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."

Comments

This won't work long term.

[Anonymous Coward]

All of these sites depend on pure mass to be useful to users. They don't want to have to be members of four different Facebook analogues. Break them up, and users will eventually flock to one site, and we are back where we started.

And how will this work? You get assigned to FB1, your wife to FB2, etc? Will you be allowed to leave one site for another? It is just unworkable.

Re:This won't work long term.

[Bradmont]

They would more likely break Facebook into Facebook proper, messenger, instagram, whatsapp, etc. Though the best case scenario would be to break it into several Facebook.com-like networks and legislate interoperability and open federation standards with any other service that wants to connect...

Re:This won't work long term.

[Zocalo]

I expect the idea is to break up the business units into separate corporations, rather than a regional "Baby Bell" style split. Google's already part way there with Alphabet, but you could still split search, mail, and Android into separate units. Facebook has also acquired a LOT of other business (71, although not all are still operating), several of which could be isolated from their eponymous social media platform - Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp, for instance. Twitter is more of a one-trick-pony though, so not really any obvious opportunities for similar break-ups there - but given their decline in popularity and financial issues, it may just be a matter of time anyway.

And, as others have noted, why do the likes of Apple and Microsoft that also leverage big data from multiple business units get a pass?

Re:This won't work long term.

[SirCowMan]

The greatest benefit would probably be to separate out their advertisement and marketing arms.

Google yes, Facebook maybe, Twitter no

[gman003]

What would a broken-up Twitter look like? They only have the Twitter network itself, and Periscope, and 99% of the company is Twitter. Splitting them up would still leave Twitter being just as big and problematic. Trying to split the Twitter network won't work - everyone will just switch to one of them. Even if you try to do it on national or regional lines, half the accounts I follow are foreign so I'd end up using them (or more likely, an aggregation service), and then you're right back where you started.

Facebook has some more substantial products besides their core Facebook. There's WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus... I'd love for Oculus to go independent, the main reason I refuse to buy their hardware is that they're owned by Facebook and are thus guaranteed to turn evil at some point. A breakup here would actually do something. I'm not sure it's a good idea, but it's not completely unproductive like a Twitter breakup.

Google is too big. Search, GMail, Android, Chrome, Chromebooks/ChromeOS, Youtube, Drive, Docs, Pay, Play, Plus, Blogger, AppEngine/Cloud, Waze, Project Fi... the network effect is huge and it's clearly anticompetitive - and I didn't even list Alphabet's separate holdings, which include Waymo and Google Fiber. They need to be broken up. They're already anticompetitive as hell.

just strip them of legal protections

[ooloorie]

Google, Facebook, and Twitter currently enjoy legal protections against copyright infringement, defamation of character, and other kinds of legal issues because they claim that they are just redistribution information with no editorial control. Obviously, that is a sham.

The solution is simple: remove legal protection from these companies and hold them responsible for anything that appears on their web sites.

No breakup needed, the problem will take care of itself with a few lawsuits.

Yes, but not for those reasons

[shanen]

Actually didn't find any insightful comment that addressed the political reasons they are trying it now. Really bad, even dictatorial, reasons.

Anti-trust is a better reason, but I think there should be some improvements in the rationale. Here's my suggestion:

Pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation to make it natural for monopolies to reward themselves by reproducing rather than just growing like insane cancers. Implementation is simple: Progressive taxation of profits based on market share. If a company becomes too dominant, it actually can increase its retained profits by dividing itself into competing companies. The fundamental goal should be to seek at least 3 to 5 competitors to choose from in each market niche.

In the cases of legitimately natural monopolies the high taxes should pay for careful regulation of the monopoly and research to break the monopoly. DSAuPR, atAJG.

Re:Thank God!

[Ol Olsoc]

Please don't give them ideas.

Dear Leaders continual rants against "Fake News" shows that he and his toadies, the Republican Party already have designs upon the first amendment and the destruction of the fourth estate. The third estate dissolution is nearly finished.