It's depressing but also interesting to watch the regulatory capture vis a vis Facebook happen in real-time.
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this is silly and paranoid and not paranoid enough, antitrust regulation of facebook would also end up being really bad for the human race
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I'm interested in your perspective. Can you say more?
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I mean let’s suppose that we had a Bell style solution, where Facebook breaks up into several smaller companies
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Now we’ll have Instagram, Messenger, Facebook Prime, etc., each with their own lobbying departments, each fighting for higher barriers to entry for competitors
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(There are also hard corpgov questions here; does the Zuck get a special class of equity in all the successor companies that gives him essentially full control? If so, are we doing anything, really? If not, what are we doing instead?)
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suppose the breakup of FB wasn't along verticals, but along horizontals. I feel like there's a scale issue here. 1 network of 1 billion people is dangerous. 1000 networks of 1 million people is useful.
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i.e. a vertical breakup would just unbundle the 7(ish) billion person networks that FB currently controls into 7 different functions each consistenting of a billion person network. that's still in the problem/dangerous territory.
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There's a fundamental tension where tech companies basically exist to take advantage of economies of scale, so antitrust suits also destroy the value. The solution looks more like utilities regulations. Single provider allowed but a minimum service standard required.
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