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.

[novakyu]

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.

Re:This won't work long term.

[jordanjay29]

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.

Re:This won't work long term.

[jwhyche]

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.

Re:This won't work long term.

[jwhyche]

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.

Lets start with ISPs and cellular companies

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Why Twitter?

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Exactly. You have a right to free speech. You do not have a right to use my printing press to exercise it.

No.

[Gravis Zero]

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.

Re:No.

[dryeo]

Well one thing that should have been done is stopping them from buying up the competition, something that Facebook seems to do a lot and the others too much.

Re:No.

[Gravis Zero]

I don't disagree but a Republican congress did nothing to prevent any of this. Their objections are entirely new which seems to indicate sour grapes rather a genuine regulatory objection.

Re:Why Twitter?

[wyattstorch516]

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.

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.

Re: Why Twitter?

[dnaumov]

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.

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.