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by danpattn
2124 days ago
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No doubt the pivots and acquisitions were how Facebook stayed on top. My point was that it doesn't matter which company wins. All breaking up Facebook would do is start the process over. No healthy market equilibrium can form when the winners benefit from increasing returns. If it wasn't Facebook abusing the system it would just be someone else. The Chinese software market ended up the same way the US market did. Very different legal systems, almost identical outcomes. If we want to solve the problem for good we need to correct what is causing the monopolies to form and we need to counter the strategies that monopolists use to stay in power. Using free and open source software platforms that are built on top of open protocols is the way to solve both problems. Linux's monopoly in the server market and the Internet's open protocols have been effective at preventing corporate monopolies. We just need to copy these solutions and apply them to social networks, consumer operating systems, and cloud services. |
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For example, if I can't do something with a 3rd party (be hired, enter a contest, ??) without doing it via FB, the 3rd party should be creating a liability for themself compared to email, or POTS where my terms with any compatible provider can be stated as a fact and dismissed in legal terms.
Having just received a change of TOS from Microsoft that claims to include their "products": One can invest in however much Microsoft Windows compatible infrastructure only to learn one has to stop using Windows completely within a few weeks if one disagrees with any new terms they care to name? Linux could do everything wrong from now on, yet the federation of similar distributions make it the only real option server side where one has investments to protect from future rent seeking by any one "winner".