| 1 | 0Professor Who Coined Term 'Net Neutrality' Thinks It's Time To Break Up Facebook (theverge.com) null/SLASHDOT/0102640274 70\r |
| 2 | i Thursday September 06, 2018 @11:30PM (BeauHD)\r |
| 3 | i from the easier-said-than-done dept.\r |
| 4 | i\r |
| 5 | i [1]pgmrdlm shares a report from The Verge:\r |
| 6 | i \r |
| 7 | i > Best known for coining the phrase "net neutrality" and his\r |
| 8 | i book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information\r |
| 9 | i Empires, Wu has a new book coming out in November called\r |
| 10 | i [2]The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age . In\r |
| 11 | i it, he argues compellingly for a return to aggressive\r |
| 12 | i antitrust enforcement in the style of Teddy Roosevelt, saying\r |
| 13 | i that Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other huge tech companies\r |
| 14 | i [3]are a threat to democracy as they get bigger and bigger .\r |
| 15 | i "We live in America, which has a strong and proud tradition of\r |
| 16 | i breaking up companies that are too big for inefficient\r |
| 17 | i reasons," Wu told me on this week's Vergecast. "We need to\r |
| 18 | i reverse this idea that it's not an American tradition. We've\r |
| 19 | i broken up dozens of companies."\r |
| 20 | i \r |
| 21 | i >\r |
| 22 | i \r |
| 23 | i > "I think if you took a hard look at the acquisition of\r |
| 24 | i WhatsApp and Instagram, the argument that the effects of those\r |
| 25 | i acquisitions have been anticompetitive would be easy to prove\r |
| 26 | i for a number of reasons," says Wu. And breaking up the company\r |
| 27 | i wouldn't be hard, he says. "What would be the harm? You'll\r |
| 28 | i have three competitors. It's not 'Oh my god, if you get rid of\r |
| 29 | i WhatsApp and Instagram, well then the whole world's going to\r |
| 30 | i fall apart.' It would be like 'Okay, now you have some\r |
| 31 | i companies actually trying to offer you an alternative to\r |
| 32 | i Facebook.'" Breaking up Facebook (and other huge tech\r |
| 33 | i companies like Google and Amazon) could be simple under the\r |
| 34 | i current law, suggests Wu. But it could also lead to a major\r |
| 35 | i rethinking of how antitrust law should work in a world where\r |
| 36 | i the giant platform companies give their products away for\r |
| 37 | i free, and the ability for the government to restrict corporate\r |
| 38 | i power seems to be diminishing by the day. And it demands that\r |
| 39 | i we all think seriously about the conditions that create\r |
| 40 | i innovation. "I think everyone's steering way away from the\r |
| 41 | i monopolies, and I think it's hurting innovation in the tech\r |
| 42 | i sector," says Wu.\r |
| 43 | i \r |
| 44 | i \r |
| 45 | i \r |
| 46 | i [1] https://slashdot.org/~pgmrdlm\r |
| 47 | i \r |
| 48 | i [2] https://www.amazon.com/Curse-Bigness-Antitrust-New-Gilded/-\r |
| 49 | i dp/0999745468\r |
| 50 | i \r |
| 51 | i [3] https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/4/17816572/tim-wu-facebook-\r |
| 52 | i regulation-interview-curse-of-bigness-antitrust\r |
| 53 | i\r |