Time to break up Google and Facebook, says New York attorney general candidate | Hacker News Reader

Time to break up Google and Facebook, says New York attorney general candidate

washingtonpost.com

34 pointsJerry228 comments

It's time. A solid 100% of the gains in wealth we've seen over the past decade have gone straight to this new aristocracy 10% of the population that has been fortunate enough to latch on to these gigantic companies that have concentrated wealth in a way never possible before in history.

And this will be a good thing for everyone. Look at what happened to Standard Oil. Rockefeller was forced by the DOJ to break things up at the height of our first gilded age, and the subsequent companies went on to be hundreds of times more valuable than Standard Oil alone, while creating thousands of jobs and spreading the wealth to more Americans.

To be fair, even if a solid 100% of wealth gains went to tech companies, it's doubtful that this solid 100% of wealth gains went to Google and Facebook alone.

And in any case, that's not the argument being made for breaking them up. The argument is that Google and Facebook are controlling the online ad market. That the ad market on the internet is effectively a duopoly. I would say, from a layman's perspective, that the ad market duopoly argument has some merit. But not being an expert, I don't know A - how deeply Google and Facebook concert to control the market? (if at all?) Nor do I know B - Is a duopoly as dangerous as a monopoly in the eyes of the Supreme Court? (ie - What is the magic number of majority market participants necessary for the courts to say a market is "competitive"? Is it 3? or 5? Or 2?) For instance, when this talk surfaced about Microsoft, it never went anywhere in part because 2 participants in the consumer desktop OS market were thought to be more than enough. Even though the second participant was relatively weak. (Apple).

I'm sure I read a paper recently that said you need four suppliers in a market before it becomes competitive. They were using mobile phone operators as an example and it seems three or less delivers lots of profit but a poor offering for the customer.

That's fine if that's what the experts think, but as I pointed out, that would be a departure from the stance taken in the Microsoft case. I don't think such a departure is likely to happen. But again, I'm no expert on this stuff.

I’m afraid this is being done for the wrong reasons though, more to protect the interests of newspapers:

> Teachout said tech companies are to blame for dominating the online advertising market — drawing revenue from newspapers and publishers.

If so then this is more like our new EPA favoring coal industries over solar, or hypothetically breaking Netflix up so blockbuster can still exist in 2018.

> A solid 100% of the gains in wealth we've seen over the past decade have gone straight to this new aristocracy

No, much of it went to the old financial aristocracy, the tech firms have just been a vehicle.bits not like the investors profiting from tech have all had their capital stakes come from tech.

Also, breaking up the firms that have already had their big zero-to-giant growth phase probably doesn't reduce the flow of money into he hands of the already super-rich aristocrats; those aren't the places the aristocrats are making the most new gains, and, as you point out below, breakup actually accelerates gains by the elites owning the firm (because they are also the owners of the successor firms.)

> Rockefeller was forced by the DOJ to break things up at the height of our first gilded age, and the subsequent companies went on to be hundreds of times more valuable than Standard Oil alone

So the aristocrats get far richer due to the breakup (which doesn't redistribute ownership). How does this help the problem of narrow wealth gains?

… and the subsequent companies went on to be hundreds of times more valuable than Standard Oil alone …

Freeze one company and let another group run ahead for decades, and it is not surprising at all that after that much time, the companies that benefited from compound growth for that many years will be more valuable.

An important question is whether the subsequent companies went on to be more valuable than Standard Oil would have been. An even more important question is whether consumers were more satisfied with the Baby Oils than they would have been with Ma Oil.

Amazon is a completely different breed of horizontal/vertical integration. Makes facebook and google look antiquated.

>Amazon is the titan of twenty-first century commerce. In addition to being a retailer, it is now a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space.

http://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

I actually think you could handle facebook without breaking it up (as simple on paper as it may sound to split fb/ig/wa.) Regulations requiring social graph portability and interoperability with other services would go a long way to opening up facebooks garden.

Do they want to break up Google or Alphabet?

Your diatribe is a complete distortion of economic history and facts, best crystallized by your use of "concentrated wealth" when what we have witnessed is an enormous creation of wealth.

Search engines, social networks, mobile phones, high-speed Internet, same- and next-day e-commerce, interactive maps, video streaming, 24/7 access to world-wide news and commentary, electric cars, cloud services, solar panels, wind farms, fracking, online banking, fitness monitors, 4K tvs, retina displays, tablets, e-book readers, voice-activated assistants, cleaning robots, advanced medical devices, tailored drugs, reusable rockets, etc. etc. are all created and those who create and finance the creation of these products and services deserve a) our accolades and admiration and b) reaping the rewards of their actions.

>Your diatribe is a complete distortion of economic history and facts, best crystallized by your use of "concentrated wealth" when what we have witnessed is an enormous creation of wealth

Yes, created and concentrated. It used to be that economic activity led to the improvement of everyone's lives. Think the model that worked great for us from post WWII, until the financial deregulation and tax cuts of the 70s/80s. Now it leads to record corporate profits which enrich a select class of wealthy shareholders.

The average American has been absolutely forgotten and left behind, as evidenced by our current political climate.

Please get a grip on reality. The average American has access to vastly better products, services, and health care than past kings couldn't even have dreamt of. Even the amazingly wealthy Rockefeller did not have access to the modern bounty that the average American can easily buy and use today, the bounty that is being created by entrepreneurs and people in the corporations you apparently envy so much.

Now, we just need a CA AG candidate to propose breaking up the Wall Street giants...

Not the same. There are many wall street giants so competition is there vs there are basically no competition for tech giants

If it ever did happen--not that it would--it would happen like brexit: "Bust them up! We don't need them. Wait a sec... Where'd my cat videos and fake news go?!"

you are misunderstanding, break them up meaning separate them into multiple independent entities that together still provide all the services. Here is a good summary: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/faculty-research/c...

edit: link to full article https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a15895746/bust-big-tec...

I am understanding perfectly. These things started out separate. They ended up together... for a reason.

We are spoiled western last men with broadband connections. It isn't enough that we can have all of these things without getting out of our chairs. Oh, no! It has to all be under the same login, integrated with alexa and siri, one-click checkouted with apple pay and google wallet, and cost somewhere in the ballpark of a couple dollars to free.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, conglomerate to conglomerate. Just like the AT&T (temporary) breakup.

Also, Microsoft.

As a software developer, I'm hugely in favor of this. These companies conspire to suppress wages via anti-poaching agreements and H1B lobbying. Not only that, but Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are using their size to put software developers and sysadmins out of work, McDonalds-icizing software with proprietary, walled-garden service stacks. The money those three make on their hosting services is coming out of our pockets (see: AWS cost monitoring and optimization is its own role!), but nobody seems to notice or care.

It appears to me to actually be more complicated to host things in the cloud than buying physical servers and DIY hosting. If anything I think they are deepening the knowledge needed to just operate a basic web app.

I don't follow how 'using their size to put ... out of work' follows.

Do you have specific examples?

"Putting sysadmins out of work?" Why not just make computers illegal and use pen and paper to create jobs?

You took that out of context, I said "software developers and sysadmins out of work, McDonalds-icizing software with proprietary, walled-garden service stacks." Implying that the result is lower-quality and disempowering of software businesses who aren't Amazon, Google, or Microsoft.

So, pen and paper vs. the computer is not a fitting analogy. The PC vs. the mainframe is a better one.

As a software developer I am against this

You must hate money then, because these companies have been caught conspiring to suppress software developer wages. Employee of one or not, you'd be paid more today if they did not control the earnings ceiling for the better part of the past 15 years. Such conspiracy (and anti-competitive practices in general) are enabled by their size, we've known this for at least a century now. Somebody posted an article here just the other day showing how slowly tech salaries have grown. It's not a coincidence.

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