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Tech Giants Like Amazon and Facebook Should Be Regulated, Disrupted, or Broken Up: Mozilla Foundation (venturebeat.com)
The Mozilla Foundation has called for the regulation of tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. From a report: Though tech giants in the U.S. and companies like Alibaba and Tencent in China have "helped billions realize the benefits of the internet," the report calls for regulation of these players to mitagate monopolistic business practices that undermine "privacy, openness, and competition on the web." They box out competitors, restricting innovation in the process, Mozilla wrote today in its inaugural Internet Health Report, "As their capacity to make sense of massive amounts of data grows through advances in artificial intelligence and quantum computing, their powers are likely to advance into adjacent businesses through vertical integrations into hardware, software, infrastructure, automobiles, media, insurance, and more -- unless we find a way to disrupt them or break them up." Governments should enforce anti-competitive behavior laws and rethink outdated antitrust models when implementing regulation of tech giants, the report states.
... of the Mozilla Foundation. Sit down and shut up. Stop ruining firefox.
Should be defunded, lose their 501c(3) license, and go the way of the Mozillasaur :)
Seriously though, on the privacy front Mozilla needs to face as much scrutiny as the companies they are throwing sand at. Let he who casts the first stone be judged first and all that :)
Is Mozilla no longer dependent on the teet that is Google? Sure was nice of Google to let Mozilla suckle for so long and now that Mozilla is all grown up it can rebel against its parents. Human nature at its finest. This is just teenage puberty. Move along.
I'd rather share my data with 1 Google than with 10 independent Googles.
Whether it is mere perception or not, companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc are seen to be anti-competitive and a net detriment to the overall market. But perception is usually the basis for laws and regulations despite the best intentions.
These guys need to get out in front of the perception and "do something" (I have no idea what that would be), or when the Democrats eventually do regain the majority (and they will...it's all a cycle), we will end up with an incomprehensible mess of regulations and restrictions that nobody wants to deal with.
It is highly likely that your little website selling wooden birdhouses would end up having to file/certify/abide by some stupid regulation that in reality has nothing to do with wooden bird houses. That is just how Washington works.
So take heed, Facebook, Amazon, and Google. What befall you will befall us all.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Sure, we could break up the American tech companies, but that would just leave the Chinese tech companies at the top of the heap.
The fixed costs of regulation are spread against the total scale of the business being regulated. The larger the fixed costs, the more this implicitly helps the largest incumbents and disadvantages upstarts with small market share.
The GDPR is 261 pages of incomprehensible legalese (and people still can't figure basic questions about it), which will cost you the same in lawyer fees to understand whether you have 1M customers or 1B.
So yeah, Facebook has no damned problem if you regulate and probably stands to gain in the long terms whatever they lose in the short term.
I'll go farther, much farther. To prevent the "too big to fail syndrome", and excesses of corporate power, any big company should be broken up, or forced to divest. Pick a size, based on turnover, or market capitalization, or whatever.
Set that value relatively low. If market cap, then no more than $100 billion, possibly a lot less. Hitting that value should be extraordinarily painful, possibly including immediate closure. That way, that companies will divest voluntarily, in an organized fashion, long before they hit it.
As a corollary, I think acquisitions should be severely penalized. Too many big companies buy up the small companies that would eventually be their competition. Which makes the big company bigger, and stifles innovation.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.