0Professor Who Coined Term 'Net Neutrality' Thinks It's Time To Break Up Facebook (theverge.com)	null/SLASHDOT/0102640274		70
i  Thursday September 06, 2018 @11:30PM (BeauHD)
i  from the easier-said-than-done dept.
i
i    pgmrdlm  shares a report from The Verge: Best known for coining
i    the  phrase  "net  neutrality"  and his book The Master Switch:
i    The  Rise  and  Fall  of Information Empires, Wu has a new book
i    coming  out  in November called The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust
i    in  the  New  Gilded  Age.  In it, he argues compellingly for a
i    return  to  aggressive  antitrust  enforcement  in the style of
i    Teddy  Roosevelt,  saying  that  Google,  Facebook, Amazon, and
i    other  huge  tech  companies  are a threat to democracy as they
i    get  bigger and bigger. "We live in America, which has a strong
i    and  proud  tradition of breaking up companies that are too big
i    for  inefficient reasons," Wu told me on this week's Vergecast.
i    "We  need  to  reverse  this  idea  that  it's  not an American
i    tradition.  We've  broken  up dozens of companies." "I think if
i    you  took  a  hard  look  at  the  acquisition  of WhatsApp and
i    Instagram,  the argument that the effects of those acquisitions
i    have  been  anticompetitive would be easy to prove for a number
i    of  reasons,"  says Wu. And breaking up the company wouldn't be
i    hard,  he  says.  "What  would  be  the harm? You'll have three
i    competitors.  It's  not  'Oh my god, if you get rid of WhatsApp
i    and  Instagram,  well  then  the  whole  world's  going to fall
i    apart.'  It  would  be  like 'Okay, now you have some companies
i    actually  trying  to  offer  you  an alternative to Facebook.'"
i    Breaking  up  Facebook  (and  other  huge  tech  companies like
i    Google  and  Amazon)  could  be  simple  under the current law,
i    suggests  Wu.  But  it could also lead to a major rethinking of
i    how  antitrust  law  should  work  in  a  world where the giant
i    platform  companies  give their products away for free, and the
i    ability  for  the  government to restrict corporate power seems
i    to  be diminishing by the day. And it demands that we all think
i    seriously  about  the  conditions  that  create  innovation. "I
i    think  everyone's  steering way away from the monopolies, and I
i    think it's hurting innovation in the tech sector," says Wu.
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