Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

Yikes. Corruption in an organization at Amazon-scale, economically, is a totally different beast. More like corruption in a governmental organisation than a private one.

"$100 million of competitive benefits to those accounts, harm to competitors, and harm to consumers."

At this point, there are "officials," with rubber stamps that are worth millions to a large number of businesses. Google, and facebook too. The difference between doing well or poorly on the ad marketplace, adwords, feeds, results, and such can be the difference between a business worth a fortune and one worth nothing.

It's similar in scale, incentive complexes and such to whatever public body approves real estate development plans. Friendly decision makers are worth a fortune. No details on who the culprits were, but it sounds like corruption near the ground level.... $100m. Different beast.

At this point, expect less criminally blatant forms of corruption to emerge. Hiring former facebook & adwords people as "consultants with contacts" is already a meaningful sized thing. Sound familiar?

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-executives-leaving-ex...

This has been a thing for years.

>Yikes. Corruption in an organization at Amazon-scale, economically, is a totally different beast. More like corruption in a governmental organisation than a private one.

I do hate it when that happens too.

Try not to create monopoly this large and wait for market to sort this out. There should be like 7 amazons, 7 Facebook and such.

A part of the reason for the existence of these monopolies is that 1/7th of a facebook (in terms of usage) is worth much less than 1/7th of a facebook in terms of revenue and even less in terms of profit and market cap.

Breadth is very valuable to and ad business. Targeting makes it moreso.

1/7 of Facebook would cover the US or EU and would be very valuable.

That's not really 1/7 of facebook, but rather 100% of facebook in the US or Europe. 1/7 of facebook is 1/7 of facebook in the US and/or 1/7 of facebook in Europe.

If you had 100% of facebook's business in Des Moines, IA, you would be raking in the cash. Good luck getting it.

Sure, those are the most valuable pieces. But all together: 7X(1/7) < 1.

This is the split (most valuable markets kept whole) that would be least detrimental to value, but also least beneficial in monopoly busting terms.

I'd argue that 7X(1/7) > 1. Many (most?) users will be participating in more than one of these concurrently.

Nothing wrong with the dismantling the ad industry for the good of society.

How will people know what to buy?

I don't know, if I'm running a business at 1/7th the size of Facebook I will still be trying to grow it as much as possible and triumph over my competitors, even if that means I end up running a monopoly. Probably a failing of my personality there.

There are like 15 stock exchanges in the US alone. For a long time there was a single network monopoly: NYSE.

The reason there are now 15 exchanges and not 1 is because the SEC structures the market to incentivize "on the merits" competition and discourage "destroy mode" competition.

In sports we don't tolerate players intentionally injuring the other side, so I'm not sure why we tolerate it in business.

Even playing by the rules and not sabotaging/destroying the competition can be harmful to consumers.

Mergers and Acquisitions have been responsible for the loss of countless services & products. Services & Products that were even profitable, and had a loyal and growing customer base, and a long road ahead of them.

This is both the example and counterexample of regulatory trustbusting.

You decrease monopoly problems in one sense, but now the "SEC" and it's quasi-subsidiary entities (NASDAQ, NYSE) have become their own sort of trust. You can even include LSX and other major worldwide markets. International trade deals have brought regulatory regimes close to each other in order to maintain liquidity between markets.

If you did this to the car industry, it would probably make cars worse. It's not obvious what a "worse car" means in the context of a stock exchange or ad marketplace, and dubious that "worse" means worse for us, so a regulator is not out of the question.

That said, I'd rather have fewer or no multi-trillion dollar trusts than a regulated trust.

Anyway, a social media regulator is problematic for other reasons.

IMO the EU & US should just find some courage and act on the findings of their own courts. The marketplaces in particular have already been found (in court) to be operating monopolistically. Split them off. Make adwords separate from Google. Amazon marketplace is trickier, because it is a "real stuff" business... but the same logic applies.

Why is social media problematic?

Banks are networked and all speak SWIFT.

Stock exchanges are networked and all speak FIX.

Tier-1 ISPs are networked and all speak IP.

Why can't we make that happen for information infrastructure of a certain size and importance?

What's probably most problematic is that some sort of federated/interoperable/regulated set of social media sites probably means that one governmental or quasi-governmental entity still needs to make calls about the thing that's actually the real flash point on Facebook. Namely, what sort of posts should be allowed and disallowed.

Why?

The question of America's apparent desire for official censorship is orthogonal to the question of monopoly. And even if it wasn't, people would be a lot more likely to get their preferred brand of censorship from whichever 1/7th Facebook they chose to use.

I like the approach Cory Doctorow has been advocating. Make it not illegal to scrape facebook/google/etc. Facebook got its start by being interoperable with Myspace. Now they wont let anyone do the same to them.

They also had an “import all your friends from Gmail” feature since Google had data portability principles. But of course there’s no porting back out of Facebook.

Facebook does have a data export feature, although I don't remember whether it existed before GDPR.

You can experience for yourself exactly what a "worse car" is today: buy an American car from the late 70s to the mid eighties. The big 3 still hadn't accepted that foreign competitors were a serious threat, and were churning out absolute garbage. Granted, there were other structural problems, but a big factor in the poor quality was the manufacturers feeling comfortable in their position and not feeling threatened.

One aspect of the car industry that's regulated is headlights. https://www.carid.com/articles/brief-history-of-sealed-beam-... talks about the history of headlights allowed on autos in the US. There was a period when cars were required to have headlights that were interchangeable across all makes and models. You simply bought a round headlight.

Things have loosened up quite a bit but the US is behind other countries in allowing advanced lighting technology on cars: https://www.autoblog.com/2018/03/13/why-we-cant-have-better-... "This is because it doesn't adhere to the inflexible and archaic 50-year-old Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) that require all vehicles to have headlights capable of only switching from high to low beams and not blend the two together, which also rules out MB's Digital Light tech."

There's a difference between intentionally injuring opponents and running up the score. A monopoly is someone running up the score. A company hiring someone to take out a competitor's employee is intentionally injuring the opponent.

Yes, perhaps it should be a law.

The FAANG took a lesson from DOJ vs Microsoft, they no longer compete, they just bought all their competitors.

Is everyone supposed to join all seven of those Facebooks?

Network effects says no.

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