[izacus]

This is IMO one of the greatest dangers of leaving those huge corporations like Facebook, Google, Amazon etc. unchecked - they're starting to attack competition by leveraging their primary products (Amazon blocking Chromecasts, Facebook censoring links and pages about their lawsuits are two latest cases) and are working deliberately against interests of greater public (and capitalism itself if we can stretch that :) )

I think it's slowly high time the anti-monopolistic regulation looks into their business practices and starts considering cutting them up into discrete companies per market.

[rms_returns]

It is not the anti-monopolistic authorities (who are part of the system, anyway), but WE_THE_PEOPLE who need to do something, so that competition is assured. WE need to keep switching services and not let one service rule everything.

Be it messengers, social networking apps, eCommerce stores, ERP software, anything - If we choose one organization to rule them all, it won't be very long before they start showing the traits of that one Saruman's ring that rules them all.

[legohead]

Yeah, that's not going to happen. The majority of "We the people" is made up of those who take the path of least resistance.

Facebook, by doing things like this, will only hurt themselves. We've been down this road before with Microsoft. It is anti-trust, and will get them in a lot of trouble.

[kartan]

It is anti-monopolistic authorities only purpose to do just that. And it is an important role to keep the economy running healthy. But I agree to an extend as I think that we also need to choose more actively to get better products. Each kind of action happens at a different level and they aren't mutually exclusive.

[Nitramp]

That doesn't work.

We the people have invented these authorities a long time ago precisely because we the people suck at making individual decisions to improve global outcomes, and we need to organize ourselves in institutions such as these to fix things.

[Camillo]

You list three companies but only give examples for two.

[010a]

Google devaluing the position of competitors like Yelp and TripAdvisor in search results for specific businesses.

http://www.eater.com/2015/11/25/9800584/google-burying-yelp-...

http://au.idigitaltimes.com/google-pushes-yelp-and-amazon-do...

http://www.fairsearch.org/yelp-ceo-stoppelman-criticizes-goo...

[necessity]

What's the problem with not helping your competitor? Telegram can use that ("censoring") as marketing if they know how to play it. People wanting to tell others what to do and how to operate their business calling themselves "capitalists" is hilarious.

[xg15]

If nothing else, it's that the users get pulled into some braindead power struggle between two companies that they could care less about. Yet they are the ones who find that they cannot use the products anymore properly. Moves like this decrease the quality of both your product and your competitor's. Yet the whole sense of competition in capitalism is supposedly to increase quality.

Of course that's just the obvious consequences, ignoring the larger implications of allowing companies to place arbitrary restrictions on their services - when at the same time those services become more and more critical infrastructure.

[Justsignedup]

Generally in a competitive market, you have one company selling product / service X and a competitor selling service Y which does something similar.

This is fine.

However online communication is different. Imagine if the telephone company would bleep out any time your friend mentions a competitor's company. You'd never know a competitor exists. Especially if that competitor is up-and-coming and doesn't have the pockets to send flyers to every damn house in the state.