OK, so how would the Federal Government \u201cbreak up\u201d 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 \u201cbreak up\u201d the network itself? Or the tweety one?\r\n
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?\r\n
I only sorta kidding: I honestly don't know how a government would \u201cbreak up\u201d 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 \u2018cap\u2019 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\u2019t think that\u2019s the goal, here.\r\n
The government can \u201cbreak up\u201d grocery-store chains, or even networks of radio stations, because while the owners<\/I> value large-scale networks, the users<\/i> don\u2019t care. But for a social network, the value to the typical user is precisely in the network\u2019s size.\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In which Your Humble Blogger can\u2019t decide if \u201cVote for us\u2014we\u2019ll kick your family off Facebook\u201d is a winning political proposition or not.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20471"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20473,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20471\/revisions\/20473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}