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> The question is have we reached a point where technology and globalization provide such enormous returns to the economies of scale that we can't go back or is all this corporate concentration just due to a lack of government enforcement?

At some point, America decided that only horizontal monopolies counted, not vertical ones.

Many of our concerns about antitrust would be assuaged if regulators started keeping separate markets separate. Like banning content distributors from buying content creators. Or requiring platforms to provide third-party-friendly APIs. Microsoft got in trouble for trying to vertically integrate its browser into its operating system. But Facebook isn't likewise called to task for treating Facebook live streams differently than others.

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RE: Antitrust - on the right track. Consumer's can't solve this from the ground up. What's needed is to prevent certain kinds of key acquisitions. The law around acquisitions is too permissive in an age of network effects; acquisition laws were fine pre-internet but don't solve their intended purpose anymore. Normally, the market corrects against the biggest players because the biggest players are slow to change culture and their business. But, acquisitions are the mechanism by which the big players are preventing themselves from being disrupted by smaller, more nimble players. If the big players can simply buy up any new comers (who will want a deserved pay-out for their efforts) on the scene, they maintain complete control regardless of what consumers want. Otherwise, any "alternative practices" you try to foster will simply be crushed, if they ever become a large enough threat.

Facebook acquiring Instagram is a perfect example.

As a very free market libertarian, I actually agree with this completely. Facebook buying Insta was a very anti-competitive situation. It wasn’t a purchase for a particular tech — it was a purchase specifically to capture a competitor. Grabbing WhatsApp is an even more severe example — it effectively gave Facebook ownership of a vast percentage of messaging networks — both their own and WhatsApp.

Google is a harder one though because Google doesn’t rely upon network effects to the same extreme FB does — meaning, my dad’s search engine choice has no impact on me — but my dad’s messaging client absolutely does.

It’s relatively easy to start a new search engine — it’s close to impossible to start a new general purpose messaging system or social network — at least not one that survives.

What about a consumer group to assert pressure?

Edit: a consumer group could have monopsony powers and be capable of negotiating concessions. Such as an open api.

Consumers already can do that — they can refuse to use FB products — but they don’t. So a consumer group is pretty useless without enough consumers to actually exert their power.

This is exactly right. Consumers could organize a week without Facebook event, including deleting the app from their devices. If a significant number of people participated, FB would get the message.

Boycotts aren't the only option.

Consumers have boycotted products in the past. Consumer pressure has worked against Facebook in the past.

I agree that it is an unlikely and difficult solution. I don't see an easy one.

I am boycotting Facebook, but I only interact with 5% of my 'friends list' on a regular basis, so it's hard to get the message out, y'know?

Microsoft got in trouble for a good deal of illegal things they did to protect the Windows monopoly from Java :) Integrating IE into the OS was fine in itself, but part of the bigger strategy for which they were sentenced.

Microsoft biggest crime was they didn’t spend any money lobbying. Apple doing the same thing Microsoft did and worst, you cannot even change the default, yet no anti-trust on Apple. Different is Apple one of the biggest spender on lobbying.

You should really read about the MS case, to understand in how many levels Apple isn't "doing the same thing".

False. The law actually changed because judges noticed that the law as it was in the books was pretty nonsensical and totally arbitrary.

It was mostly created, pushed and used by a group of progressive to go after their political opponents. Its well documented (even if people choice not to remember this part) that this was very much PR and protectionism of businesses that were afraid to be driven of the market by the larger more efficient companies. The first anti-trust law in US history for example was quite explicitly passed to restrict the centralised slaughter house industry from driving all the local butchers out of businesses)

The new interpretation that has been adopted requires that you can show consumer harm. I actually have credible evidence that people are getting overpriced.

> Many of our concerns about antitrust would be assuaged if regulators started keeping separate markets separate.

That is very easily said but practically impossible. And even if it is possible, it would be massively harmful because some of the largest changes in the history happened because or were at least massively supported by companies bridging, merging, combining, integrating different markets.

In fact what you describe is pretty much called 'Indian Socialism' a form of 'Socialism' that was very in vogue with British elites after WW2 and India served as a nice place to test this since many of the Indian leaders had an English education and agreed with it. They had a sort of 5 year plan that attempted to plan how many companies could be in what market requiring licences to go into or out of different markets.

Those licences were of course a perfect tool for the state bureaucracy to get bribes from all business people.

> Or requiring platforms to provide third-party-friendly APIs.

Again, said very easily. Have you considered what that would mean? It would mean government regulator would have to go threw each layer of the software and each application and define adequate rules about what sharing would mean. This is a political insanity specially in a democracy.

Now you could argue, that it should all be made by some loosely controlled government bureaucracy like the Fed. An API tzar but how that would end is pretty easy to see.

I would agree that it would make sense for government to support and insensitive the adoption of open standard that were created and adopted by people and companies in the market voluntary.

If you want to use state power to force companies to support open standards it can not be on a ad-hook bases. You would need to think about a specific general law that could be applied to everybody and that does not involve concrete technologies or companies. That would be pretty hard because I think once such a thing is written most people (at least in here) would oppose it.

> That is very easily said but practically impossible.

It's very practical to say <content distributor> should not be able to buy <content creator>.

Likewise, it is practical to say <web site> cannot favor their product in feeds, search, app stores, etc. over competitors.

> Again, said very easily. Have you considered what that would mean?

Sure. To the extent that open standards support types of media, it's a solved problem. Displaying <img> tags has been a thing for decades, for instance. <video> tags are a thing now, as well. Facebook could be previewing external video the same way they preview their own. But their business model is to try to gain market share in the streaming video market, live and otherwise.

You are missing my point. You are assuming a perfect regulater in your imagination. However this is not how the real word works.

Do you remember all the democratic autrage about Net Neutrality. How everybody cried about how unfair it was.

Who are actually the exact people that get to make these choices. How do you enforce fair proceedings? How do you handle appeal? How do you do all this without making it fundamentally undemocratic?

Do you want a democratic vote to make these choices?

Do you want the Senate as a whole to vote on these issues?

How about a congressonal subcommity?

Do you want a largly unsuprivised undemocratic burocracy to just make these chocie by fiat?

The list of problems goes on. What is the legal bases for these effect and how do you punish people who don't follow the rules? How about the US not controlling the internet and if the US goes away from global standards it could massivly hurt the US as a industry standard.

These are real conceptual issues that have caused many issues in many of these ideas that people have where they assume that 'if only I could make these choice the way I want, it would be better for everybody'. However the outcome that you imagine is probebly not the outcome you are gone get, specially if you don't think about these issues.

Do you want a democratic vote to make these choices?
Do you want the Senate as a whole to vote on these issues?
How about a congressional subcommittee?

Do you want a largely unsupervised undemocratic bureaucracy to just make these choices by fiat?

Hmm, well to me it seems like the that last option is the worst of the bunch. And that's what we get when we don't regulate at all - unsupervised, undemocratic, corporate bureaucracies making decisions that critically affect our lives. I don't need a perfect regulator, I just need a regulator because even in your worst case scenario for a regulator you've only tied what I already live under. To your net neutrality argument, your argument is essentially that instead of having a regulatory body in charge of net neutrality who then rescinded it, we should never have had that government body at all - to me that's just unconvincing, at least I got some years of net neutrality this way, better than none at all.

Why do you need every detail of a plan to see if something is good? You want us to quote from law journals for you? Why don't you just admit you don't like the idea - don't pretend that if only we could lay out a plan you'd be for it, your disagreement isn't in implementation it's in foundation.

> Hmm, well to me it seems like the that last option is the worst of the bunch. And that's what we get when we don't regulate at all - unsupervised, undemocratic, corporate bureaucracies making decisions that critically affect our lives.

Your implaying that state burocracy and markets produce the same outcome. That is 100% false, as both systems have totally different feedback mechanism. It is a totally different thing if you are a open soruce standards commity that has to actually attrackt people rather then a burocracy that has no insentive to attrackt people.

The market process is guided by the choices of all the players, and this is why even in a bad case the deversity will be higher then in any government run situation. Standards can be overcome, thrown away, upgraded depending on the chaning needs people.

We already have the largly unregulated market and in that market we have lots of standartisation both completly open and industry standards. Open Source software is winning in many places. New spaces are being opened up for standards, like RISC-V. Yes its not perfect, but you have to realize that you are risking everything we have by giving some government burocracy (and a US burocracy at that) the complete power over the internet.

There are good and well studied reason why this approche is better then the political processes I have mentioned.

> Why do you need every detail of a plan to see if something is good? You want us to quote from law journals for you? Why don't you just admit you don't like the idea - don't pretend that if only we could lay out a plan you'd be for it, your disagreement isn't in implementation it's in foundation.

If you don't have even a basic idea what the scope and power of your policy is, how are you gone compare it to anything else? I am a consequentialist, if you can make a reasonable argument that your burocarcy can significantly improve on the current 'anarchy' approch then I'm happy to listen to your argument.

We actually do already have lots of government promoted standards, and if they are any indication then I would be running into a different direction as fast as I can.

To the extent that open standards support multimedia, you're absolutely right that Facebook could preview any video from any place on the internet. There might be some potential for minor security concerns around loading and serving big blobs of external data, but those are controllable.

What might be of larger concern is the IP licensing aspect. Users uploading video and indemnifying Facebook against their dubious claims of ownership is questionable. It's possible that what you suggest might run afoul of copyright concerns, as well as the business model reasons you so correctly point to.

> What might be of larger concern is the IP licensing aspect.

If that's the larger concern, then why isn't it a concern for text or images?

Lots of photographers would love Facebook-enforced DRM for the wedding photos they haven't licensed.

No, it makes more sense to assume the concern is pursuing consumer and creator lock-in through vertical integration.

You are, obviously and of course, correct that Facebook stands to benefit from lock-in.

Perhaps I fail to understand the IP issues correctly. Users uploading wedding photos to Facebook that they claim they have the rights to is in the same category, legally, as the videos that users claim they own the rights to. Both get the same (lack of) concern.

That's my understanding, at least. Does your differ?

On a legal level, you are correct. On a practical level, people are able to share text and image files without consequences while companies like facebook and google provide tools to detect and proactively police copyright infringement in audio and video files.

Well so, thats because the concept of a vertical "monopoly" makes no sense.

A monopoly means that you are the one major player in a certain market. It is in the word.

It is definitely possible that a company could have excess market power in a certain SEGMENT of their vertically integrated market, but that is still a horizontal monopoly.

Vertical integration isn't a threat to anybody as long as every segment of the market has competitors.

For example, maybe facebook has a monopoly on the social network part of their product. And maybe they shouldn't be allowed to use that excess market power for bad purposes.

It's even worse than a monopoly, it's the elimination of a market. When you perform a vertical merger you no longer have to negotiate with people at that level of the market. The acquired business now only has to respond to the demands of the parent company and it is only through those demands that market forces act on the child business.

Furthermore, since the parent company has removed its demand from the market, there is less money moving around. The less competitive businesses who contributed to the market forces keeping prices low end up folding or being vertically integrated into competitors. The market dies and the oligarchy strengthens immensely. Especially so because now startup competitors must have all segments of the market in order to compete.

I mean, your argument is effectively that vertically integrated companies are so efficient, and lower costs so much, that they force competitors out of business.

If I was a lawyer, fighting FOR the company, I would literally use your exact same argument as for why vertical integration is a good thing.

Reducing costs, and making the market more efficient is a good thing, not a bad thing. Reducing prices is good, not bad.

There's another explanation, that they have the capacity to drive price of entry up. That they have enough money saved that they can undercut their competitors and snuff them out before they can gain any market share. So this is true whether they are efficient or not.

However I'd argue the damning blow is that centralization makes efficient but fragile structures. Its why everyone hates a monolithic codebase.

> vertically integrated companies are so efficient, and lower costs so much, that they force competitors out of business.

I don't think you would want to argue that driving competitors out of business since antitrust legislation is partly designed to prevent that.

My understanding is that using the lowering of costs as an argument works when the government is concerned with consumers but not when it is concerned with competition. I think the US is the former while the EU is the latter?

Right. Semantic points aside, the claim is that non-trivial vertical integration is bad for market capitalism, bad for consumers, and bad for workers.

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