[hn_throwaway_99]

> Saying everything is so integrated that it can't possibly be decentralized is basically proof of monopoly.

That doesn't make any sense to me. I would expect different applications from the same company to share the same underlying infrastructure. Whether or not they are a monopoly is orthogonal to the issue of integration.

[abernard1]

> Whether or not they are a monopoly is orthogonal to the issue of integration.

So, I get you here and what you're saying. But companies at this scale argue they're "independently managed" or whatever.

With that context, for Facebook, there's really no way of saying that these 3 different brands are independent when it comes down to it.

It'd be much like Procter & Gamble saying their 100s of brands were all really different institutional entities.

[Spivak]

At the far end of this reasoning three separate companies that all use AWS share the same underlying infrastructure and all go down when AWS does. It doesn't mean they're not independently managed.

[human]

And the same could be said for the electrical grid, the post services, roads, etc. I agree that infrastructure and monopoly are two very distict concepts.

[abernard1]

But there aren't 3 different Amazon marketplaces--owned by Amazon--built on that infra. And AWS is available standalone.

Here we have core infrastructure that isn't sold to anyone else and powering 3 supposedly different social messaging services.

The key isn't the backend, it's the supposed independence of the frontends.

[baby]

No, it’s relatively easy to go from one cloud platform to the other (thanks god for terraform). To go out of fb infra? I can’t even imagine.