HE’S RIGHT: Professor Who Coined Term ‘Net Neutrality’ Thinks It’s Time To Break Up Facebook.

via slashdot.org:

pgmrdlm shares a report from The Verge:Best known for coining the phrase “net neutrality” and his book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Wu has a new book coming out in November called The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. In it, he argues compellingly for a return to aggressive antitrust enforcement in the style of Teddy Roosevelt, saying that Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other huge tech companies are a threat to democracy as they get bigger and bigger. “We live in America, which has a strong and proud tradition of breaking up companies that are too big for inefficient reasons,” Wu told me on this week’s Vergecast. “We need to reverse this idea that it’s not an American tradition. We’ve broken up dozens of companies.”

“I think if you took a hard look at the acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram, the argument that the effects of those acquisitions have been anticompetitive would be easy to prove for a number of reasons,” says Wu. And breaking up the company wouldn’t be hard, he says. “What would be the harm? You’ll have three competitors. It’s not ‘Oh my god, if you get rid of WhatsApp and Instagram, well then the whole world’s going to fall apart.’ It would be like ‘Okay, now you have some companies actually trying to offer you an alternative to Facebook.'” Breaking up Facebook (and other huge tech companies like Google and Amazon) could be simple under the current law, suggests Wu. But it could also lead to a major rethinking of how antitrust law should work in a world where the giant platform companies give their products away for free, and the ability for the government to restrict corporate power seems to be diminishing by the day. And it demands that we all think seriously about the conditions that create innovation. “I think everyone’s steering way away from the monopolies, and I think it’s hurting innovation in the tech sector,” says Wu.

 

Related: AG Sessions to Examine Antitrust Violations, Censorship by Tech Corps.

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Google, Amazon and Facebook are deeply vulnerable on Antitrust. And they’re going to have decide whether they choose ‘woke’ or ‘broke’, lefty politics or maintaining their monopoly. Because the one thing they can’t do is be a monopoly and control everyone’s speech.

Attention is being paid.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions will meet with state attorneys general later this month to discuss concerns that tech companies “may be hurting competition and intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas on their platforms,” the Department of Justice said in a statement Wednesday.

The proposed meeting between the country’s top prosecutor and state officials is the first major signal of potential antitrust action against Silicon Valley and follows recent claims by President Donald Trump of political bias and censorship by major social media firms.

What that means, aside from Google and Facebook investing in even more lawyers, is a message being sent.

“Mixing ‘competition’ and the ‘exchange of ideas’ raises the idea of government using antitrust law to intimidate companies into doing their bidding — into being favorable to the Trump administration,” said Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association. “It’s worrisome.” Facebook and Google are both members of CCIA.

 

 

h/t GR

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