I know FAANG companies are easy to beat up on, but going after these is just bullying. Go after the actual evil companies.
FAANG companies mostly treat us like trash. We've just come to accept poor service, UX dark patterns, and all-pervasive tracking as the norm. I've had much, much better customer service experiences from smaller, more focused companies.
Edit: I feel like I breezed over Google. They've also killed multiple popular services (Reader), tried to force G+ on everyone (again with UX dark patterns and no consent), and degraded their main product (search) to the point that some keywords return only one or two organic results "above the fold".
However I’m skeptical whether many consumers care; Google’s favorability ratings are very high:
https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-approval-ratings-best-appl...
This is just the top result from Google, I’ve seen others similar.
I’m in favor of strengthening antitrust (and that applies to a bunch of other industries too, not just tech), but you really have to be careful not to destroy more value than you preserve with this sort of thing.
Outside the US, particularly in China, there are large video hosting services, and within the US, Twitch, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram serve as not-quite-apples-to-apples equivalents for video hosting.
What customers? They offer you a good service, sure, but what relationship do you really have with Facebook or Google?
Facebook is in the business of selling the ability to coerce people into doing things that are against their best interests. It's very dangerously good at it. Facebook has also turned a blind eye to its platform being used to organize politically-motivated violence.
It needs to be heavily regulated or shut down completely.
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That said, I don't expect Washington to break up the tech giants. Meaningful anti-trust enforcement has not happened in decades and would go against very long standing, but unspoken, precedents against Washington harming large piles of money. Any action taken by the government would likely be for show (in no small part to pander to conservative fears over platform bias, and possibly to extract superficial concessions from the tech sector on this front), and would be very unlikely to survive the post-Trump Supreme Court intact.
I mean the new york times actively advocated for the Iraq -- should they exist, maybe be shut down?
It's a matter of opinion whether Facebook is responsible in any way for that genocide, but it's a matter of record that Facebook did very little to prevent its platform from being used to organize it.
As for 'sources' for the outcome I expect from any anti-trust enforcement, it's really not appropriate to demand an a cited essay/publishable work reviewing the past fifty years of antitrust law and practice combined with a detailed analysis of the GOP platform and the established views of Trump's USSC justices. That kind of analysis takes a lot of time and isn't usually done for free.
It wanted to move fast and break things. It did. People don’t like that it did.
“Evil flourishes when good men do nothing”. They are giving every appearance of doing as little as they can get away with, while pretending to do more. Should the rest of us let them do as little as possible?
Perhaps the outward appearance is different from the internal reality, but I cannot judge except by appearance.
That's my opinion and I understand there are many folks who have similarly logical opinions countering mine. For what it's worth, I don't even use Facebook and haven't for years. I personally don't find use in it but know others who do.
I disagree on two grounds:
1. Facebook actively manages and develops an algorithm for what to show to whom
2. Joint liability, or possibly several liability
Haha nice. E.g. google treats their customers (advertisers) best while dumping tons of garbage on billions of users. And AFAIK they dont even have customer support. Way to miss the fiorest here.
> Go after the actual evil companies.
Big tech is no less evil that tobacco/big oil . The honeymoon days of the 2000s are over and done.
You 'll notice from the comments here that views on big tech have changed a lot and they are no longer placed in a pedestal as they used to be. Some commenters seem surprised by this, probably because they live in the SV bubble.
That has nothing to do with tobacco. Jobs can just as easily be provided in any other industry. What does tobacco provide to society?
As for the rest of your comment, on the contrary, I find this negative tech sentiment only present on Hacker News and similar tech-heavy forums. Regular people outside of tech hubs couldn't care less except for what the media is feeding them (no derogation, I am similarly fed by the media in industries I am not familiar with).
What do pervasive ads provide to society? What does instagram? How did the obliteration of newspapers help? Tobacco provides stimulation to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors which increase alertness, heart rate, reaction times etc. Some people highly value this, even though overall it s an unhealthy habit.
It's not black or white. You see more complaints here because there are a lot of IT professionals who have seen how these things work. Average folk dont know much beyond what with Big Tech's marketing departments spew. There's also a lot of pushback from mainstream press, which was to be expected since BigTech took all their ad incomes.
> EK: ... The core story of the book is that over the past 50 years, the country’s dominant political coalitions have sorted by ideology, race, religion, geography, psychology, consumer behavior, and cultural preferences. This has, in turn, kicked off a series of feedback loops in which political institutions ... adopt more polarized strategies to both respond and appeal to a more polarized audience, which further polarizes the audience, which further polarizes the institutions, which further polarizes the audience, and so on.
> Social media is one of those institutions, and in my view, is clearly a polarization accelerant. In the coming years it may prove a primary driver. But the bulk of the run-up in American party polarization predates social media, which means social media isn’t core to the story.