Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.