[sgregnt]

This comment is very biased, who are you to speak for all facebook users?

For one thing, Facebook allows me to stay connected with my family in another country. I'm infinity grateful to it for that, and I'm ready to exchange getting this amazing free service for my very personal information. No one stole this data from me, I'm happy with this arrangement.

Same with other the services: Google's, amazon, and what not... Hell, the progress all these amazing services brought made my live on earth a heaven really (not sarcastic)!

I'm personaly not afraid of big tech, imho they compete with each other, they rise and fall, let them be. I'm afraid of regulation that incentivizes lobbying, kill competition, and create long term monopolies.

[osmarks]

They do not compete with each other (potential competitors just get bought out), and already do lobbying in vast quantities. And there's nothing about inter-country communication which requires Facebook's data mining, inasmuch as there are already network links between them which Facebook uses.

[jpttsn]

I’d view “buying competitors” as a sign of “competing”.

Otherwise, in the Middle Ages, “European kingdoms don’t fight wars, they just conquer one another”

[osmarks]

Possibly, but it's not the sort of competition which leads to more choice and better outcomes for consumers.

[jpttsn]

Maybe, maybe not. Consumers would be analogous to consumers of kingdoms, so it all sort of falls apart.

Anyway, if the competition is not an ends unto itself it would seem a more direct argument can be made.

[lanstin]

The math showing free market equilibrium being the most prosperous depends on a large number of entities on both the selling and the buying end.

[minusf]

i can think of a couple of sad examples where buyout resulted in drop of quality or even dying off. it's often used to kill competition and not the other way.

[ev1]

The problem here is that the majority of users don't actually have informed consent. They don't know what is happening. They think it's just being served ads or something and are like "OK, I can accept the ads in exchange for the service" - what they don't know is FB is passing data to and from data brokers, purchasing your credit card purchases, matching your phone numbers against real life data, then leaking that data to unintended recipients via API or otherwise.

I wouldn't care if I was served isolated display ads, even targetted based on my entered data.

[trasz]

There are plenty of services that would serve that role - staying connected with your family - at least as good as FB does. That's the part most people are missing, I think: that FB doesn't really have that much to offer, apart from its market share. And, because of FB monopoly, pretty much anything that hurts them is good for the market, ie everyone, in particular their users.

[phatfish]

You have been able to do that since email existed. You would just pay a few cents extra a month to your ISP for them to run the servers. Their business model wasn't data mining and behavioural manipulation.