This is basically the worst possible course of action. Facebook is neither a utility nor monopoly. Facebook will be irrelevant in a generation or less. Even if Facebook manages to leverage the network effect of its alternative subsidiaries, there will always be the treadmill of evolving trends, and there’s not such thing as one true mode of electronic social interaction.
I’m being extremely generous with that approximate duration of relevance.
Look at Microsoft. Windows’ golden period lasted from 1998 until 2006 with the release of Vista. With the release of Vista, Microsoft’s strangle hold on relevance disintegrated in a summer. And now what? Microsoft technically “exists” but who cares?
We are witnessing Facebook’s Vista moment right now. Donald Trump is Facebook’s Windows Vista.
What history teaches us is that past generations have been ruined by serious things, like war, political upheaval, disease, and economic collapse, not by a frivolity in their social lives like FB.
Modern marketing has ensured that everyone in the US born after the'80s has grown up in an environment of marketing saturation, but modern marketing/propaganda was invented in the early 20th century. (Thanks, Edward Bernays) It changed our lives and the way we think, from Fascist propaganda to Coldwar rhetoric, and to the belief that orange juice is a breakfast drink and the engagement ring is a thing.
FB is one of thousands of powerful entities continuing the tradition, but of course, data mining has reached obscene levels, but FB is only one of many players.
While they're only one of many players, they are a big player, and from experience it's mostly boomers that use Facebook. They have a lot of power, but I do not think they should be broken up. Things have been allowed to be this way, and I doubt they will change for the better.
While true, I think it’s worth remembering that history is being written constantly. Facebook’s position and scale has no precedence, and we’re just now really beginning to understand what the consequences of such a position can be. Today’s event was historic in its own right (even though I think it was mostly unproductive).
We’ll emerge from this a little wiser, and maybe with some new regulations. Whether regulation is good or bad I can’t say, but this is all very much a learning process as a society and, to some potentially great extent, as an industry.
Frankly, I think crossing this line was necessary.
I agree: I don't have the same concerns with Facebook as with, say, a monopoly ISP.
That said, in both cases I think there's an opportunity to define customer data as containing a responsibility and liability, so that collecting it is a double-edged activity and there are potential repercussions causing companies to guard its dispersal with more care.
I'm trying to think of what it is, exactly, that Facebook has a monopoly on. The nearest I can come up with is: Facebook has a monopoly on Facebook users.
The followup question would be: how can that be broken up?
Seems somewhat ridiculous to allow companies to acquire other companies/services just to force them to spin them off.
I'm for regulation, if you can come up with sensible ones. But targeting a specific company to be split up doesn't seem like it actually solved the problem in the long run. I mean look what happened with AT&T -- we're almost back to complete consolidation again.
> Seems somewhat ridiculous to allow companies to acquire other companies/services just to force them to spin them off.
Not really. If Facebook can answer "we're sorry, we'll change and fix it" to every problem, why can't a regulatory regime do the same? E.g. "We're sorry we allowed this acquisition to go through, but it turned out to actually be anticompetitive and our prior mistake doesn't change that..."
> I mean look what happened with AT&T -- we're almost back to complete consolidation again.
The unfortunate thing with AT&T is the regulators, over time and political changes, weren't consistent. I don't think we really want a politically lowest-common-denominator regulatory regime, but that's what we have.
Many (most? all?) newspapers have a firewall between ad sales and news/editorial. Since news and editoral on FB is pretty much the news feed, I think duplicating the newspaper model here might be something like so:
One could split Facebook into a "connecting the whole world" company that Zuck talks about constantly and the ad company FB actually is.
The ad company would have exclusive license to fill of all the ad slots on the platform, and the social company would request ads through some kind of interface which had strict privacy controls. The ad company would take a cut and pass the rest of the cash to social network.
Just one way I think it could splitting the company could work.
> I'm trying to think of what it is, exactly, that Facebook has a monopoly on. The nearest I can come up with is: Facebook has a monopoly on Facebook users.
Perhaps Facebook could be thought of as a monopoly because 1) it has no clear, direct competitors, and 2) it's taken action to buy up anything that could become one [1]?
[1] successfully with Instagram and WhatsApp, and attempted with SnapChat
> The followup question would be: how can that be broken up?
It could be divested of Instagram and WhatsApp, for starters. I think its core facebook.com could also be split up in a way to increase competition further: randomly divide its users between multiple successor networks with a mandate to provide an open API for inter-operation.
> Facebook will be irrelevant in a generation or less. Even if Facebook manages to leverage the network effect of its alternative subsidiaries, there will always be the treadmill of evolving trends, and there’s not such thing as one true mode of electronic social interaction.
Maybe so, but Facebook has shown a willingness to spend the money to acquire control of those evolving trends to maintain its dominance (see: Instagram, Whatsapp, and the failed attempt to buy Snapchat).
At a minimum I think it should be divested of Instagram and WhatsApp.
Maybe Facebook.com fades to irrelevant, but Facebook.the.company evolves to dominate that treadmill, purchasing or replicating any threats for a long period. In this scenario Facebook is not a classical static monopoly protecting its rentier status, but instead a dynamic monopoly whose massive resources enable it to leapfrog from one trend to the next. Facebook-the-company is clearly aware of the history of its predecessors and is poised to pivot.
Um, neither WhatsApp nor Instagram were competitors to Facebook. Both of the acquired companies simply did something that Facebook tried to do, but very successfully.
The government can only prevent acquisitions and mergers, when such would greatly harm the consumer by giving a company too much control of a vital market, like health insurance or phone service. Moreover, it didn't stop banks from consolidating 30 separate entities into 5 between 1990 and 2005 or so.
How would you describe competitors if it's not someone who tries to do same thing?
On top of that, there was very move of youngsters to WhatsApp and Instagram as their social media of choice. Instead of lame old man's Facebook. That's very clear competition for new users.
Would you argue that Google should have been allowed to buy them then? How about Google buying YouTube? Where do you draw the line? Because so far it seems to largely stem on whether the people proposing this like the company or if they think (wrongly) it swayed the election outcome away from their perceived world view.
A good first step would be to force Facebook to let users easily take out their data in machine-readable form, including their social graph, posts and media.
My problem is what exactly you do with that data, beyond being able to scrape email or phone contact details - there's no competing social network that allows you to import your Facebook data export.
They have done that voluntarily for years. It's under your settings. One thing they don't currently allow is a complete and utter, real, deletion of your profile and all of its assets. You can delete your account, but it's more or less just held in a suspended state.
> A good first step would be to force Facebook to let users easily take out their data in machine-readable form, including their social graph, posts and media.
> They have done that voluntarily for years. It's under your settings.
Only kinda sorta. I exported my data and the photos were clearly lower-res versions from the ones that are currently live on my profile. Also I doubt the export contains all the data they have linked to you, as I bet they have far more from their tracking, analytics, and shadow profiles that they won't export.
Take the case of Paul-Olivier Dehaye. In December 2016 Mr Dehaye, a Belgian mathematician, e-mailed Facebook asking for a copy of the data it had gathered about him through an advertising tool called Pixel.
Organisations based in the EU or which process data of EU residents are required to answer questions like this, known as subject-access requests.
Yet it took 106 days for Facebook to do so. The firm acknowledged the existence of Mr Dehaye’s Pixel data, but declined to provide them, stating that doing so would involve “disproportionate effort”.
The data were buried too deep inside Facebook’s data-analytics warehouse, known as Hive. When Mr Dehaye appealed to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), which regulates Facebook’s data processing in Europe, he entered a similar maze of e-mails. The DPC is still assessing the case.
My only problem with Facebook is that it was allowed to purchase Whatsapp and Instagram it's future competitors. I was glad Snapchat did not sell to Facebook. Personally I only use WhatsApp of these 4 as it is something I can't do without for work.
I agree. The momentum seems to be focused on Facebook mainly because they played it too fast and loose for too long. But many of the issues that apply to Facebook apply to Google as well, but it just hasn't provided as much reason for this level of scrutiny.
Not at all, actually! Ever heard of Verizon, AT&T, and Centurylink? All of them came from the Bell breakup. Bell used to do things that were cool as fuck; post-breakup, prices rose for everyone, and innovation stopped really happening.
Monopolies aren't inherently bad - especially not ones like Bell, where they're beneficial to everyone.
Any citations for this? The rise of MCI cut my phone bills by more than half in the 80's. Bell was killing us with 3 figure/month residential phone bills. And, I pay 10x less now per month in non inflation adjusted dollars than I did in 1986.
Out of state calls back then were commonly double digit cents per minute. Now they are typically 1 cent per minute or even less.
It was actually an issue after the breakup because the successor companies started making much more money as a group than they did when they were together.
They did all sorts of creative accounting to make it look like the breakup was a big success that led to lower profits, when in reality cutting bloated bureaucracy and the R&D budget led to really bumper profits.
Hmm. Maybe more overall minutes/calls due to the lower cost? I know for sure my phone bills got cut in half when I switched to MCI. I didn't call or talk more often, just paid less.
Maybe others paid more than before, but enjoyed the additional minutes.
Although not entirely the same thing: Google has a semi-monopoly on a lot of things, and they're most certainly a rough net gain for everyone.
Standard Oil did (minus the environment); under their monopoly prices were incredibly cheap. The person who benefited most from the split was Rockefeller, who you've probably heard of.
I don't see how breaking up Facebook changes the fact that companies are financially incentivized to track and sell as much information on their customers as possible. Whether a monopoly or a collection of small companies, people follow incentives.
That and one can't help notice the irony that on all these articles they're still trying to load the Facebook trackers in addition to the others (not to beat a dead horse).
Agreed, I wish governments would ban something like diamonds in wedding rings instead. Like Facebook, we don't need diamonds to survive. Diamonds have been a the cause of much conflict in Africa.
And honestly one larger company with a set of privacy controls would be a lot easier for users to manage than dozens of smaller sites with their own settings.
There is a very simple alternative to Facebook: don’t use Facebook. That’s the competition. There is nothing quite the same but there are lots of other things to do online.
There is a strong draw for many of us. It's the only reasonable way I have to see pictures and updates from my family that's pretty far flung across the world. Convincing all my kids, grandkids, siblings, cousins, in laws, nieces, nephews, etc to move away from FB isn't really practical. I do use FB mostly read only, but there isn't really a way for me to leave.
you would live a longer, healthier life without those pictures, at least as presented in that medium. How many pictures of kids covered in chocolate cake do you need?
I'm guessing you don't have adult children, nieces, nephews or grandkids? There isn't any number of pictures, stories, etc of them I wouldn't look at and that wouldn't please me more than anything else.
To be fair, I shared your attitude in my 20's. My mother would snail mail a yearly newsletter with printed pictures and I yawned at the effort.
You speak as if you have no agency in the situation. But, you do have agency. Using, or not using, facebook is 100%, entirely your choice. There was a happy (happier?) world before 2005, where families shared photos and stayed in touch, without Mark Zuckerberg.
Yes, I have the agency to lose touch with people I care about, because it's not practical for me to convince them all to use a different medium. It is the FB moat. It's real.
I decided to do this a long time ago. I use the phone the normal way and other real social settings to keep up with my friends. I'm at my stress limit already since long so this wasn't such a hard decision. My well beeing and my familys goes before anything else. Avoid a burnout, it's very damaging to your world when it hits you.
So people who don't use facebook aren't in touch with people they care about? There is no moat, only an FB blindfold. It's just a product. If it's not serving you well, drop it. Better ones will arrive faster than we blink.
That's just so black and white. I could muster an effort and get some of what I get from FB via other angles, sure. And yes, there are some relatives that aren't on FB, but for me, that's the exception, not the rule.
But it is just so naive to assume I wouldn't miss out on notable pictures and news of people I love by opting out. Facebook does have some value. We're not just purely idiots. We get the trade-off. Hard opting out would have real downsides for me.
It hasn't been a choice for a long time. 10 years ago I started getting emails from facebook showing me others that I knew that had shared their address books with facebook, giving them my name and other contact details. Mapping all my friends together if they use facebook or not. Tagging friends on images uploaded to facebook. Visiting pages that have the facebook pixel on them.
I think why many won't is because the fear of missing out. They fear they would lose contact with many "friends" that they have. Be it distant relatives, or friends of friends. That in itself is the problem with Facebook: that's their draw. People overvalue the opportunity cost of missed opportunities if they quit Facebook.
Broken up into what exactly? If you don't like Facebook don't use it. How about the Senate and the internet outrage machine spend time on companies like Equifax instead, who (1) we literally cannot opt out of, (2) have private data that we didn't choose to share with them, and (3) have broken actual laws but haven't received as much as a slap on the wrist for it.
Fine, I won't. That won't stop society in general being surveilled though, and all the attendant ills of that that the article suggests. Further: more and more apps require me to use Facebook to sign in.
Society is being surveilled regardless of Facebook's existence. The Senators who have been grilling Zuckerberg to protect our privacy are the same ones who vote in favor of state-sponsored spying on citizens every chance they get.
Why do you suggest one can “opt out” of facebook?
They profile non-members and encourage users to disclose personal data of non-members by installing apps or helping them to “find my friends” based on sharing such data (e.g. address books). #1 and #2 apply to facebook as well. We might find out about #3.
How do they profile non-members or even people who've either deactivated their accounts or aren't using them? If I don't log in how does invites affect me? All they could possibly have is my phone number and email. Which aren't exactly private information anyway.
As I mentioned, i don't think we can consider phone number and email address as private data. Everything we use, track those. It also mentions that it was a bug and not intentional. Iphone has leaked far worse things. People seem unfazed when a newer model comes out.
If you break up the major US tech platforms, it cedes leadership of those sectors to Chinese competitors. Something to think about in discussions about breaking up Facebook, Amazon, and Google.
Using the legislative branch to break apart a competitive business into smaller disconnected pieces isn't a failure from internal crisis / overleverage.
> why would that cede leadership to Chinese companies?
It cedes leadership because the Chinese companies, modeled after the un-splintered US platforms, have more resources, capability to undertake coordinated action, and can take advantage of greater network effects.
There would be consequences, but I doubt they would be that major. Facebook hasn't really contributed anything of value, other than a platform for people to get tracked mercilessly. FB's business model is based on advertising, and advertising is poison to the mind.
But I do think the best solution is very strict privacy regulation, similar to GDPR. The so-called free market has failed to manifest a good solution to privacy issues, mostly because the harm done isn't directly visible and hard to contextualize for most people. But it is very real, and can have massive consequences.
I think the modern society has forgotten how it is to not have facebook so if that would be forcefully taken away at this point, there would be a lot of angry people not knowing what to do any more.
> I think the modern society has forgotten how it is to not have facebook so if that would be forcefully taken away at this point, there would be a lot of angry people not knowing what to do any more.
They'll adapt. Facebook isn't even the trendy social network anymore.
It's not like Facebook really does much that's innovative for users anymore. Their only real innovation was to couple a real-names policy along with social exclusivity, but the value to users of that was lost long ago during their race to 2 billion users.
> It cedes leadership because the Chinese companies, modeled after the un-splintered US platforms, have more resources, capability to undertake coordinated action, and can take advantage of greater network effects.
The Chinese platforms could be banned from the US for a whole host of reasons. China does the same to US platforms and they're unlikely to reverse course on that any time soon.
Firstly, it is not possible to opt out of facebook. [1] And they do indeed collect private data that we didn't choose to share (shadow accounts, third party website trackers, etc).
Facebook have broken "actual laws". There are so many cases were facebook have broken the law. [2] [3]
Also, please read up on Fallacy of relative privation ("not as bad as").
Regarding [1], it is possible to opt out of facebook: don't visit websites with Facebook like/share buttons. (This website, for example). When you access a website with facebook tracking installed, you are consenting to being tracked.
Yet websites try again and again to load the facebook like button.
As per GDPR, which is in effect but not enforced until May, tracking me without explicitly and clearly asking me if that is okay is not allowed and anything else, like withdrawing service until I agree to be tracked, does not construct consent.
When I visit a new website I do not know if they have facebook like buttons. I have to load the page to check that and without a script or ad blocker I will also load the like button and facebook will track that.
At which point in that process did I consent to any and all scripts on that webpage leeching of my personal data?
>don't VISIT websites with Facebook like/share buttons.
So people should know a site uses Facebook share buttons before opening it through Google search. Then, they should keep closing pages until they find the one that don't have share buttons. Then, memorize a list of "safe sites?"
The Fanboy Social list is mostly cosmetic filtering, it won't prevent connection to Facebook servers.
For this I suggest dynamic filtering[1], as this guarantees there will be no connection to sites with block rules, and block rules can be easily locally overridden in case it is needed for a specific site.
Besides, the GDPR is clearly not allowing things like that. It has to be consent given and I have to be aware that I gave consent. It is not ok to use implicit consent. Checkbox or it didn't happen.
I have read these and many more such articles, and apart from using catchy terms like "shadow profile" none of them have been able to describe how it affects me at all if I don't have a Facebook account. Facebook scanned my friend's contact book which happened to have my name and email on it -- what then?
>How about the Senate and the internet outrage machine spend time on companies like Equifax instead
You have not understood what this outrage is about. Trump's campaign didn't use data from the Equifax breach to win the election, so it doesn't matter.
No, it also doesn't matter that Obama did the same and boasted about it. He is a visionary, Trump is a baddie.
Do you get it? Trump baddie, all other politicians, unless Republicans, goodies.
If I had known that Trump winning would be enough to get some of my friends off Facebook, I would have urged all my American friends to vote for him!
How about you go back and look at the Equifax breach threads on HN. There was just as much (and ultimately, just as impotent) outrage there. How about you realize that people can be intelligent enough to get worked up about both incidents?
Also, your second to last sentence is the type of glib, dimwitted and edgelord-y kind of nonchalance that reduces all internet conversation threads to "snarkiest cynic wins". Try harder.
I don't really think I have to. You are already trying hard enough to elicit an emotional reaction on my part.
FYI: mine wasn't an argument, it is a sarcastic statement meant to explain why, to some extent, very few people seemed to care about the Equifax debacle and we didn't see this level of outrage. My point still stands.
Yes, it's because newspapers are telling me it's dying. Right. Newspapers. I don't know if you mean newspapers in a literal sense, but if you do, well, nobody except my parents reads those anymore. ;)
Profit and number of users are not good metrics for the future of a platform. Facebook the company probably isn't going to die, but Facebook the platform can and will inevitably become a ghost town in short order, just as all its predecessors.
Remember, Facebook is a parent company to other revenue sources. The company will continue to survive. Then again, the same can technically be said of Myspace.
Facebook's user growth in North America is in decline.
Being someone who works for a media company, we've already seen a significant drop in Facebook followers since the Cambridge Analytica fiasco.
No, I don't think Facebook the social media platform has a bright future. The fact that Gen Z isn't using Facebook is a sign that Facebook has entered the initial stages of apoptosis.
I can't say I blame Gen Z. Why would any young person want to use Facebook at this point when it's highly censored and your mom and grandma are peering at every post you make or like?
Back in the 90s people thought Microsoft was too dominant, could not be fixed, and needed to be broken up. It turns out they were wrong, because competition from companies and technologies nobody saw coming knocked Microsoft off its pedestal.
Few would have predicted the dominance of Facebook back in 2004. And few will predict the next big thing that will break Facebook's dominance.
All this talk about the government breaking up Facebook is likely just as short-sighted as the talk about the government breaking up Microsoft in the 90s.
Nobody mentioned the FTC yet, but haven't they failed in a big way regarding Facebook? They allowed them to buy Whatsapp, Instagram, tbh. There is no competition because Facebook buys them before they get dangerous.
My husband left me for another girl. I felt really bad but was hoping he would come back to me. one day, I saw a post about how a lady met her husband and I decided to try this prophet who helped her because my relationship was failing. Although I never believed in spiritual work. I tried reluctantly because I was desperate, but to my greatest surprise, this prophet helped me and my relationship is perfect now as he told me that my husband now treats me like a queen, even when he had said before that he never loves me anymore. Well, if you are going through difficulties in your relationship here is the email______ dr_mack @yahoo. com,
113 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadA lot of harm can be done in one generation. Don't you think the history shows us that?
Look at Microsoft. Windows’ golden period lasted from 1998 until 2006 with the release of Vista. With the release of Vista, Microsoft’s strangle hold on relevance disintegrated in a summer. And now what? Microsoft technically “exists” but who cares?
We are witnessing Facebook’s Vista moment right now. Donald Trump is Facebook’s Windows Vista.
Think about that for a second.
Modern marketing has ensured that everyone in the US born after the'80s has grown up in an environment of marketing saturation, but modern marketing/propaganda was invented in the early 20th century. (Thanks, Edward Bernays) It changed our lives and the way we think, from Fascist propaganda to Coldwar rhetoric, and to the belief that orange juice is a breakfast drink and the engagement ring is a thing.
FB is one of thousands of powerful entities continuing the tradition, but of course, data mining has reached obscene levels, but FB is only one of many players.
We’ll emerge from this a little wiser, and maybe with some new regulations. Whether regulation is good or bad I can’t say, but this is all very much a learning process as a society and, to some potentially great extent, as an industry.
Frankly, I think crossing this line was necessary.
assuming what you said is true, should we allow the next FB a generation of leeway too? A generation here and a generation there...
I agree: I don't have the same concerns with Facebook as with, say, a monopoly ISP.
That said, in both cases I think there's an opportunity to define customer data as containing a responsibility and liability, so that collecting it is a double-edged activity and there are potential repercussions causing companies to guard its dispersal with more care.
The followup question would be: how can that be broken up?
I'm for regulation, if you can come up with sensible ones. But targeting a specific company to be split up doesn't seem like it actually solved the problem in the long run. I mean look what happened with AT&T -- we're almost back to complete consolidation again.
Not really. If Facebook can answer "we're sorry, we'll change and fix it" to every problem, why can't a regulatory regime do the same? E.g. "We're sorry we allowed this acquisition to go through, but it turned out to actually be anticompetitive and our prior mistake doesn't change that..."
> I mean look what happened with AT&T -- we're almost back to complete consolidation again.
The unfortunate thing with AT&T is the regulators, over time and political changes, weren't consistent. I don't think we really want a politically lowest-common-denominator regulatory regime, but that's what we have.
One could split Facebook into a "connecting the whole world" company that Zuck talks about constantly and the ad company FB actually is.
The ad company would have exclusive license to fill of all the ad slots on the platform, and the social company would request ads through some kind of interface which had strict privacy controls. The ad company would take a cut and pass the rest of the cash to social network.
Just one way I think it could splitting the company could work.
Perhaps Facebook could be thought of as a monopoly because 1) it has no clear, direct competitors, and 2) it's taken action to buy up anything that could become one [1]?
[1] successfully with Instagram and WhatsApp, and attempted with SnapChat
> The followup question would be: how can that be broken up?
It could be divested of Instagram and WhatsApp, for starters. I think its core facebook.com could also be split up in a way to increase competition further: randomly divide its users between multiple successor networks with a mandate to provide an open API for inter-operation.
Maybe so, but Facebook has shown a willingness to spend the money to acquire control of those evolving trends to maintain its dominance (see: Instagram, Whatsapp, and the failed attempt to buy Snapchat).
At a minimum I think it should be divested of Instagram and WhatsApp.
The government can only prevent acquisitions and mergers, when such would greatly harm the consumer by giving a company too much control of a vital market, like health insurance or phone service. Moreover, it didn't stop banks from consolidating 30 separate entities into 5 between 1990 and 2005 or so.
On top of that, there was very move of youngsters to WhatsApp and Instagram as their social media of choice. Instead of lame old man's Facebook. That's very clear competition for new users.
YT with today's reach: no buyout from Google. Simple as that
> They have done that voluntarily for years. It's under your settings.
Only kinda sorta. I exported my data and the photos were clearly lower-res versions from the ones that are currently live on my profile. Also I doubt the export contains all the data they have linked to you, as I bet they have far more from their tracking, analytics, and shadow profiles that they won't export.
No they haven't.
Take the case of Paul-Olivier Dehaye. In December 2016 Mr Dehaye, a Belgian mathematician, e-mailed Facebook asking for a copy of the data it had gathered about him through an advertising tool called Pixel.
Organisations based in the EU or which process data of EU residents are required to answer questions like this, known as subject-access requests.
Yet it took 106 days for Facebook to do so. The firm acknowledged the existence of Mr Dehaye’s Pixel data, but declined to provide them, stating that doing so would involve “disproportionate effort”.
The data were buried too deep inside Facebook’s data-analytics warehouse, known as Hive. When Mr Dehaye appealed to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), which regulates Facebook’s data processing in Europe, he entered a similar maze of e-mails. The DPC is still assessing the case.
https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21739997-europeans-ask...
Surely the breakup of Bell is better than if they were allowed to continue as a monopoly right?
Monopolies aren't inherently bad - especially not ones like Bell, where they're beneficial to everyone.
Any citations for this? The rise of MCI cut my phone bills by more than half in the 80's. Bell was killing us with 3 figure/month residential phone bills. And, I pay 10x less now per month in non inflation adjusted dollars than I did in 1986.
Out of state calls back then were commonly double digit cents per minute. Now they are typically 1 cent per minute or even less.
They did all sorts of creative accounting to make it look like the breakup was a big success that led to lower profits, when in reality cutting bloated bureaucracy and the R&D budget led to really bumper profits.
Maybe others paid more than before, but enjoyed the additional minutes.
Prices for long-distance calls fell.
That is an interesting thought. What other examples are there for monopolies being inherently good for everyone?
Standard Oil did (minus the environment); under their monopoly prices were incredibly cheap. The person who benefited most from the split was Rockefeller, who you've probably heard of.
There's no irony here, just the fact that the author doesn't manage or control the website team that put the trackers there.
To be fair, I shared your attitude in my 20's. My mother would snail mail a yearly newsletter with printed pictures and I yawned at the effort.
You speak as if you have no agency in the situation. But, you do have agency. Using, or not using, facebook is 100%, entirely your choice. There was a happy (happier?) world before 2005, where families shared photos and stayed in touch, without Mark Zuckerberg.
But it is just so naive to assume I wouldn't miss out on notable pictures and news of people I love by opting out. Facebook does have some value. We're not just purely idiots. We get the trade-off. Hard opting out would have real downsides for me.
It took time but everybody is happy now : )
I still sometimes miss the family blig we used to have but updates are more frequent and the threshold for contributing is lower than it used to be.
Fine, I won't. That won't stop society in general being surveilled though, and all the attendant ills of that that the article suggests. Further: more and more apps require me to use Facebook to sign in.
Note they‘ve been doing this for a long time (the article is from 2013).
If you break up the major US tech platforms, it cedes leadership of those sectors to Chinese competitors. Something to think about in discussions about breaking up Facebook, Amazon, and Google.
If you break of the platforms into smaller separate companies, why would that cede leadership to Chinese companies?
> why would that cede leadership to Chinese companies?
It cedes leadership because the Chinese companies, modeled after the un-splintered US platforms, have more resources, capability to undertake coordinated action, and can take advantage of greater network effects.
But I do think the best solution is very strict privacy regulation, similar to GDPR. The so-called free market has failed to manifest a good solution to privacy issues, mostly because the harm done isn't directly visible and hard to contextualize for most people. But it is very real, and can have massive consequences.
They would get over it pretty fast and adapt.
They'll adapt. Facebook isn't even the trendy social network anymore.
It's not like Facebook really does much that's innovative for users anymore. Their only real innovation was to couple a real-names policy along with social exclusivity, but the value to users of that was lost long ago during their race to 2 billion users.
The Chinese platforms could be banned from the US for a whole host of reasons. China does the same to US platforms and they're unlikely to reverse course on that any time soon.
Facebook have broken "actual laws". There are so many cases were facebook have broken the law. [2] [3]
Also, please read up on Fallacy of relative privation ("not as bad as").
[1] https://boingboing.net/2017/11/08/involuntary-profiling.html
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/12/facebook-...
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/19/facebooks-tracking-of-non-...
Yet websites try again and again to load the facebook like button.
As per GDPR, which is in effect but not enforced until May, tracking me without explicitly and clearly asking me if that is okay is not allowed and anything else, like withdrawing service until I agree to be tracked, does not construct consent.
When I visit a new website I do not know if they have facebook like buttons. I have to load the page to check that and without a script or ad blocker I will also load the like button and facebook will track that.
At which point in that process did I consent to any and all scripts on that webpage leeching of my personal data?
Take that up with the websites, not Facebook.
Vast numbers of websites use Google Web Fonts which enables Google to track users. I didn't opt in to that so I just block it.
Visiting a website is not consent for tracking.
So people should know a site uses Facebook share buttons before opening it through Google search. Then, they should keep closing pages until they find the one that don't have share buttons. Then, memorize a list of "safe sites?"
For this I suggest dynamic filtering[1], as this guarantees there will be no connection to sites with block rules, and block rules can be easily locally overridden in case it is needed for a specific site.
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-to...
Bury it in long legalese isn't accepted either.
You have not understood what this outrage is about. Trump's campaign didn't use data from the Equifax breach to win the election, so it doesn't matter.
No, it also doesn't matter that Obama did the same and boasted about it. He is a visionary, Trump is a baddie.
Do you get it? Trump baddie, all other politicians, unless Republicans, goodies.
If I had known that Trump winning would be enough to get some of my friends off Facebook, I would have urged all my American friends to vote for him!
Oh, well.
How about you go back and look at the Equifax breach threads on HN. There was just as much (and ultimately, just as impotent) outrage there. How about you realize that people can be intelligent enough to get worked up about both incidents?
Also, your second to last sentence is the type of glib, dimwitted and edgelord-y kind of nonchalance that reduces all internet conversation threads to "snarkiest cynic wins". Try harder.
I don't really think I have to. You are already trying hard enough to elicit an emotional reaction on my part.
FYI: mine wasn't an argument, it is a sarcastic statement meant to explain why, to some extent, very few people seemed to care about the Equifax debacle and we didn't see this level of outrage. My point still stands.
Profit and number of users are not good metrics for the future of a platform. Facebook the company probably isn't going to die, but Facebook the platform can and will inevitably become a ghost town in short order, just as all its predecessors.
Remember, Facebook is a parent company to other revenue sources. The company will continue to survive. Then again, the same can technically be said of Myspace.
Facebook's user growth in North America is in decline.
https://techcrunch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/techcrunch.com...
Being someone who works for a media company, we've already seen a significant drop in Facebook followers since the Cambridge Analytica fiasco.
No, I don't think Facebook the social media platform has a bright future. The fact that Gen Z isn't using Facebook is a sign that Facebook has entered the initial stages of apoptosis.
https://amp-businessinsider-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.b...
I can't say I blame Gen Z. Why would any young person want to use Facebook at this point when it's highly censored and your mom and grandma are peering at every post you make or like?
Few would have predicted the dominance of Facebook back in 2004. And few will predict the next big thing that will break Facebook's dominance.
All this talk about the government breaking up Facebook is likely just as short-sighted as the talk about the government breaking up Microsoft in the 90s.