OK, so how would the Federal Government “break up” a social media site using their anti-trust powers? I mean, they could totally make the company that owns the FB site sell off the insta-one, that makes sense to me. But how could they “break up” the network itself? Or the tweety one?
Would they make all the IP addresses from west of the Mississippi move to different network? Or split it by age? Or would it be, like, this site is for people who have occupations that start with the letters A through G, and H-N are on this rival site? Or would it be a promotion and relegation system?
I only sorta kidding: I honestly don't know how a government would “break up” such a site to make it less powerful. Regulating, more or less, like TV and Radio stations used to be, I can come to grips with. Taxing, yes. But I don't see how the government "breaks up" the biggest social networks into two or three smaller, less influential, but still profitable networks. The government could make FB a failed and bankrupt company, since some sort of ‘cap’ would presumably result in a chain reaction, as people whose friends were forced off the network choose to leave, and the site become less and less interesting to anyone. But I don’t think that’s the goal, here.
The government can “break up” grocery-store chains, or even networks of radio stations, because while the owners value large-scale networks, the users don’t care. But for a social network, the value to the typical user is precisely in the network’s size.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
As usual, you hit on an interesting question! Not being a user of Facebook myself, I am probably the last person who should be opining about this, but in the spirit of a science fiction thought-experiment, I’ll scare up some ideas.
I posit that one could break up Facebook without actually disrupting the network if one established laws about control over access to pages maintained by the social media company for users. If anyone not blocked by the user could access the Facebook page or the Fastcandids page or whatever that the person creates, then different social media companies could operate as site hosts, with the users interacting more or less as before. Users would choose to set up their page on one site or another without being pressured by the size of the site host’s network and instead could choose the host based on their privacy policy, for example. You could start the process with existing accounts being distributed randomly among the spin-off social media companies, with a one-year freeze period on changing accounts. The break-up would then establish competition, and it would provide a way for start-ups to enter the market. The social media market would still have to be monitored for consolidation: the process of competition would lead to reconsolidation, so periodic interventions would continue to be necessary. Is there any reason, technically, that approach wouldn’t work?
Of course, it would be much easier to have a social media platform provided to all U.S. citizens and permanent residents 16 and older, but that would be socialism . . .
I am really tempted by the idea of mandatory interoperability, not least because it would (maybe) induce platforms to compete for users by improving their interfaces. It seems like most people hate the the social media platform they use most.
There are technical problems, of course, which might yield to technical solutions, and I even if it could be made to work I don’t think it would have all the advantages of our current networks, but they might not have all of the huge disadvantages, either. But I don’t know if the business model of a platform that lets its users go if they don’t like it is profitable.
Thanks,
-V.
I think this gets easier if you stop thinking about Facebook as a monolithic product that does one thing — you access it in one place at one URL to do one set of things (keep up with friends), but that’s just a convenience for you. Really, facebook is the posting platform and the messenging platform and the identity provider (you know, all those other random sites you use in your day-to-day that say you can “sign in using facebook”) and the video chat platform and the ad platform and presumably a gaming platform of some sort, i dunno, i’m not actually any sort of expert on what all functionality Facebook has.
The feasible way to break up Facebook isn’t to limit or divide the mesh of users who can use it to talk to each other — i agree the size of that mesh is part of what makes Facebook powerful, but as you say, it’s hard to think about dividing as a practical matter, and it’s probably not that much fun to have a precedent that social media sites can only have 100 million users and not 200 million users. If you went after Facebook’s ability to bundle an unlimited number services or functionality (whether that’s things you think of as functionality like video chat, or things Facebook thinks of as functionality like targeted ads) seamlessly to users at the same address, that would target its power as a platform without having to futz with the size of the mesh at all.
That seems like an excellent way to stop Facebook from making as much money as it currently does, and limiting the market value of its stock, but not at all a good way of diminishing its power as a quasi-censoring body (not technically censorship, of course, but it does have outsize power in choosing which informationlike substances are transmitted to whom) and as a conduit for radicalization and whatnot. But perhaps I’m underestimating the power of Messenger.
And while FB is the main target, Twitter runs it a very close second, and they probably have fewer different services—and Reddit, f’r’ex, doesn’t seem like it could be “broken up” in that way at all.
Thanks,
-V.
A somewhat cynical libertarian answer: “Breaking up Facebook” has nothing to do with “breaking up a monopoly” in the traditional sense; it’s just a phrase they have to invoke so that they can do whatever they want to do to Facebook, and cloak it in the guise of “anti-trust”.
My less libertarian but perhaps more cynical answer is that “breaking up Facebook” has nothing to do with actually doing anything of any kind, and is just a way for legislators and other political types to make mouth noises about how much they object to whatever Facebook is doing at the moment.
Thanks,
-V.
Yet another cynical take is that whatever happens, it will be with Facebook’s full cooperation, and will be carefully designed to let them hold onto power while stifling future competition. “We welcome regulation” and all that. Increasing their costs is *great* for them, as long as it increases everyone’s costs, since they’re more able to bear the increase.
Coincidentally, this coming week’s episode of the Mohanraj and Rosenbaum Are Humans podcast features Cory Doctorow as a guest, and quite a bit of what he talks about there is the importance of requiring companies to allow interoperability. Among other things, he says “I’m writing a book now full of Baby Twitters, like the Baby Bells.” (And then he goes on to explain what he means by that.) (That line and discussion are at around 40:00 into the episode.)
Episode will be available wherever fine podcasts appear this coming Monday morning, May 10.
Thank you! I keep meaning to try the podcast (I don’t generally listen to podcasts at all) so maybe that will be the impetus to actually do it.
Thanks,
-V.