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