I absolutely agree, and I don't mean in a "Google is now under Alphabet and all Google companies are not "Google" anymore" way that happened recently.
How do you split a social media site up exactly? Sure you can take away their other stuff, but the site itself, where they have the most power?
Facebook has so many quietly owned subsidiaries it's unnerving.
Oculus being one of them.
He's not wrong, let's take an example that hits close to home, twitch.
Twitch can be basically a deciding factor on whether or not your game is succesful, and while they have guidelines on what kind of content it's allowed, they can arbitrarily chose to ban your game from the platform, I think this is an unjust power.
google would be hit the hardest I think as they offer such a complete integrated system. Idk how you'd break up facebook or twitter in any meaningful way but amazon has floated the idea of taking their web services and splitting them from their commerce which would actually work somewhat, though they might have to split their commerce up a bit more too with prime being gargantuin these days
What the fuck that's not Al Gore get him out of my sight
Maybe it's unjust, but what's the alternative?
To not let companies have such power.
To not allow the gross vertical integration of companies.
Although Twitch's internal ability to capriciously ban or bump games, streamers and whatever else features in it's content cannot be effectively legislated against, but the fact that Amazon, a megalithic software giant of untold power and scope, owns Twitch, can be legislated against.
Because it worked so well with breaking up AT&T. They'll just reconsolidate their power again. I don't know how to prevent that from happening again with web giants.
So, make it illegal to be successful part a point?
No, regulations should be put in place so services that are essential for certain types of games to succeed can't ban games from being shown for no reason, specially when the rules put in place by the service itself are being followed.
Why not just start a different streaming platform to compete with Twitch? If they're turning people away, these people would appreciate an opportunity to showcase their games.
Google could still offer that, I think. It'd 'just' have to open the same APIs to other products.
Overall, it's probably not as much a stretch as it seems at first. Their software/service landscape is actually quite modular, just extremely bundled.
This already exists, but it's like starting a different platform to compete with youtube, it just won't work.
The problem is that developers could be following twitch's rules and still have their games banned, I find this an unjust power to decide the success of games.
I'm not in favor of tech giants being broken up unless the ISPs are broken up and reigned in. Otherwise AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon will instantly snatch up the remains of google and facebook to make themselves even stronger and have even more control over the internet.
You have no concept of how markets work, do you?
When you have a giant monolithic entity that requires billions of dollars of capital to create and maintain, you essentially don't have competition.
See Youtube, Twitch, Amazon, etc.
Do you have any concept of how this works?
They're giant monolithic entities because they're better at what they do, which doesn't prohibit you from getting into the market as none of them started this way. This is specially true in the case of digital media. If money was the only thing keeping people from competing with Twitch, YouTube would have destroyed Twitch.
No dude...?
So, lets say you wanted to start a Youtube competitor.
How do you do that?
Well, you need billions in dollars in server farms, and you need to be prepared to never make a profit off of it. Ever.
So, how do you actually compete in that market? Do you have any idea how much video is uploaded per minute, every day? How much space that takes, and how hard it is to manage it?
This is NOT "especially true" in relation to digital media. You don't seem to have the foggiest clue of why that's not true.
Digital media requires a large amount of capital to compete in. You're solution to people being poor, and there being poor options for competitors is "Just bootstrap yourself up some capital and build a better product". That isn't possible, not even vaguely for;
Amazon
Facebook
Youtube
Twitch
and a variety of other large industries.
Lets say you wanted to create an ISP(Internet service provider). What do you need to do so? Billions of dollars in capital, and a competitive business model, as well as the ability to decline the large number of buyouts any mildly successful ISP gets from the major 3 other ISPs, who have a cartel like agreement to not compete with each other in their major markets.
It's almost like you don't even know the basics of economics, but insist on talking about it like an expert.
All the companies you mention started small in a market of giants.
No, they did not.
They started small in a market that had yet to find any sort of solid ground. They came up when the market was still solvent.
Are you saying 2005(Facebook) and 2006(Youtube) was a time of tight competition in tech? Youtube was a mile ahead of its competitors like Vimeo or some of the other forgotten video hosting sites. Then they got bought by google.
Google did not start in a crowded market of giants.
Youtube did not start in a market of giants.
Facebook, amazon, did not start in a market of giants.
Anyone who starts now, starts in a field of monolithic giants. Anyone who started then, was starting during, or just past, the .com bubble, a prime time to be investing in the market.
Most of these were just first and/or had very significantly different approaches to what existed before.
Which still does work though, to some extent. PeerTube for example uses different technology than YT so it doesn't have the same scaling problem that platform has.
Then again, it's not actually aimed at making money as a platform but as installable software product (through fundraisers for development).
Mastodon uses very different tech and a different approach to Twitter. It probably won't replace it, unless that gets legislated into interfacing, but it has a very significantly different feel anyway (because there are no features that exponentially boost posts that reach 'critical mass' in the same way as there).
I think the only one that was just better at the same thing was Amazon, though that's partially purchased via abusive work conditions increasing the margins on there. (That said, it's not necessarily less expensive anymore if you're willing to dig a bit, at least here in Germany. Their own shipping in Hamburg is also the single worst of all the different ones I had the 'pleasure' to interact with, so far. They don't drop your package off at some store if you're not home and will give it to neighbours without actually telling you who has it.)
its almost like 20 years of very lax antitrust enforcement has lead to them gobbling up so many services that they are back to being massive...
This will never happen under Trump
Even fucking Reagan split ATaT up.
It'd have to be done in a practically overhauled government to keep shit from occurring again. It'll take a lot and more to have power not be unevenly distributed into monopolies.
Fuck me were you dropped on your head at birth or something? That's the only reason I can see behind this extreme a lack of memory.
You don't just get to start a business in the same fields as Amazon, Twitch, Youtube, etc. It's virtually impossible for a nobody to do so. As HumanAbyss mentioned you need millions if not billions in capital just to get your datacentre and infrastructure costs out of the way. You need leading minds in the fields of network topology to ensure you have a consistent service across the entire planet. In the case of video and streaming services you need experts in video compression technology to ensure your storage costs and bandwidth usage stay within acceptable margins. You need experts in machine learning algortihms to try and guide people to content they may like based on their previous usage. You need to hire untold numbers of people to maintain the legal requirements of these services. This all requires insane capital and you'll never make a profit off the service.
Youtube and Amazon in particular don't run profits like you'd expect. Amazon make most of their money selling their tech stack to others because they are vastly undercutting every other retailer if they can. Youtube just doesn't make money. It can't.
All of these companies were founded shortly after the dot-com bubble burst, when tech innovation was just starting to ramp up and fancy new "web 2.0" ideals were still largely underused. The idea of sites that you could interact with in the way we do Facebook, Youtube, etc. were still pretty unheard of back then. You had super basic "social media" and video hosts. You didn't have fully integrated services like the current giants were even back then. At that time getting investors and capital was a bit easier as the costs were much lower due to the minimal user base of the early noughties.
There's a reason most of the upstart competitors to these services tend to actually just be other big conglomerates trying to hide behind a hip new socially clean mask, rather than actual startups who have a good service and the millions required to even think of competing.
Get the fuck out of here with your asinine libertarian ideals of "oh the free market will fix it!". The free market isn't fair, it doesn't cater to newcomers in this field, and it likely never will due to how services work. Go read The Foutainhead or something rather than making us suffer your shit. It's unbearably naive.
The worrying aspect of Facebook's power is not that they own Oculus and a few ad and app companies, but the amount of power the website itself holds.
Burn them to the ground
Bell System: 2.0?
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