AT&T was an effective monopoly.
Facebook isn’t.
In response to Marksman saying that you bring up AT&T and suggest that because there were other ways to communicate that perhaps they shouldn’t have broken up Ma Bell.
I point out that AT&T and FB are not the same situation so why use it to refute what Marksman said and you say “because it’s an anti-trust case that doesn’t meet Marksman’s standard.”?
I guess you missed the part where I said it did meet that standard. What standard do you think Marksman is eluding to?
What? Marksman said that Facebook doesn’t have a monopoly on interpersonal communication. Which is true, but irrelevant. Because other famous antitrust actions don’t meet that standard either. Saying that the railroad antitrust cases, the AT&T case, and Facebook all don’t meet Marksman’s standard doesn’t say anything about if Facebook’s case meets some standard that the AT&T case set.
That sentence makes sense to me, yes. Saying that neither the Facebook case or the AT&T case comes close to meeting Marksman’s standard says nothing about the relative strength of the two cases. It certainly does not imply that I am saying that the Facebook case is as strong as the AT&T case.
Why should Facebook be broken up? Because it acquired monopoly power through acquisitions, as detailed in the linked antitrust subcommittee report. So it should be broken up into its constituent parts. It should also be further regulated, probably banning targeted ads based on spying on its users.
I don’t think his take is all that unreasonable, that Trump was impeached to try to exert some level of control over him in the last days of his presidency. I actually said this was a good reason to do it, since the Senate could vote to remove him immediately if things got crazy, it’s a useful thing to have over his head. And I don’t doubt that Republicans tried to exert influence on him using their upcoming vote. It’s the certainty of Greenwald’s tone that I could understand is grating, although I don’t find it to be so. He had another similar bad take with the needles, saying that at one point they were all the way at 80% and then swung back magically later in the night. Like, yes, the needle model was flawed (it is basically guaranteed to be flawed), but the needle swinging one way or the other doesn’t prove some grand conspiracy.
The crazy and deranged part is acting as if Snowden and Assange played an even an iota of a role in Ds decision that Trump needed to be impeached/controlled… as if ensuring the peaceful transfer of power and their personal safety wasn’t enough.
Yeah, now that we made it this far in one piece and are near the finish line, it’s possible that friends of some neoconservative Senators that will soon decide his fate are letting Trump know they would not look kindly on pardons of Snowden and Assange, just as Snowden said.
But that’s not a juicy enough story for Greedy Grifting Glenn, gotta turn it into part of the conspiracy of why Trump was impeached in the first place.
Incidentally, this is why I support a pardon of Snowden but not Assange. Snowden has always struck me as someone that is earnest and that did things he did for the right reasons. Assange and Glenn… not so much.
I mean Greenwald isn’t the one who needs to pivot to find a new angle. His brand is shitting on establishment Democrats, and I’ve got a feeling business is going to be booming. Guys like Larry O’Donnel and Maddow and Don Lemon and Fredo Cuomo and that Vox Rupar guy, they have to be sweating bigly. Who in the world is going watch their dumb shows now that they don’t have Trump to talk about? And that Rupar guy’s “job” appears to just be sitting around all day and watching Fox news? Is that a viable gig in the post Trump era? Who knows.
This is such a Greenwaldian tweet. Like it sort of makes sense until you think critically about it for 10 seconds and are like wait… the Dems would have tried to impeach Trump even if he was already out of office, right? Like even if you’re totally cynical and think it’s just political theatre, they still would have. And if nobody called Assange or Snowden existed, the Dems would still have impeached Trump, right? So how can any of the shit he’s talking about be any kind of a “reason” why Dems are doing this, let alone a “big reason”? It can’t have any explanatory power if the sequence of events would still go down the same way in the absence of any of it.
This is the same thing I was talking about here:
Again, Glenn’s tweet is basically composed of facts: The Dems are impeaching Trump, the impeachment process might keep him in line his last week, the Dems really do want Assange and Snowden punished. The problem, again, is the ordering of those facts to create a bullshit narrative, and again this is because it suits Glenn rhetorically to pretend he believes this.
Facebook doesn’t monopolize interpersonal communication via internet messaging.
AT&T OWNED all the phones and controlled all the phone calls.
I don’t use Facebook at all. I interact with people online every day through a dozen different avenues.
I wasn’t making any phone calls in the 1980s without AT&T.
I was one of the first people in this community to tell people Facebook is awful and people shouldn’t use them. Never had anything to do with them being a monopoly.
Google Search is actually the biggest internet tech monopoly right now. You can’t even compare the influence Google has on search to what Facebook has on messaging.
I wouldn’t stand up and oppose Facebook being broken up.
However if anyone noticed AT&T was broken up and 40 years lady we have a duopoly instead. So it doesn’t really matter if the government doesn’t actually stay on top of it.
I say legally the government would have a very tough road to try and break up Facebook for being a monopoly. It is one reason I encourage everyone not to use Facebook.
That being said any kind of break up would just likely break off oculus, WhatsApp and Instagram.
The core Facebook operation would likely be left intact and that is demonstrably the very worst part of all of it.
Maybe they could break it up into regional Facebook’s.