<story><title>Break Up the Tech Giants? No, Just Level the Field</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-11/break-up-the-tech-giants-no-just-level-the-field</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AndrewKemendo</author><text>&lt;i&gt;If the companies are merely facilitators and marketplaces, they should treat everything and everyone using them exactly the same.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s a really interesting proposition and one that I think bears looking at.&lt;p&gt;Facebook and Google are effectively trying to become privately owned utilities, aka natural monopolies, for access to the internet. Facebook with their internet.org and google with googlefiber. So there is a case to make there for those companies being looked at like utilities.&lt;p&gt;However I&amp;#x27;m not sure how Amazon fits that narrative. Amazon Marketplace is a tiny chunk of their sales revenue, despite it becoming the largest part of their fulfillment. AWS isn&amp;#x27;t infrastructure in the same way as facebook and google are trying to do.&lt;p&gt;I think it&amp;#x27;s too far a reach politically - they can&amp;#x27;t even get ISP&amp;#x27;s classified as utilities.&lt;p&gt;I think the major problem here is that because these companies don&amp;#x27;t need to operate from a fixed location in the same way a steel mill, power plant etc... would that there isn&amp;#x27;t really that many ways that the government can muscle them. They feel the pressure and they just pick up and move (legally first) or shift workers around. So regulators don&amp;#x27;t have a framework for how to muscle these companies in the same way as old industry.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lucio</author><text>I dunno for the other cases, but Facebook could be forced to have an standard protocol, an imposition justified because data and connections (friends) belong to the user not the company.&lt;p&gt;Something like how a phone number is portable between mobile cos.&lt;p&gt;With a standard protocol&amp;#x2F;API a Facebook user could move to another social network provider without losing the data or the connections.</text></comment>
<story><title>Break Up the Tech Giants? No, Just Level the Field</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-11/break-up-the-tech-giants-no-just-level-the-field</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AndrewKemendo</author><text>&lt;i&gt;If the companies are merely facilitators and marketplaces, they should treat everything and everyone using them exactly the same.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s a really interesting proposition and one that I think bears looking at.&lt;p&gt;Facebook and Google are effectively trying to become privately owned utilities, aka natural monopolies, for access to the internet. Facebook with their internet.org and google with googlefiber. So there is a case to make there for those companies being looked at like utilities.&lt;p&gt;However I&amp;#x27;m not sure how Amazon fits that narrative. Amazon Marketplace is a tiny chunk of their sales revenue, despite it becoming the largest part of their fulfillment. AWS isn&amp;#x27;t infrastructure in the same way as facebook and google are trying to do.&lt;p&gt;I think it&amp;#x27;s too far a reach politically - they can&amp;#x27;t even get ISP&amp;#x27;s classified as utilities.&lt;p&gt;I think the major problem here is that because these companies don&amp;#x27;t need to operate from a fixed location in the same way a steel mill, power plant etc... would that there isn&amp;#x27;t really that many ways that the government can muscle them. They feel the pressure and they just pick up and move (legally first) or shift workers around. So regulators don&amp;#x27;t have a framework for how to muscle these companies in the same way as old industry.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aaron-lebo</author><text>Does classifying them as utilities simply lock them in? There&amp;#x27;s no special recognition given to them currently, they are just big business that can get beat by other businesses. If you make them a utility, you&amp;#x27;re giving them recognition and connecting the to government in ways specific to them. Maybe they would have been beaten given a couple decades, but with the above scenario you&amp;#x27;ve simply ensured they&amp;#x27;ll be around for 80 years and we have to deal with their boring and uninnovative products.&lt;p&gt;My perhaps naive belief is the only thing stopping these companies is outside ambition and will. Is this overthinking the utility thing? It seems so defeatist and reactionary. Oh no, nobody has beaten Facebook after 13 years, it&amp;#x27;s never gonna happen.</text></comment>