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kleinbl00  ·  1796 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Cory Doctorow: Inaction is a Form of Action

This isn't hard at all. You say "your business is illegal. You are no longer allowed to make money on it." Suddenly Facebook can no longer collect ad revenue on FB or Instagram. The court gives Zuck 30 days to wind things down and let people download their data.

How many days do you think it will take before someone comes up with a business that allows you to upload your data? How many different balkanized Bookfaces are there going to be? And how much advantage does the one that talks to everyone else's balkanized Bookface over the one that keeps your shit behind their paywall? How much advantage does the one that charges you $4 a year and serves no ads over the one that pays you $4 a year and shoves all the ads it wants at you?

See, I don't know the answer there. But I know that suddenly we've introduced two or three different dimensions of vendor competition. Maybe I pay $10 a month to keep my shit completely locked down and roam freely over the rest of BookFaceNet with all my data intact. Maybe the kidz all install BookFaceTock because their favorite K-Pop star lives there.

I could break up fucking Facebook tomorrow. I could break up Microsoft tomorrow: M$ is no longer allowed to sell software. That means there's a trillion dollar market of businesses who need their M$ shit supported. Remember - theoretically docx is an "open protocol" (lol) so I just need to find the vendor that will disrupt my life the least while not ruining me in the process.

They broke up Bell and nothing fucking happened. They broke up the A&P and nothing fucking happened. You kick 'em in the wallet and tell 'em to make money some other way. AT&T in 1981? $99b market cap (2017 dollars). AT&T in 2017? $226b.

We wouldn't even have the Internet if Bell hadn't been broken up. What would we have right now if, instead of making a movie celebrating what an amoral dipshit Zuckerberg is, we tore Facebook the fuck down?