> Article criticizing Facebook’s dominance has a link to share on Facebook. Be the change you want to see?
I'm sure article-author Scott Galloway, NYU Professor of Marketing, has the authority to change Esquire's social media strategy, on account of writing an article for it.
I think there should be disincentives for any company to grow beyond a certain size. Huge companies provide a short-term benefit to the consumer but in the ling run they cause a lot of damage to innovation and the economy.
I think I like the spirit of your idea but I'm not so sure about the execution. What is the certain size? Who determines that? Will it be updated frequently enough to handle changing times / technology trends?
So you want to determine whether or not we break up a company based on whether or not the founder or CEO is making too much money? That seems like a great way to remove economic incentives from starting businesses.
This idea somewhat pre-empts the possibility of achieving certain economies of scale. If a large company can achieve great economies of scale and pass that on to a consumer, who benefits from the onerous regulation that costs the tax payer money to enforce as well as money to pay for the increased cost of the good?
Anti-trust in the U.S. has not been super strongly enforced in recent decades (perhaps since the Ma Bell breakup and Glass Steagall before it was repealed?). But if the consumer is not being harmed, why get in the way of a company that has truly earned market dominance?
The corrupting factor of a company being too large and effectively a vertical monopoly has to be weighed against economies of scale. At a certain point new competitors stop existing, and the company can begin milking consumers or users and spending to lock in their position. Microsoft was hit by this, though the tactics have changed (the Network Effect being a natural phenomena but still containing the same properties). I could see them for instance being forced to open their APIs to allow for interoperable products to be developed, or their data troves being broken up.
Regardless of whether or not tech companies should be regulated, I think the nature of tech might make it way, way easier said than done and far more difficult than breaking up Ma Bell or Standard Oil. You mentioned opening API's or breaking up data. I think 1) that is also easier said than done and 2) regulating bodies/congress/public not knowing what an API is speaks to a problem of tech companies potentially being a touch too far removed (in terms of understanding of how they work) for effective regulation
Microsoft had to have a panel assigned with full access to microsoft source code and systems for a few years, and also was required to share their APIs with third parties. There are elements of the justice system with the expertise to handle it. You'd think the companies would actually want people who know what an API is if they're going through litigation, because a lawyer without context can still win a lot of arguments about harm the company is doing, technical implementation details be damned.
I believe it does, but the commenter said size should be the determining factor. I disagreed with that area, but harm to consumer should absolutely be regulated by anti-trust
It's hard to determine consumer harm. For example Walmart is often considered as beneficial to the consumer because of price but you could also argue that harm is done by limiting choice and innovation.
The consumer is harmed by all the services and goods that never appear; because it's clear newcomers who looked like competition would be crushed if they tried, or were acquired instead, early. All the dogs that never barked.
The "big 4" should be disrupted by the market, not the government. Of those firms listed, only Amazon seems to be in a position of solid, lasting strength.
Don't believe it? Remember Microsoft? They used to dominate our industry and crush innovation. Their tactics made Uber's seem soft and fuzzy. Sure the government gave them a knock but that didn't slow them down. Do you know what did? Apple and iOS. They missed the boat on mobile and now they're still valuable but not an existential threat to the industry.
It's really hard for a tech company to dominate over the decades. Apple has been near death multiple times in the past and while they have a ton of money, they aren't exactly innovating anymore. It will happen again, it's in their DNA.
Facebook is just Myspace 2.0 that was smart enough to snatch up Instagram (starting to show its age), and Whatsapp. Acquisitions != innovation.
None of these companies are threats to technological progress in the long term. Something new will show up a that disrupts their entire model. It's happened with every boom cycle in tech history.
The trick is to look for the next big thing and ride the wave and not look to the single most regressive institution in existence (the government) to come help you.
And google (.... or alphabet)? Between their domination of mobile OS and search engines, I think they have equal lasting strength as Amazon. Plus their communication tools aren't exactly uncommon either, albeit replaceable.
I too have heard about Bing's growth, but how much of that is NOT because of it being default for windows 10 and Cortana searches? I think default-bing searches make up >90% of all bing searches (as opposed to going to bing.com or setting it as the default on your browser), but I'd love to see the data on that.
Google became a verb which demonstrates a solid position. I was interviewing at Yahoo and was given a project problem. The interview said "Feel free to Google stuff to build the project", I joked back "Don't you mean Yahoo it?" He laughed and said "No, you can use Google. We all use Google here, it's fine."
According to one analysis, Google has over 90% of the global search market. What's crazy is that its market share includes virtually 0 in China, where it backed out/was forced out.
Meanwhile, in the affordable consumer desktop world, Windows is still king. Wanna game on a PC? Windows. What OS dominates professional workstations in offices? Windows.
Windows proficiency is still considered the standard for computer literacy. Your toy phone can do things, but thats nothing compared to a laptop or desktop.
And theyre making a move on the cloud too, leveraging their dominance in productivity suites. It has been more effective than many here guessed, with FLOSS like LibreOffice competing in the same space.
And they still have those same business practices.
Why? There's something to be said for letting dinosaurs get fatter and lazier. Eventually an upstart will come along and be able to move up to the top. In the 1960's no one even dreamed that IBM would lose its dominant position in computers, then along came Microsoft. 20 years from now, it'll be some other company.
I think you're absolutely underestimating the consequences of the various antitrust rulings Microsoft had to submit to, especially in the European Union.
Even if Microsoft was no longer a monopoly (which, by the way, is entirely incorrect), you can't always hope for a new emerging market to break up a monopoly. The hold that Google has on digitized data is nearly unassailable at this point.
Microsoft absolutely did get slowed down by the government. Badly. It would have been illegal for them to integrate the way Apple did with MacOS, long before iOS rolled around.
The role of the government is to correct for market failure. A company that has the power to be a gatekeeper (for other companies) to the industry (and uses it) is too big.
Microsoft is still huge though. Sure they've lost server share to Linux (which they're embracing in some ways now) and desktop share to Apple, but they're still massive.
The trouble is, how do you compete with Google, now, today. We use to have Lycos, Hotbot, Yahoo, Dogpile ... Duckduckgo is far from even approaching Google's share.
I don't think the future is the free market. The future is developers making distributed platforms that everyone can support. The next YouTube won't be centralized. The next search won't have removable results, because they'll be cached among all the computers that contribute to that search.
I am not sure that’s gonna work as we all want it to.
If there is no central governing body (like FB or Google) then these decentralized networks will be pure anarchy...in which case it won’t take long for government to jump in and mess everything up with a bunch of nonsensical regulations...just look what happened with BitTorrent and now Crypto currencies.
You seriously think the government is gonna do a better job at regulating Google or Facebook then these companies themselves? The incentives are simply not aligned...it’s all gonna go to hell my friend :(
Working in tech (not companies listed), I get somewhat irked at the recent barrage of "regulate/break them up" articles I keep seeing about tech companies.
Not being a big fan of regulation in general, but if you're going to regulate, should these companies be at the top of your list? There are plenty of wrongs being committed by a variety of companies and industries right now. Not saying these companies are as holier than thou than they preach to be, but they are all innovative and good companies. While they have practices that merit examination, so do many other companies that have histories of being far less transparent and far less proactive about change.
I don't mean to say the world of tech doesn't need a fair amount of reflection and self reflection, but this recent bandwagoning of "regulate tech!" seems reactionary and hype driven as opposed to more well intentioned. This guy was even mentioning his book... The media has covered tech in the last year in a "if it bleeds it leads" capacity that I think undercuts many of the valid points being raised. Idk, I could be wrong, but that's my two cents
Exactly. Wouldn't say, Monsanto or BP be considered far more evil and manipulative? What about those opioids pharmas that have literally destroyed small-town America through outright fraud/malfeasance?
Yeah, tech companies aint goody two-shoes, but there are bigger fish that need frying.
Yeah. I used to think the same thing. Maybe I will again, but here's what changed my specific situation:
I once had Time Warner. It was OK, I didn't need to deal with Customer Service and my cable never went out. No real issues other than a bill I thought was too high at times.
Then Google Fiber came here. Literally across the street. I couldn't taste that sweet, sweet gigabit even if I wanted to. Time Warner, sitting on it's laurels didn't care. I was their only choice if I wanted something faster than 15Mb/s.
Cue the Time Warner/Spectrum/Charter (Honestly, I don't know what order that was, but the billing took care of it) buyouts. Oh no! Things are going to be terrible. Except your old login still works with Spectrum/Charter. The QoS wasn't affected at all by the switching. Oh, and since Charter came out I get a free doubling of internet speed, because Google Fiber.
Now I'm using Spectrum (I think). All of a sudden, the option for 940Mb/s is available for me. That's close enough for wireless devices to call it "gigabit" to me.
Even though companies changed hands 2 or 3 times, I still have the same options (but better!) that I had before.
It's easy for me to get behind the hatred that monopolies have for communications in theory, but when they literally make the transition seamless, still provide all the same options as before, and allow me to get a taste of that sweet sweet gigabit; I just don't care anymore. Especially when they maintain competitive pricing.
> if you're going to regulate, should these companies be at the top of your list
Yes. Two of them (Google and Facebook) basically control a huge fraction of the information people are exposed to on a daily basis, either directly on indirectly. They're so dominant and aloof, that they can make or break businesses without even realizing it or caring. Their control over information flow also has important civil society implications.
Amazon could conceivably control most American retail activity in the future, though it has a few retail titans that could conceivably stand up to it if they get their acts together [1]. At best, we seem to be headed towards a retail oligopoly.
Personally, I'm much less worried about Apple, its control is much less pervasive. Though I wish there were more alternatives to it other than Android.
If your site gets incorrectly fucked over by one of Google's ranking algorithm changes, try to find someone to talk to who cares enough to try to fix the issue.
Ditto if your Gmail account gets wrongly flagged and closed for some reason. There's no one for you to call and you're fucked, unless you happen know someone inside Google.
Neither of these have happened to me personally, but I've followed cases of each pretty closely.
For Facebook:
It's recent newsfeed changes have had a huge detrimental impact on legitimate news organizations, even more in some foreign markets than int the US. See how much Facebook cares.
> What exactly do you hope to achieve by regulating them?
The standard stuff, like elimination of unfair competition (e.g. Google using Search to push its other stuff). I'd also like to see some breakups/forced divestitures to increase overall competition.
In Facebook's case, specifically: I'd like to see Instagram and Whatsapp spun off; and the core Facebook social network decentralized into several independent instances, with mandates to conform to open interoperability standards. Those standards should include a mandatory privacy permissioning system, to control how personal data is used across instance boundaries.
Yes, they do both control a lot of information that people see, BUT Facebook already changed their news feed algorithm and many tech companies are making changes. Not saying they're doing it perfectly or even well, but still.
On the other hand
Tobacco companies for years lied about the risks and promoted false science
Energy companies regularly fund climate change denial organizations (see Heartland Institute)
While I do agree that all these areas need regulatory improvements, I feel like you're falling into the what-about-ism trap. I personally feel like increased regulatory scrutiny about tech companies (i.e. regulating information) would be a strong first step in allowing society to then regulate the other industries that you mentioned.
I think you make a good point about what-about-ism. Unfortunately, the attention of regulators, the U.S. government, and the media is a rival good and areas of focus are definitely mutually exclusive.
It's a sad fact of the national attention span, but still likely a fact.
BUT Facebook already changed their news feed algorithm and many tech companies are making changes
I can't rid myself of the impression that such changes are only applied to avoid the hammer coming down.
For example : Facebook gave exactly zero fucks about harrassing - or hate posts in specific markets despite the fact that such posts were illegal in such markets. Only when Germany started to crack down severely you saw change.
Same with other tech companies. Uber and Airbnb don't only not give a shit they actively flout the law and you only see changes in their behavior when the hammer of the law threatened to come crashing down.
While I agree with your examples that doesn't mean that we should give tech companies a pass. Rotten (and potentially illegal) behavior is hurting us all for the benefits of very, very few.
I'm glad, that Europe is at least trying to put a stop at the most egregious behavior. The US seems more inclined to give a pass even when borderline crimninal behavior is involved. (Equifax?)
It's not society can only pursue one bad actor at a time. This is a tech forum so we're going to focus on the tech side.
Also, I would say the flow if information is a more pressing priority, because its vital to solving those other problems as well. Imagine a future Facebook that takes a payoff from Monsanto to opaquely bury all criticism of it.
> BUT Facebook already changed their news feed algorithm and many tech companies are making changes. Not saying they're doing it perfectly or even well, but still.
Facebook's algorithm tweaks don't solve the problem of its market position and dominance.
There ARE real limits to regulatory capacity though.
- Major merger approvals tie up DC for months at a time.
- The SEC is perpetually unable to keep up with Wall Streets’ shenanigans
- Major procurement programs like the F35 dominate the military’s buying capacity
> Amazon could conceivably control most American retail activity in the future, though it has a few retail titans that could conceivably stand up to it if they get their acts together [1]. At best, we seem to be headed towards a retail oligopoly.
There's a problem in the UK where people get splashed with acid. A UK kid made a prank out of it (using water instead to scare them) .. and Google banned his entire YouTube channel.
Was what he did stupid? Oh absolutely. Maybe he needed to be taught a lesson .. but now his entire channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers is gone, and so is the ad revenue .. and all the videos/content.
Because of the dependence on that platform, Google can kill anything they deem unworthy. You could say, "Well so could television companies, or Netflix/Amazon Video," but you typically enter in a contract with those companies, and there's some degree of oversight on the content. Here people are giving YouTube their content, and then monetizing it only if/after they get popular.
> Was what he did stupid? Oh absolutely. Maybe he needed to be taught a lesson .. but now his entire channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers is gone, and so is the ad revenue .. and all the videos/content.
Do you believe that the government would be more or less ok with allowing controversial content like that? I suspect that government regulation would make this problem worse, not better.
Depends on which govt. I am no expert, but being a news junky the past few years I would think that Germany may side with censoring, and I would hope that the US would push for free speech above all else. The UK is looking at pushing google, visa/mc, and ISPs to choke anything sexually arousing online and then forcing blocks nationwide.
Getting rid of religious stuff has been interesting the past couple of years.
I am looking forward to more routers like the disney router to make these choices easier for households, and less about the portals relaying info posted by others.
At the same time people should have easy access to unfiltered net as well. Too many groups pushing to censor millions of minds here and there.
Govt could make it better, and of course they could make it worse.
Can tech really give those choices to the adults to make for themselves?
>> Was what he did stupid? Oh absolutely. Maybe he needed to be taught a lesson .. but now his entire channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers is gone, and so is the ad revenue .. and all the videos/content.
> Do you believe that the government would be more or less ok with allowing controversial content like that? I suspect that government regulation would make this problem worse, not better.
In the US, the government would absolutely be OK with it. Protection of speech from government interference is one of the most fundamental and sacred cornerstones of US law.
out of all of the examples I can think of for unjustly banned youtube content, that is one of the least compelling example I've ever heard of. I'm not a lawyer but that "prank" is almost certainly a crime.
Having political or cultural influence, or holding market dominance aren't crimes in a capitalist economy. Those aren't valid reasons to "regulate" the success out of those companies.
I don't know. But I feel like the assumption here is that these companies are harmful merely because of their size and influence, which I understand, but don't believe is necessarily true. Or at least not true enough to write laws about.
One of the arguments is that companies that are too large stifle innovation. The author claims that our current crop of companies came about because of Microsoft anti-trust legislation. Do you not think this is true?
>One of the arguments is that companies that are too large stifle innovation.
They might, but is "innovation" something that should be enforced by law? Do companies have a right to expect equal access to a market regardless of the successes or advantages of their competitors?
> Having political or cultural influence, or holding market dominance aren't crimes in a capitalist economy. Those aren't valid reasons to "regulate" the success out of those companies.
Capitalism isn't the only idea by which we run our society, nor is the market society's only priority.
Also, we have experience with the pernicious effects of too much market dominance, which is why we developed antitrust law.
> Two of them (Google and Facebook) basically control a huge fraction of the information people are exposed to on a daily basis, either directly on indirectly.
I think CNN, NBC ("beauty of our weapons") and Fox news control a bigger fraction, but nobody's clamoring for them to be regulated. I wonder why it's just the upstarts being targeted.
No. No. No other company on the planet knows where billions of people exactly are and what they're doing at a given point or can predict their behavior. Not Coca Cola or Monsanto or any of them. There are very, very specific reason why people on HN are complaining about big tech now. We're mainly well-educated and have read a lot of sci-fi written by well-educated people.
And yet, they benefit the most from lobying, taxes and profits, and dictate and have dictated the market for decades. They drain entire countries, they extract all their resources, most of their water, they pollute and are responsible for the extinction of entire ecosystems and quite a few human deaths. Imagine, they've done all of that without knowing exactly where you are and what you are doing right now.
What has Facebook done? Copied all of Snapchat and displayed some russian ads.
Well for one, Facebook, through crass negligence and a failure to own up to the duties that go along with their position in regulating the flow of information between people, played a key role in the election of an administration which supports the draining of countries, the extraction of resources, and the extinction of ecosystems...and if the recent stories about a lifetime cap on medicaid benefits are true, quite a few human deaths! (Obviously Facebook isn't solely or even mostly responsible, Monsanto is worse, yadda yadda yadda)
Thank you captain planet, most people are aware those corporations are scum and do not approve of their behavior.
I'm not really sure what to tell you - something closely approximating omniscience will be in the hands of a few organizations ran by a few people in 20 years. Hopefully society wisens up. This will be an interesting century. I would personally pick Monsanto if I were you.
No one cares which companies are the worst, they are all bad in their own way, but if you claim that the number one priority is to break up Facebook because they could harm people in the future with their omniscience, then don't get mad when someone calls you out and tells you it's been happening for decades, even without all of that techno-knowledge you are so afraid of.
But they know where you are and what you do! yes, so what, they can harm you without knowing, they have been. They've been telling people what to think since they invented talking.
Superintelligence is coming and guess what? Governments are gonna own it, full stop. Not a company, not two. Governments, with guns. And for the looks of it is gonna be China. The NSA has been fighting against the odds this whole time but who knows, maybe they still have a chance. Facebook is just a pawn, the tip of the wedge, and you've fallen for the distraction.
Or do you really think breaking up facebook will completely halt development of AI?
1) How vast the useful data gulf is between Google/FB and dozens of other entities.
Maybe they have more data overall and had a decade head start, but at this point there's tons of other software, hardware and data stakeholders that can construct a pretty complete map of your life. And even before Google/FB there was the whole financials infrastructure: banks, credit agencies, etc.
2) How actionable that data advantage is for Google/FB.
Let's say you're right and they know a lot more than the next most knowledgeable entities. They're still constrained in how they can actually use that to manipulate your life to whatever nefarious ends. They're already under a lot of scrutiny, which is good, and no doubt will remain so. There are many obvious and overt steps they'd have to achieve (all of which would garner huge backlash) before consolidating some kind of truly hegemonic power. The leap from "has the best information" to your sci-fi scenarios is pretty significant for non-government entities with like-sized competitors to worry about in the private sector.
Google, Facebook & Amazon are all trying to own all aspects of your wallet and life. That data is extremely actionable as you can see by their market cap. These three companies are so pervasive and agressive in their reach into your life. And no one outside of those companies truly knows the amount of data being collected and it's borderline criminal in my opinion.
I'm not for breaking them apart but I am for limiting their data collection and privacy invasion outside of their own products.
Okay, so we should regulate all those other companies and industries too? Is that your point?
Maybe that self-reflection should include why people are so eager to dump on tech companies? I've been saying this on HN and other mediums for a while, but the backlash against silicon valley has just begun and will continue to grow. People are starting to discover just how many facets of their lives are controlled by opaque black boxes owned by large tech companies and any time something goes wrong (fake news, twitter bots, crypto scams, data breaches) they will lash out at whatever is most visible precisely because they are being kept in the dark about what's going on behind the scenes. A corollary of this is if companies continue to claim that they have revolutionary AI that can rival human intuition when they're really just doing fancy linear regression behind the scenes (insert whatever outlandish tech marketing claim that usually just means simple database read/writes here) they will be targeted if that linear regression results in predictable downsides since the people have been sold a bill of goods that implies more control than what is really possible.
But even besides the public perception problem, there's the issue of the inherent winner-take-all business models rampant within tech and SV. The publishing/VC model inherently promotes monopolies and anti-competitive behavior, and the natural network effects in many technologies only exacerbate this. Ignoring this just because other companies do bad stuff and tech gets a bad rap isn't going to change the fact that many tech companies have scary control over not only entire industries but also entire segments of the world's population. Since we both work in tech we can be honest here, the end goal of almost any tech company is the collection and protection of user data. Whether the data is your product itself or if the data allows you to create a product doesn't matter, this hoarding and collection of user data will inevitably come under scrutiny. At this point you have to ask yourself if people will look favorably on this. Are we doing our best as an industry to stay above reproach? Are we doing our best as engineers to use this data without hint of ethical quandaries? I can assure you if we don't ask these questions ourselves now people with less knowledge and less context will ask them later, and eventually people who are just as clueless as the general public, but with more power will ask them. And this doesn't just apply to user data, it applies to many other facets of the industry as well. Are we really comfortable with a single entity that's legally controlled by a single person hosting so much of the "distributed" internet (Amazon, Bezos, AWS)? Are we really comfortable with a single company legally controlled by a single person controlling the communication platforms of such a large percentage of the global population (Facebook, Zuckerberg, Whatsapp/Instagram/FbMessenger)? The refusal to see any kind of downside to those questions is itself intertwined with the poor public perception, and we would do well to begin to answer those questions ourselves, even if they have hard answers, then let others answer them for us.
In the end you can complain about a bandwagon campaign all you want, and you can be right about it until the cows come home, but it won't make any difference if we can't convince the general public. And to do that I think we need to deeply re-examine some long held beliefs and givens that almost all of us hold, and we need to dramatically improve how we communicate and interact with those who rely on our work to go about their day to day lives.
I think that what’s becoming clear is that the downsides of our 21st century Information Age is similar to last century’s nuclear age. Like radioactive materials, data is extremely valuable, but prone to leaking and no one’s figured out how to store it safely long term. It can hang around for ages, and if (when) it gets out in an equifax-style meltdown the consequences can be devastating.
The only way to safely store it is to not have it.
The argument for breaking up these companies is not based on punishing them for wrongs. Instead, it’s based on the idea that they have so much manifest power that their natural order of business inherently has the effect of “abuse of monopoly (monopsony) power”, regardless of any ‘unfair intent’.
Take Google as an example: they provide a large number of incredibly valuable services to the public (in my opinion). The cost for those services is a vast centralized surveillance system that cannot be reasonably avoided by basically anyone taking part in the first world economy. If Google we’re less hegemonic, then there would be at least a chance for alternatives that don’t either knock you out of contemporary society or simply change the nameplate on the panopticon to exist.
An exception that proves the rule here is DuckDuckGo: it’s a scrappy, functional search engine that lets people opt out of part of Google’s oversight —- except that it doesn’t; the remainder of Google is still in so many aspects that it can effectively bypass the loss of personal data that goes to search. If YouTube, Gmail, and AdSense were also separate blocks, though...
Fortunately, there is one thing on the horizon that can stop all of this, which is to have AI that can recognize and remove ads: that would destroy all incentives for these companies to track us.
You seem to be talking about credit agencies though.
It's orders of magnitude easier to browse the internet in incognito mode than it is to live without a credit card or to not have a credit report. There's only two credit card networks and three credit reporting agencies.
Google and Facebook don't know exactly where you live but credit agencies do, and they also know your bank accounts, social security number, etc. Credit agencies openly sell their data, but Google and Facebook don't and never have. Google and Facebook don't actually have vast logs of everything you've ever done, they trash old logs after some period of time, and frankly most of is not useful to bother to do anything with to try to join it in the first place. But your credit card data and credit history lasts your whole life.
We could put some regulations on personally identifiable information... except actually that exists already, and the credit agencies have been the ones that have been hopelessly reckless with that and somehow always get away with it.
If you use either Google and Facebook on your phone they do know where you live. Most likely they know where you work, how you get there, your voice (Google), your income, your demographic information, what websites you visit, what you buy, who your friends and family are and what you look like.
Google and Facebook buy the data from those credit agencies and they resell that data to the highest bidder numerous times a day. Google and Facebook have far more data on anyone in the US than any credit agency ever will.
No, seriously, they don't sell personal data to the highest bidder. There is no such data sales product that they offer. It doesn't exist. They don't compile lists of web sites you visit and sell it to anyone.
They don't keep vast logs of everything you've ever done because it's expensive to store and simply isn't worth anything, especially if it isn't recent. They do want to keep your age and gender and what city you live in, that sort of thing. They don't care what you look like.
> Google and Facebook buy the data from those credit agencies
No they freaking don't. Facebook barely makes one dollar per month per user. Google makes something like $2 per month per user. Credit reports cost on the order of $20 each. Do the math.
It comes off as insincere to me. The rapid rise in anti-tech sentiments really seems like someone with an agenda is targeting tech companies, rather than a genuine response to perceived wrongs.
It seems that entrenched media companies and other businesses that are most threatened by Facebook, Google, and Amazon are the ones who are the quickest to jump on the bandwagon and publish anything they can against big tech.
I think there are valid concerns to be had about big tech companies and the data and influence they have, but a genuine response is to consider the best way to deal with those concerns. Aggressively pushing for the breakup or destruction of their business is an indicator of other motives.
Every time I see an article about this, I look for something to explain why Apple is lumped in with Facebook and Google - something beyond 'they make the piece of glass you look at facebook or google on', and I can't really find it.
This time around, the author points to an incorrect profit margin (he claims a profit margin of over 250% for an iPhone, which is nearly an order of magnitude too high), and one time that a Spotify update was rejected. Not exactly compelling...
They have 50% of the US market, and control 75% of the app store spend. (iOS users spend 4x as much in aggregate), ergo, they are the gatekeepers of 75% of the mobile software economy, take a 30% cut, are using their closed ecosystem leverage to inflate an inferior music streaming competitor (Apple Music) vs Spotify, etc. I mean, there's lots of current market power abuse or potential market power abuse, and had it not been for Android, who knows how much of a monopoly they'd have.
That said, I don't think they need to be broken up, nor do I think Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, or Google do. The problems of wage stagnation in the advanced economies have nothing to do with tech.
The "whataboutism" this time is correct, because we're quit literally talking about spending political capital to break up these companies on mostly theoretical harm, with unknown consequences, while ignoring decades of much much nastier abuses by other corporations that have actually killed lots of people.
You're not going to seriously get me triggered over Amazon blowing away Walmart, at the same time, you have chemical companies dumping toxic waste into streams. On the scale of needs, I'm worried about Amazon last.
There's a tendency of #firstworldproblems, of people in cushy white collar desk jobs, to hyperbolize relatively minor effects on their own life, while they consume products from companies that ship misery abroad, overseas.
You lose your shit when someone removes a feature from Snapchat because it affects you directly, but continue to enjoy your Sweatshop manufactured clothing, or your durable goods made with blood minerals because you don't see who it's hurting.
No good deed goes unpunished it seems. Many of the tech companies have been at the forefront of corporate responsibility compared to old industries, have reliably contributed to progressive causes, have responded to publish criticism and pressure without needs to be sued into it, and yet, all of the focus is on them.
I mean, good lord, Paul Manafort worked with defense contractors, right wing think ranks, and Congress and shipped small arms to a Angola, which was in the middle of a peace talks to end a civil war, and re-ignited a fight that got 100,000 people killed. Whataboutism in this case is justified, if you're going to spend your time lobbying for something, spend it on something that's going to help save people in actual danger.
Actually, other comments did reference "what-about-ism"
Also, if you say Google has an too large an effect on your business because of tweaks to search ranking, you can't say Apple doesn't have too large an effect due to tweaks in their T&C, app review policies, or outright bans if your app. Lots of startups have been hurt by App Store bans, removals, and delays.
This article has a lot of economical misconceptions.
To name just one of the most blatant: the author complains about wages not growing enough, but also that tech giants are "less efficient" in job creation, having more market value per employee, and requiring less employees to generate the same revenue and profit.
How the heck is a company supposed to pay more it's employees without being able to make more money per employee? And if it's making more money per employee, then obviously they will have more market value per employee. This is not a company being inefficient at "creating jobs" but actually being efficient at creating high quality jobs with wages that keep growing over time.
That's just basic math and economics, but seems to be beyond the understanding of the author.
All the part about the economic impact of the big four is quite nonsensical, and reads like the proverbial rant of light bulb makers that they can't compete with a free source of light like the sun.
As with most of the current zeitgeist the idea of the article seems to be that success is the problem. The problem with the big four is not that they exist, but why there aren't more of them? Why not the big 100 or 1000?
What's hindering other companies from being as successful in generating profits and high-paying jobs?
Maybe the big four are doing a lot of evil things to prevent others from joining the club. Maybe the government is also to blame. Maybe both big government and big companies are together in this (anyone knows the meaning of the word "lobbyist"?).
If you keep asking the wrong questions and ignoring basic economic reality you'll never get to know the answer.
Not so. The author praises economic efficiency, but understands its downsides and thinks some of the transition costs could be paid by four companies that are actually evading taxes other companies pay.
There aren't more of them for the reasons given in the article - they've been allowed to extend their monopolies so freely that now investors won't touch possible competitors 'cause they know they're already crushed. Extending a monopoly (actually, it's market power, not monopoly that matters) is illegal. But the U.S. decided these were their thugs, so they wouldn't touch them - just let them extinguish a competitive marketplace in area after area as they metastasized. That's how the U.S. has violated the principles of free trade and abused its economic partners, for decades. Now, the domestic cost to the U.S. itself is becoming clearer.
The big issue is that the companies have absolute power over facilities that should be mankind's possession and thus managed with explicit laws and a justice-like system offering due process.
Google is managing mankind's search engine with a secret algorithm and they can arbitrarily decide your site's presence or position in search queries with no recourse (granted, it's hard to define a fair way to do this, but still).
Facebook is managing mankind's person-to-person communication system and you have no recourse if you are banned, if your content is removed, or if you are trying to publicize some content and the newsfeed algorithms are unfavorable to you.
Amazon is managing mankind's delivery system and you have no recourse if they refuse to carry your products.
[Apple is less of a problem because they are merely monopolizing iOS devices, and there's an easy fix in terms of forcing them to open source iOS and license any related patents, so that iOS apps can be made to run on Android devices]
Reddit is another huge problem as they manage (and especially allow random moderators to manage) mankind's discussion forums with no regard to free speech, with arbitrary bans and no enforced transparency.
One option is to enforce competition: this could be done for Google by only allowing them to operate their search engine for up to a few consecutive hours per day, can be done for Amazon by allowing them to operate only a few days per month, for Facebook by forcing them to federate their social graph, so that people can host their accounts on any service and still have the same interaction and for Reddit to also federate their forums like Usenet is federated.
The other option is to be force them to manage all these facilities in the public interest, with explicit and published rules of operation (e.g. Google and Facebook must publish their ranking algorithms) and with all protections like free speech applying, according to well-defined rules and providing due process for any decisions that are adverse to anyone.
Obviously these should be as much as possible be general laws, like extending free speech to apply private spaces as well, forcing to put any software that can generate lock-in (e.g. because it implements a proprietary widely used API or manages a proprietary widely used file format) in the public domain and forcing to federate any service that benefits from network effects.
Google is the worst of these right now IMO, only because fbook has agreed to change some things recently.
I am looking for a group of people to start a competing search portal to take about 20% of the google search and do it better. I've been watching the big G slide into more and more censorship and it's looking like it's going the direction of "wacky safe".
If anyone can help make a more mature portal for search, please contact me. The time is right for this disruption.
The disruption of fbook is so easy that I'm not too worried about it, when it happens it will be swift.
Eventually google will just be the new yellow pages, with a bunch of unregulated tv channels (unless youtube is split off from it)
Do you think Google is willingly sliding into censorship with their core search product?
The reality is, Google is in a tough place legally with certain content. How will your proposed search disruptor handle these same legal and ethical issues differently from Google?
I think in some areas google is being pressured by various govts. However in many areas they are self censoring for different reasons by different people and groups of people within the G sphere. Both are bad and are going to far IMO.
I understand the reality you speak of, I've read a lot of news regarding this for years.
My proposed search disruptor idea is to have it vary the top results on various verticals and the results as a whole based upon region, even state by state, city by city. Some of this due the regulatory pressures that exist, some due to the community standards that exist and vary town by town, state by sate, country by country..
but also as a wise business move.. as getting the accepted content to those in city X and ads that city X is likely to enjoy is a win win, and keeps the san fran ads from freaking out the small town groups on the other side of the state will bring less pressure..
So yes it's possible to do this much better. I know big G could do it - but they are thinking on a bigger more scale-able and move on issues, so a niche nimble engine can do this better..
There also appears to be groups at G that want to censor more and more things that are not illegal, what was the term for the last ceo? Make them grow up and adult or need a babysitter or something?
Anyhow, they are censoring a LOT of results based on negative push down factors from their hatred of SEO from years back - and that is making the engine server a lot less of what people are looking for as well - no pressure from and regulatory there - just a moby dick thing where they are cutting their nose off despite their adwords..
There is money on the table, it's a problem that could use fixing, and we can do it better than they can. It will only effectively target 20% of G's searches..
and we'd probably only get about 8% of the adwords type money that G is getting.. but I think a nimble search portal could provide a decent living for a group of coders and investors on that kind of money for a while.
If you haven't already but are feeling tempted, save yourself some time and don't bother reading this article. It's pure unthinking big-company-hate without any substance.
Well, I guess the gimmick -- that each of these large tech companies corresponds to a bodily region and appeals to us for a related reason -- is nice, but even that doesn't really make much sense.
I don't want to begrudge Scott Galloway his living... If this is what it takes to get a publication like Esquire to pay then I guess this is what it takes. I just seems like the guy should be able to make a living in some non-embarrassing way.
An e-commerce site, glossy UIs, friend connector, and a searching utility...honestly our tech "giants" are just the the last guys standing from the Internet boom of the nineties
I think our "anti-trust" principles are due a major reform, booth theoretical and legal.
There is more to take into account than "trusts" or (in most cases) monopolies. We're not dealing with trains and resource transport anymore. Barriers to entry and societally harmful consequences of scale work totally differently.
Google & FB have absolute control of online advertising (in most markets), and significant control of online media. Their decisions vis-a-vis surveilance deterrmine the level of privacy most people have. If Youtube demonetizes certain content (for immodesty, politcal views, etc.), then these are the standards of the internet. If Google and FB agree that an article is important (via whatever employees, users, algorithims or combination make the "decision"), then it is. If they agree a position is propogandist or dangerous & should be silenced, then it is. Youtube's fair use implementation is what fair use is in normative practice.
That is just a lot of power. It's unchecked, and IMO scary.
This is not about good and evil. It's not a trial of Alphabet & FB. I'm not accusing them of wanting to censor media^. Not accusing them of being worse than others. Their size itself is a problem,
^Ad-surveilance though, that is probably worth $100bn pa to them, maybe more. Here their interests are pathological, imo. Completely at odds with their users' interests
Meanwhile, These companies (again particularly Google & FB) just take up a lot of "space," and are not always gret custodians of the territory they occupy.
Lets play what-if. What if Tinder dissappeared today. I see a decent chance that something will take its place by tomorrow. I wouldn't be surprised if it's something better. Tinder isn't hard to make. What's hard to do is draw the network, which is where the value of Tinder is. Full credit to Tinder for the concept and implementation but that does not guarantee that they are the best custodians of that space.
Giants have more moat than Tinder. FB have over half the population logging in daily and subscribed to IMs/notifications. .
Google controls my phone, my browser, my TV... It controls the network of advertisers, the eyeballs, the app store, the user profiling data.... Good luck competing with youtube.
Youtube is important. It is online video, which may be the most important media channel in the world.
The WWW (culturally and technically) gives users a platform to be their own media, have their own show, expand and free and democratize media. IMO, podcasting is an interesting space. It's very decentralized and free, running on bare metal protocols, more or less. They negotiate directly with advertisers and deliver directly to users. The stuff that succeeds seems to be much better quality. Spam doesn't exist. Clickbait is minimal.
Video though.. video goes through Google & FB. If FB decide that 30s videos are the s--t, that's what people see. If youtube decides that original content is less valuable than random mashups of content (bordering on spam, imo), then they are. If youtube's comment section sucks, then online discussions of videos suck. If Google decides that the platform/content revenue split is 50-50, then it is. If they think science is boring, it is.
(Personally, I think Youtube is mismanaged, and that is a big let down. You can probably tell.)
But if Youtube disappears tomorrow... We'd still have online video. New platforms would appear. Competition would (for a time) take place. The internet would be better off.
I've got no idea how these (half baked) ideas sould be implmented into regulation, to pre-empt the comment. Obviously, it's tricky.
But, I don't think this can be improved via the normal antitrust concepts. the problem isn't price fixing or "artificial" barriers to entry. The problem is a lack creative destruction and an accumulation of power.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadI'm sure article-author Scott Galloway, NYU Professor of Marketing, has the authority to change Esquire's social media strategy, on account of writing an article for it.
[1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-...
Anti-trust in the U.S. has not been super strongly enforced in recent decades (perhaps since the Ma Bell breakup and Glass Steagall before it was repealed?). But if the consumer is not being harmed, why get in the way of a company that has truly earned market dominance?
Presumably the anti-trust regulation exists to determine the consumer harm.
Don't believe it? Remember Microsoft? They used to dominate our industry and crush innovation. Their tactics made Uber's seem soft and fuzzy. Sure the government gave them a knock but that didn't slow them down. Do you know what did? Apple and iOS. They missed the boat on mobile and now they're still valuable but not an existential threat to the industry.
It's really hard for a tech company to dominate over the decades. Apple has been near death multiple times in the past and while they have a ton of money, they aren't exactly innovating anymore. It will happen again, it's in their DNA.
Facebook is just Myspace 2.0 that was smart enough to snatch up Instagram (starting to show its age), and Whatsapp. Acquisitions != innovation.
None of these companies are threats to technological progress in the long term. Something new will show up a that disrupts their entire model. It's happened with every boom cycle in tech history.
The trick is to look for the next big thing and ride the wave and not look to the single most regressive institution in existence (the government) to come help you.
Google became a verb which demonstrates a solid position. I was interviewing at Yahoo and was given a project problem. The interview said "Feel free to Google stuff to build the project", I joked back "Don't you mean Yahoo it?" He laughed and said "No, you can use Google. We all use Google here, it's fine."
I think they're pretty dominant
http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
Windows proficiency is still considered the standard for computer literacy. Your toy phone can do things, but thats nothing compared to a laptop or desktop.
And theyre making a move on the cloud too, leveraging their dominance in productivity suites. It has been more effective than many here guessed, with FLOSS like LibreOffice competing in the same space.
And they still have those same business practices.
Even if Microsoft was no longer a monopoly (which, by the way, is entirely incorrect), you can't always hope for a new emerging market to break up a monopoly. The hold that Google has on digitized data is nearly unassailable at this point.
The role of the government is to correct for market failure. A company that has the power to be a gatekeeper (for other companies) to the industry (and uses it) is too big.
The trouble is, how do you compete with Google, now, today. We use to have Lycos, Hotbot, Yahoo, Dogpile ... Duckduckgo is far from even approaching Google's share.
I don't think the future is the free market. The future is developers making distributed platforms that everyone can support. The next YouTube won't be centralized. The next search won't have removable results, because they'll be cached among all the computers that contribute to that search.
I fully agree with your prediction that the future is decentralized and probably non-commercial though.
If there is no central governing body (like FB or Google) then these decentralized networks will be pure anarchy...in which case it won’t take long for government to jump in and mess everything up with a bunch of nonsensical regulations...just look what happened with BitTorrent and now Crypto currencies.
You seriously think the government is gonna do a better job at regulating Google or Facebook then these companies themselves? The incentives are simply not aligned...it’s all gonna go to hell my friend :(
Not being a big fan of regulation in general, but if you're going to regulate, should these companies be at the top of your list? There are plenty of wrongs being committed by a variety of companies and industries right now. Not saying these companies are as holier than thou than they preach to be, but they are all innovative and good companies. While they have practices that merit examination, so do many other companies that have histories of being far less transparent and far less proactive about change.
I don't mean to say the world of tech doesn't need a fair amount of reflection and self reflection, but this recent bandwagoning of "regulate tech!" seems reactionary and hype driven as opposed to more well intentioned. This guy was even mentioning his book... The media has covered tech in the last year in a "if it bleeds it leads" capacity that I think undercuts many of the valid points being raised. Idk, I could be wrong, but that's my two cents
Yeah, tech companies aint goody two-shoes, but there are bigger fish that need frying.
I once had Time Warner. It was OK, I didn't need to deal with Customer Service and my cable never went out. No real issues other than a bill I thought was too high at times.
Then Google Fiber came here. Literally across the street. I couldn't taste that sweet, sweet gigabit even if I wanted to. Time Warner, sitting on it's laurels didn't care. I was their only choice if I wanted something faster than 15Mb/s.
Cue the Time Warner/Spectrum/Charter (Honestly, I don't know what order that was, but the billing took care of it) buyouts. Oh no! Things are going to be terrible. Except your old login still works with Spectrum/Charter. The QoS wasn't affected at all by the switching. Oh, and since Charter came out I get a free doubling of internet speed, because Google Fiber.
Now I'm using Spectrum (I think). All of a sudden, the option for 940Mb/s is available for me. That's close enough for wireless devices to call it "gigabit" to me.
Even though companies changed hands 2 or 3 times, I still have the same options (but better!) that I had before.
It's easy for me to get behind the hatred that monopolies have for communications in theory, but when they literally make the transition seamless, still provide all the same options as before, and allow me to get a taste of that sweet sweet gigabit; I just don't care anymore. Especially when they maintain competitive pricing.
Yes. Two of them (Google and Facebook) basically control a huge fraction of the information people are exposed to on a daily basis, either directly on indirectly. They're so dominant and aloof, that they can make or break businesses without even realizing it or caring. Their control over information flow also has important civil society implications.
Amazon could conceivably control most American retail activity in the future, though it has a few retail titans that could conceivably stand up to it if they get their acts together [1]. At best, we seem to be headed towards a retail oligopoly.
Personally, I'm much less worried about Apple, its control is much less pervasive. Though I wish there were more alternatives to it other than Android.
[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/01/01/amazon-is-...
They seem to take the privacy of their users far more seriously than other competitors as well as the government (US - net neutrality).
For Google:
If your site gets incorrectly fucked over by one of Google's ranking algorithm changes, try to find someone to talk to who cares enough to try to fix the issue.
Ditto if your Gmail account gets wrongly flagged and closed for some reason. There's no one for you to call and you're fucked, unless you happen know someone inside Google.
Neither of these have happened to me personally, but I've followed cases of each pretty closely.
For Facebook:
It's recent newsfeed changes have had a huge detrimental impact on legitimate news organizations, even more in some foreign markets than int the US. See how much Facebook cares.
> What exactly do you hope to achieve by regulating them?
The standard stuff, like elimination of unfair competition (e.g. Google using Search to push its other stuff). I'd also like to see some breakups/forced divestitures to increase overall competition.
In Facebook's case, specifically: I'd like to see Instagram and Whatsapp spun off; and the core Facebook social network decentralized into several independent instances, with mandates to conform to open interoperability standards. Those standards should include a mandatory privacy permissioning system, to control how personal data is used across instance boundaries.
On the other hand
Tobacco companies for years lied about the risks and promoted false science
Energy companies regularly fund climate change denial organizations (see Heartland Institute)
Monsanto sends detectives after farmers who get tangled with them (https://www.organicconsumers.org/old_articles/Monsanto/farme...)
Tyson, Purdue regularly keep chicken farmers in poverty and silenced about chicken farming conditions.
Volkswagen created emission cheating software to hide their emissions...
Again, tech companies aren't great and control a lot of information, but what about the food we eat and the air we breathe?
It's a sad fact of the national attention span, but still likely a fact.
>Tobacco companies for years lied about the risks and promoted false science
And were punished severely, rightly so. They paid out billions.
>Energy companies regularly fund climate change denial organizations (see Heartland Institute)
This is difficult to solve within the existing legal infrastructure and might require a constitutional amendment
>Monsanto sends detectives after farmers who get tangled with them (https://www.organicconsumers.org/old_articles/Monsanto/farme...)
I'm not sure that should be illegal - they sued the farmers and lawyers use investigators.
>Tyson, Purdue regularly keep chicken farmers in poverty and silenced about chicken farming conditions.
This should be more regulated and there are serious calls to do so.
>Volkswagen created emission cheating software to hide their emissions...
And are now paying billions for it.
Not to mention, it's not like the government can't do both at once. Most of those industries you mentioned have other departments that regulate them.
For example : Facebook gave exactly zero fucks about harrassing - or hate posts in specific markets despite the fact that such posts were illegal in such markets. Only when Germany started to crack down severely you saw change.
Same with other tech companies. Uber and Airbnb don't only not give a shit they actively flout the law and you only see changes in their behavior when the hammer of the law threatened to come crashing down.
While I agree with your examples that doesn't mean that we should give tech companies a pass. Rotten (and potentially illegal) behavior is hurting us all for the benefits of very, very few.
I'm glad, that Europe is at least trying to put a stop at the most egregious behavior. The US seems more inclined to give a pass even when borderline crimninal behavior is involved. (Equifax?)
Also, I would say the flow if information is a more pressing priority, because its vital to solving those other problems as well. Imagine a future Facebook that takes a payoff from Monsanto to opaquely bury all criticism of it.
> BUT Facebook already changed their news feed algorithm and many tech companies are making changes. Not saying they're doing it perfectly or even well, but still.
Facebook's algorithm tweaks don't solve the problem of its market position and dominance.
- Major merger approvals tie up DC for months at a time. - The SEC is perpetually unable to keep up with Wall Streets’ shenanigans - Major procurement programs like the F35 dominate the military’s buying capacity
Etc etc
Isn't that precrime?
Was what he did stupid? Oh absolutely. Maybe he needed to be taught a lesson .. but now his entire channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers is gone, and so is the ad revenue .. and all the videos/content.
Because of the dependence on that platform, Google can kill anything they deem unworthy. You could say, "Well so could television companies, or Netflix/Amazon Video," but you typically enter in a contract with those companies, and there's some degree of oversight on the content. Here people are giving YouTube their content, and then monetizing it only if/after they get popular.
Do you believe that the government would be more or less ok with allowing controversial content like that? I suspect that government regulation would make this problem worse, not better.
> Do you believe that the government would be more or less ok with allowing controversial content like that? I suspect that government regulation would make this problem worse, not better.
In the US, the government would absolutely be OK with it. Protection of speech from government interference is one of the most fundamental and sacred cornerstones of US law.
First he's not "a kid", looks more like 18 - 22. So old enough to know better.
Second there's something of an epidemic of acid attacks in London recently. So scare the shit out of random strangers for clicks n giggles.
He should try his "humour" in an airport or on a copper - I'm sure he'd get plenty of extra views.
Acid attacks are extremely, extremely horrible and damaging.
They might, but is "innovation" something that should be enforced by law? Do companies have a right to expect equal access to a market regardless of the successes or advantages of their competitors?
Capitalism isn't the only idea by which we run our society, nor is the market society's only priority.
Also, we have experience with the pernicious effects of too much market dominance, which is why we developed antitrust law.
I think CNN, NBC ("beauty of our weapons") and Fox news control a bigger fraction, but nobody's clamoring for them to be regulated. I wonder why it's just the upstarts being targeted.
Google and Facebook refuse to be acknowledged as such
It's not one or the other.
What has Facebook done? Copied all of Snapchat and displayed some russian ads.
I'm not really sure what to tell you - something closely approximating omniscience will be in the hands of a few organizations ran by a few people in 20 years. Hopefully society wisens up. This will be an interesting century. I would personally pick Monsanto if I were you.
Everybody has their version of the apocalypse.
No one cares which companies are the worst, they are all bad in their own way, but if you claim that the number one priority is to break up Facebook because they could harm people in the future with their omniscience, then don't get mad when someone calls you out and tells you it's been happening for decades, even without all of that techno-knowledge you are so afraid of.
But they know where you are and what you do! yes, so what, they can harm you without knowing, they have been. They've been telling people what to think since they invented talking.
Superintelligence is coming and guess what? Governments are gonna own it, full stop. Not a company, not two. Governments, with guns. And for the looks of it is gonna be China. The NSA has been fighting against the odds this whole time but who knows, maybe they still have a chance. Facebook is just a pawn, the tip of the wedge, and you've fallen for the distraction.
Or do you really think breaking up facebook will completely halt development of AI?
1) How vast the useful data gulf is between Google/FB and dozens of other entities. Maybe they have more data overall and had a decade head start, but at this point there's tons of other software, hardware and data stakeholders that can construct a pretty complete map of your life. And even before Google/FB there was the whole financials infrastructure: banks, credit agencies, etc.
2) How actionable that data advantage is for Google/FB. Let's say you're right and they know a lot more than the next most knowledgeable entities. They're still constrained in how they can actually use that to manipulate your life to whatever nefarious ends. They're already under a lot of scrutiny, which is good, and no doubt will remain so. There are many obvious and overt steps they'd have to achieve (all of which would garner huge backlash) before consolidating some kind of truly hegemonic power. The leap from "has the best information" to your sci-fi scenarios is pretty significant for non-government entities with like-sized competitors to worry about in the private sector.
I'm not for breaking them apart but I am for limiting their data collection and privacy invasion outside of their own products.
Maybe that self-reflection should include why people are so eager to dump on tech companies? I've been saying this on HN and other mediums for a while, but the backlash against silicon valley has just begun and will continue to grow. People are starting to discover just how many facets of their lives are controlled by opaque black boxes owned by large tech companies and any time something goes wrong (fake news, twitter bots, crypto scams, data breaches) they will lash out at whatever is most visible precisely because they are being kept in the dark about what's going on behind the scenes. A corollary of this is if companies continue to claim that they have revolutionary AI that can rival human intuition when they're really just doing fancy linear regression behind the scenes (insert whatever outlandish tech marketing claim that usually just means simple database read/writes here) they will be targeted if that linear regression results in predictable downsides since the people have been sold a bill of goods that implies more control than what is really possible.
But even besides the public perception problem, there's the issue of the inherent winner-take-all business models rampant within tech and SV. The publishing/VC model inherently promotes monopolies and anti-competitive behavior, and the natural network effects in many technologies only exacerbate this. Ignoring this just because other companies do bad stuff and tech gets a bad rap isn't going to change the fact that many tech companies have scary control over not only entire industries but also entire segments of the world's population. Since we both work in tech we can be honest here, the end goal of almost any tech company is the collection and protection of user data. Whether the data is your product itself or if the data allows you to create a product doesn't matter, this hoarding and collection of user data will inevitably come under scrutiny. At this point you have to ask yourself if people will look favorably on this. Are we doing our best as an industry to stay above reproach? Are we doing our best as engineers to use this data without hint of ethical quandaries? I can assure you if we don't ask these questions ourselves now people with less knowledge and less context will ask them later, and eventually people who are just as clueless as the general public, but with more power will ask them. And this doesn't just apply to user data, it applies to many other facets of the industry as well. Are we really comfortable with a single entity that's legally controlled by a single person hosting so much of the "distributed" internet (Amazon, Bezos, AWS)? Are we really comfortable with a single company legally controlled by a single person controlling the communication platforms of such a large percentage of the global population (Facebook, Zuckerberg, Whatsapp/Instagram/FbMessenger)? The refusal to see any kind of downside to those questions is itself intertwined with the poor public perception, and we would do well to begin to answer those questions ourselves, even if they have hard answers, then let others answer them for us.
In the end you can complain about a bandwagon campaign all you want, and you can be right about it until the cows come home, but it won't make any difference if we can't convince the general public. And to do that I think we need to deeply re-examine some long held beliefs and givens that almost all of us hold, and we need to dramatically improve how we communicate and interact with those who rely on our work to go about their day to day lives.
I think that what’s becoming clear is that the downsides of our 21st century Information Age is similar to last century’s nuclear age. Like radioactive materials, data is extremely valuable, but prone to leaking and no one’s figured out how to store it safely long term. It can hang around for ages, and if (when) it gets out in an equifax-style meltdown the consequences can be devastating.
The only way to safely store it is to not have it.
Take Google as an example: they provide a large number of incredibly valuable services to the public (in my opinion). The cost for those services is a vast centralized surveillance system that cannot be reasonably avoided by basically anyone taking part in the first world economy. If Google we’re less hegemonic, then there would be at least a chance for alternatives that don’t either knock you out of contemporary society or simply change the nameplate on the panopticon to exist.
An exception that proves the rule here is DuckDuckGo: it’s a scrappy, functional search engine that lets people opt out of part of Google’s oversight —- except that it doesn’t; the remainder of Google is still in so many aspects that it can effectively bypass the loss of personal data that goes to search. If YouTube, Gmail, and AdSense were also separate blocks, though...
It's orders of magnitude easier to browse the internet in incognito mode than it is to live without a credit card or to not have a credit report. There's only two credit card networks and three credit reporting agencies.
Google and Facebook don't know exactly where you live but credit agencies do, and they also know your bank accounts, social security number, etc. Credit agencies openly sell their data, but Google and Facebook don't and never have. Google and Facebook don't actually have vast logs of everything you've ever done, they trash old logs after some period of time, and frankly most of is not useful to bother to do anything with to try to join it in the first place. But your credit card data and credit history lasts your whole life.
We could put some regulations on personally identifiable information... except actually that exists already, and the credit agencies have been the ones that have been hopelessly reckless with that and somehow always get away with it.
Google and Facebook buy the data from those credit agencies and they resell that data to the highest bidder numerous times a day. Google and Facebook have far more data on anyone in the US than any credit agency ever will.
They don't keep vast logs of everything you've ever done because it's expensive to store and simply isn't worth anything, especially if it isn't recent. They do want to keep your age and gender and what city you live in, that sort of thing. They don't care what you look like.
> Google and Facebook buy the data from those credit agencies
No they freaking don't. Facebook barely makes one dollar per month per user. Google makes something like $2 per month per user. Credit reports cost on the order of $20 each. Do the math.
Yes. Ironically, these companies are doing the regulation now. And they control an increasing share of the real economy.
It seems that entrenched media companies and other businesses that are most threatened by Facebook, Google, and Amazon are the ones who are the quickest to jump on the bandwagon and publish anything they can against big tech.
I think there are valid concerns to be had about big tech companies and the data and influence they have, but a genuine response is to consider the best way to deal with those concerns. Aggressively pushing for the breakup or destruction of their business is an indicator of other motives.
This time around, the author points to an incorrect profit margin (he claims a profit margin of over 250% for an iPhone, which is nearly an order of magnitude too high), and one time that a Spotify update was rejected. Not exactly compelling...
Maybe it takes into account the revenue generated from that user over the life of the phone?
As has been pointed out previously, the only thing Apple has ever held a monopoly on is taste.
That said, I don't think they need to be broken up, nor do I think Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, or Google do. The problems of wage stagnation in the advanced economies have nothing to do with tech.
The "whataboutism" this time is correct, because we're quit literally talking about spending political capital to break up these companies on mostly theoretical harm, with unknown consequences, while ignoring decades of much much nastier abuses by other corporations that have actually killed lots of people.
You're not going to seriously get me triggered over Amazon blowing away Walmart, at the same time, you have chemical companies dumping toxic waste into streams. On the scale of needs, I'm worried about Amazon last.
There's a tendency of #firstworldproblems, of people in cushy white collar desk jobs, to hyperbolize relatively minor effects on their own life, while they consume products from companies that ship misery abroad, overseas.
You lose your shit when someone removes a feature from Snapchat because it affects you directly, but continue to enjoy your Sweatshop manufactured clothing, or your durable goods made with blood minerals because you don't see who it's hurting.
No good deed goes unpunished it seems. Many of the tech companies have been at the forefront of corporate responsibility compared to old industries, have reliably contributed to progressive causes, have responded to publish criticism and pressure without needs to be sued into it, and yet, all of the focus is on them.
I mean, good lord, Paul Manafort worked with defense contractors, right wing think ranks, and Congress and shipped small arms to a Angola, which was in the middle of a peace talks to end a civil war, and re-ignited a fight that got 100,000 people killed. Whataboutism in this case is justified, if you're going to spend your time lobbying for something, spend it on something that's going to help save people in actual danger.
Also, if you say Google has an too large an effect on your business because of tweaks to search ranking, you can't say Apple doesn't have too large an effect due to tweaks in their T&C, app review policies, or outright bans if your app. Lots of startups have been hurt by App Store bans, removals, and delays.
To name just one of the most blatant: the author complains about wages not growing enough, but also that tech giants are "less efficient" in job creation, having more market value per employee, and requiring less employees to generate the same revenue and profit.
How the heck is a company supposed to pay more it's employees without being able to make more money per employee? And if it's making more money per employee, then obviously they will have more market value per employee. This is not a company being inefficient at "creating jobs" but actually being efficient at creating high quality jobs with wages that keep growing over time.
That's just basic math and economics, but seems to be beyond the understanding of the author.
All the part about the economic impact of the big four is quite nonsensical, and reads like the proverbial rant of light bulb makers that they can't compete with a free source of light like the sun.
As with most of the current zeitgeist the idea of the article seems to be that success is the problem. The problem with the big four is not that they exist, but why there aren't more of them? Why not the big 100 or 1000? What's hindering other companies from being as successful in generating profits and high-paying jobs? Maybe the big four are doing a lot of evil things to prevent others from joining the club. Maybe the government is also to blame. Maybe both big government and big companies are together in this (anyone knows the meaning of the word "lobbyist"?).
If you keep asking the wrong questions and ignoring basic economic reality you'll never get to know the answer.
Last time I check none of these had reach $ 1T value, compared to the US government that expends $ 3T a year.
No one of those same people seem to be concerned with the harms of the a government expending so much money.
There aren't more of them for the reasons given in the article - they've been allowed to extend their monopolies so freely that now investors won't touch possible competitors 'cause they know they're already crushed. Extending a monopoly (actually, it's market power, not monopoly that matters) is illegal. But the U.S. decided these were their thugs, so they wouldn't touch them - just let them extinguish a competitive marketplace in area after area as they metastasized. That's how the U.S. has violated the principles of free trade and abused its economic partners, for decades. Now, the domestic cost to the U.S. itself is becoming clearer.
Don't regulate! Come up with something better.
Google is managing mankind's search engine with a secret algorithm and they can arbitrarily decide your site's presence or position in search queries with no recourse (granted, it's hard to define a fair way to do this, but still).
Facebook is managing mankind's person-to-person communication system and you have no recourse if you are banned, if your content is removed, or if you are trying to publicize some content and the newsfeed algorithms are unfavorable to you.
Amazon is managing mankind's delivery system and you have no recourse if they refuse to carry your products.
[Apple is less of a problem because they are merely monopolizing iOS devices, and there's an easy fix in terms of forcing them to open source iOS and license any related patents, so that iOS apps can be made to run on Android devices]
Reddit is another huge problem as they manage (and especially allow random moderators to manage) mankind's discussion forums with no regard to free speech, with arbitrary bans and no enforced transparency.
One option is to enforce competition: this could be done for Google by only allowing them to operate their search engine for up to a few consecutive hours per day, can be done for Amazon by allowing them to operate only a few days per month, for Facebook by forcing them to federate their social graph, so that people can host their accounts on any service and still have the same interaction and for Reddit to also federate their forums like Usenet is federated.
The other option is to be force them to manage all these facilities in the public interest, with explicit and published rules of operation (e.g. Google and Facebook must publish their ranking algorithms) and with all protections like free speech applying, according to well-defined rules and providing due process for any decisions that are adverse to anyone.
Obviously these should be as much as possible be general laws, like extending free speech to apply private spaces as well, forcing to put any software that can generate lock-in (e.g. because it implements a proprietary widely used API or manages a proprietary widely used file format) in the public domain and forcing to federate any service that benefits from network effects.
I am looking for a group of people to start a competing search portal to take about 20% of the google search and do it better. I've been watching the big G slide into more and more censorship and it's looking like it's going the direction of "wacky safe".
If anyone can help make a more mature portal for search, please contact me. The time is right for this disruption.
The disruption of fbook is so easy that I'm not too worried about it, when it happens it will be swift.
Eventually google will just be the new yellow pages, with a bunch of unregulated tv channels (unless youtube is split off from it)
The reality is, Google is in a tough place legally with certain content. How will your proposed search disruptor handle these same legal and ethical issues differently from Google?
I understand the reality you speak of, I've read a lot of news regarding this for years.
My proposed search disruptor idea is to have it vary the top results on various verticals and the results as a whole based upon region, even state by state, city by city. Some of this due the regulatory pressures that exist, some due to the community standards that exist and vary town by town, state by sate, country by country.. but also as a wise business move.. as getting the accepted content to those in city X and ads that city X is likely to enjoy is a win win, and keeps the san fran ads from freaking out the small town groups on the other side of the state will bring less pressure..
So yes it's possible to do this much better. I know big G could do it - but they are thinking on a bigger more scale-able and move on issues, so a niche nimble engine can do this better..
There also appears to be groups at G that want to censor more and more things that are not illegal, what was the term for the last ceo? Make them grow up and adult or need a babysitter or something?
Anyhow, they are censoring a LOT of results based on negative push down factors from their hatred of SEO from years back - and that is making the engine server a lot less of what people are looking for as well - no pressure from and regulatory there - just a moby dick thing where they are cutting their nose off despite their adwords..
There is money on the table, it's a problem that could use fixing, and we can do it better than they can. It will only effectively target 20% of G's searches..
and we'd probably only get about 8% of the adwords type money that G is getting.. but I think a nimble search portal could provide a decent living for a group of coders and investors on that kind of money for a while.
If you haven't already but are feeling tempted, save yourself some time and don't bother reading this article. It's pure unthinking big-company-hate without any substance.
Well, I guess the gimmick -- that each of these large tech companies corresponds to a bodily region and appeals to us for a related reason -- is nice, but even that doesn't really make much sense.
I don't want to begrudge Scott Galloway his living... If this is what it takes to get a publication like Esquire to pay then I guess this is what it takes. I just seems like the guy should be able to make a living in some non-embarrassing way.
There is more to take into account than "trusts" or (in most cases) monopolies. We're not dealing with trains and resource transport anymore. Barriers to entry and societally harmful consequences of scale work totally differently.
Google & FB have absolute control of online advertising (in most markets), and significant control of online media. Their decisions vis-a-vis surveilance deterrmine the level of privacy most people have. If Youtube demonetizes certain content (for immodesty, politcal views, etc.), then these are the standards of the internet. If Google and FB agree that an article is important (via whatever employees, users, algorithims or combination make the "decision"), then it is. If they agree a position is propogandist or dangerous & should be silenced, then it is. Youtube's fair use implementation is what fair use is in normative practice.
That is just a lot of power. It's unchecked, and IMO scary.
This is not about good and evil. It's not a trial of Alphabet & FB. I'm not accusing them of wanting to censor media^. Not accusing them of being worse than others. Their size itself is a problem,
^Ad-surveilance though, that is probably worth $100bn pa to them, maybe more. Here their interests are pathological, imo. Completely at odds with their users' interests
Meanwhile, These companies (again particularly Google & FB) just take up a lot of "space," and are not always gret custodians of the territory they occupy.
Lets play what-if. What if Tinder dissappeared today. I see a decent chance that something will take its place by tomorrow. I wouldn't be surprised if it's something better. Tinder isn't hard to make. What's hard to do is draw the network, which is where the value of Tinder is. Full credit to Tinder for the concept and implementation but that does not guarantee that they are the best custodians of that space.
Giants have more moat than Tinder. FB have over half the population logging in daily and subscribed to IMs/notifications. .
Google controls my phone, my browser, my TV... It controls the network of advertisers, the eyeballs, the app store, the user profiling data.... Good luck competing with youtube.
Youtube is important. It is online video, which may be the most important media channel in the world.
The WWW (culturally and technically) gives users a platform to be their own media, have their own show, expand and free and democratize media. IMO, podcasting is an interesting space. It's very decentralized and free, running on bare metal protocols, more or less. They negotiate directly with advertisers and deliver directly to users. The stuff that succeeds seems to be much better quality. Spam doesn't exist. Clickbait is minimal.
Video though.. video goes through Google & FB. If FB decide that 30s videos are the s--t, that's what people see. If youtube decides that original content is less valuable than random mashups of content (bordering on spam, imo), then they are. If youtube's comment section sucks, then online discussions of videos suck. If Google decides that the platform/content revenue split is 50-50, then it is. If they think science is boring, it is.
(Personally, I think Youtube is mismanaged, and that is a big let down. You can probably tell.)
But if Youtube disappears tomorrow... We'd still have online video. New platforms would appear. Competition would (for a time) take place. The internet would be better off.
I've got no idea how these (half baked) ideas sould be implmented into regulation, to pre-empt the comment. Obviously, it's tricky.
But, I don't think this can be improved via the normal antitrust concepts. the problem isn't price fixing or "artificial" barriers to entry. The problem is a lack creative destruction and an accumulation of power.
Global warming is threatening the entire world no articles about disrupting the energy industry.
Give me break.