* 1955: GM makes $800M profit [1]; GNP is about $3 trillion [2] — GM's profit is 1/3750 of the overall US economy.
* 2016: Apple makes $50B profit [3]; GNP is about $18 trillion [2] — Apple's profit is 1/360 of the US economy.
I would be very curious how it looked in 1929! How much of the economy did, say, Rockefeller or Carnegie control?
[1] http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_arch...
[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gross-national-pr...
[3] http://fortune.com/2016/06/08/fortune-500-most-profitable-co...
US GDP in 1955 was around $400 billion (it didn't reach $3t until the 1980s). GM's profit in 1955 exceeded $1 billion.[1] That produces a ratio very similar to Apple's today. That's despite immense global growth since 1955 giving Apple an enormous global market to play in. Most of GM's profit was derived from the US domestic market. If we went just by Apple's US profit today, their ratio would be slashed to closer to 1/1000.
US GDP in 2018 will be roughly $20.5 trillion. Apple's ratio against that is about 1/360 (their profit will be closer to $57b-$60b for 2018 than $50b).
[1] http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,807967,...
This idea of "government should do something!" just stokes outrage. It's not constructive. Propose something, and you'll find that the devil is in those details. Laws? Which laws? Apply them how? Those laws are not as clear or useful as you seem to think.
1) a person has the right to export their data and receive it in a usable format 2) a person has the right to use this exported data and give it to a competitor
There is no reason why switching between, say, Spotify, Google Play Music, Apple Music, and Amazon Music should be any harder than switching a cell phone carrier. Imagine how much faster Myspace or Digg would've imploded if you could just export to a competitor with a click of a button.
Each uses internal IP, unique to them, that won't work with a competitors technology even if they could get access to it. And of course that ignores all the issues of trade secrets and patents that your suggestion would bring up.
You can switch cell phone carriers because of a few very simple standards. But when you do you are not taking the majority of data about you. You are only taking your number.
I also challenge that all of this data is "your data." Let's take hacker news as an example. What is "your data"? Your username, passwords, comments, those all seem pretty clear. But what about your upvotes and reports? Is that your data? An upvote involves you, but also someone else's comment or story, so it's hard to argue that it's yours alone to do with as you please. Also, what about website log data? Is that your data? Logs about web requests that you make are definitely trigger by an action of yours, but the log message itself is produced by ycombinator software, so why should you get to "own" it?
The only big controversy I'm aware of is trying to download your social graph from Facebook. You can't even export your friends' email addresses! But... this was a big controversy a few years ago when Google was pissed that Facebook would import all your Gmail addresses but FB wouldn't let them be exported back out. It seems like the privacy advocates argued Facebook's side of this.
You can have data portability, or you can keep data private. Without crazy DRM schemes, you can't have both.
2. There are plenty of antitrust laws on the books from the early 1900s.
Over the years Facebook have acquired over fifty lesser known companies.
For starters, the part of my social network on Whatsapp can spin off to Whatsapp, and the part of my social network on Instagram can spin off to Instagram.
Example: personal data format standards, making it simple to export your data from one platform to another,
Another example: regular vertical spread of data companies, so they can collect but not utilize, and you must be notified of anything sold about you (e.g. inclusion on an email list)
Compare to the carrier and media conglomerate monopolies which don't receive any rhetorical pushes against them as monopolies. Despite them literally being the only option in many localities - and not even tiny ones either.
The network effects Facebook and Google enjoy are every bit as powerful as carrier barriers to entry. I have way more options for Internet access (two wired, four different cellular providers), than I do connecting with my family over social media. (My family lives all over the world, and I don’t even have phone numbers or email addresses for most of them). I have no choice not to have Google scan my emails, because my family all had gmail addresses. Etc.
Less.
Apple, Amazon, Microsoft (should be part of FAANG), Google are not trying to eat Facebook's extraordinarily profitable social monopoly. Google tried, kinda sorta, briefly. Apple raised a pinky for a second, with Ping. They can't and they know they can't, they've all given up on trying. Facebook gets to print $20+ billion per year in monopoly profit from here on out unopposed. Separately, the epic position of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger is almost entirely unopposed by Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google.
Apple, Amazon, Facebook, are not trying to eat the Windows-Office monopoly. Google is, kinda sorta. They're certainly not going out of their way to do it, say, by cutting into their $100+ billion in cash to massively subsidize the effort. Most of Google's focus is on mobile. Apple is by far the most successful company on the planet, they're not desperately trying to go after mass market share with the Mac to challenge Windows for the bottom 90% of the market. Apple is fat & happy with where their margins are at in computing, they gave up trying to dethrone the Windows monopoly a very long time ago.
Amazon, Apple, Facebook are not trying to eat Google's long duration, extraordinarily profitable search monopoly. Google search is tracking toward $40 billion per year in operating profit, the second greatest product for printing cash on earth next to the iPhone. Amazon throw a shot at it, briefly, and quickly gave up. Apple and Facebook, to whatever extent they ever considered going after mainstream search, haven't done anything there. Only Microsoft took a serious long-term shot at Google search; they're not making a serious effort there any longer, they're maintaining. Microsoft hasn't been desperately trying to take away Google's search monopoly in many years. Not only did they realize they can't, no matter what they spend, they probably like having the monopoly issue to hit Google over. The other companies are also not trying to build their own competitor to Android or YouTube (Facebook has taken a modest shot at YouTube, it isn't scratching them so far), almost entirely leaving both positions unchallenged (Apple has no interest in actually competing with Android in what it does in the market, Android is a required part of what makes the iPhone possible and lucrative, as previously with Windows & Mac; Android phones being the majority are the best thing that ever happened to the iPhone).
Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, aren't interested in entering retail to compete with Amazon, essentially at all. They have no interest in those margins. They bat at Amazon's online retail empire at the edges. They're also not desperately trying to distrupt Amazon's publishing empire, ebook monopoly (arguably the least concerning of all the monopoly positions in the group, because digital book sales are declining and independent book stores are thriving).
Netflix is part of FAANG, and they're the least powerful of all of the major tech companies. They have no monopoly. Their margin is so bad it's realistically very negative - they're vaporizing incredible sums of cash, borrowing heavily (perhaps dangerously), to try to get to scale before the clock runs out. Their balance sheet gets more dire by the quarter.
> If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.
> - J Paul Getty
The government wants the data that they provide and the tax revenue their employees provide.
Besides, fascism grows by the day everywhere around the world, in rich and intelectualized societies no less (or moreso.) The 60's have called and want their ideals back. The saddest part? People who lived through that are getting beyond old any day now. And when their first-hand reminiscence has gone? It'll fall upon the 80's children and oh! how soon we forget. There are those who'll stand by Stallman, Wozniak and those who'll stand by Jobs, Gates, Bezos or Graham but I'm just being mean-spirited now. Well really, the first three off the latter group look starkly more like your run-of-the-mill fascist if creatively visualized not in the private but in the public sphere, being granted whimsical wishes by an unprincipled society.
It all boils down to MIT vs. GPL for us, doesn't it? Hacker, know thyself.
Think of all those FAANG engineers and startup founders who aren’t going to go quietly from their upper middle class incomes and RSUs/ISOs, regardless of the cost to society.
What matter's is who is controlling production and how is this control is enforced.
> with the growing success of populist, nationalist and even neofascist movements all around the world
The first, populism, is neutral; at its best it is the recognition of legitimate grievances, while at its worst it is the channeling of those grievances into tribalism.
The second, nationalism, is more fraught: It is where tribalism becomes codified, and allegiance takes the place of grievance.
The last, fascism, is the end-state, where tribalism enables violence against both those outside the tribe and those seen as a threat within it.
It's unfortunate that populism has a name that leads to this misconception. People see the word and jump into discussion assuming that they know what is all about.
Populism is the claim that the people have a 'will'. There is no real disagreement of what the real people want or need for compromise. There are people who disagree but they are not the 'real people'. They are somehow compromised, the corrupt elite, misled or 'the others'. What 'people want' is already known, now you just need to vote populist into power to implement the will of the people. Laws and norms often make it difficult to implement this 'will' and they should be changed.
By contrast liberal[1] democracies are based on idea that the complex democratic process gradually produces something that people can live with. It's not exactly what anyone wants. There is no common agreement of what people want when people go and vote. The end result of working democracy is negotiated compromise. Laws and norms should be followed when this game of democracy is played.
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[1]: liberal is another word that have different meanings in different contexts. Liberal does not mean leftist in this context.
As for GP's point, it may be the case for Trump but not so much for the newest populist in Brazil, for instance, who's more or less a sellout to the US of A and giant platform companies as many a breed of politician here down south have ever been.
If we can actually start to break into a new paradigm, personally I think that technology actually can help with these types of societal problems.
For example, decentralized autonomous organizations via Ethereum could have some benefits over more traditional political structures.
Banking concentration can potentially be mitigated by things like cryptocurrency.
In terms of replacing the technology monopolies, decentralized technologies could provide common public platforms instead. For example take things like Mastodon instead of Facebook (which is federation, I believe P2P social could gain wider deployment).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_newspape...
Could they try to sell papers (or attract eyeballs, or whatever) by actually providing relevant, factual, useful information instead of emotional manipulation?
Once we have these memes established we can blame things like extremism on them.
Wu, as an antitrust legal scholar, certainly has an agenda. This article is fear mongering and playing to the NYT base.
as opposed to...?
As an aside, it's interesting to watch how people on both sides of the aisle are jumping to find the rise of fascism in every nook and cranny of society. Sometimes, like here, it doesn't even seem to be an attempt at a political cudgel, which is the usual case. While I think most can agree FAANG is out of control, I'm not sure the fascism alarmism is a great approach.
