It's depressing but also interesting to watch the regulatory capture vis a vis Facebook happen in real-time.
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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how can that be managed if the provider is also a media company that sells advertisements? if that's the direction it goes then the FB "users are the product, advertisers are the customers" model is being ruled illegal b/c harmful. Maybe that's correct.
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Nah, FB would still sell the data, but it'd become subject to HIPAA-like regulations guaranteeing a degree of anonymity. (What, you thought healthcare providers _weren't_ selling your data?)
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