test/expected/SLASHDOT/0102640274.header

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