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Should The US Government Break Up Google, Twitter, and Facebook? (siliconvalley.com)
The Bay Area Newsgroup reports:
Political momentum for a crackdown on Silicon Valley's social media giants got a boost this week when a state attorney general said he would tell U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions next week that Google, Facebook and Twitter should be broken up. Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry wants the federal government to do to the social media firms what it did to Standard Oil in 1911, according to a Louisiana newspaper report Tuesday... "This can't be fixed legislatively," Landry told the paper. "We need to go to court with an antitrust suit." He or another high official from his office will next week present the break-up proposal to Sessions... Landry, president of the National Association of Attorneys General, had spent months with his colleagues probing what they described as anti-competitive practices by Facebook, Google and Twitter, according to the paper.
CNET reports: On Friday, Bloomberg reported it had obtained a draft of a potential White House executive order that asks certain government agencies to recommend actions that would "protect competition among online platforms and address online platform bias." The order, reportedly in its preliminary stages, asks US antitrust authorities to "thoroughly investigate whether any online platform has acted in violation of the antitrust laws."
CNET reports: On Friday, Bloomberg reported it had obtained a draft of a potential White House executive order that asks certain government agencies to recommend actions that would "protect competition among online platforms and address online platform bias." The order, reportedly in its preliminary stages, asks US antitrust authorities to "thoroughly investigate whether any online platform has acted in violation of the antitrust laws."
Its a direct conflict for a cable company to be your ISP. So lets split that up first since there is a clear line
Social networks have no honor, so need a right to privacy bill to protect the users and ban ghost tracking of those who dont use it
What authority does the gov't have in stopping "common platforms" from censoring people as they see fit? The 1st Amendment does not cover private companies.
Exactly. You have a right to free speech. You do not have a right to use my printing press to exercise it.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
The workable solution would be a vigorous enforcement of antitrust regulations. Government does routinely prevent mergers and acquisitions on antitrust grounds; it should not be too hard for them to bar Facebook and Google from gobbling up new start-ups in order to nip nascent competition in the bud.
Betteridge got it right, again. Facebook, Twitter and Google all have viable alternatives that are easy to access, the fact that few use them is irrelevant. Also, there is little standing in the way of people setting up their own alternatives to all of these platforms. There are things that need investigating at Facebook and Google but I know of nothing warranting breaking them up.
Before you condemn me, I hate Facebook, think social media is scourge on society. However, it seems like more than anything else that this is just sour grapes over how these private businesses conduct themselves. There is an argument to be made for the social good but it defies every argument put forth by Republicans over governments interfering with businesses. If you want to do what's best for society then you also need to behave consistently.
Hypocrisy, thy name is Jeff Landry.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It doesn't but these companies are claiming protection under communication's decency act that they can't be sued for what someone posts but they are actively censoring people's like a publisher which means they can't claim immunity. So as much as they can censor people's speech they can't claim immunity from liability which they do.
Disney needs breaking up.
Summation 2
https://www.eff.org/issues/cda... Other issue is you look at 2016 and how these companies use their massive power and reach to influence election's like they tried to do in 2016. Everyone will look at "the russian interference" which lets be real did next to nothing compared to likes of google messing with its search to benfit the leftist democrat's while putting labels on GOP's picture calling them a nazi. Then you got most recent news from likes a twitter saying conservatives are scared to voice their opinion's in a very hostile liberal work place. We can also look at how Facebook and Cambridge analytic's story where all you heard about was how it helped Trump but never how Facebook data was used by Clinton and Even obama in 2012 which facebook found out later about but let them keep the data which was illega campaign contribution and like would be charged as if they looked at it. All and All these companies as posted above are using their power and reach to influence people's vote in 1 person's favor and we all know that is in favor if the liberal democrat's.
Break them up, and users will eventually flock to one site, and we are back where we started.
Which is exactly what happened to AT&T. Most of the Baby Bells have been rebundled into what is now Verizon. Breaking up monopolies only works if the government routinely intervenes in business acquisitions to avoid new monopolies from forming.
It's called the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. If you want to fight that in the court the go right ahead, it's been settled law since 1890. Saying that somebody has the right to censor you on their common platform is the same as censoring somebody from using their common railroad if they said something the railroad owner found objectionable. Funny how people have no problem with censorship these days as long as it means censoring the other side.
Being a company isn't the problem.
Once you've become a behemoth of a company who can manipulate popular opinion on a whim, now you're no longer just a company. You're either an ally or an adversary depending on the beliefs of the CEO, or how deep your pocketbook is. The Party in power loves these platforms as long as they are useful to them. Once they're not, we start seeing calls to break them up because of how much influence they wield over the population.
This is why it's dangerous to allow media giants to consolidate. You're putting an awful lot of power into the hands of too few people. In effect, we're letting a very few subtly influence how the majority thinks. I shouldn't have to explain how dangerous that is.
Here in the US, there isn't any neutral news anymore. They're propaganda channels for Team Red or Team Blue. You absolutely cannot watch the news without some sort of political bias inserted somewhere. ( Which is why I quit watching it at all )
So, yes. There are a lot of companies that need to be broken up and forbidden from ever becoming one again. Media companies, Content Provider / Content Delivery, Telecoms, Banks / Investment Houses, etc.
The problem is these same companies wield an awful lot of influence and money over the very people who should be regulating them.
( Why would I break up a company that will help my team win the next election ? )
Which is why they still exist at all in their current form.
This is getting really old: for the 637236th time - different rules apply to a business deemed to have a monopoly or a near-monopoly position in the market they operate in.
This is the first thing I thought about when I read the title. If you just broke them up they would eventually reform under a new name a decade later when nobody cared. Instead of breaking them up it would be better to just regulate them as a public utility.
Granted, having a bunch of senile old farts attempt to regulate something like google or facebook appeals to me about as much as having a blind man shave my ass with a bolo knife.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
The person criticizing the EU for "criminalizing speech" earlier this week is now advocating for criminalizing speech -- so long as it is merely the courts destroying mechanisms for distributing speech at the whims of private interests.
You truly are an idiot.
Hint: remove legal protection from those companies and you must remove them from all companies. And then you can kiss your ability to post insanity like this goodbye. Nobody will be willing to pay copywriters and attorneys to review your material, so the internet will turn into an electronic version of a newspaper -- usatoday.com -- minus any comment mechanism.
And it will be glorious... /s
No the problem is ultimately that the government doesn't have the slightest interest in this. We are talking about breaking up Facebook now, but only 4 years ago greenlighted a huge mega billion dollar acquisition of WhatsApp. That went through the regulator at the time, as does every merger and acquisition.
The government most definitely can already with the existing regulations prevent these mega companies from forming monopolies, but they just don't do it. Facebook has acquired 3 companies this year alone with zero opposition. What makes anyone think they will be broken up?
During Standard Oil's heyday, a consumer wanting to escape from the monopolist's grip would've had to drill for oil himself and build his own refineries.
If you were a Windows user and wanted to kiss Microsoft goodbye, you still had to remove Windows from your hard drive and buy/download/compile all your apps for your preferred alternative OS, if at all possible.
Escaping the Google search engine monopoly, according to my latest information, requires the following steps:
1. launch browser
2. type "bing.com" into the address bar
3. hit "Enter"
This has to be the cutest "monopoly" in the history of antitrust legislation.
What makes anyone think they will be broken up?
Honestly, not a thing. Everything you have pointed out is truth. Over the past decades they have had plenty of opportunity put a stop to the baby bell merging and facebook/google getting so big. The real truth is they just have no interested in doing so. To much money flowing in one direction and they don't want to kill that tit.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Based on a narrative that Facebook, Twitter, et. al. are engaged in an alleged campaign to censor conservative voices and opinions, and to suppress news that supports a conservative narrative.
The more cynical might observe that these companies are large contributors to Democratic candidates for office, and that this is an attempt at retaliation.