Hacker News Reader

Comment by B-Con | Hacker News Reader

> Rather than trust busting, why not start with relaxing the federal laws which forbid the development of third-party applications?

Cute phrasing, but what this really means is "why not force anyone who develops a product to allow others to capitalize on it?"

> It seems premature to pursue trust busting action while we still have federal laws that encourage and cement the dominance of a single provider.

You mean "allow a product to exist as a unified product". "Provider" is 100% misleading language.

View on HN

I think you're misunderstanding. I'm not proposing that Facebook be _forced_ to allow third-party access, which would carry the risks you've pointed out. I'm simply proposing the federal government not aid them in their market dominance.

Facebook could still prevent third-party applications from functioning, but it would have to do so by methods inside of the HTTP specification rather than legal ones. For example, it could simply ban users who authenticate via a third-party app.

It seems like the argument is for large-scale IP protection reform. What one could do there is create an actual new class of asset in "data" with different rules so that traditional asset law doesn't apply.

What's the difference? If it's desirable to reserve the right to disallow third-party frontends, why push the burden onto them (and everyone else) enforcing it through technical measures?

Because with technical measures, the cost is allocated to the party who benefits from vendor lock-in, rather than to the public.

>Cute phrasing, but what this really means is "why not force anyone who develops a product to allow others to capitalize on it?"

Or maybe that could be the form of trust-busting: by default, you don't have to give the access to the data, but if you're found to be an abusive monopolist, then you can be forced to.

>Cute phrasing, but what this really means is "why not force anyone who develops a product to allow others to capitalize on it?"

. . . why not though? I don't see how permitting monopoly rents in perpetuity is an economically or socially desirable outcome.

Facebook is a product, not a monopoly.

I said "monopoly rent." It's a term with a specific definition that you would do well to understand.

Pretty much any definition of "monopoly rent" I've found does actually require the existence of a monopoly. Also, there's no reason to talk down to people.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent#Monopoly_rent

>I've found does actually require the existence of a monopoly.

Monopoly is defined loosely and based on the idea of market power, not being a sole provider. The Wikipedia article you cite even mentions Microsoft and Intel as examples, and they had less market power over their fields than Facebook does.

Monopoly rent implies (near) monopolies, which Facebook is not.

What's more, this is a conversation around individual users. Facebook's economic rent is paid by their customers, which are advertisers and not the subject of this conversation.

>Monopoly rent implies (near) monopolies, which Facebook is not.

Except it is, because it's able to leverage its market power to dictate terms to the market. If you prefer the term "oligopoly" rent you can do that, but there isn't much point. Their network effect and capacity for lock-in allows them to collect economic rents, which is the point here.

>Facebook's economic rent is paid by their customers, which are advertisers

No. Loss of privacy, surrendering your data and information, and platform constraints are all forms of rent paid to Facebook by consumers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com