Facebook faces most serious breakup threat yet from lawsuits | Hacker News Reader

Facebook faces most serious breakup threat yet from lawsuits

thehill.com

18 pointsevo_922 comments

It's fascinating to me that Facebook is so much more the target of these suits than entities like Google or Apple. Facebook controls a couple social media platforms and an instant messenger and a VR headset. Google controls the number 2 social network, every browser you use to access it, 71% of the mobile OS market, 92% of the search engine market.

- The lawsuits aren't about market share, they're about anti-competitive acquisitions.

- For some reason you're brushing off FBs assets with phrases like "a couple" but you dropping the big % numbers when talking about Google. You're also using the very generous interpretation that YouTube is a social network.

Facebook is openly evil and disingenuous in how it fosters addiction, circumvents ad blocking, collects personal data despite claiming otherwise, etc. Google, I feel, is a lot more cognizant of the ill effects of their practices and is generally trying to be less evil (except pop-up under your mouse ads which you are meant to accidentally click on)

Taking the other statements at face value, can you talk a little bit about how Facebook circumvents ad blocking? Also, I'm a little confused by the implication that Facebook claims they do not collect personal data.

In my experience, uBlock Origin is completely effective at blocking Facebook ads. Also in my experience, it is pretty clear that Facebook is collecting personal data.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/09/facebook-...

There is an ongoing arms race between Ad blockers and facebook engineers.

On mobile, of course, theres no way to block ads

There may have been more of a race in 2016, I don't remember. I haven't personally seen an ad on Facebook in years. On iOS I use Purify, and don't see any ads on Facebook either. YMMV I guess.

> On mobile, of course, theres no way to block ads

You can use https://m.facebook.com/ in mobile Firefox with Ublock Origin.

I don't see YouTube being primarily a social network, if that's what you mean. It is a different thing. I happen to post a lot on YouTube to share with friends and family, but I have a grand total of one friend who does the same. Aside from meeting them via YouTube (his YouTubing/skateboarding daughter commented on a video of my daughter skateboarding, back when comments were even allowed on kid-oriented channels), that's not how we communicate. If a competitor to YouTube arose, I could easily switch over and it would be no big deal. I just use YouTube because it is convenient and free.

Basically, being a "social network" isn't a binary thing. YouTube is nothing like Facebook, the latter of which is a primary way many people keep in touch with friends and family. YouTube is far more one directional, with the vast majority of users being passive consumers, and the vast majority of content they watch is posted by people they don't know in real life.

That said, I'm all for breaking up all of them, to be honest. Or at least forcing them to open their platforms in various ways. I think we'd all be better off, and even their stockholders would be better off in the long run. But Facebook, in my opinion, is the one with the strongest network monopoly in play.

Google's browser isn't controlled in the same way as Facebook controls Facebook. It is open source and Microsoft is able to make a version of it (Edge) that strips out the Google specific stuff, and there is Brave, etc. Also, if you use a completely different browser such as Firefox, you can use YouTube just fine, you can use Google search just fine, you can use it for any other purposes and you aren't "left out" as you often are if, say, you use some non-Facebook social network.

Apple really pisses me off with their walled garden BS, but still, I think Facebook's monopoly is more actively harmful to competition. Partly because the Android platform does provide competition to Apple in mobile devices and apps.

Google is currently facing an antitrust suit as well: https://www.reuters.com/article/tech-antitrust-google-idUSKB...

> or Apple.

Yeah Apple has hurt so many people, making them buy nice smartphones and personal computers. Occasionally they force people to buy earbuds or a watch. What an evil corporation, all those happy bouncy ads they run on TV, it's outrageous. Evil personified. Nuke Cupertino before they nuke us first. Who are they to tell me to think different? Who knows what they'll force us to buy next. I'm personally invoking NATO's Article 5, we've been attacked, they've weaponized an app store by setting their fees too high for developers.

All of those arguments also apply to Facebook. I'm not nor have I ever been a Facebook user. I'm not forced to engage with Facebook in any form.

Antitrust isn't necessarily about being evil. AT&T wasn't evil either, but they needed to be broken up. Apple's abusive app store policies, they are certainly worth looking at and they should probably be forced to allow for alternative app stores and maybe forced to have stronger support for Progressive Web Apps. That would be a reasonable remedy.

Did the NEED to be broken up?

Definitely, and we've benefitted tremendously from the subsequent competition and innovation in telecom after that. Don't know if you realize this, but there used to be a time when you'd spend a lot of money just to make long distance phone calls. The fees charged were of course disproportionate to the cost of carrying those calls. They were rent-seekers, and deserved to be broken up.

Which social network does Google own? I thought they shut down G+ and Shoelace. Did they buy someone I've forgotten about?

Many consider YouTube.com a social network. To be honest, I never thought of it as one, but the reality is that users post content, and other users interact with that content. So it does act like a social network in that sense.

It's probably my personal situation that blocked the idea of it being a social network from my head, but I think of it as a "public place" - no private interaction for me on there, no interactions with people I know on there. Just interactions with strangers that create/share content.

YouTube

Google's also got some huge fraction of personal email.

Are you able to email your friend that uses Gmail, even though you chose another email provider?

If you are, then it is very different from Facebook.

They're next.

Google next.

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