I heard a fairly prominent libertarian say that the case for anti-trust being used against the big social networks is better than any anti-trust case ever seen before.
I’m not an expert anti-trust by any stretch. I know enough to know that the case against Standard Oil was nonsense, but let’s use it as an example. When you break up a company like that, which actually has assets like oil refineries, the process kind of makes sense to me. You divide up the refineries and make lots of little companies which compete with each other. Seems straightforward enough.
I don’t get how this would work with a social network and I haven’t seen an actual proposal. Twitter doesn’t sell oil. It sells ads. The input is eyeball time from its users. To break up the Big Twitter, would you divide its users up and create a bunch of smaller Twitters (call them Twitlets)? If you did this, couldn’t the users just move to the Twitlet they prefer? If they prefer to all be together, aren’t we right back where we started? We would just have Twitter by another name.
The only way around this that I can imagine would be to have the government run social media. I don’t even want to give that concept space in my brain. Oh, maybe we could all just join Weibo?
Chemical Wikiterian 