Submitted by If the tech industry wants another wave of innovation to match the PC or the internet, Google and Facebook must be broken up, journalist and film producer Jonathan Taplin told an audience at University College London’s Faculty of Law this week.
He was speaking at an event titled Crisis in Copyright Policy: How the digital monopolies have cornered culture and what it means for all of us, where he credited the clampers put on Bell then IBM for helping to create the PC industry and the internet.
There’s quite a few other companies I’d add to those two.
But yes, that sounds about right; spudley99 and I focused on the 1st option, and you on 2nd and 3rd …what (3rd) we sort of unfortunately got.
But it did spur a ~commercial product, Autographer. 
With the failure to break up Microsoft in the 90’s, the ability to break up ANY big company was lost. This was reaffirmed in the failure to break up any of the big banks/financial services that caused the world crash in 08. Any talk of breaking up any company today is just spitting in the wind.
Indeed. The political climate does not favour messing with Big Corp. Especially as the interest has shifted from breaking up the previous mostly national monopolies (IBM/Bell) to strengthening the current global monopolies (Microsoft/Apple/Google/Facebook/…) in a percieved national interest.
Hopefully the new EU sans UK will become more bold and put some needed regulation in place.
The EU was designed as a neo-lib dream to destroy the welfare state (and welfare capitalism/socialism). I can’t see why they’d take on big business for the sake of taking on big business. They’d be more likely to try and partner with (eg, give them lots of money for favors) those big businesses as they’ve been doing for a long while now. That’s what neo-libs do.
It’s funny you mention Microsoft, as I kept hearing in the 90’s and early 00’s about how we’d have to break up MS to have any real competition on the desktop.
Then Apple came along and snuck in the back door, followed shortly by Google …
And Windows remains supreme (in terms on numbers) on the desktop.
The rest are merely window (sic) dressing in MS’s eyes.
Right, that’s why I said ‘snuck in the back door’. I know people who’s only computers are iPads or Chromebooks. I expect this trend will continue to spike upwards in the coming years, as these devices become more capable as desktop computer replacements.
Apple was already around, and for quite some time MS kept them around intentionally so they could point and claim to have competition.
Google are also a rounding error when it comes to desktop…
MS still dominate desktop computing, and are still using it with varying degrees of success to leverage their way into other markets. Their dominance still makes it difficult if not impossible to compete, just look at Munich for an example.
Apple and Google have had success in other markets, not desktops.
Not sure if this adds to the conversation, just agreeing that that there was no ‘then Apple came along’ the market share for Macs isn’t much higher than that for Linux desktop usage. Microsoft still dominates in the 90-95% range.
Granted most of this is complete guess work, since there isn’t a perfect way to rate usage.
I’d suggest maybe Netflix would have some good numbers, but I think their ‘mobile’ and ‘console’ numbers would trounce everything else. Doesn’t help that Netflix is gimped on everything but IE/Edge.
Focusing on just the desktop market is itself an error though. If you look at consumer computing as a whole, you see a massive migration away from desktops and into smart devices of various kinds. This is why Apple focuses so much on iOS as a laptop replacement. And frankly, it’s a great idea. Open computers are too difficult for consumers to manage (I’m talking about the plague of computer viruses in the 00s, and even persisting on Windows to this day – and other open OS platforms – Windows/macOS).
Google is smart to follow this trend with Android and Chrome OS – though I wish they’d make more aggressive moves into laptop/hybrid style consumer computing. They are the best positioned to take on Microsoft in their own stronghold – but they haven’t been moving aggressively enough.
A quick search on, err google, threw up his company’s name “Intertainer” and guess who are license holders and investors? Microsoft, Apple and Sony.
Figures why the’d want Google and Facebook broken up!
Nice try, Mr. Taplin. How about breaking up Microsoft first. Surely they’ve monopolised PCs for almost 4 decades now! Until then, shut your biased trap please!
The thing with Apple is that they don’t home a monopoly stake in and market segment that the operate in.
Even in phones, Android devices far outnumber (As the Fandroids love to tell everyone else) iPhones.
I don’t know if this is some cunning plan by Cupertino or not.
I do know one thing and that is I don’t have nearly as many issues with my Apple kit than I ever had with Windows devices.
All Apple have to do to keep the non-monopoly status is NEVER ever release a low to mid-range phone.
Android dominates mostly due to this. Samsung vs Apple is pretty much the only high-range phone war, and Apple kind of funds Samsung by buying their displays anyhow…
Everyone wins, right? (except the consumers who end up buying 1000 dollar phones that don’t work all that great as a phone…)
shotsman,
Apple clearly has the resources to fix this, but what’s not clear is whether apple executives have much incentive to dig into profits to do it. For better or worse, the job of an executive is to maximize shareholder profits and apple has traditionally done very well investing in branding rather than R&D. Never the less, I think apple’s image has deteriorated in the past few years. Personally if I were running the ship, I’d focus far more on R&D, but then I have to concede I’ve never been in apple’s target demographic. My whole life I’ve always bought products for their value over image and to me the whole RDF was just off-putting.
without netneutrality laws…not possible if was possible, it should be done by OBAMA terms and end of BUSH 2nd term…but its too late for that idea i am afraid….you should follow the policy or get busted by law enforcement…very simple users to do….you had your chance with OBAMA…now its their turn to roll the dice
remember Yahoo was victim of it, then SPrint, then Tmobile later….tell me who benefit the most…bigger companies without the law…bigger companies still…it don’t matter how…they getting conseravtives and liberals lobby for them…but to me they all are the same side of the team vs startups
Edited 2017-12-02 22:02 UTC
user78,
Hmm, it doesn’t sound like you meant to respond to me since none of this corresponds to anything I said in my post.
In response to yours though, I agree that neither party has been willing to stand up for individuals against wall street / big business. Although it’s got to be said that the new republican tax plan, which is projected to add at least a trillion dollars to the deficit, will result in corporations acquiring even more wealth, and the burdens of paying for the national debt will invariably fall onto the shoulders of ordinary people like us.
It wouldn’t have to be this way, but there’s just so much damn corruption at all levels. Politicians are increasingly confident about lying through their teeth about their intentions, claiming to be working for the people while simultaneously stabbing us in the back. Meanwhile the electorate are stupid enough to believe the lies. It’s not that I think everyone is dishonest, but in politics you can rise much faster by being a crook and corrupting laws to favor large corporate interests, unfortunately.
Edited 2017-12-02 22:49 UTC
Most recent data
https://www.recode.net/2017/9/1/16236506/tech-amazon-apple-gdp-spend…
This one is older (2015), but takes revenue into account.
https://qz.com/374039/huaweis-rd-spend-is-massive-even-by-the-standa…
tuxroller,
Thanks for sharing those charts. It mostly looks like apple’s R&D trends have continued where they left off with both R&D and sales growing in similar proportions. Alas, apple R&D remains a meager 3%. I guess they feel it’s enough for them. On the other hand, if we were to ask apple’s customers, they are probably frustrated with the level of R&D at apple.
The chart with Huawei is interesting, I do wish more foreign companies were represented so that we could make a meaningful comparison between domestic and foreign R&D investment.
Edited 2017-12-03 09:34 UTC
THIS, this is what’s wrong with business today. It is NOT the job of an exec to maximize shareholder profits. I don’t know when that crept into business school, but it’s totally wrong. Businessmen (and their companies) have many other more important responsibilities than maximizing profits. Keeping profits up is good, but should never be a goal in and of itself. It should be a byproduct of sound corporate practices.
JLF65,
I readily concede that maximizing shareholder profits does cause harm, which is why I said “For better or worse, the job of an executive is to maximize shareholder profits…”.
When I said this, I did not mean to assert this as a ideal way of running a business, but rather as pragmatic acknowledgement of what happens when wallstreet owns these corporations. I genuinely agree with your concerns, however wallstreet ultimately decides how to run corporations and they get to decide what the corporate goals are. It’s just that for wallstreet this is practically synonymous with generating profits at any cost. Wallstreet literally exists for no other reason than that.
We’ll probably agree that wallstreet’s interests have been harmful to customers, harmful to employees, harmful to homeowners, harmful to the environment, etc…there’s nothing they won’t stoop to in the name of profit. When they fail, they get bailed out with our public funds. When they are insanely wealthy and setting record profits, their elected puppets succeed in passing massive tax cuts for them so they can collect even more money at the expense of our society and well being.
What the hell are we supposed to do to protect against such corruption? One would hope we could overcome this democratically, but democracy hasn’t helped weed out corruption. I really don’t know how we go about fixing this because our so called representatives are themselves benefactors of this corporate corruption.
Sorry JLF65 if this discussion gets out of hand, it’s a loaded topic! Haha.
Edited 2017-12-04 16:51 UTC
How interesting it would have break up Bell Labs long ago, we would have gotten rid of transistors, lasers and UNIX.
How interesting it would be to break up Google. We’d get rid of all that pesky research coming out of DeepMind and Google Brain, not to mention opensource projects like VP8 and VP9 which brought a viable open source video codec for the web, something OSAlert has requested for a long time.
For people interested in the atmosphere at Bell Labs when it still mattered check out http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/doug97.html“ rel=”nofollow”>https://web.archive.org/web/20071019220633/