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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
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.
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
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.
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
Then we can save Hollywood by blowing that up into pieces also.
Will Michael Bay direct that?
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 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
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.
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.
So Google is the only one I have an answer for, but after that, I still don't know how you'd break them up.
The problem with Google is network effects: Google's product gets better the more people use it, because fundamentally, their product is based on data. So the more you use it and find things, the more you reinforce their search algorithms, which means that searches are better. So you keep coming back and using their search engine because it gives the best results, and so the cycle goes. These compounding effects are hard to beat, so it's hard for other search engines—even if it were possible to write markedly better search algorithms—to compete.
I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search, but I still type in !g (open this current search in Google) a lot for certain things. Google simply returns the best results, and they're a long way from getting caught.
But how do you fix that? Literally any solution here would make the user experience worse.
And to go even further back, that's why these organisations are powerful. Google has the best search experience, Amazon has the best shopping experience. Facebook has the best (???) social network experience (or at the very least, the most comprehensive, by virtue of having the biggest network—again, compounding network effects are in action here), and Apple has what we could call the best device ecosystem experience, perhaps. (Even as an Apple user, that distinction is fairly tenuous. Not because of anything they've done recently per se, but of all the companies listed, they have the most subjective experience. You can quantify the experience for all the others in some way or another.)
But I don't know how one would break up any of these companies. Breaking up Amazon in any meaningful way would make it not Amazon. ACS separate from Amazon the store? Okay, sure, but what does that actually get any of us as consumers? Split Google (Alphabet, I guess) up? Into what—Android and Search divisions? Would that even matter? Apple doesn't even have the biggest market share in anything, so I have no idea how you'd be able to make any anti-trust claims against them, just because they make the most money. And Facebook...the only thing you might be able to do is force them to let you retain ownership of your social graph—that's where the real value is. If you could ship that around to other networks transparently, it might make it more possible for other social networks to compete, but that has nothing to do with breaking them up.
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.
Windows Phone.
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.
I don't know where you're pulling that from, but there are five specific areas in which Mark perfectly predicted the current late-stage capitalist cancer.
1) Imaginary appetites (see, iPhone X and just about every advertisement)
2) Capitalism's Chaotic Nature (see: the Great Recession of 2008 and the increasing economic inequality and resulting social disruption. It's called the "shock doctrine" or "disaster capitalism". For late-stage capitalism to work, the population has to be kept in a state of constant upheaval, apprehension and fear.)
3) Monopoly (see: what every company strives for)
4) The Globalization of Capitalism (see: Wars vs socialism. Capitalism requires ever-growing markets, and those markets will be obtained at any cost, including wars and invasions)
5) The Reserve Army of Industrial Labor (see: the "service" economy. The current levels of underemployment and stagnant wages are required by capitalists. As we saw from the New Deal to Ronald Reagan's inauguration, a prosperous middle- and working-class gains political power and spreads power (women's rights, civil rights, etc). Capitalism cannot survive powerful middle and working classes, so Ronald Reagan declared war on them, using "supply-side" economics as a weapon.
Which is exactly what Marx predicted would happen. You're making his case.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What does Microsoft have a monopoly on?
Microsoft still has an abusive monopoly on desktop operating systems.
It's kinda the issue inherent in capitalism.
Capitalism Corollary: Market competition by profit motive provides the best product for the best price to the market consumer.
1. The goal of capitalist endeavors is to bring in the maximum profit.
2. High profit is attained providing the best product and maximizing market share.
3. MAXIMUM profit is attained via 100% share.
4. 100% market control is anti-competitive thus reducing the value of the competitive market to the consumer.
The solution (thus far accepted) is to accept that people will seek out 100% market share and to break them up and say, "OK! Let's run the race again under these new controls!"
Consider a control: Did rates in nations that didn't breakup their phone monopolies also go way down?
No, they went up. Canada didn't break up Bell Canada until several years later, nor did they go with deregulation of Bell Canada which held a defacto monopoly in most of the country until the mid-1990's. It wasn't until the marketplace was opened up that LD and local rates fell through the floor. In many parts of Canada, Bell Canada still holds the defacto monopoly on the last mile. If another company wants to sell service for that last mile to their own exchange, they usually pay around $21 of $29 directly to Bell.
Compare that with last mile access for Internet where the last mile is also deregulated. An ISP usually pays around 30-40% of what they charge the customer directly to whoevers lines they are, no matter the speed or package that the customer is paying. So if someone has 30/1Mbs service 30% of $51/mo goes directly to rogers. If the person is paying $79/mo for 75/10Mbps service 35% goes directly to rogers.
Om, nomnomnom...