#facebook squashes competition

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John Oliver Calls For The Break Up Of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook - TheStreet

The "Last Week Tonight" host makes the case for antitrust legislation.

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I’ve been waiting 15 years for Facebook to die. I’m more hopeful than ever | Cory Doctorow

Facebook is struggling to retain users, fending off regulation, trying to pivot to VR, and paying a massive wage premium to attract the workers it needs to make any of this happen. The company is on the ropes

For 15 years, I’ve been waiting for Facebook to suffer the fate of every network-effects-driven success story – to experience the precipitous decline that is triggered by people leaving the service and taking the value they brought to it with them. Facebook now has to somehow retain users who are fed up to the eyeballs with its never-ending failures and scandals, while funding a pivot to VR, while fending off overlapping salvoes of global regulatory challenges to its business model, while paying a massive wage premium to attract and retain the workers that it needs to make any of this happen. All that, amid an exodus of its most valuable users and a frontal regulatory assault on its ability to extract revenues from those users’ online activities.

Stein’s Law holds that “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

Facebook can’t go on forever.

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Social’s Down

If the massive Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp/ outage today isn’t the best indicator of the gargantuan Zuckerberg social media monopoly that exists today then I don’t know what is.

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Rulings in Facebook, Apple antitrust cases show how tough it is to define a monopoly in the age of Big Tech

Obama-appointed judges on opposite ends of the country have refused to rein in Big Tech.

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Zuckerberg Grows $5.1 Billion Richer After Judge Throws Out FTC’s Antitrust Case Against Facebook

The judge's decision underscores the complexitis about Facebook's future: It won't be easy to regulate, and its stock has been nothing but a winner.

A federal judge has given Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook investors a trillion or so reasons to smile.

Judge James E. Boasberg on Monday tossed aside several antitrust cases brought by the FTC and state authorities, turning away the most concerted campaign yet to police the social network. The decision sent Facebook’s stock sharply higher, allowing the company to cross the $1 trillion threshold in market value for the first time. These rising shares were a boon for common shareholder and billionaire alike: The 4.1% increase in stock price during after-hours trading added $5.1 billion to Zuckerberg’s fortune. (This briefly made Zuckerberg the world’s fourth richest person, wealthier than Bill Gates for the first time.)

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The Fight to Rein In Facebook Is Going to Be a Slow Grind

A major loss in court was a reminder of how steep the climb really is.

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Privacy-focused Facebook competitor MeWe says it's gained more than 2 million users in the past week

Alt-right fringe groups have flocked to alternative social networks as Facebook and Twitter clamp down on hate speech and false election fraud claims.

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Can I just say I love your blog for existing. Keep fighting. Facebook doesn't deserve to be a monopoly feeding off of so-called relationships and forsaking user privacy. We need to get more people reading and involved in this. It was fine when it first started, but now it's degraded into a capitalist cesspool.

Thank you, anonymous! Agreed on all counts.