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Tim Berners-Lee Says Tech Giants May Have To Be Split Up (reuters.com)
Facebook and Google have grown so dominant they may need to be broken up, unless challengers or changes in taste reduce their clout, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has said in a new interview. From a report: The digital revolution has spawned a handful of U.S.-based technology companies since the 1990s that now have a combined financial and cultural power greater than most sovereign states. Tim Berners-Lee, a London-born computer scientist who invented the Web in 1989, said he was disappointed with the current state of the internet, following scandals over the abuse of personal data and the use of social media to spread hate. "What naturally happens is you end up with one company dominating the field so through history there is no alternative to really coming in and breaking things up," Berners-Lee, 63, said in an interview. "There is a danger of concentration." But he urged caution too, saying the speed of innovation in both technology and tastes could ultimately cut some of the biggest technology companies down to size. "Before breaking them up, we should see whether they are not just disrupted by a small player beating them out of the market, but by the market shifting, by the interest going somewhere else," Berners-Lee said.
Sherman anti-trust act gives all the needed legal cover. Do it. They are fully formed evil megacorps and trusts if there ever were any. Break them up and let them compete with the fragments of themselves. Competition is the soul of capitalism, not monopolies.
He's right, and wait an see a bit longer is also right. However to to their untaxed nature and yields I doubt this will eventuate. More likely they use the loot to lobby and send legislation to a committee
Something needs to be done more than a breakup. Look at Ma Bell. It got broken up into regions, then one region bought another out, etc... and AT&T was reformed with all the Baby Bells.
All breakups will do is ensure some other company swallows up the tech piece. If there is something done, it needs to be a consistant antitrust effort, not just a one time thing.
You've got to be kidding me. Never heard of this jackhole, and not surprised he's dead wrong on the issues. The scale of Google is what enables their individual products to excel at what they do. Breaking them up would be insanely counterproductive. Somehow big companies = evil for a class of people. It's simply not true and there is no evidence to support that thesis. Corporations are indeed people.
Split up Standard Oil in 1910--how well did that work out? Split up Ma Bell--happy with the result? Split it up and the parts will recombine in some other form but functionally equivalent.
I wonder what the paid trolls from Google and Facebook think about this proposal. Maybe they'll tell us...
Bullshit, Sir Lee... Historically, to warrant the actual breaking-up, the following conditions had to hold:
For example, if Twitter — the dominant player in its field — is really behind the troubles Gab.com is experiencing (if — I make no such allegations), the first item holds. But, given the ease, with which one can start an Internet web-site, the second condition does not hold — and there is no reason to even investigate Twitter in this case...
Simply doing something somebody does not like is not a good justification to use the force of government — however much the bunch of little authoritarians would like it to be.
Don't fall into the trap of believing, that experience in something — such as hyper-text — makes a man an expert in everything.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Don't worry - Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter have competition: Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent and Xiaomi
And the other monopolists? If we're going to split up some, we might as well split them all.
They are to big and for some there only ISP choice
Split up Standard Oil in 1910--how well did that work out?
Pretty well. At it's peak Standard Oil controlled somewhere around 90% of all oil production and sales in the US and they were renowned for predatory business practices. You really think having one private company with that much control over our energy supply is a good idea?
Split up Ma Bell--happy with the result?
Short answer yes. The reason you have a lot of the choices you do is precisely because AT&T was broken up. You might not be old enough to remember what it was like prior to the breakup but I am. Prior to the breakup there was basically no competition in the long distance call market. Unix was in no small part a result of the breakup. AT&T wanted to get into the computer business and the breakup was the price they had to pay to do it. The breakup introduced a lot of competition and innovation that likely would never have happened without it. Could the AT&T breakup have been done better? You could make a case for that. But it almost certainly was a good thing overall.
Split it up and the parts will recombine in some other form but functionally equivalent.
Umm, no. The current AT&T has no where near the market power the company had prior to the breakup. I'm not sure you fully appreciate how powerful a monopoly AT&T was prior to the breakup.
Facebook: Don't like our TOS? MAKE YOUR OWN!
Gab: Okay!
Facebook/Google/Apple/Paypal: Hey everyone! They're hosting Nazis! Get them off the Internet!
Sorry, they're already too fucking big.
For example, if Twitter â" the dominant player in its field â" is really behind the troubles Gab.com is experiencing (if â" I make no such allegations) But, given the ease, with which one can start an Internet web-site...
I totally agree with this, Facebook and Twitter are not in any way monopolies, there is no way as you say for them to control competitors.
But the other angle of this is, what does breaking up Facebook or Twitter even look like, and how would it help anyone?
Lets say you break up Facebook so that Oculus and Instagram. Well all of the sudden Facebook has less distraction and is even more focused on what it is currently doing instead of being distracted by these side projects. How does that help anyone? How does that improve anything?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People go to Google or Facebook or Amazon not because they are better in technology or service, but because they have the bulk of the data or products available.
So you could Split up Google and have different Apps one for search a company for maps, a company for google suites. However their success is based on their integration. And Google Maps alone probably wouldn't be able to fund itself without google search dollars.
Also people will Google with Google. There isn't anything stopping me from searching with Bing, I can even have Chrome search with Bing. I don't have to shop at amazon there are other stores. Unlike say Microsoft back in the late 1990's where if you weren't on their systems, you were at a disadvantage. You can live your life without Google, Facebook and Amazon. With Bing, living a good normal life, and going to a normal brick and mortar store (or is online section) .
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Tim Berners Lee didn't invent the Web
if you believe he did,
you might as well state and declare that
Trump built the wall to keep the mexicans out.
BS
UTTER BS.
caption : penguin
As Napoleon once said: "Never interfere with the enemy while he is in the process of making a mistake."
If you just wait a few years Facebook/Twitter problems will be gone one way or another, no need for the government to step in and take action.
Facebook has become universally disliked and distrusted, to the point where I think they have just about zero power over anyone now. They are ripe for competition to take over what they do.
Twitter is simply self-immolating at a rapid clip, never doing a thing the users ask for (like the simple ability to edit tweets), instead doing things like removing features people actually like (the like button) and mass banning supposed bots, but every time carving out more and more real users.
I have been looking around for alternatives, some of which have been discussed here before - there's a great list up on Reason of some alternative social media platforms. I plan to pick one of these (maybe Minds) and stick to that as primary, every now and then checking Twitter/Facebook but slowly fading from those platforms.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We don't need to break them up, we only need to mandate interoperability between the platforms.
Compare the internet platforms to telephones. Both are run by super mega-oligopolies. Both are almost completely privately owned yet vital infrastructure. Yet, there is much better competition in phone companies than the big internet companies, consumers have much more power in the market to change. Why? Because your phone can call any other phone. Interoperability is the key. If companies can lock you inter their platform, consumers are slaves to the platform. If they can't, then consumers have all the power.
Wow! The M$ shills have jumped right on this.
The question is not whether a business is dominant in one industry segment (a monopoly), but does it use its power in one segment to manipulate other segments. For example, M$ used its dominance in operating systems to manipulate browsers. M$ has been convicted of monopolistic behavior in multiple venues without ever being broken up.
The Ma Bell monopoly breakup was actually intentional, with the idea of spinning off money losing (rural) customers. Once the breakup occurred, profitable baby bells (SBC, Ameritech, etc.) started merging.
The godawful nature of trying to do everything via HTML is all your damn fault, sir.
"Anyone can make a website" is horseshit. To get anywhere near a tenth of Facebook's user base, you need piles of hardware and a team of administrators. Electricity costs mean a pile of money.
You simply can't compete when everyone is using it. People use FB because people they know use it. There was nothing like it at the time. Now you have to have something compelling to make people switch. There's big money for anyone who succeeds. Has anyone even come close to succeeding?
Meanwhile in the real world Facebook gets more and more popular every day and facebook logins are default for many services. Facebook is Too Big To Fail. Zuckerberg is Too Rich To Jail. Get over it.
The same way Facebook dethroned MySpace and a bunch of others, they can themselves be taken over the minute they lose it...
A looser's argument...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"Imagine the possibilities!"
Is this:
A. The slogan of some fast-growing tech giant?
B. The slogan of some billion-product established multinational?
C. One politician to another in the cloakrooms of many countries, drooling over the possible kickbacks, illegal and legal , to slow or halt this breakup process?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
What you describe is the same situation for anyone starting a competitor to any major corporation. Unless you're sitting on a big fat pile of start up capital, tough luck. This is commonly referred to as "late capitalism".
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Fascist trolls calling liberals fascist? Irony.
I think they also owned the wires IN your house. They have always owned the wires TO your house, and 'they' still do.
After breakup, they pushed 'inside wire' insurance plans so you wouldn't have to worry about the wires that were now yours.
I don't think the key was the breakup though.
It wasn't JUST the breakup but there are a lot of things that would never have come to pass without it, including the internet as we know it today. There is almost no way the internet or the world wide web becomes what it is today if AT&T is still a monopoly.
It was the requiring them to let other companies use their lines. That's what changed things. They owned the wires to your house, so they could say "oh, you wanna use them? Then you have to lease a phone from us. You have to get your service from us. Etc. "
The local phone company STILL owns the line going to your house. That never changed. It's true even today. AT&T's monopoly on phones in the house was broken with the Carterfone legal decision back in 1968. That decision eventually let to a lawsuit from MCI which eventually let to the voluntary breakup of AT&T. Yes, that's right, AT&T broke itself up for reasons to complicated to enumerate here. It's really interesting to read about so I highly recommend studying the history.
The mistake the regulators made with the breakup was that our government didn't make rules preventing the companies providing the wires to your house from being more than "dumb pipes". The companies providing the lines to your house should have no control over what content goes over those lines. The whole net neutrality debate comes from this decision. The companies providing the content should have no control over the lines to your house. This keeps conflicts of interest detrimental to the consumer out of the market significantly. So the breakup wasn't the success it could have been but it's very clear that the net result of the breakup was a net good for us as consumers. We got cheaper long distance, the internet, unix, competitive ISPs, competitive phone equipment makers, and a lot more. Not perfect but a lot better than it probably would have been otherwise.
Those "small players that beat them out of the market" that Tim speaks of? They don't. They disrupt the big boys' gravy train and then get bought, and then their novel new concept becomes part of the big boys' gravy train. So, ultimately, breakup needs to occur.
Please do it. I swear to God, I never ever interfered in your NPC sites like cheddar but this is awful guys.
Gab is under a massive smear attack. gab.com The CEO got death threats, they threatened his wife and turned on the gas in his parents house!!!! It's really sick now.
Gab is a platform, just like twitter, only Libertarian, If we don't break them up now, as in yesterday, your children will live in hell for all eternity.
They want to consolidate power quickly to keep us under control and distort the reality of our speech. Don't let them.
I know some of you think that Hirono hench woman is the real deal "Men, do the right thing and step up" re: Kavanaugh fake sexual assault.
This is real. We need to step up here. This shit really does matter for all of us, and we're desperately running out of time.
We've been breaking up "monopolies" since the 1800's. No difference, if it can be proven these companies are monopolies or anti-trust type situations
Just pass some common sense internet privacy laws. Install ad-blockers and track-blockers by default on new systems. Shrink their ad revenue, watch the over-inflated stock pop like a bubble.
If we don't do it we're all dead. Do you understand? Does that make it more pressing for you.
gab.com is under a massive attack. They threatened the CEO, his wife, and his parents - elderly people. Do you understand what happens if we don't act?
Don't let us all get slow cooked like frogs as they come after us more and more every day. If a site you use hasn't been attacked yet, you are mainstream NPC in my book, you just go where the herd go.
This is happening. They are shutting down our ability to communicate with each other so that in the end only bots will dominate the discourse.
Instagram barley synergizes with Facebook as is. Even as a separate entity why would it drop the ability to broadcast changes to other social media platforms, like Twitter or Facebook?
Competition includes tracking, advertising, and eyeball hours.
So maybe you reduce Facebook revenue a tiny bit. Big whoop, it seems way more likely that you cripple Instagrams ability to survive in as pure a form as it is right now where pressure to do crazy things like Snapchat has done is removed.
WhatsApp also is another app hardly touched, it basically just has financial backing you remove. Zero impact on Facebook, but now WhatsApp has to go find revenue again - very likely at the cost of user privacy.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can easily avoid searching through Google, Gmail, maps, Docs, Chrome, chromebooks, etc... The only two Google things that are difficult to avoid are all the websites embedding Google scripts and there isn't a lot of choice between mobile OSes. You can't really split up Google's advertising firm as then it would be completely inoperatable.
As far as Facebook is concerned, I haven't visited that site in over 4 years. There are two clubs I'd like to join which only use Facebook Groups so I haven't joined them, but that's not a big deal. Anything 'important' on Facebook you can find/get in other ways. But again it's hard to avoid Facebook's tracking, but what can you do about that? Split up it's photo sharing section from it's comment section? In terms of shadow profiles and slurping up everyone's contact lists and images, the only way to stop that is through a new law.
I accept your point but for the well being of society, I don't give a crap if twitter is much more successful than Gab. If there is only one twitter, there is only one target to control, deploy their bots - Russian, Iranain, but mostly UN NGO bots to dominate a fake discourse where it's just a whole lot of bots arguing. It's lethal for society.
It's not what they do, it's who benefits from what they are: Nobody good. Any loophole should be exploited to stop them. They will kick and scream and say it's dangerous to the economy, they my try to crash the economy, but there's no other way.
Seriously, if Google and FB were smart, they would split on their own. Rather than go horizontal, do multiple vertical. In particular, they should create 2-3 for America, maybe 2-3 for Europe, and at least 1 for Asia. Then ideally America and Europe will block Baidu until they split.
Need the same for FB.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm a Trump supporter. These companies should not be broken up. They should be obliterated and their corrupt executives hung for treason.
Facebook was able to rise — and to take over established players — without any such:
Having gotten that measly $500K in 2004, FB were able to take over MySpace in 2008, despite the latter belonging to a multi-billion dollar corporation...
Never heard this term before — cannot be as "common" as you think it is. I had to look it up and, guess what? The Commie term has nothing to do with newcomers competing with the incumbents.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
These entities are large enough that they just buy out and absorb upstarts.
starts getting into brick and mortar stores ...
The Standard Oil people put their money into a number of "charitable" trusts and foundations that continue to act in concert, as one body. They also seem to have recruited all of the Silicon Valley new money.
They all move in concert as one political party. The problem is not that they all back the Democrats. They are so powerful that they took over the Democrats. They tell the Democrats what to say or they don't get funded next election cycle or mentioned in the press. They donate large amounts to the cities to tell the cities what laws to enforce, and what laws not to enforce, and what non-laws the rich want the police to enforce, or else the cities lose tens of millions of dollars in donations. More worrisome is that they have out of nowhere all taken a hard-right Islamist tone in the past few years. Ban blasphemy! Cover your women! That coming from the, uh, "progressive" 'liberals."
These are allegedly some of their media properties listed on the page:
1 AlterNet
2 Consortium News
3 Counterpunch
4 Daily Kos
5 Democracy Now!
6 Disinfo.com
7 Huffington Post
8 The Media Consortium
9 PBS
10 Salon.com
11 The Daily Beast
12 The Guardian and The Observer
13 The Young Turks
14 Truthdig
15 Truthout
16 Vice Media
17 Vox Media
18 Washington Monthly
Whoa, PBS? Aren't they supposed to be the government? Aren't they supposed to be nonpartisan? That depends who staffs the organization. The Ad Council is also supposed to be nonpartisan yet it is staffed by senior members of Open Society Foundations, Kellogg Foundation, Arcus Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation, and the like-minded. Once these crooks get into the government, they spend your money to fund only their friends and people who think like themselves, and if you complain then they use their media properties to smear you and call you a Nazi.
We are two years into a a Trump administration that promised to fight back against them but the IRS is still not looking into their explicitly political activity and the DoJ is quiet about enforcing the antitrust and racketeering laws that were written to stop this one specific group of organizations. The alternative is to directly elect them.
only idiots would continue to use facebook, users know full well that facebook is exploiting their users for all they can get out of them,
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Mr. Tim (creator of the WWW), how much money have you given your representatives in government? Is that amount equal or greater than what the monopolies have given?
Mr. Tim (inventor of the WWW), do you believe that you and all the Slashdotters and all the concerned citizens are going to contribute more to candidates' reelection funds than the monopoly powers?
Mr. Tim (god of the WWW), do you understand that government action is purchased by the highest bidder? Until you find a way to buy that action, your words are empty.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Luckily, after the EU fines their executives and jails them, they will break up the firms.
Due to treaties, Canada and Mexico and many other countries will agree with these moves.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So, what I'm hearing is that there are better options for an office suite and a map company, but because Google uses it's monopoly over several areas to integrate them, they lose in the marketplace. That's pretty much the ideal case for an anti-trust intervention.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
By purchasing a pair of clout goggles.
...never heard of phone calling or email?
Nonsense! Standard Oil was broken up ONLY on paper --- not in actuality! And that paper breakup greatly profited John D. Rockefeller! I would posit that AT&T is back stronger than ever, having been reconstituted thanks to Clinton's signing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996! (The attorney general at the time of the so-called breakup of Standard Oil was Charles Joseph Bonaparte, the grandnephew of Napoleon --- you know, that French conqueror dude --- who also gave us the Bureau of Investigation, that political police created to squash the growing socialist/anti-predatory capitalist movement in the USA --- later to be known as the FBI!)
I just last night shut down my Facebook account and opened one on diaspora.org
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
At least for Facebook, one approach suggested is to force Facebook to split off their subsidiaries to create rivals and reduce the broad range of data they can collect. So that would mean re-establishing Instagram, WhatsApp, and other large brands as separate entities. It's not perfect, but it would break up the sheer scale they've achieved through those acquisitions.
Google, Amazon and Twitter are harder since those businesses are built around a more centralized section. You could force Amazon for example to break away AWS from their e-Commerce and entertainment units. Google, maybe break off Gmail and the Android businesses from the core search machine. These ideas all require further study, but I think its a starting point to explore.
What I particularly like about social media platforms is when I'm one of only a handful of users.... oh wait, no actually I like having my entire circle of friends, colleagues and old school chums on the same network, otherwise what's the point!
Well Tim, you are also responsible by creating the internet as a server / client network.
This has caused concentration of data and control.
Dick head, it has to be changed to peer - peer topology.
Go well
Mainly because he's a moron and has never once said anything even remotely intelligent about anything.
I think putting a cap on Market capitalization is better
Casteism
Meanwhile in the real world Facebook gets more and more popular every day
I'm curious why you choose to believe user counts from a company that grossly inflated video views for advertisers.
Not to mention, how many of those accounts are REAL people.
Facebook will absolutely have an order of magnitude more people than any other network for quite a while. But that does not mean it's not worthwhile moving now and acting to get critical mass elsewhere - especially if you are the kind of person that actually posts useful things, which entices more users onto that platform.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley