I have never understood American politician's obsession with killing their Golden goose. They did the same with many manufacturing jobs in past and most of those jobs ended up moving to other countries over time. Hurting Google or Facebook is not going to make anything better but will lead to job less, loss of economic opportunity and competitive advantage to other nations.
You are absolutely right that ATT, Comcast etc. are the real monopolies that have been established with the help of government and they need to be broken.
I guess in 10 years they will do the same to Tesla, SpaceX.
Let's break up the big Tech giants, but leave Big Banking and Big Pharma alone (for example)? How come Comcast gets to operate as an ISP and Telecom and suppress competition, but Google, Amazon, and Facebook are illegal monopolies that need to allegedly be broken up by Government? It reeks of targeting.
They can be regulated / and forced to fund public research.
when Facebook decides who gets silenced, who's news is treated as true, etc. google shuts people's accounts down for no given reason, changes search traffic and penalizes sites. They should be held accountable for their actions, and justify them. currently there is nothing in place for that.
recognizing them as monopolies and regulating them as such could rectify that.
you are also incorrect about facebook. You can easily break them up, Facebook / WhatsApp / Instagram for example.
These large dominating companies are monopolies in every sense of the word and need to be broken up. The Bell System was broken up and didn't have a tenth of the tracking and control of people's lives that Google and Facebook do. Ma Bell didn't actively harm its users and cause depression. Ma Bell didn't collude with Russia to influence a presidential election and install a puppet president.
Monopolies are wonderful if used responsibly. Having 1 standard way to do something across the board can solve entire universes of problems. Interstate highway system, electrical grid, internet, etc. all fall very cleanly into that bucket.
Splitting up a technology company like Amazon or Google would probably just make matters worse over the long haul. Instead of 1 obvious regulatory target you would wind up with several and this creates more shadowy areas for perverse incentives to grow like mold. Just look at how splitting up ATT has played out. It ultimately re-aggregated into more-or-less the same monster but with even more power and influence than in the 80s. If ATT would have been nationalized instead of split up, I'd have a hard time believing we wouldn't have better internet access on average today.
The ISPs and mobile carriers are too powerful. At least Google/Facebook have to innovate, or buy companies like Instagram or Whatsapp that innovate. ISPs get their billions in revenue from monopoly. All they have to do is buy off politicans and put people like Ajit Pai in power. Now that they've started to acquire tech companies like Yahoo, no one can stop them from giving preferential treatment to their content and streaming services eventually threatening the ability for tech startups to compete through innovation.
I am very sympathetic to your view that these massive companies mustn't be allowed to use their absurd concentration of power to be anti-competitive. But the thing that I've noticed over time with these tech companies is that whilst they are extremely profitable and at points can be extremely powerful, their power is unstable. When you look at other markets the contrast is stark, AT&T and the break up of Bell system - they were a monopoly for decades and acted terribly and were broken up by the government and have basically slowly morphed back into their old shape. Compare that to AOL - they were powerful sure, but that exploded pretty quick. Before Facebook it was Myspace, and after Meta something else will come. These industries just don't seem to form a stable equilibrium they continue to get disrupted. And the problem you have is that if the government is going act thoughtfully, they'll act slowly, and if they act slowly they'll almost certainly be too late.
Google, Amazon, FB are not the monopolies that you should be worried about. They are fun to talk about and tech is sexy, but there are bigger problems - ISPs / telecoms, for example.
Remember the baby bells? In 1982, AT&T (ma bell) lost an anti-trust lawsuit and was broken up into 8 companies (the baby bells).
Guess what happened since? If you guessed they merged back together, you would be correct. The baby bells merged back together and became 3 companies - AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink.
For those who are customers of AT&T - how do you like your service? Is it as good as Google?
Oligopoly is the new monopoly. Financial services, airlines, oil majors, media, pharma, auto, etc. Those are the industries that need breaking up. You pay for their services / products and they price fix (airline baggage fees, overdraft fees, etc), you don't even pay for Google. You can easily use duckduckgo and delete your FB / Insta with no consequence.
Edit - to address the comments saying that the tech companies should be broken up: sure, but how exactly? Google and Facebook in particular. You don't even pay for their services, so you (the citizens) can't claim consumer protection from their business. Only the companies / individuals that pay for Google and Facebook ads can.
Again, I get the frustration of the times and misinformation sucks, but Google and Facebook are not the cause. They are the means of distributing info (including ads that are sometimes just fake new), not the root source of all evil.
The USA has such a terrible track record when it comes to breaking up companies. Not what companies but break up but how to do it. Look at AT&T. The solution for one national monopoly? Why a collection of regional monopolies of course! I mean that's what the RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies) were.
So whenever I hear about some kneejerk proposal to break up tech I expect to hear someone propose that Facebook should be broken up into two companies: one for surnames A-M and another for N-Z.
I think the only tech company where you could make any case for being anticompetitive right now is Amazon. Fedex and UPS exist largely at the whim of Amazon. Any online retailer is now at a severe disadvantage to Amazon itself as well as Amazon marketplace sellers.
Second place are the two app stores.
We're living in an era where China's tech giants are tools of statecraft and not subject to the same level of scrutiny as US companies. The Chinese market is artificially restricted from competition. By any measure of government intervention China cheats here. It doesn't really seem like the right time for the US to kill the golden geese.
It's true, they're just fulfilling their duties to shareholders. But, when corporations start using the government to stifle competition: this is a line that should not be crossed and deserves precisely the reaction that this article has mentioned. Google and Facebook have not crossed this line, at least not yet.
They're actions are rational, only if they succeed. If there's enough political reaction that results in the breaking up of these monopolies, it may not be so rational afterall.
I wonder how much annually these monopolies collectively spend on lobbying gov against the populist temptation to break them up? Huge sums i assume. Huge.
I would first favour opening them up, see how it goes, and then consider alternative approaches if the desired outcome is not seen. I think it's critical to have a very clear idea of what the desired outcome would be before taking action. That would require a 20/ 20 view of what the problems are, but the monopolies are working hard to hide the problems from view. Google tries to present itself as not being a search dominant corporation (the Alphabet deception). Facebook is now a very big book and definitely needs 'editing'.
Want R&D? Oppose monopolies. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and possibly others all need to be broken up into smithereens.
There seems to be bipartisan support for this but current leadership is once again distracted buying voters rather than solving hard problems (typical for no matter who is in power).
I agree with Comcast, they need to be broken up, and Amazon could do with some scrutiny. But Apple, Boeing and United Airlines? The aren't monopolies by any definition.
Don't nationalise them, break them up. A state monopoly is preferable to a private monopoly, but in this case there's no reason we have to have a monopoly. Facebook and Google do too many things.
I realize this is probably not a popular opinion but Amazon, Google and Facebook are natural monopolies in the businesses they operate in. That is to say the optimal market structure in almost all internet businesses is high concentration with a single organization controlling +80% of market share. So breaking up these organizations doesn’t necessarily solve the problems we are facing today. This is not an antitrust issue. Economically speaking, it will likely be impossible to prove that someone like Amazon behaved in a anti-competitive manner. Same goes for Google. Facebook is the only one I can see broken up largely due to all the negative publicity.
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple - all need to be shut down in their present form. The biggest problem is that our anti-competitive legislation is ill-equipped to handle tech monopolies.
The extremely complex nature of modern software and its ability to offer unparalled distribution advantage is nothing like the world has ever seen. The ability of Google to push something like a chrome browser comes not only from its galleons of highly paid engineers, but also its ability to advertise/support it for free for decades to come. There simply does not exist another sustainable model to finance a complex product like an internet browser and provide it for free to consumers for decades.
The bigger problem is what is the form of regulation that could be applied to such behemoths. Its extremely hard to regulate it by a case-to-case basis, similar to what happenned in telecom, simply because the business models are too complex and different products monetize differently.
I think a line of thought which might yield some regulatory possibilities is to limit these companies manpower. No single company should be allowed to employ more than X number of engineers. If they go above, they should be required to spin of into multiple entities, each of which do no more than X number of engineers. I dont know what X is - but that is open for deliberation.
The impact that something like this could have on say Google is that Google is forced to split apart its search business with the ads business. This further allows the search business to collaborate with more ad providers to find the best fit. And on the other side, it allows its ads business to experiment with more search providers and open up a market for profitable search engines.
This is not something I have completely thought through, but whatever little I have, this seems to be the cleanest approach to fix tech.
This is actually the real solution IMO. Instead of playing whack-a-mole with endless stream of various abuses across all the bad business practices they do, these giants should not be able to exist in their current size and scope.
The fact Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Disney, Verizon, and others [1], etc are even allowed to exist in their current forms is absolutely bonkers to me. The outsized roles
and influence they have on the economy and their individual markets just highlights that the government is incompetent or willfully corrupt.
[1]: Just a random selection of giants I can think of in a split second. But there are tons of other companies that dominate other less-sexy markets that should absolutely broken up.
You are absolutely right that ATT, Comcast etc. are the real monopolies that have been established with the help of government and they need to be broken.
I guess in 10 years they will do the same to Tesla, SpaceX.
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