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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 Governments should enforce anti-competitive behavior laws and rethink outdated antitrust models when implementing regulation of tech giants, the report states.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.
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.
The Mozilla Foundation has called for the regulation of tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook.
If they want to have this happen they have to show how CONSUMERS are being harmed in some tangible (mostly financial) way. The mere fact that those companies have simply out competed their rivals is not sufficient and it's clear those companies have provided a lot of value whatever their flaws might be. None of those companies are monopolies or if they are they are extremely narrow ones. Amazon may be the big gorilla in ecommerce but they aren't a monopoly. Facebook may dominate social media but proving that harms consumers is going to be a tough argument.
Plus is it really realistic to call for regulation when the party that breaks out in hives whenever they hear the word controls both congress and the presidency? Never going to happen. This is the same party that seems to think net neutrality is some communist plot to reduce profits of big business. This is the same party that hasn't issued a single enforcement action out of the CFPB in over a year. Regulate? Not bloody likely.
A colon *PRECEDES* a list or a more detailed explanation of whatever was immediately before it. It can be used to indicate that someone said something, but then whoever said it should come before the colon, not after.
I'm pretty sure, thus, that the headline should actually read "Mozilla Foundation: Tech Giants Like Amazon and Facebook Should Be Regulated, Disrupted, or Broken Up".
While one could argue that this form of headline might be acceptable because one can still figure out what was probably meant, I am not convinced that is an acceptable reason to discard notions of proper grammar and punctuation usage.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
Whoever is saying "so they are almost monopolies, what is the big deal?". Well, it is a big deal. The government in the US is starting to pay more and more attention. They don't want to hurt business in general, but they also do not want these near-monopolies to rule the US and much less the planet.
Mozilla is making this statement to educate the people. As much as I hated history as a youngster, the cliche of history repeating itself is very real. Go see how the public eventually is guaranteed to get screwed when there is a monopoly. Basic econ 101 states that monopolies will eventually charge more for crappier services because there is no competition. Smaller businesses are snuffed out, so those guys hate monopolies. Employees are taken advantage of, think Walmart employing so many in the US and the poor wages. Consumers get less choice, worse service, and higher prices, think one ISP in your town.
Mozilla makes software for browsers. No monopoly.
They don't squeeze out competition, rake private data, and make the user the item for sale. They don't target industry segments, then low-ball that segment until it drips red blood as mom-and-pops die out, killing and maiming small business.
They don't read your every email for keywords to sell you something. Mozilla doesn't sell your private data to firms that would use it to apply bias to political processes.
Is Mozilla benign? By comparison, hell yeah.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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.
Amazon - There are still local shops and individual web stores a like. There are even other major everything store - AliExpress for one (dubious as that might be). Don't like AWS Microsoft and a whole tone of other guys like Rackspace offer compute and storage.
facebook - Many tentacles sure but few 'essential services' You can still login pretty much everywhere without a facebook account, you communicate without facebook using e-mail, WWW forums, and for you nerds IRC and news.
On the other hand just try and do anything on the net without Google something or other. If nothing else half the pages you visit probably use googleapis. You have essentially one other smart phone vendor to choose from if you don't want a Google account. Even if you do use another e-mail provider, chances are good your recipient is on GMAIL or Google for Domains. Search is there any serious competition that isn't re-branding Google? Bing? sort of if you don't care about getting terrible results comparatively.
Of the big three Google is nearly impossible to avoid, Amazon and facebook can be avoided with some effort if you desire to do so.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I'll use the same argument I used to make about Microsoft: having an 800 pound gorilla in the room is very good for driving standards. Google brought us Android. Amazon prospers by having enough money to throw a bunch of ideas at the wall and see what sticks; they don't actually have a monopoly in any one industry. Facebook will go the way of MySpace and Yahoo in a few years anyway, no need to worry about them, but what we need is an open source universal login to replace what many web sites use Facebook for now.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
04/8/18 – Facebook censors Diamond and Silk’s page, labeling them “unsafe to the community.” The outspoken sisters were were provided with no reason why their videos were labeled as unsafe.
11/2/17 – The president’s Twitter handle, @RealDonaldTrump, is deactivated for 11 minutes.
10/9/17 – Twitter shuts down Congressman Marsha Blackburn’s campaign’s ability to promote her announcement video because of pro-life statements.
09/9/17 – A pro-Trump YouTube star has her song “Make America Great Again” taken down from YouTube. The company refuses to comment on this specific case.
10/12/16 – Google’s YouTube censors conservative video channel by labeling it “restricted adult content.”
06/22/16 – Anti-Hillary Clinton game removed from Google Play Store, but “Punch the Trump” game remains.
06/10/16 – Investigative video released showing how Google manipulates search results to favor Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.
06/26/06 – Google begins to prioritize its own services over those of start-up competitor Foundem.com in search results.
They are already doing something!
Zuckerberg could not explain why Facebook thought "Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day" and "Diamond and Silk" were such gross violations of "community standards" that they had to be banned. He also could not think of a single time that someone in their community guidelines enforcement had nuked a prominent left wing group on Facebook.
If a business as easily replaced as a local bakery cannot choose to impose its own standards on how it does business, a business as uniquely situated to exploit the market and block competition as Facebook sure as shit should not be able to do that. By law. (And before anyone cries "well what about a gay couple in Appalachia that can't find a baker." To that I would point out, if a gay couple can't find a baker willing to work with them where they live, they might want to first consider the OPSEC issues with having their "wedding" in that region if it's really that opposed to their orientation)
It really sounds to me like the few people still remaining at the Mozilla Foundation are expressing some passive aggressive bitterness, over their own loss of prominence in the market. Firefox (and even more-so, Netscape before it) was once a genuine player in the browser market, but now they've been relegated by most measurements to a weak second (or third) in the desktop market, and a veritable non-entity in the mobile market.
You had your heyday, Mozilla, but that's in the past and the digital world has changed in several strong leaps and bounds, since that time. Regardless of what you think the reasons were, there's not really much point in griping about the guys who now have what you lost... and no amount of finger pointing and gesticulating is going to change that.
...not sure where rage against Amazon is coming from. They run their own store, they run a market that others can rent space in, they run some TV distribution, they run ebooks and an ebook reader to varying degrees of success. They also have a cloud platform that anyone could rent time on.
None of these are monopolistic.
In ebooks, they have both an overwhelming share of the market in many English-speaking countries, and a Select programme that demands ebook exclusivity. If you hang out on writers' forums you'll hear the rage. With ebooks you're (hopefully) not talking about commodities, but in terms of whether it's monopolistic, the sheer size of Amazon's market means a lot of self-publishers and smaller publishers don't feel they can turn down the exclusivity, which comes with added visibility in the store and promotional tools. Their payment terms involve paying a sum they decide into a pool and authors and publishers won't know how much they'll get until after it's been earned. There are concerns about various types of scamming in the Kindle Unlimited programme, including the practice of "book stuffing" (a form of double-dipping by which several novels of "bonus" books, not labelled, are put in the back of books several times over to increase the overall page length and therefore the payout, which is per page.) Many writers, including David Gaughran, have criticised Amazon's poor response to this problem in the KU store. A non-monopoly couldn't get away with such practices.
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.