git://git.nikiroo.be / gofetch.git / blame
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|---|---|---|
| 299a08f3 NR |
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 pgmrdlm shares a report from The Verge: Best known for coining\r | |
| 6 | i the phrase "net neutrality" and his book The Master Switch:\r | |
| 7 | i The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Wu has a new book\r | |
| 8 | i coming out in November called The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust\r | |
| 9 | i in the New Gilded Age. In it, he argues compellingly for a\r | |
| 10 | i return to aggressive antitrust enforcement in the style of\r | |
| 11 | i Teddy Roosevelt, saying that Google, Facebook, Amazon, and\r | |
| 12 | i other huge tech companies are a threat to democracy as they\r | |
| 13 | i get bigger and bigger. "We live in America, which has a strong\r | |
| 14 | i and proud tradition of breaking up companies that are too big\r | |
| 15 | i for inefficient reasons," Wu told me on this week's Vergecast.\r | |
| 16 | i "We need to reverse this idea that it's not an American\r | |
| 17 | i tradition. We've broken up dozens of companies." "I think if\r | |
| 18 | i you took a hard look at the acquisition of WhatsApp and\r | |
| 19 | i Instagram, the argument that the effects of those acquisitions\r | |
| 20 | i have been anticompetitive would be easy to prove for a number\r | |
| 21 | i of reasons," says Wu. And breaking up the company wouldn't be\r | |
| 22 | i hard, he says. "What would be the harm? You'll have three\r | |
| 23 | i competitors. It's not 'Oh my god, if you get rid of WhatsApp\r | |
| 24 | i and Instagram, well then the whole world's going to fall\r | |
| 25 | i apart.' It would be like 'Okay, now you have some companies\r | |
| 26 | i actually trying to offer you an alternative to Facebook.'"\r | |
| 27 | i Breaking up Facebook (and other huge tech companies like\r | |
| 28 | i Google and Amazon) could be simple under the current law,\r | |
| 29 | i suggests Wu. But it could also lead to a major rethinking of\r | |
| 30 | i how antitrust law should work in a world where the giant\r | |
| 31 | i platform companies give their products away for free, and the\r | |
| 32 | i ability for the government to restrict corporate power seems\r | |
| 33 | i to be diminishing by the day. And it demands that we all think\r | |
| 34 | i seriously about the conditions that create innovation. "I\r | |
| 35 | i think everyone's steering way away from the monopolies, and I\r | |
| 36 | i think it's hurting innovation in the tech sector," says Wu.\r | |
| 37 | i\r |