It’s amazing how well connected industries like big oil and big Ag seem to operate with impunity while the nascent bad boys are put under the investigation spotlight.
Big tech companies haven’t been “the nascent bad boys” for a while now, at one point there were 4 such tech companies being worth between 800 billion and 1 trillion dollars, the last time when that was the case for oil companies Rockefeller was still the wealthiest man on this planet (and banking groups never got that much of a valuation). That is to say that those tech groups are well established behemoths, when you’re actively influencing elections (to say nothing of regular people’s day-to-day life) you may as well be.
Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook are regularly in the top 10 in annual corporate lobbying spend. They disclosed more than $45 million in lobbying spending last year alone. DC is crawling with tech lobbyists. Ag’s spending is peanuts in comparison.
I strongly encourage anyone who has an interest or opinion about this topic (Big Tech monopolies and antitrust action) to subscribe to Matt Stoller's newsletter, Big: The History and Politics of Monopoly Power.
It's the most informative resource I've come across on the topic.
Among many things you will learn about:
- The definition of "market power" and why it matters
- The details of US, EU and international antitrust laws
- Why most of the Big Techs are almost certainly in violation of these laws today
- Antitrust enforcement actions that are in the pipeline and what their repercussions may be
There are some important principles which are not widely understood and Matt's newsletter goes into them. For example, once you reach a certain level of success, it becomes illegal to keep doing some of the stuff that your company has always done. These principles often come as a surprise to people but they are grounded in a long intellectual and legal history that goes as far back as Adam Smith.
Big Oil and Big Ag aren't an existential threat to the business model of the traditional news media, and the traditional news media still have a lot of power to influence opinions.
An experiment: try counting the number of positive news articles about Google/Facebook you see and compare it to the number of negative ones.
The down votes are concerning. Regardless of your opinion on FAANGXYZ there are other industries which aren't being talked about enough (banks, oil companies, etc..), and we all know why. Talk about tech, yes, but we don't need a sustained smear campaign like we've been getting the past 3 years.
US big tech have been able so far to lobby (read buy) themselves out of any regulatory corrections.
Only the EU has fined these behemoths and there's a large contingent of people that start crying discrimination whenever that happens.
We need to keep this topic under public scrutiny until these companies stop abusing their dominance. And it's not a smear campaign if the criticism is true.
But keep in mind the 3 year smear campaign followed a multi-year media love fest for Big Tech.
The Tech industry has spent billions on PR. That spending propped up a massive media infrastructure — how many reporters cover the tech beat? How many of those reporters exist because their publication host events and conferences, run advertorials, print “Special Features”, etc. paid for in large part by the tech industry? — and the industry naively thought they had the leverage to control the narrative. They were wrong and now the massive infrastructure they built to help them market their products has turned on them. The amount of noise being generated is a function of the size of the “problem” but it’s also a function of the size of the media-industrial complex built by the industry.
Ag and Oil are also under scrutiny but you shouldn’t be surprised they get less attention. They haven’t spent nearly as much over the last decade twirling shiny objects to distract from poor business practices.
This probe doesn't make any sense. Lawmakers are either seriously misguided, or have an agenda against specific tech companies.
One aspect of the investigation claims that tech companies are stifling competition and that the big names are monopolistic. I'd argue that's as far from reality as possible - it's never been easier to start a tech company, and the barrier to entry is extremely low. You know a market with a high barrier to entry, and literal laws preventing new competition? Internet service providers. Investigate the ISPs instead.
The second aspect of the probe surrounds concerns about personal data and its aggregation. But why bother investigating how Google et al are handling this data when there are clear offenders who have behaved with gross negligence and suffered no consequences (Equifax)? If those companies are not investigated, what possible reason could there be to investigate Google (who have not suffered a large-scale data breach) other than politically-motivated harassment? You know what would be more productive than investigating big tech companies - passing actual legislation like the GDPR to set up a framework to prevent the kind of privacy issue these legislators are supposedly concerned with.
Your first point isn’t a matter of opinion. Competition and innovation have been steadily declining, and monopsony (wage-setting power) concentrating. These aren’t just the musings of some random know-it-all on some tech board, they are reality. Look it up.
Your second point is just whataboutism. Investigating Google now doesn’t mean Equifax can’t be investigated later.
Happy to look it up. Can you point me to some sources that measure competition and innovation? One yardstick could be the number of new businesses per year, which is increasing per this article from two years ago [0].
I am not trying to what-about around Google possibly having some skeletons in their closet - just pointing out that the company screaming "hey, I'm handling data irresponsibly" is not being investigated, but the ones that have been the target of techno-fear-mongering smear campaigns are. Makes me question that the motivation of the investigation is not actually to benefit the average consumer.
This is somewhat incorrect. There are finite resources in the US justice system. Investigating Google now does hinder investigation of Equifax. Furthermore, momentum for prosecution in a class of business begets greater public support for prosecution of other businesses in that class. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there is a substantial belief that tech companies deprioritize Conservative opinions and content. We should not ignore the political component to these prosecutions.
Your first point is correct, however. Competition in some fields is declining; Amazon is the dominant internet retailer by a large margin. Google has even larger dominion over the online ad space, save for walled gardens. Investigation of large tech companies is justified on its merits. It is likely that some companies have not broken any laws, but there is value to investigation.
It's pretty clear that this is just a battle between the big tech and their enemies. However I don't think the government will support this attack: it needs the big tech as much as it needs its aircraft carriers and a petty dispute between two generals isn't a reason to sink half the ships.
have you ever tried to start a competitor to facebook? plenty of platforms have, and you haven’t ever heard of them because whilst better, facebook has a monopoly by way of critical mass... it’s almost impossible to pull significant populations away from their platform: not even google could, and google plus was an excellent product; far better than facebook in almost every way
I've heard of plenty of social media platforms (Diaspora, G+, LiveJournal) that have failed to gain traction for various reasons. I'm not convinced that it's because one of their competitors was just too big. The same argument could have been made that MySpace would never be dethroned a decade ago.
And I've also witnessed many successful social media platforms evolve in the post-Facebook era (Snapchat, Twitter, Tumblr, TikTok). There are also a plethora of small communities like DeviantArt, image boards, and specialty forums. My point is, of course cloning an existing platform won't pull populations away from it - users are sticky. That's true with any product. Folks need a reason to move, and once they have that reason, they're happy to do so. The beauty of social media is you don't even have to move, you can just have accounts in both places.
So I don't think the fact that a Facebook clone failed means that Facebook has a monopoly on social media. They might have a strong momentum with users that prefer Facebook-flavored social media, but given the market of all the different available platforms, it doesn't seem like there is a lot of demand for Facebook #2. Having a differentiator is the killer, and that makes the difference between G+ and TikTok.
What about Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, Slack, LinkedIn, Reddit? There’s countless social media/chat/video/news aggregation competitors to FB. In what category of business do you think it has a monopoly?
That was Microsoft’s fault. No one asked Microsoft to shovel ads in my operating system, no one told them to force telemetry, it was Microsoft's choice not to open up retail stores everywhere with trained staff who can handle a broken or replacement device immediately. They didn’t provide a curated App Store where I didn’t have to worry about malware.
Microsoft did nothing to earn the trust (instead the broke the trust) and business of customers, why should they have succeeded?
Given that Microsoft now owns GitHub, I would add them into this list too.
Also, perhaps some of the focus should also shift towards preventing such acquisitions (Google + YouTube, Facebook + WhatsApp), which the tech community at large can immediately identify as a potential monopoly threat. A simplistic way to do this would be to look at how much the company pays for the acquisition, but I am sure others here can come up with better metrics.
Also, Facebook should not be clubbed with the other companies in this list. What they are doing isn't some poorly defined "tech monopoly consolidation". They are just a completely fraudulent company headed by someone who should probably not be running any company. Tim Cook's point may have been self-serving, but he was absolutely right when he said that "if I were Facebook, I would not be in this situation".
I've worked for 7 software companies in my career. Every single one of them used Github, and I don't believe my experience was unusual in this regard.
Your argument implies that all Github does is service the Git protocol, but we all know it does so much more than that. From a cloud-based source control standpoint, Microsoft absolutely gained market control. An open protocol != cloud-based SAAS company.
GitHub doesn't do anything but centralise a bunch of services other companies (including Microsoft) have SaaS for. There's literally hundreds of git hosting platforms, kaban boards, issue trackers, CI services, code search tools out there.. All GitHub does is bring it together. It does not really have any kind of lock-in.
> Regulators, lawmakers and legal experts, however, worry that significant slices of the high-tech marketplace have become uncompetitive. Those include advertising, search, social media, app sales and certain retail sectors, among others.
If Google and Apple were operating in a truly competitive market, they couldn't get away with treating app developers so poorly. Because said app developers would just use a competitor. It's basically a duopoly.
Games are generally the only apps users are willing to pay for, and the games market is not only Apple and Google but also Nintendo and Sony and Microsoft (XBox). All five of those markets are closed to 3rd party stores.
Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and HBO Go and all the video apps are also closed to 3rd parties.
> Games are generally the only apps users are willing to pay for, and the games market is not only Apple and Google but also Nintendo and Sony and Microsoft (XBox). All five of those markets are closed to 3rd party stores.
It should be obvious why console games are a different market from mobile games, but it's no different within console games. I always find it strange that people consistently point to that as something different even though the whole point is that it's basically the same, and they shouldn't get away with it either.
The best argument that there's a difference is that a lot of customers have both a PlayStation and Xbox so neither of them has a monopoly on those customers, especially if you count PC gaming as the same market (which is a lot more plausible than lumping mobile gaming in there). But then that's a relevant distinction from mobile apps, because the percentage of people who carry both an iPhone and an Android phone rounds to zero.
> Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and HBO Go and all the video apps are also closed to 3rd parties.
That's the same thing again. Most people have more than one video service (e.g. both Netflix and HBO), so neither of them has a lock on those customers. And substantially everyone also uses YouTube or another free video distribution service (cf. no F-Droid/homebrew on iOS).
I am not sure why people are so anti big tech investigations. There is data available that says they are among the top 10 lobbyists at DC. And who would want this industry to be plagued with monopolies ?
Because they're clearly not monopolies in the usual sense, just maybe oligopolies (note the "mono" in monopoly: it means "one"). If I want search I can use Bing and get results that are usually good enough, sometimes even better than Google's. If I want a phone, I can choose between Apple and Android, and maybe even niche brands like Jolla. If I want to message somebody, I can use Slack, WhatsApp, Skype, WeChat, Line, Telegram, Signal... If I want to post pictures or videos of myself, there's YouTube, TikTok, Facebook/Instagram. If I want to buy ads, I can buy from Google, Bing, Facebook and Twitter. They're only monopolies if we define the class of businesses so narrowly that each business model is a new class, such that each firm is a monopoly.
Contrast that with e.g. home internet, where in many parts of the US there's literally just a single company providing internet connectivity, a single ISP, and it's illegal to start a competing ISP.
This isn't an investigation into whether these companies are monopolies. This is an antitrust investigation. Are these companies being anti-competitive?
So take the e-reader market. Amazon was able to undercut everyone else on price by a wide margin. A question could be asked whether their breadth of business allowed them to sell at a loss for long enough to kill off competition. Maybe, or maybe not, but was that their intent? I'm not sure how much intent matters in these types of cases.
And I'm sure there's more here that could be perceived as anticompetitive. I'm just picking some obvious example of where an investigation might be useful.
Then competitors re-enter the market and drive the jacked up price back down.
This phenomenon on its own is not anticompetitive at all. You’d need evidence of something entirely different like regulatory capture to prevent competitors from market re-entry or lobbying for laws that favor existing market leaders.
>>Contrast that with e.g. home internet, where in many parts of the US there's literally just a single company providing internet connectivity, a single ISP, and it's illegal to start a competing ISP.
You know, you might have shed some light on the core issue here. Usually for tangible goods, it is about choice, at an affordable cost. In the case of tech however, it is not about choice, but it is actually about access, at an affordable cost.
In theory, you could also just set up your own wireless mesh network to reach the internet. Its actually really simple: figure out the basic hardware, and then the software which goes with it, and then get the cooperation of your immediate neighborhood, and then the community at large, and don't centralize anything so you don't become branded as an ISP. Of course, the problem is that it is prohibitively expensive, at least in terms of time. So you might say "Well, it makes no sense. I will rather pay the very high price that my ISP charges". So you have just perpetuated the ISP's monopoly, because there is now one less person who has a good reason to potentially contribute to the wireless mesh network.
You can use Telegram instead of WhatsApp, but now you don't have access (because most of your friends are not going to move to Telegram just because you are such an amazing friend).
But here is the important thing: the fact that all these tech giants use every single dark UX pattern imaginable (to increase access on their products), and don't allow unfettered data export (to decrease access for competitors), means they are well aware of this and try to make access prohibitively expensive (again, in terms of time) if you chose one of their competitors.
I don't have a solution, but I think that is why the monopoly label makes sense.
re: mesh networking, I believe there's also scaling issues.
Also, perhaps certain liabilities could come in to play where you might be responsible for harbouring dodgy content from some of your less scrupulous neighbours.
Centralisation makes absolute sense in the case of shared public utilities. This whole business of treating them as just regular businesses is just a cod to help make some fat cats fatter.
One potential solution is to mandate some form of open cross-platform system, where the big tech companies are forced to give up our data and allow us to freely share it with others. So Telegram and WhatsApp would still both exist, but if I download Telegram, I should be able to communicate with WhatsApp users as easily as Telegram users.
I*ve been wanting something like this for a while, but I usually use Facebook as an example.
Right now, facebook is like a phone company that only allows folks to communicate with others using the same company. If you could see pages on other platforms and chat with users on other platforms - at least to an extent - that would open up some space for competition and overcome the most difficult part of building any "replacement" or competition to facebook.
All that said, I think this is probably a problem that is more complex than I make it out to be and it might or might not be a feasible solution. The first hurdle would be deciding on the standards for this stuff.
Yup. In the UK and many other places we had "local loop unbundling", allowing ISP competition for price and service. The UK lacks this, resulting in more expensive worse consumer internet in a lot of places.
It's becoming clear that we might need to "unbundle" the other end of the loop. Although that's much harder to even define. Trying to mandate the Fediverse is a pretty extreme technical and social challenge in the first place, let alone when billions of dollars are at stake.
A small thing might be to replicate the US approach to movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic.... : allow services to be either content producers or content aggregators but not both, and enforce non-discriminatory licensing of content. I.e. if Netflix pays Paramount $X for a series, any other streaming service should have the right to also buy it for $X at the same time.
> Contrast that with e.g. home internet, where in many parts of the US there's literally just a single company providing internet connectivity, a single ISP, and it's illegal to start a competing ISP.
It’s not illegal to start a competing ISP anywhere. (It’s illegal under federal law for local governments to grant exclusive franchises.) But your comparison is interesting. Almost everywhere in the US, you at least have DSL and satellite service as competition. They’re lower quality alternatives that few people choose, but the same is true for DDG and Bing. I think you correctly perceive that ISPs have market power because they have little effective competition. But by that same logic tech companies have substantial market power in many areas.
And there are theoretical reasons why these markets would tend towards concentration. In the ISP space you have the tendency toward natural monopoly that comes with physical utilities. But in the tech space you have strong network effects, which are another kind of market characteristic that tends to limit competition.
If the reports are true, some of the behaviors being reported are textbook anticompetitive behavior:
>investors say that their companies have been summoned to acquisition meetings with tech giants who ordered them to take a lowball offer or be exterminated by the giant creating a directly competing, loss-leader-priced service that puts them out of business altogether.
Sure, why not have investigations around antitrust and other issues from Big Tech firms. Include Verizon / AT&T / and telcos, and do it for companies in all other industries, too.
50 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadPerhaps Big Tech hasn’t hired enough lobbyists.
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s&showYe...
https://mattstoller.substack.com/
It's the most informative resource I've come across on the topic.
Among many things you will learn about:
- The definition of "market power" and why it matters
- The details of US, EU and international antitrust laws
- Why most of the Big Techs are almost certainly in violation of these laws today
- Antitrust enforcement actions that are in the pipeline and what their repercussions may be
There are some important principles which are not widely understood and Matt's newsletter goes into them. For example, once you reach a certain level of success, it becomes illegal to keep doing some of the stuff that your company has always done. These principles often come as a surprise to people but they are grounded in a long intellectual and legal history that goes as far back as Adam Smith.
An experiment: try counting the number of positive news articles about Google/Facebook you see and compare it to the number of negative ones.
Only the EU has fined these behemoths and there's a large contingent of people that start crying discrimination whenever that happens.
We need to keep this topic under public scrutiny until these companies stop abusing their dominance. And it's not a smear campaign if the criticism is true.
The Tech industry has spent billions on PR. That spending propped up a massive media infrastructure — how many reporters cover the tech beat? How many of those reporters exist because their publication host events and conferences, run advertorials, print “Special Features”, etc. paid for in large part by the tech industry? — and the industry naively thought they had the leverage to control the narrative. They were wrong and now the massive infrastructure they built to help them market their products has turned on them. The amount of noise being generated is a function of the size of the “problem” but it’s also a function of the size of the media-industrial complex built by the industry.
Ag and Oil are also under scrutiny but you shouldn’t be surprised they get less attention. They haven’t spent nearly as much over the last decade twirling shiny objects to distract from poor business practices.
One aspect of the investigation claims that tech companies are stifling competition and that the big names are monopolistic. I'd argue that's as far from reality as possible - it's never been easier to start a tech company, and the barrier to entry is extremely low. You know a market with a high barrier to entry, and literal laws preventing new competition? Internet service providers. Investigate the ISPs instead.
The second aspect of the probe surrounds concerns about personal data and its aggregation. But why bother investigating how Google et al are handling this data when there are clear offenders who have behaved with gross negligence and suffered no consequences (Equifax)? If those companies are not investigated, what possible reason could there be to investigate Google (who have not suffered a large-scale data breach) other than politically-motivated harassment? You know what would be more productive than investigating big tech companies - passing actual legislation like the GDPR to set up a framework to prevent the kind of privacy issue these legislators are supposedly concerned with.
Your second point is just whataboutism. Investigating Google now doesn’t mean Equifax can’t be investigated later.
I am not trying to what-about around Google possibly having some skeletons in their closet - just pointing out that the company screaming "hey, I'm handling data irresponsibly" is not being investigated, but the ones that have been the target of techno-fear-mongering smear campaigns are. Makes me question that the motivation of the investigation is not actually to benefit the average consumer.
[0] https://fortune.com/2017/02/22/startups-2017-challenger/
Your first point is correct, however. Competition in some fields is declining; Amazon is the dominant internet retailer by a large margin. Google has even larger dominion over the online ad space, save for walled gardens. Investigation of large tech companies is justified on its merits. It is likely that some companies have not broken any laws, but there is value to investigation.
not if 'big tech' enables (russians|the people) to pick unfavored generals and upset the status quo
And I've also witnessed many successful social media platforms evolve in the post-Facebook era (Snapchat, Twitter, Tumblr, TikTok). There are also a plethora of small communities like DeviantArt, image boards, and specialty forums. My point is, of course cloning an existing platform won't pull populations away from it - users are sticky. That's true with any product. Folks need a reason to move, and once they have that reason, they're happy to do so. The beauty of social media is you don't even have to move, you can just have accounts in both places.
So I don't think the fact that a Facebook clone failed means that Facebook has a monopoly on social media. They might have a strong momentum with users that prefer Facebook-flavored social media, but given the market of all the different available platforms, it doesn't seem like there is a lot of demand for Facebook #2. Having a differentiator is the killer, and that makes the difference between G+ and TikTok.
Edit: incoherence
Microsoft did nothing to earn the trust (instead the broke the trust) and business of customers, why should they have succeeded?
Also, perhaps some of the focus should also shift towards preventing such acquisitions (Google + YouTube, Facebook + WhatsApp), which the tech community at large can immediately identify as a potential monopoly threat. A simplistic way to do this would be to look at how much the company pays for the acquisition, but I am sure others here can come up with better metrics.
Also, Facebook should not be clubbed with the other companies in this list. What they are doing isn't some poorly defined "tech monopoly consolidation". They are just a completely fraudulent company headed by someone who should probably not be running any company. Tim Cook's point may have been self-serving, but he was absolutely right when he said that "if I were Facebook, I would not be in this situation".
Your argument implies that all Github does is service the Git protocol, but we all know it does so much more than that. From a cloud-based source control standpoint, Microsoft absolutely gained market control. An open protocol != cloud-based SAAS company.
e.: people mentioning "Github profiles" when discussing preparing for interviews.
* WKWebView is the only browser engine allowed on iOS.
* Apps can only be distributed through the iOS app store.
* No formal appeals processes based on established judicial principles for either Apple or Google.
If anti-trust is on the table it's the government who will be deciding whose ecosystem it is and exactly who owes what to whom.
You don't get to choose which phone the customer for your app already bought.
> Regulators, lawmakers and legal experts, however, worry that significant slices of the high-tech marketplace have become uncompetitive. Those include advertising, search, social media, app sales and certain retail sectors, among others.
If Google and Apple were operating in a truly competitive market, they couldn't get away with treating app developers so poorly. Because said app developers would just use a competitor. It's basically a duopoly.
Games are generally the only apps users are willing to pay for, and the games market is not only Apple and Google but also Nintendo and Sony and Microsoft (XBox). All five of those markets are closed to 3rd party stores.
Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and HBO Go and all the video apps are also closed to 3rd parties.
It should be obvious why console games are a different market from mobile games, but it's no different within console games. I always find it strange that people consistently point to that as something different even though the whole point is that it's basically the same, and they shouldn't get away with it either.
The best argument that there's a difference is that a lot of customers have both a PlayStation and Xbox so neither of them has a monopoly on those customers, especially if you count PC gaming as the same market (which is a lot more plausible than lumping mobile gaming in there). But then that's a relevant distinction from mobile apps, because the percentage of people who carry both an iPhone and an Android phone rounds to zero.
> Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and HBO Go and all the video apps are also closed to 3rd parties.
That's the same thing again. Most people have more than one video service (e.g. both Netflix and HBO), so neither of them has a lock on those customers. And substantially everyone also uses YouTube or another free video distribution service (cf. no F-Droid/homebrew on iOS).
Contrast that with e.g. home internet, where in many parts of the US there's literally just a single company providing internet connectivity, a single ISP, and it's illegal to start a competing ISP.
So take the e-reader market. Amazon was able to undercut everyone else on price by a wide margin. A question could be asked whether their breadth of business allowed them to sell at a loss for long enough to kill off competition. Maybe, or maybe not, but was that their intent? I'm not sure how much intent matters in these types of cases.
And I'm sure there's more here that could be perceived as anticompetitive. I'm just picking some obvious example of where an investigation might be useful.
This phenomenon on its own is not anticompetitive at all. You’d need evidence of something entirely different like regulatory capture to prevent competitors from market re-entry or lobbying for laws that favor existing market leaders.
You know, you might have shed some light on the core issue here. Usually for tangible goods, it is about choice, at an affordable cost. In the case of tech however, it is not about choice, but it is actually about access, at an affordable cost.
In theory, you could also just set up your own wireless mesh network to reach the internet. Its actually really simple: figure out the basic hardware, and then the software which goes with it, and then get the cooperation of your immediate neighborhood, and then the community at large, and don't centralize anything so you don't become branded as an ISP. Of course, the problem is that it is prohibitively expensive, at least in terms of time. So you might say "Well, it makes no sense. I will rather pay the very high price that my ISP charges". So you have just perpetuated the ISP's monopoly, because there is now one less person who has a good reason to potentially contribute to the wireless mesh network.
You can use Telegram instead of WhatsApp, but now you don't have access (because most of your friends are not going to move to Telegram just because you are such an amazing friend).
But here is the important thing: the fact that all these tech giants use every single dark UX pattern imaginable (to increase access on their products), and don't allow unfettered data export (to decrease access for competitors), means they are well aware of this and try to make access prohibitively expensive (again, in terms of time) if you chose one of their competitors.
I don't have a solution, but I think that is why the monopoly label makes sense.
Also, perhaps certain liabilities could come in to play where you might be responsible for harbouring dodgy content from some of your less scrupulous neighbours.
Centralisation makes absolute sense in the case of shared public utilities. This whole business of treating them as just regular businesses is just a cod to help make some fat cats fatter.
Right now, facebook is like a phone company that only allows folks to communicate with others using the same company. If you could see pages on other platforms and chat with users on other platforms - at least to an extent - that would open up some space for competition and overcome the most difficult part of building any "replacement" or competition to facebook.
All that said, I think this is probably a problem that is more complex than I make it out to be and it might or might not be a feasible solution. The first hurdle would be deciding on the standards for this stuff.
It's becoming clear that we might need to "unbundle" the other end of the loop. Although that's much harder to even define. Trying to mandate the Fediverse is a pretty extreme technical and social challenge in the first place, let alone when billions of dollars are at stake.
A small thing might be to replicate the US approach to movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic.... : allow services to be either content producers or content aggregators but not both, and enforce non-discriminatory licensing of content. I.e. if Netflix pays Paramount $X for a series, any other streaming service should have the right to also buy it for $X at the same time.
It’s not illegal to start a competing ISP anywhere. (It’s illegal under federal law for local governments to grant exclusive franchises.) But your comparison is interesting. Almost everywhere in the US, you at least have DSL and satellite service as competition. They’re lower quality alternatives that few people choose, but the same is true for DDG and Bing. I think you correctly perceive that ISPs have market power because they have little effective competition. But by that same logic tech companies have substantial market power in many areas.
And there are theoretical reasons why these markets would tend towards concentration. In the ISP space you have the tendency toward natural monopoly that comes with physical utilities. But in the tech space you have strong network effects, which are another kind of market characteristic that tends to limit competition.
>investors say that their companies have been summoned to acquisition meetings with tech giants who ordered them to take a lowball offer or be exterminated by the giant creating a directly competing, loss-leader-priced service that puts them out of business altogether.
https://boingboing.net/2018/06/04/thanks-milton-friedman.htm...