So what's up with Liz's plan to break up Gloogle, Farcebook, and Amazong?

[paulkienitz]

My initial preference in the primaries is for Elizabeth Warren, as she has the most concrete track record at working constructively to limit the power and maximize the accountability of the big financial institutions which are at the core of the increasing stratification and corruption of our public society. But then she comes up with an idea that makes me scratch my head: treat the three biggest internet companies as monopolies and break them up.

With Amazun this might make sense; you could realistically expect separate pieces to compete with each other. But the traditional competitive model just isn't going to apply to Goggle or Facebuck. They offer free services. If you split such a service in two, then whichever of the two offers slightly better service will drive the other out. This especially applies to social media where the number one reason for choosing a particular platform is because it's the one that other people you know have already chosen. There is little value in being the number two social media platform, and I as a user have practically zero choice in which one to use -- my friends and family have already chosen for me, and I can either communicate with them or go off and talk to myself.

So apparently Liz is mainly talking about just divesting them of some of the side companies they have added to their portfolios over the years: Youtub, Instagroan, and so on. That might help reduce the consolidation, but it does nothing about the essential monopoly control that each company will still have in their core area.

But I've also heard someone mention forcing Fazebuck to support integration with other media services, so that if I like service A and you like service B, we can still see each other's shit. That is probably the thing that would help the most, and would allow smaller companies to essentially sell a boutique social media experience that still has the content you're there for. But I remain doubtful that it would actually succeed in creating meaningful competition. Most of the people will probably still end up in the same place.

And for the search monopoly, I don't even see how there's an option like that which on paper might help make it competitive. That lock on the market probably isn't going anywhere until it gets disrupted by artificial intelligence that can understand natural language questions, and even that might just come from the same company.

What do you guys think? Have any of you looked into Liz's plan in greater depth, and do you have any ideas about it?

[Merlot]

1. "Liz?" Really?

[still_one]

2. It will be interesting to see how well this is accepted.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/elizabeth-warren-s-break-plan-amazon-facebook-could-be-dawn-ncna982161

She is assuming that there will be a majority consensus on this, but based on what happened with the Amazon deal that imploded in New York, I think it is a very mixed bag, and I am not sure if there is a clear consensus on this

[dflprincess]

3. Good old fashioned trust busting

just might open the door for more competition or better regulation of the monopolies that can't be broken up.

[paulkienitz]

8. you might be right

Maybe the best use of this plan is as a threat for leverage to get concessions.

[Awsi Dooger]

4. She's great on principals but clueless toward margin for error

It's easy to throw away 1% here and there when you're from Massachusetts with 13% more liberals than conservatives. Meanwhile, the national gap is 9% in the other direction

[Blue_true]

5. I too am surprised that Senator Warren is betting a lot on such an idea.

I don't think the breakup idea is sound.

BTW, there is still something called email to communicate with friend and family, there is even this old thing called a distribution list where you can send email to lots of people at once. Maybe I am getting old.

[MarvinGardens]

6. Google and Facebook are *not* monopolies.

There are plenty of other ways to communicate with friends online, and other search engines. Remember when it was commonly said that Microsoft had a monopoly? And now the devices most folks carry in their pockets are running... Not Windows.

[paulkienitz]

7. Microsoft is still a monopoly in the business office

In its own sphere, Microsoft has just as much of a hold on the market as the other two do in theirs. It's not an absolute monopoly, any more than the others are, but in all three cases it's an uphill struggle with recurring hidden costs to try doing without them. Search is the area where it's easiest to use an alternative, but you generally will still get sucked into some part of the Gloogle ecosystem in some way, unless you're handing everything over to Apple instead, which offers no grounds for me to think it's any better of an idea.

I still doubt that there's anything that can really be done about it -- the incentives for sharing one common platform are too strong. Even the smartphone duopoly of iOS vs Android is not much better than a monopoly in terms of what choices an end user has, and I have to figure that in the end the pull of standardization will eventually unbalance that and pull most people into one system.

If I were in her shoes, I'd be thinking more about a public-utility model than a competitive model, as the long term solution to these issues. But there's no way that can be an actionable item on the time scale of a presidential administration -- that might be decades away. The utility approach probably only works with stable mature services.

[MineralMan]

14. I see you can spell Microsoft.

Why is Office the standard? Well, that was my specialty as the main office system reviewer for PC World. Starting with word processing and then adding the other parts later, once suites emerged. Microsoft didn't always win in my reviews, especially with Word for Windows. Word for MS-DOS had heavy early competition from WordPerfect, which was preferred by many. When Word for Windows came out, it, too, had competitors. One, Ami Pro, actually was the top pick in one of the word processor roundup reviews I wrote. But, something happened.

All of the competing products in the word processing area made really stupid mistakes with their Windows versions, or got sold to some other company, which was unable to keep up with updates. Word ended up on top because it kept getting better while the others got worse or couldn't change.

Remember Lotus 1-2-3? It was the leading spreadsheet software for years. but, it didn't move to Windows fast enough. It tried creating an office suite by buying Ami Pro, but then royally screwed up that very nice, easy to use word processor by completely changing its interface to match its Lotus for Windows version. No can do. Ami Pro wasn't that popular yet, and died almost immediately after Lotus bought it and screwed it up. Then Microsoft added Excel and PowerPoint to the suite, and took a stab at a database application, which never did all that well, really.

But, by using a common interface and continually conducting usability testing, Office just got better and better for quite some time. Later, Microsoft screwed it up somewhat by redoing the interface, but by then, it was the business standard. All competition was gone. There are some open-source office systems, but they aren't really competitors for Microsoft Office, interesting as they are.

I watched the entire thing from a professional reviewer's point of view, starting with Word 1.1 for MS-DOS. Microsoft established a concept for word and document processing and stuck to it. It maintained backward compatibility for a very long time. It kept enhancing the program without compromising its usability.

Microsoft won. But, it was a long hard fight - a fight that began in 1984.

[paulkienitz]

16. I remember the nineties as well as you do

but what's of interest to this discussion is what's happened since then, when competition to MS Orifice and Windoze died down to an insignificant level, and they became something you had to have rather than something that needed to earn your business.

There are bugs in Word and Excel nowadays which have been there for over twenty years, unfixed. Some of them have even survived changing to a new codebase.

I use a lot of other Microsoft products besides Office, and in most of them I see lots of development but very little improvement. They keep trying to add new layers of convenience (which in the end just make things more complicated and confusing), but never fix long-standing problems. The only MS product that I consider reasonably well-made is the .Net platform, which manages to be a better Java than Java is. Most everything else they sell is awash in mediocrity and compromise, successful only because it's part of the overall winning business ecosystem, and progressing and innovating only when an actual competitor briefly does something to challenge them.

[MyNameGoesHere]

9. I suggest a spelling class

[paulkienitz]

10. do I have insufficient respect for brand names?

[MyNameGoesHere]

15. I just assumed your keyboard was made in someone's back shop

or your spell checker was developed by some person in a garage. Or maybe the pad or phone you bought from that guy that makes blenders on the side had a malfunction. I don't really know, maybe you could Google it a see what the issue is? Oops, I mean that search engine designed by that person that has an aroma therapy website and made a search engine on the side.

[MineralMan]

11. Liz? A close friend of yours, is she?

If you are serious about this post, why not just go ahead and spell the names of your villain companies correctly? What is served by misspelling them deliberately?

There's not a search engine monopoly. You can choose among several. That most people choose Google has more to do with what it delivers when you search.

But, I don't know. Ask "Liz" next time you meet with her.

[Amimnoch]

13. Presidential order will achieve this?

this is exactly the kind of stuff I keep harping on about.

It doesn’t matter if she wants this and you support it. It doesn’t matter if she wants this and you are opposed to it.

Presidents don’t write legislation in this country. Congress does. After it’s passed both chambers of Congress, the president gets to sign it into law, or Veto it.

As a Senator, she has MUCH more power than she EVER would as President to make this happen. Is there a bill authored or cosponsored by her to make this happen??

Is there any version of the 2020 Senate and House that will jointly pass this?? Especially in the Senate, I can’t conceive of a roll call majority for anything like this.

[paulkienitz]

17. The Senator explained this further in a town hall:

The particular thing she says she's keen to prevent is the Enron-like practice of doing your own buying and selling within the same marketplace that you are the mediator of for third parties. Like with Amazon, it's as if one particular wall street investment bank were also simultaneously the owner of the New York Stock Exchange. Now that is a restriction I can get behind... and I guess it means that running the Amazon Marketplace for third-party sellers can't be under the same roof as selling out of the Amazon warehouse. Still isn't clear how this could shake out in practice, but I am clearer now on the reasoning for how to approach the problem.