I'm tired of the big tech alarmism. Nobody needs to break up any of these companies. Having power does not make a company evil.
You can ask legitimate questions about Amazon's treatment of employees. Boycott them if you're so inclined. Are they being paid fairly? Are they being exploited and over-worked? I think it's a conversation worth having. At least be sensible and call for regulations that address this in particular, not trying to break up Amazon entirely.
Google is guilty of what, exactly? Do you dislike how they treat you, the user, as the product? Change your Google privacy settings or better yet switch to Google alternatives (Protonmail, DuckDuckGo, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, the like, YouTube is too useful to abandon).
All I see is a big push to vilify tech companies so politicians can look like they're for the little guy.
Take the recent Google internal vulnerability case. All of the sudden politicians come out of the woodwork, when public disclosure of this sort of thing was never an issue before. In reality, people doesn't seem to understand that enforced disclosure of internally discovered vulnerabilities will make more proactive actors look less secure than companies which aren't as rigorous (and have less to disclose).
If you very understandably don't trust Facebook with your data, simply get off it. Use Signal, SMS, email, Discord, Slack, anything else you want to talk to your friends and family.
I suppose telling people not to use Facebook, Instagram, or Google services doesn't have the same ring to it as tearing companies down though.
Edit: Changed nonsensical sentence about Google's vulnerability disclosure. Clarified.
Edit: Reclarified still nonsensical Google vulnerability disclosure paragraph.
Edit: Changed "more" to "less" in the disclosure paragraph. Third time's the charm.
Google has been accused of, and increasingly being found guilty of, a great many things: run-ins with the FTC (the Canadian pharmacy settlement comes to mind), to the DOJ (consent decree... companies rarely agree to these unless there's some there there), to artists being forced to list their catalogs with Google in order to have them automatically scan/take down copyright violations on YouTube (a form of tying IMO), to scraping web sites for the purposes of competing with them (Yelp etc.), to contractually eliminating any real competition re: Android (this was a story on HN in the last couple days re: finally something being done about it in the EU at least), to 'no-poach' agreements with other companies for employees and on and on.
None of this is unique to Google or even the tech industry: when a company gets an advantage, they tend to press it. When pressing it works, they press a bit more. They will continue to ratchet up what they are doing until they meet significant market resistance or are otherwise stopped. When you are able to use your market position/power to eliminate the competition and/or abuse your customers, the tendency is to do so when it helps the bottom line. Rarely is there an edict from the top that says 'go forth and do great evil', it's usually more a bunch of people in the organization being told from above 'hit your numbers', 'close the sale', 'get it done' (sometimes with an implicit or even explicit 'or else') and self-interest takes care of the rest. When you get the right mix of market power and greed, about the only entity that can deal with it is the government as market forces are no longer functioning.
The problem in a very real sense is Google is using its market dominance to enter other markets and unfairly compete/stifle competition.
Whether I/you/we use google or not, we are all losing out.
How does it happen?
Google search is >90% of all internet searches. Is that a monopoly by itself? No, but they use the dominate market position to determine where they will expand. Example, flights/hotels Google knows everything about the economics of that industry from their market position. Then Google expands into flights/hotels. Google flights is now automatically at the top of every organic search to the detriment of competition and market incumbents. Google will also now bid up ads for these terms simultaneously putting themselves at the top of ads, lining their own pockets, and driving up the cost of Google’s own ad customers who were paying $1 yesterday to Google and now paying $10 Google to compete with Google. As a result many competitors across these industries go out of business and leave consumers with only Google.
> If you very understandably don't trust Facebook with your data, simply get off it
Facebook compiles shadow profiles of people who have gotten off Facebook [1]. Their lack of platform security affects users and non-users alike, particularly when those actions spread violence and political misinformation.
Facebook bought WhatsApp and promptly broke its promises to WhatsApp's founders and the EU. Facebook bought Instagram and used its heft to copy Snapchat's product. Using incumbency-resulting scale to copy and destroy competitors is inefficient. It's a market failure. It's why we have antitrust law.
When people say "break up Facebook," we mean "update antitrust law to see user data as capital."
If I do something bad, like collude to depress the wages of my workers, the existence of alternatives to the service I provide are not exculpatory.
Legally, if those bad things are anti-competitive in nature, one of the potential remedies is the forced breakup of the company.
If you don't think these companies are doing anything bad, that's one thing, and the existence of competitors is certainly one piece of evidence towards that conclusion. But it isn't determinative. You can engage in many anti-competitive strategies that don't preclude 100% market share.
Why don't we elect representatives who can ask the hard questions for us and compel the tech companies to provide us the information necessary to make informed decisions on whether we should be concerned or if we do have reason to be concerned.
Maybe we could even compel Facebook to answer our question with the threat of jail if they lie.
What is wrong with this idea? Seems like a very democratic and completely appropriate thing to do in a representative democracy.
I am starting to get the sense that a lot of technologists skipped the section on civics, didn't learn about it or simply don't care how it works.
> All I see is a big push to vilify tech companies so politicians can look like they're for the little guy.
The more popular opinion is that we need improved checks and balances in a major sector of the economy in order to keep it stable. A growing concentration of power and wealth is typically not seen as a good thing.
An updated legal framework which attempts to optimize competitive/market forces is what is needed here. It's not simply about "tear them down because they screwed with my data" as you imagined.
The real problem is a failure of our political system to create appropriate regulations and incentives.
At the end of the day, the corporation behaves within the system. What the "big tech" CEOs figured out is that there's a gray area between "what is acceptable" and "what is legal", and while people before have felt constrained by "doing the right thing" the new CEOs have not even been constrained by "behaving in accordance with the letter of the law". See Uber as a great example of moving fast and breaking the law until the law was changed in their favor.
"Big Tech" encompasses a wide spectrum of issues, from garden-variety law-breaking up to "too-big-to-fail". Microsoft was slammed with anti-trust once. Given the prevalence of tech in our society, some laws and regulations are appropriate, the question is really how far they should extend.
With regards to Facebook in particular, you can always leave... but it's more difficult to keep in touch with those who stay and good luck convincing your grand parents to send you a zip file of pictures from their recent trip to Italy instead of just "throwing them up on the facebooks".
I've abandoned Facebook myself as very little of that interests me, but my wife enjoys those social contacts and is stuck in a position where she's researched and knows better alternatives but can't exactly drag her family with her. It would never happen because this would destroy their business, but if Facebook offered RSS feeds (or similar) for profile activity I'm pretty sure most of their users would abandon using their site/app directly.
Google is guilty of what, exactly? Do you dislike how they treat you, the user, as the product? Change your Google privacy settings or better yet switch to Google alternatives (Protonmail, DuckDuckGo, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, the like, YouTube is too useful to abandon).
All I see is a big push to vilify tech companies so politicians can look like they're for the little guy.
Well, your rant sounds emotive, but part of the question is a legal (and to some extent ethical) one. It's been considered, after the experience of the late 1800s and early 20th century, that monopolies (or cartels in old parlance) cause wide enough damage to trade (i.e. free market capitalism) that they should be regulated by government. Classical free market economists warned of monopolies. Modern free market philosophers like Milton Friedman argued stopping them was one of the (limited) critical functions of government. The U.S. Federal Government has the ability to regulate them for the benefit of all.
Serious question, here. When I read comments like these on HN, I have to ask: do people learn philosophy and economics in typical computer science programs?
Corporate power is very different from personal power. The layers of management and decision making in a corporation don't often admit to any moral dimension - just success/fail measurements and next quarter profits.
So yes, a corporation may not be evil, but it is almost by construction, amoral. Which may be worse in a sense.
Construction of success/fail measures has a moral dimension.
If a corporation only had profits as a deciding goal, that isn't something that comes from outer space independent of morality, it's a consequence of moral value judgments, particularly of it's stockholders (but board members and executives have a role, too.)
My fear is that if a breakup occurred, it would only allow Chinese tech companies to come marching in, destroying American competition. (This could backfire pretty bad...)
For a long time I have been told that small nimble companies will succeed so it seems healthy to me to break up these big, slow companies. I wonder if there is some level of Stockholm syndrome going on that makes people think we need these huge, dominant companies.
Or alternatively, maybe it's true that there are major economies of scale to most businesses, and big companies get big not through "lobbying" and "regulation" but because they're far more efficient than small companies?
Yes, they are efficient and well run but they also can suppress threatening innovation. At some point big companies can buy out any potential competition. You can see that in tech where a lot of startups don't even try to run a profitable business but plan on getting bought out. Same in medical tech where startups just do basic research that's sold to the big guys.
This makes sense, but ask yourself why a search engine company and a phone software developer should be part of one big company. Vertical integration has almost no justifiable reason to be protected, it's primary purpose is for locking you into an ecosystem, which gates out new, innovative players.
So? Of course you should be able to pay experts to represent you in these hearings, or hire them for unrelated purposes. The issue is whether such payments are appropriately disclosed.
I am starting to think that companies from a certain size on should be broken apart automatically. Or we should find other ways to disincentive growing a company beyond a certain size.
Why would you want to break them? A guy builds a company and then for some reason somebody who never helped build it thinks it's ok to break it into little parts?
sounds communistic to me... let the free market decide and if needed, then regulate it more.
>let the free market decide and if needed, then regulate it more.
That is exactly what happened over a 100 years ago. That additional regulation was called the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.
When the US DOJ broke up Standard Oil, who had control of 90% of the market just like a certain search engine does today, consumers and the market were better off...and even Rockefeller who lost his illegal monopoly, saw his fortune double as a result of the breakup making him the richest man in the world.
What a shit article. Yeah, if you go to the level of economists who work at elite universities and firms, and are the type to testify before government bodies, most of them are one degree of separation from the world's biggest corporations. So what? Either what they're saying is evidence-based and defensible, or it isn't. The article seems to want to smear these people on the basis of their links, no matter how tenuous, to big tech corporations.
It's amazing watching [a subset of] the American public clamor for the destruction of incredible things that could only be created in America, and should really be sources of pride, imho.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
The issue is that nearly every single one of these people are paid to believe big tech is not a problem. This isn't even a scenario where there were competing viewpoints: The deck was entirely stacked with paid supporters.
And as far as the fact that these companies were created in the first place: Today's giants only exist because we properly employed antitrust regulations against the previous generation of giants. Google would not exist without the antitrust case against Microsoft. And an innovative future depends on us applying antitrust law again, to the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
We should be proud of what our country has accomplished, but we must break them up on occasion to allow for new growth. Movement and innovation is what keeps us on that leading edge, and resistance to apply regulation against these companies will allow other countries to surpass us.
You edited to include additional claims, and some counterfactuals. I see no reason to believe that the anti-trust rulings against Microsoft, which were actually rather weak when all was said and done, is what allowed Google to come into existence. I don't see how they had any effect on Google, or how Google was stymied by Microsoft's monopoly. Can you substantiate that claim?
Likewise, you have to prove that these companies are destroying the ability for other folks to innovate through abuse of monopoly power (the point of the hearings), not just say that they're big so we need to "break them up".
"I see no reason to believe that the anti-trust rulings against Microsoft, which were actually rather weak when all was said and done, is what allowed Google to come into existence."
Microsoft's behavior changed a lot once they got under pressure from the US and the EU. During the 90s they were much more heavy handed and aggressive than after.
A number of Microsoft employees have confirmed that the main reason Microsoft never did anything to stop Google's growth when it was small was fear of further antitrust punishments:
And most important, as Microsoft lived under government scrutiny, employees abandoned what had been nascent internal discussions about crushing a young, emerging competitor — Google. There had been informal conjectures about reprogramming Microsoft’s web browser, the popular Internet Explorer, so that anytime people typed in “Google,” they would be redirected to MSN Search, according to company insiders. Or, perhaps a warning message might pop up: “Did you know Google uses your data in ways you can’t control?”
Microsoft was so powerful, and Google so new, that the young search engine could have been killed off, some insiders at both companies believe. “But there was a new culture of compliance, and we didn’t want to get in trouble again, so nothing happened,” Burrus said. The myth that Google humbled Microsoft on its own is wrong. The government’s antitrust lawsuit is one reason that Google was eventually able to break Microsoft’s monopoly.
As an HN user, I assume you are probably familiar with dozens of projects for products or services that were superior to Google's entrenched ones. Be they alternative mobile OSes, search engines, email or calendar products, etc. But thanks to monopoly power, all of them have failed to gain traction from the incumbents due to their vertical integration with the rest of their product portfolio.
Gmail is not the best email client (it's not even a particularly good email client now that it takes two minutes to load), Android is far from the best mobile OS. But both are dominant because of the inescapable monopoly which owns them and every other product people use online. Google Search isn't winning because of the quality of the code or the results, but because Google has invested billions of dollars every year in ensuring the default search on nearly every electronic device is Google. No matter how superior someone's product is, if they don't have Google's scale or their billions, they can't compete.
Fair enough. Note, I'm not arguing that there is no appropriate use of FTC action to stop anti-competitive behavior. The informally discussed actions attributed to MSFT employees would probably qualify (certainly using browser monopoly to effectively block websites). However, it never happened and "informal conjectures" are pretty dubious. I don't think that rises to the standard of evidence that Google wouldn't exist had the FTC not intervened.
From the same article
What eventually humbled Bill Gates and ended Microsoft’s monopoly wasn’t antitrust prosecutions, observers say, but a more nimble start-up named Google, a search engine designed by two Stanford Ph.D. dropouts that outperformed Microsoft’s own forays into search (first MSN Search and now Bing). Then those two dropouts introduced a series of applications, like Google Docs and Google Sheets, that eventually began to compete with almost every aspect of Microsoft’s businesses. And Google did all that not by relying on government prosecutors but by being smarter. You don’t need antitrust in the digital marketplace, critics argue. “When our products don’t work or we make mistakes, it’s easy for users to go elsewhere because our competition is only a click away,” Google’s co-founder, Larry Page, said in 2012. Translation: The government ought to stop worrying, because no online giant will ever survive any longer than it deserves to.
I am certainly familiar with alternative options to popular digital products. Some of them do in fact gain adoption, which seems to counter your position that it's impossible to gain traction because of monopoly power. They often get bought by the incumbent (Facebook's properties being the most obvious example). Note that some independents (Snapchat, Twitter) have also managed to rise post-Facebook and IPO. It's not clear monopoly power is what makes these supposedly subpar products dominant. Certainly I use Google Calendar because I use GMail, and I use GMail because I don't care enough to look for another email provider. It's good enough for me. If a better one came out, worth switching to, I certainly would. Just like I switched my email from Yahoo! to GMail when GMail came out. I think there's a difference between a company being big and holding the lion's share of the market (Tide holds 50% market share in laundry detergent) and being a monopoly. Telecoms and utilities are monopolies, in many markets. There are no other options. I don't see why Google Search is (DuckDuckGo exists and has done pretty well with a focus on privacy, for example; and of course Bing). But I also disagree that it's _not_ because Google has the best search results. As far as I can tell, they do. Who's better?
Bing and DuckDuckGo both have vastly better search products (for different reasons). DDG obviously has a strong privacy push, and allows you to grab results from different search engines in a private way, Bing pays for your searching there with rewards.
Results quality is incredibly similar, and in fact, several times I've read hyped up announcement articles about new Google Knowledge Graph features or tools like the metronome when you search "metronome", only to notice that Bing already had that functionality already. Google isn't really the innovator in search and hasn't been for a long time. But given that they pay billions to both Apple and Mozilla to be the default search on iOS and Firefox, and also control the largest mobile OS, Android, Google remains mostly uncontested for the 90% or higher market share it has in a lot of countries.
Defaults win, we've seen time and time again. Google didn't explode in popularity because people set it as their search engine. Sure, nerds like us did back then, but what happened was Adobe Flash Player and similar apps started installing the Google Toolbar, which changed your default search engine to Google. And this is why the EU has finally taken a move to prevent Google from making Android manufacturers default to Google Search, though it's likely most will still be paid to provide that default going forward.
