Slashdot Mirror
Should We Break Up the Tech Giants? Not if You Ask the Economists Who Take Money From Them (fastcompany.com)
This week's FTC hearings on the growing power of companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google only included economists who have taken money, directly and indirectly, from giant corporations that have a stake in the debate. From a report: Amid growing concern over the power of such behemoths as Amazon, Google, Facebook, and other tech giants, in recent months there's been a bipartisan push for better enforcement of antitrust rules -- with even President Trump saying in August that their size and influence could constitute a "very antitrust situation." The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has launched its most wide-ranging study of corporate concentration in America in more than 20 years with a series of hearings being held around the country. Chairman Joseph Simons, a practical enforcement-minded leader, launched the hearings by expressing concern over the growing problem of monopoly, which is now found in nearly every sector of the economy. "I approach all of these issues with a very open mind," said Simons, "very much willing to be influenced by what I see and hear."
But there's a problem. The FTC organized these hearings so that Simons and the public would be hearing from many economists who have taken money, directly or indirectly, from giant corporations. For example, on Monday, the FTC convened a panel titled "The Current Economic Understanding of Multi-Sided Platforms" to look specifically at the most dynamic and dangerous set of concentrated economic actors, the big tech platforms. Every single one of the economists who testified had financial ties to giant corporations. One example is David Evans, the chairman of the Global Economics Group. Evans scoffed at the danger of platform monopolies. He indicated that the question of "whether Facebook and Google and Amazon are monopolies, it's all interesting, it's great to read in the New York Times," but it's "not all that relevant" to the practice of antitrust. His firm has taken money directly from Microsoft, Visa, the large investment bank SIFMA, and the Chinese giant tech giant Tencent. Another example is Howard Shelanski, a partner at Davis Polk. Shelanski is more enforcement-minded, but he expressed caution, testifying that we don't know enough for antitrust enforcers to understand whether powerful technology companies hold unassailable market positions. Shelanski pointed to his own children, saying that they've stopped using Facebook because it's uncool. As it turns out, his law firm's clients include Facebook, as well as Comcast, and Chinese search giant Baidu.
But there's a problem. The FTC organized these hearings so that Simons and the public would be hearing from many economists who have taken money, directly or indirectly, from giant corporations. For example, on Monday, the FTC convened a panel titled "The Current Economic Understanding of Multi-Sided Platforms" to look specifically at the most dynamic and dangerous set of concentrated economic actors, the big tech platforms. Every single one of the economists who testified had financial ties to giant corporations. One example is David Evans, the chairman of the Global Economics Group. Evans scoffed at the danger of platform monopolies. He indicated that the question of "whether Facebook and Google and Amazon are monopolies, it's all interesting, it's great to read in the New York Times," but it's "not all that relevant" to the practice of antitrust. His firm has taken money directly from Microsoft, Visa, the large investment bank SIFMA, and the Chinese giant tech giant Tencent. Another example is Howard Shelanski, a partner at Davis Polk. Shelanski is more enforcement-minded, but he expressed caution, testifying that we don't know enough for antitrust enforcers to understand whether powerful technology companies hold unassailable market positions. Shelanski pointed to his own children, saying that they've stopped using Facebook because it's uncool. As it turns out, his law firm's clients include Facebook, as well as Comcast, and Chinese search giant Baidu.
>ask the industry
Seems like wasted steps. Just write BUT INNOVATION on a sign and hold it up when necessary.
Anybody taking money from the tech giants are in a conflict of interest and so need discounted.
The tech giants have a monopoly. Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Google, If they aren't going to be broken up, then Bell telephone and GM both need to sue the government because they were broken up and they were smaller and less controlling than the tech giants of today.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Sounds like anti-semitism!
Why are such people even consulted? And screw 'economists',they are the among the most useless bunch of experts out there. Break 'em up,specially google and facebook!
News at 11
This isn't necessarily my view on it.
However Economist who theories seem to favor the big companies, may choose to work for such companies.
Economist working with big companies may see and realize things that other may not notice.
That being said, we should listen to their explanation, however take it with a grain of salt knowing that their self interest is towards getting paid by such a company.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
1. Eliminate corporate personhood. 2. Drag the C-level out into the street, hang them from lamp posts, and hand their employees sticks to beat them like pinatas. Don't worry I'm sure everyone loves them and someone will cut them down. Maybe. Probably. Well, okay, probably not, but it was a thought. 3. Watch wages grow like they did after the French dragged their aristofucks out into the street. Funny, they were cool with wages rising after that shit.
Yes we should break them up because it will benefit Russia and China.
Doesn't sound like it?
It takes only ONE company for a monopoly.
You're right, we've got a oligopoly. Far worse.
Get Nationalized.
Where would you find an economist who is not employed by the wealthy and powerful. How many middle-class people or small businesses, much less poor people, hire economists? Even the academics that don't have corporate clients/donors that support their work, depend on attracting students who are going to work for corporations. They all accept an ideology that justifies a marketplace that benefits the wealthy and powerful. And, like all ideologues, they are expert at adjusting reality to fit their ideology.
Would there be any harm whatsoever if, when a company reached 5,000 employees or $500m turnover, it was forced to split into two companies? With the stock split going to the existing shareholders? Would there be a loss or gain in the economy?
See subject
I hate Google and Facebook with a burning passion, and would love to see them fail, but even for those stinkers: what right would the government have to break them up? The whole discussion makes no sense to me.
If they were engaged in specific abuses of monopoly power, hold them accountable for that (as the EU has been doing with Google), but this seems like a straight-up desire to punish success. Heck, as much as I hate the lack of an alternative to e.g., YouTube and it's bizarre and arbitrary censorship, it's not like Google has been unfairly stomping competing products - people just like YouTube.
Regulate them as carriers? Sure, that's an interesting discussion, and the conclusion isn't obvious. But break them up? On what basis other than envy?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
At this point decisions should be made for the benefit of the many, not do that a few can hoard more money and take it out of the economy.
I don't think a breakup is needed so much as government regulation is - I'm not talking about a government filter on user-made content, but rather strict regulations regarding things like security, breach reporting, advertising, and privacy. Look at Google, where Google Plus had been breached for months and the company decided not to report it or do anything about it except for shutting down Google Plus. Facebook has also had their share of data breaches, which they've largely reported but who knows what the company is hiding because they are not under any requirement to report anything.
In fact, there are a lot of issues where really, the only thing stopping it from happening is a voluntary program on the company's end. Take things like:
- The flood of fake/counterfeit goods on Amazon, which got so bad that they were choking out smaller domestic companies by offering cheap Chinese-made clones of their products. The only thing stopping them is a voluntary program by Amazon, which from what I understand is not doing all that good of a job at it.
- The use of Facebook and Twitter for political advertising purchased by foreign governments. The only thing stopping them from doing it are voluntary monitoring programs from the corporations that, while at least somewhat effective, are clearly not enough to stop Russia and China from trying to influence things.
- The breaches on Google Plus, where Google opted not to tell anyone until they had decided to simply shut down Google Plus.
These things are only going to get worse until the government steps in and forces these companies to do the right thing.
No company, tech or otherwise, should grow to the point of eliminating the value of private enterprise.
Companies that grow too fast or too powerful will implode, destroying the market beyond them. Nobody licensed them to be surrogate fragmentation grenades.
Evolution, adaptation, awareness - these should be emphasized. Profit should not. Profit motives are the prime cause of failure, not success.
Good businesses, like good houses, should last 500 years.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...the first thing we do is hang the economists.
From the Federalist 1
"Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives, not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as upon those who oppose the right side of a question"
In other words economists influenced by money are as likely to be correct as those with purer motives.
OP is right. People like you rationalize a lifetime of wage slavery, so don't see the problem.
The ruling class must feel fear, which means there has to be a total purge within living memory.
It's time to gas the ruling class, who have steal people's lives though wage slavery.
You're a cuck. When the time comes make sure you're on the right side, or you get the gas too.
Breaking up the tech companies isn't going to help because they're not a monopoly in the sense that they're the only game around. You have a freedom to use ANY social network you wish. There's alternatives to Facebook, there's alternatives to Twitter, there's alternatives to YouTube. The problem here is kind of a reverse monopoly.
Instead of a traditional monopoly where there is one company and everyone is forced to use that one. You have one company that everybody uses, to the exclusion of everything else.
For example: Facebook offers social networking timeline, keeping in touch with family/friends, group forums.
Facebook has 3.5 billion users. So if you have a brand and want to get noticed, or you want to reach folks, you DO have a choice, but it's a bad one:
A. Use Facebook, reach 3.5 billion users
B. Use unknown social network X, and like maybe 300, and spend all your time trying to get your Facebook friends to switch to that other network.
The solution is not to break up Facebook. Who cares. So you break up Facebook how? Break up FB, Instagram, and Whats App?
It doesn't matter. You still have one network that has the largest user base and dominates social media. Two really, big guys are Facebook and Twitter. Instagram is a different animal. And actually Instagram works amazingly well, but I digress.
The problem is that Facebook and Twitter are public forums where there should not be ANY hindrance of free speech, and here's why:
Moderation of speech on all social networks is done at the user level. You can block people or in the case of Twitter, mute them. Muting them does not prevent you from following them or even DM'ing them, it just means you don't see their tweets. It's like unfollowing someone on Facebook, kind of.
The whole "hate speech" narrative by the left is ridiculous. Now if you go around calling black people the N word and promoting white supremacy that should be smacked down. But again, that can be handled by block/mute. And I think most of us agree that kind of speech and behavior is atrocious and we won't accept it.
That said I see no reason to break apart social networks, it's not going to fix the problem or enable smaller companies to succeed, because ultimately you have to pry away users from Facebook and Twitter. Which is dumb anyway.
Google, Facebook and Twitter provide wonderful things to the world. They need to be kept in check, not split up. Because you can't split up a social network. What are you gonna do, say 1 billion users go to company A and 1 billion go to company B? It's stupid. And it's going to create more problems because now you have the userbase divided in two different places.
So let's say you break up FB so that Instagram and WhatsApp are two different companies. That COULD be good for Instagram or Whatsapp, but FB is still FB. And it still has the majority of users.
Ultimately I think as usual this is the result of legislators not understanding technology.
- Alex
We need to transform Internet-based services, chat, blogs, news (aka facebook, whatsapp, instagram, twitter etc.) into decentralized peer to peer services. Key for this transition is IPv6 because it enables us to give every human a set of personal IP addresses. For anonymization, we can use tor like overlays. Of course we need IPv6 routing without NAT.
I would be amenable to breaking up the tech giants, but only we break up the cable monopolies first. The tech giants are a problem, yes, but not as much of a problem to everyday people as the fact that they're being exploited mercilessly by att&t and comcast. If you're going to break up anyone, you need to think about them first.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Yes. Break tech giants up and don't listen to the economists that have money in it. Then after we've worked the kinks out of the process on them, repeat it with the banks.
"What right?"
It is a company, it wouldn't have rights if not enforced by the government.
Same with the patents it uses to enforce its monopoly, wouldn't exist if not enforced by the government.
Don't act like a company is a person with the same rights as real persons.
where a virtual company with a free product is going to use their powers as a monopoly to affect my life? If you think that facebook, which is a voluntary, needs to be broken up because it's too big than you've got some screws loose. No one is forced to use it (hopefully), other social media exists and is allowed to be created whenever by whomever, and it actually increases in value the larger it gets. A town owned facebook is useless.
Google and Facebook do not directly stifle innovation and privacy.
They do so indirectly in that any kind of competition is bought, the good parts integrated (be it the brand or the guts), and the rest is given to charity a week before the stock implodes.
Google and Facebook get a refund for their loss, and the NSA and IRS get a camera in your living room.
Win/win/win right (Facebook/Google/USA)?
Facebook, Google, can die with one deadly blow, or death by a thousand anti-trust cuts.
You need to read up on the history of standard oil and ATT.
The government has a vested interest in not allowing businesses to become 500lbs gorillas.
Regulate them as carriers? Sure, that's an interesting discussion, and the conclusion isn't obvious. But break them up? On what basis other than envy?
Really the only basis is anti competitive practices with their hardware platforms or software services. If there are contracts that force customers, partners or vendors to only use big tech company A's products, then sure antitrust issue there especially if the market intrusion is significant. I suspect this has more to do with the free speech argument floating around; aka political pages, channels and media creators being banned because of TOS violations and then their supporters crying a violation of free speech, so politicians start to cry antitrust. And now we have the supreme court about to hear a case of whether freedom of speech applies with private corporations, so antitrust could balloon in to constitutional violation arguments. There is some irony here... but not on topic.
The government has a vested interest in not allowing businesses to become 500lbs gorillas.
The government has a vested interest in preventing abuse of monopoly power. But that's not what we're talking about here. There's nothing implicitly wrong with a company being very successful.
I think the real topic is "how do we regulate social media to prevent corporate abuse of communication platforms for political ends?" This is something we've figured out for other carriers and broadcast companies: you're either just a pipe, or you're a publisher responsible for what's published.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"What right?"
It is a company, it wouldn't have rights if not enforced by the government.
Same with the patents it uses to enforce its monopoly, wouldn't exist if not enforced by the government.
Don't act like a company is a person with the same rights as real persons.
Ummm, rights do not come from governments.
Rights exist inherently.
You have a major problem if you believe rights come from any government.
If you break up ISIS, you end up with two organisations both called IS.
Intel, Microsoft, and Google keep getting fined, but what we need is an alternative. Envy? justice? Not that much difference.
Scott Galloway Says Amazon, Apple, Facebook, And Google should be broken up
At Business Insider's IGNITION conference, Scott Galloway gave a blistering presentation on why "The Big Four" — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google — should be broken up. Galloway is a professor of marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business and the author of "The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google."
No, he's right, because he's talking about companies. Companies (corporations and related entities like LLCs) are the creation of government, and therefore their rights, and limitations, are defined 100% by the government.
You'd have been right if you were talking about people, but you're not.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
You need to read up on the history of standard oil and ATT.
The government has a vested interest in not allowing businesses to become 500lbs gorillas.
...and yet there are "too big to fail" banks, which the Am. public bailed out on their unscrupulous practices. I don't foresee this going anywhere except "rabble, rabble, rabble..."
Companies are associations of people. People have rights. The only creation of government is "limited liability". It's not obvious why a group of people should lose their natural rights for limited liability.
The reasonable argument (IMO and the O of the SCOTUS) is that a public corporation has fewer rights than a group of people who all know each other, but even then, what rights would you deny the New York Times?
We have plenty of laws on how people get to treat other people, in groups or otherwise. Being a corporation doesn't shield you from those laws, beyond when the debt collectors come calling.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"it's not obvious why a group of people should lose their natural rights for limited liability."
Actually it is obvious. You just took away other people's natural right to recover damage done to them. It is really pretty simple, corporations aren't "associations of people", they are there own person and the "owners" are not liable for anything they do.
But natural rights with regard to property are an interesting thing. Is there some reason why my Viking ancestors lost the right to take whatever they could by force? The answer is that it had nothing to do with reason. It was because governments were organized to protect property and the Vikings lost the ability to take it. It had nothing to do with losing their "natural right" to do so.
American companies should engage in licensing of foreign website tech in order to create competitors to the big internet companies. Softbank did this with Yahoo, to create "Yahoo Japan". We could license the Russian search engine "Yandex", to create an American alternate to Google, or Bing.
I am not sure that breaking them up does anything, as in the end the exact same people work in tech. Perhaps as they spread around the country it will be very slightly better.
This is what Standard Oil has turned into, by the way. All of those big charitable foundations that fund education and civil rights activism will also practice every sort of racketeering to shut down competing businesses and social groups that are not one of them. You are only allowed to be one kind of gay, one kind of feminist, one kind of Jew, their kind.
Four years ago some random disorganized people on 4chan noticed that they were starting to get into the video game business with the help of some state sponsors of al-Qaeda. You can tell which newspapers and activists they control by how they reported on the story and the widespread censorship of it across the Internet.
Start with Comcast, Verizon, Charter, and AT&T. They have way too much power, and stifle competition everywhere.
The problem here is that nobody has to be solely reliant on Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Google (outside of search), Amazon, and other major "tech" companies. There are competitors here. The places where we have no competition has been largely in places that the government has interfered with the free market. It's cable companies being granted monopolies in the 1990s and the creation of an indefinite extension on copyright. Both in the tech sphere and entertainment spheres to tractors. They all are using copyright law to build monopolies. "Intellectual" property and government regulations have undermined what we could have. A true free market.
PS Best t-shirt ever: "Intellectual property is neither": libertyminded.com
You seem to imply that rights and responsibilities are separate. You can't have one without the other. The law supervises over rights and responsibilities.
The govt should be broken up first. It has proven to be corrupt, inefficient and a poor steward of the environment.
If only all headline were that transparent and refreshly frank! "Trump lies again about..." would be common!