I'm not a fan of extremely concentrated power in any industry, but the market will work itself out in the long run. It's one thing if a company gains their market share and influence via government coercion (e.g. telecom, utilities), but the orgs in question have primarily done so because they're frankly better at their jobs than everyone else. Amazon is a phenomenally run company; it's hell to work there, but I won't begrudge Bezos for making money and putting outdated business models at risk because he found how to ship basically anything to your doorstep in two days at a normal price. I'm far less sympathetic for someone like Facebook because Zuckerberg is a tool, but the media landscape has shifted a thousand times in the last century; Facebook won't be on top forever.

MySpace became the more powerful social media until Facebook launched. MySpace started dying when Rupert Murdoch bought the company.

Quote:Myspace was acquired by News Corporation in July 2005 for $580 million,[6] and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States.[7][8] In April 2008, Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors and was surpassed in the number of unique U.S. visitors in May 2009,[9] though Myspace generated $800 million in revenue during the 2008 fiscal year.[10] Since then, the number of Myspace users has declined steadily in spite of several redesigns.[11] As of January 2018, Myspace was ranked 4,153 by total Web traffic, and 1,657 in the United States.[3]

Quote:In June 2009, Myspace employed approximately 1,600 employees.[15][16] In June 2011, Specific Media Group and Justin Timberlake jointly purchased the company for approximately $35 million.[17] On February 11, 2016, it was announced that Myspace and its parent company had been purchased by Time Inc.[18][19] Time Inc. was in turn purchased by the Meredith Corporation on January 31, 2018.[20]

So Time Inc is not the owners anymore.

Quote:Myspace quickly gained popularity among teenagers and young adults. In February 2005, DeWolfe held talks with Mark Zuckerberg over acquiring Facebook but DeWolfe rejected Zuckerberg's $75 million offer.[28]

So, the MySpace founders tried to buy Facebook away from Mark.

Uhh, I think you just proved her point.

(03-11-2019 06:06 PM)Kronke Wrote:  Uhh, I think you just proved her point.

this is too much fonzies sitting on the sidelines....

Spot on.

This is getting interesting. If she makes this her issue, she may actually be able to pull herself out of the hole she put herself in.

There's always unintended consequences of government action. Breaking up the left coast tech giants might sound good to some of you on paper, but lord knows what will come next and what will happen after that. The market has ways of making things work in the long run, let it play out.

https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/down-th...ke-harris/

What's scary is they think they have absolute power.

Article on a book about Silicon Valley:

"...Absolutely. As I said above, I spent several years on this book, and that’s largely because the final two were spent going down this rabbit hole of political intolerance in Silicon Valley. The deeper I delved into this topic and the more people I spoke with, it became very clear to me that what happened with Palmer—from the inaccurate reporting, to the online mob, to the professional discrimination—was not an isolated instance; in fact, part of the reason I focused so heavily on this was because his situation seemed to so perfectly personify Life Circa 2016. And the other reason I focused so heavily on this was because Facebook is one of the most powerful companies in the world—a company built on an ethos of “openness” and transparency”; who literally hangs up posters on campus with the slogans “Always Assume Positive Intent” and “Bring Your Authentic Self to Work”—and, well, given that Facebook has ambitions of owning virtual reality, I think their actions in actual reality are incredibly important to assess and evaluate.

To this point, I’ll end with a passage from Chapter 45 in the book…

After the election, the majority of Facebook employees appeared to feel some combination of shocked, devastated, and/or horrified. This cocktail of emotions seemed to crystalize in the creation of a quickly popular internal Facebook group called “Refocusing Our Mission.” As per the page’s introductory message—“The results of the 2016 Election show that Facebook has failed in its mission”—the conceit of this group was that Trump’s victory was some sort of proof that Facebook needed to change its ways...."