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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 |