What Facebook (or for that matter Google) does is not competition. They're far too large to really compete with when you're getting up and running. Everything that even gets close to something they do or might want to do gets bought out.
I can't imagine anyone thinks such a situation is in the best interest of the user.
1) Yes, it's voluntary, but the interests of the consumers aren't necessarily taken into account. Only the shareholders of the companies being bought stand to gain from the transactions.
2) Google/Fb gives these companies an offer at a moment when it still makes sense to buy them (i.e. when they can both win from the acquisition). If the company being bought decides to decline, Google or FB or whatever monolith has ways of destroying them:
- By buying their competitor instead of them, and heavily investing in them
- By just building the feature themselves, and potentially fighting a very expensive legal battle
Are you taking the general community's well being into account when you ask for a raise in your salary? You know, if and when you do ask for a raise you're making the product your company produces that much more expensive, you're not adhering to your own rules.
In any voluntary transaction, both parties gain out of it. People who are not parties to that transaction have no business in it.
> 1) Yes, it's voluntary, but the interests of the consumers aren't necessarily taken into account. Only the shareholders of the companies being bought stand to gain from the transactions
Yes of course, because they are trading their private property. When you buy vegetables from the supermarket, can someone complain that you're not taking into consideration other people's interests, namely there's less food for everyone else. And also that only you and the supermarket stand to gain out of the transaction. This is an reductio ad absurdum of your statement
> 2) Google/Fb gives these companies an offer at a moment when it still makes sense to buy them (i.e. when they can both win from the acquisition). If the company being bought decides to decline, Google or FB or whatever monolith has ways of destroying them: - By buying their competitor instead of them, and heavily investing in them - By just building the feature themselves, and potentially fighting a very expensive legal battle
Okay, I see your logical problem, you want good to be done in one instance, but you IMHO fail to see the consequences if you logically apply that concept to its conclusion.
Again, voluntary transaction. If the startup refuses, it's voluntary. If FB or Google goes and invests elsewhere it's their money, their business. Who are we to tell them what to do with their money. Would you be okay if they told what to do with money you've earned? All things you've mentioned are coercive i.e. they are all based on things people have agreed on in written documents. Concretely, if they (Google/FB) buy a competitor, it's their money, their business. If they build the feature themselves, their money, they don't owe this startup their money, they refused when offered anyway. If they fight a legal battle, it's still legitimate because both parties (Google/FB and startup) have all agreed to work with local laws (US or otherwise).
Please, at least one example of a social networking application where "everybody is" and which makes Facebook fear the loss of it's users.
For example, give us at least one example of a service that would directly cause Facebook to think twice before making it's app constantly harass me to update my page, minimising the videos I am trying to close, and automatically sending me push notifications for someone starting a live video?
> Please, at least one example of a social networking application where "everybody is"
Everybody is not there, even on Facebook, there is no such social network yet.
> and which makes Facebook fear the loss of it's users.
Whatsapp, Instagram and Snapchat. Facebook has paid premium prices for the former two and gave a pretty high offer for snapchat. They wouldn't do that if they're concerned ( of course, neither you nor I can confirm their emotional state, but we can derive useful conclusions from their actions)
> For example, give us at least one example of a service that would directly cause Facebook to think twice before making it's app constantly harass me to update my page, minimising the videos I am trying to close, and automatically sending me push notifications for someone starting a live video?
Have you stopped using facebook? Then why should they care? They will care IMO, but the point is by continuing to use facebook, you've shown that you weigh the benefits of facebook to be more than the costs/annoyances. So, you're happy enough as far as they're concerned, they might try and make you happier but that's left to them :)
Edit: Whoops! I hit submit before completing my last sentence
It's harder to stop using Facebook when there's no proper alternative.
More importantly, the functionality of Facebook can be replicated by anyone with more-then a few years of experience in software.
So you're saying that Facebook does have proper competition? No, they don't. They were lucky enough to be at the exact place at the exact time to build the sturdy population of users. And now most of the users are paying for their luck.
>What Facebook (or for that matter Google) does is not competition.
Why not? Being the first one in and the best at what you do is still competition. Most industries don't get disrupted by a competitor until there is truly some valuable innovation that happened. (ie look at Yahoo and MySpace)
Whenever the government starts to interfere it sounds really good on paper, but it typically is not in the best interest of the user. Existing corporations often use laws to then further eliminate incoming competition.
Cars are not really a valid analogy here because we're talking about services with network effects that impose behavioral norms for all users regardless of location.
To use your driving example it would be like saying that to use a car everyone has to drive on the same side of the road or accept identical pollution control standards. That's obviously not the case. Cars are adapted--sometimes quite substantially--to local jurisdictions.
Korea and Japan actually did this with cars. Enforcing extremely high tariffs on all imported vehicles. It seems to have worked well for their automotive Industries.
Can USA wake up one day and decide to impose a 40% tariff without repercussions? Aren't there rules and international trade agreements backed by enforcement mechanisms?
> Can USA wake up one day and decide to impose a 40% tariff without repercussions? Aren't there rules and international trade agreements backed by enforcement mechanisms?
You could debate how far the US could go with it before there are serious repercussions. However, several of the big auto-making countries go a great distance out of their way to shield their own domestic auto industries from foreign competition at home, including Germany and Japan. The US should behave exactly as they do and for exactly the same reasons.
What has the US gained by allowing foreign auto competitors such equal footing? Japan and Germany are widely regarded as having the two best auto industries overall, it has clearly has worked out just fine for them (insert the replies about correlation/causation). Why is the US held to a very different standard than China, Germany and Japan (3 of the 4 largest economies) when it comes to trade? That should and will end by necessity, whether it's a Trump or a Bernie Sanders that does it. It's a cultural wave that can't be stopped.
The US should use every lever at its disposal to compete, including strategically manipulating the global reserve currency (eg it's crazy that the US isn't running a $2 trillion, ten year, infrastructure QE program; the USD as the global reserve currency is unlikely to last more than a few more decades, we should leverage it while we have it to increase US competitiveness).
You're ignoring the US consumers who get cheaper and higher quality vehicles from abroad because we don't have protectionist politics on vehicles. Why should I pay more for inferior Detroit cars?
Monopolies are bad for consumers. The Chinese government is protecting Chinese markets from global monopolies (and also acting as the world's biggest innovation VC). Other countries have been asleep at the wheel and are only just starting to wake up with uber and airbnb. (Also the fact that fb has been caught targeting Kremlin propaganda to voters in foreign elections makes me wonder if they will get shuttered in a lot of places. And Twitter can only be next.)
There's a difference between protecting from global monopolies, and totally eliminating any competition.
The fact that the Chinese sanctioned companies become monopolies themselves is even more proof that it's about nationalism than protection from monopolies.
> it's about nationalism than protection from monopolies
Well if I was Chinese I guess I'd hope my government was making some effort to protect the national interest at least.
Of course they are developing their own monopolies and have some pretty terrifying social control programs in the works. That can be criticised in its own right and hopefully it will be. But to try and make the case that FB is a benevolent saviour of the Chinese citizenry from their evil government is nonsense and whataboutery. If you must believe in the US as some kind of global beacon of free speech and democracy, then at least don't think that just being the lesser of two evils is a really great way to promote this.
The hard problem is that any proprietary social platform has to have a mass of people using it to be particularly useful, and any social platform that big is collecting data that makes it a huge security risk and economic factor at the national level. The only solutions I can think of are to have social networks under national control or to promote interoperability between smaller networks and partition data collection to an acceptable level for national security purposes.
It's a general question of national security for any country, and in the broader sense which also includes control of their economies. The Chinese have been very smart about this, other countries should look at this. I don't think that's pushing a pro-Chinese line so much as about other countries needing to learn something about protecting national interest from 'foreign data invaders' (which have been mainly US to date but which I can see starting to include Russia and China)
thank you for espousing the free markets ideology (I concur with you). I don't know why but these days, I feel HN also has become protectionist (where I'd have expected free marketeers).
Perhaps this is out of context, but I wonder if Trump is a symptom of this protectionism or if they're unrelated
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I can't imagine anyone thinks such a situation is in the best interest of the user.