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goobster  ·  1812 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Cory Doctorow: Inaction is a Form of Action

    "b) now we have a bunch of medium-sized players, each with their own set of the exact same rules because they're all competing with eachother. It's like having five big banks instead of one. You're going to get the exact same service and restrictions, with very slight variations..."

And even more importantly, all the same people still working on the same projects, with the same internal knowledge of the others, friend circles, and back-channel communications. So now you have institutionalized insider trading and back-channel cooperation making their products work better than any competitors' could. (See: MS Windows and MS Office.)

The only antitrust model that would work to break up a company like FB, would be to sell the IDEA to a third party (the IP, and possibly the codebase), and to close down the existing product.

So suddenly there is no Facebook, no Instagram, no Messenger. Those apps just stop working for 7-8 months until a new company can be formed, a new dev team can be hired (with NONE of the previous company's employees), trained on the code base, and then patching all the "holes" where their code (say, Instagram) integrated with FB and Messenger, so the app is "whole" and can work as a stand-alone app...

And now all the "users" need to redownload the app from the new company - call it "Latergram" - and set up new accounts, and all their previous data is lost, and...

Yeah. Breaking up a tech company will never work.

You can only kinda gently force them to open up to competition, a la Microsoft v Java, which STILL wound up in MS completely fucking Java, and then releasing an identical product that was Windows-only (C#), with hard-wired access into secret OS calls that made it completely fail on any non MS-owned OS or Browser.

Everybody ... ummm ... wins?