Server 2016 - especially with Exchange is just hideous to manage compared to previous versions. It's bad. Yet, there still isn't a viable alternative.
A possible breaking tool is fiscal treatment. Each country should take a look at how many other countries a given company is incorporated in. Then, apply taxes accordingly, possibly coordinating with the other countries. Tax rates should be so steep that giant companies would prefer to split, lest being beaten by smaller competitors.
At a quick glance, prof Galloway doesn't seem to consider democracy as an ingredient of those "love affairs". It is well known that investors are rather oriented toward increasing their own revenue than doing The Right Thing. A democratic company should have a policy which provides for employees voting for managers, in the hope that workers know what they're doing. Democratic election is a flawed process which not always results in electing the best leaders, but it's still the least worse model the human race has ever found...
I feel similarly, but about Google and Amazon.
(that is if I was going to consider this line of thought at all)
Google has its hands in a lot of things that don't seem related, Search Engines, Docs, the Cloud, Email, etc. Amazon was a Retail company that built a great back bone and now their Cloud offerings are what others run on, but if you are a retailer who might compete with Amazon, there is clearly risk there. Facebook is just one social platform, it does have a lot of power, to control what gets said in its walls, but I'm not sure how you'd break up facebook at all. Where as many of Google's services could be spun off into separate companies (and may already be doing that ot some degree - Android OS/Pixel biz, search engine and ads biz) FB is hard to see boundaries within. I don't see what's wrong with Apple though. Their business makes sense to stay together, between Phones/Tablets/Computers all are general computing devices at this point. Now yeah the apple store is a little weird, but as long as the internet exists there are other ways to get software on your iOS device I think.
What does Microsoft have a monopoly on?
Microsoft still has an abusive monopoly on desktop operating systems.
I'm more concerned with their abusive monopoly on office applications. A lot of businesses might consider a different path for operating systems if not for Microsoft Office.