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.

Comments

Yes breakups did work

[sjbe]

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.

The problem is private infrastructure

[DalM]

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.

Re:Worked for Ma Bell. Sounds like a good idea.

[Dutch Gun]

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.