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Tim Berners-Lee Says Tech Giants May Have To Be Split Up (reuters.com)

Posted by msmash on from the closer-look dept.

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.

5 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Worked for Ma Bell. Sounds like a good idea. by Seven+Spirals · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Worked for Ma Bell. Sounds like a good idea. by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 5, Interesting

      One problem with breaking up Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, is that often these companies have ONE service which dominates their revenue. It's not like the old Standard Oil or AT&T in which you can break them up into smaller regional interests which are roughly equivalent. In Google's case, there's no point in breaking up search and advertising, because search is what drives eyeballs, while advertising is what funds damn near everything else they do.

      And how the heck would you split up Facebook or Twitter? Nothing they do is really all that significant outside of their ONE primary product. How would breaking up Facebook even work? Facebook1 and Facebook2? Randomly split up accounts? Duplicate them and make people choose? You can't really make a case for splitting apart their advertising and social media platform, as one drives the revenue for the other. And everything else they do is a sideshow by comparison. Even moreso with Twitter.

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    2. Re:Worked for Ma Bell. Sounds like a good idea. by Powercntrl · · Score: 2, Interesting

      YouTube is effectively a monopoly, and got that way by being run at a loss for years, subsidized by Googles monopoly on search.

      Taking a loss to undercut the competition is anti-competitive behavior - not a monopoly. A monopoly means that you're the single provider of a specific good or service. People share video files P2P just fine without YouTube, just don't be surprised that it's mostly pirated Hollywood movies. YouTube also has plenty of competition in the adult market, since they don't even allow that sort of content.

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    3. Re:Worked for Ma Bell. Sounds like a good idea. by Bert64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The problem with monopolies is when people are locked in.

      Google (Search) don't really have a lot of lock-in, there's nothing to stop you using bing or duckduckgo etc.
      Similarly with android, there are alternative android builds from the likes of amazon each with their own store etc.

      Whats much more of a problem is platforms like facebook, skype and whatsapp etc, which force you to be on their platforms if you need to communicate with your friends who also use the same platforms. Splitting these companies up wouldn't do much good, unless you also create and enforce some kind of open interoperable standards allowing users on different platforms to still communicate with other and allowing third parties to create their own compatible alternatives.

      If you take email as an example, the underlying protocols are standard and there are many compatible clients and providers while people are also free to create their own clients or operate their own servers. While there might be a few large players, they can't lock you in and there are many smaller alternatives.

      Currently it's a farcical situation where the average user has accounts and clients for an array of different services, and are forced to use the clients provided by those services on devices supported by those clients. How many people remember the days of ICQ when the first third party clients came out, you could run a much better client on platforms not supported by the official one.

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  2. The problem is private infrastructure by DalM · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.