If you watched the hearing, you will have noticed many of the congressmen and women, after asking their questions in a harsh, accusatory manner, sometimes speaking over the witnesses, turn down to their laps to look at their Apple or Google phones, Google search something, post it to Twitter and or Facebook, and maybe purchase something on Amazon for good measure.
That kind of illustrates the point that these companies just might be too big, but what I don't hear anyone discussing are the potential consequences of breaking these companies up--they are a hard dependency in some way for most of the American populace if not the world's day to day operations and the quality of their services is largely reliant on their scale--I don't think the analogy to Standard Oil does justice to the complexity of the situation. We're not talking about a simple consumer product here, we're talking about complicated data-driven services, services that all rely on access to massive pools of information collected over years at this point, once you fragment the access to that data, the services will no longer perform as they currently do--then what will happen to the little guy we're trying to protect from the big boys who relies on Facebook and Google to advertise, Amazon to feed part of his supply chain, and Apple hardware? How might his business look if you suddenly swap out all of these behemoth quality services he depends on for disjointed shadows of their former selves, many of which will no longer be able to justify the gratis offerings and free tiers they currently can?
Not saying it these giants shouldn't be broken up, just saying it's a process that will require a lot of incredibly careful thought and to be honest I'm not confident those with the power to make the decisions in this case have all the tools they need to ensure such a transition happens without having catastrophic side-effects.
That kind of illustrates the point that these companies just might be too big, but what I don't hear anyone discussing are the potential consequences of breaking these companies up--they are a hard dependency in some way for most of the American populace if not the world's day to day operations and the quality of their services is largely reliant on their scale--I don't think the analogy to Standard Oil does justice to the complexity of the situation. We're not talking about a simple consumer product here, we're talking about complicated data-driven services, services that all rely on access to massive pools of information collected over years at this point, once you fragment the access to that data, the services will no longer perform as they currently do--then what will happen to the little guy we're trying to protect from the big boys who relies on Facebook and Google to advertise, Amazon to feed part of his supply chain, and Apple hardware? How might his business look if you suddenly swap out all of these behemoth quality services he depends on for disjointed shadows of their former selves, many of which will no longer be able to justify the gratis offerings and free tiers they currently can?
Not saying it these giants shouldn't be broken up, just saying it's a process that will require a lot of incredibly careful thought and to be honest I'm not confident those with the power to make the decisions in this case have all the tools they need to ensure such a transition happens without having catastrophic side-effects.