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🗞 News
Break up Facebook?
Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook (who left a decade ago) published a long piece in the New York Times arguing that Facebook should be broken up. Link
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I think there are two sets of issues to consider here. First, when we look at Google, Facebook, Amazon and perhaps Apple, there's a tendency to conflate concerns about the absolute size and market power of these companies (all of which are of course debatable) with concerns about specific problems: privacy, radicalization and filter bubbles, spread of harmful content, law enforcement access to encrypted messages and so on, all the way down to very micro things like app store curation. Breaking up Facebook by splitting off Instagram and WhatsApp would reduce its market power, but would have no effect at all on rumors spreading on WhatsApp, school bullying on Instagram or abusive content in the newsfeed. In the same way, splitting Youtube apart from Google wouldn't solve radicalization. So which problem are you trying to solve?
Second, anti-trust theory, on both the diagnosis side and the remedy side, seems to be flummoxed when faced by products that are free or as cheap as possible, and that do not rely on familiar kinds of restrictive practices (the tying of Standard Oil) for their market power. The US in particular has tended to focus exclusively on price, where the EU has looked much more at competition, but neither has a good account of what exactly is wrong with Amazon (if anything - and of course it is still less than half the size of Walmart in the USA), or indeed with Facebook. Neither is there a robust theory of what, specifically, to do about it. 'Break them up' seems to come more from familiarity than analysis: it's not clear how much real effect splitting off IG and WA would have on the market power of the core newsfeed, and Amazon's retail business doesn't have anything to split off (and no, AWS isn't subsidizing it). We saw the same thing in Elizabeth Warren's idea that platform owners can't be on their own platform - which would actually mean that Google would be banned from making Google Maps for Android. So, we've got to the point that a lot of people want to do something, but not really, much further.
Other news...
Google held its annual developer conference, IO, which has now become mostly about showing what it's doing with machine learning. So, on one hand we had lots of ML platform tools as part of Google Cloud, and on the other lots of useful bits of ML scattered all over the consumer products - for example, Android will now be able to generate live text captions to any audio playing on your device, and Google will now be indexing the speech inside podcasts. There's an ongoing discovery process here - what can you apply ML to, how can you surface it in the UI, and should it live on the device or in the cloud?
However, the other emphasis, and this was new, was privacy. So, a bunch of Google apps (eg Maps) gain private mode, with no data going to Google, and there are new tools to see and delete data held on you and manage ads inside Chrome. Some of the ad tools, in particular, have got attention from the adtech world: Google and Apple are both squeezing them. Meanwhile, Google is making a big splash around differential privacy / AKA federated learning. In essence, this means that instead of all data being aggregated at the centre for analysis, the analysis happens on the users devices and only the results, in an anonymized form, are merged back into the central system. Links: Every IO announcement, Verge roundup, Google online comic about Federated learning, change in ad privacy in Chrome, Privacy
Another IO announcement: the Nest brand is going away. All of Google's home hardware will be merged into one unit, and the 'works with Nest' platform for other devices will go away. Smart home is another sector in discovery mode: we know there will be something here, but not yet quite what. Link
Apparently, the Chinese have got hold of at least some of the NSA"s tools/exploits/secretly-discovered vulnerabilities for breaking into networks and have been using them. This is why no-one in tech is impressed by the idea that they should build back-doors into their products, give the keys to the NSA (or any other government) and expect those keys to remain secure. Link
🔮 Reading
Alex Stamos, formerly CSO of Facebook, gave a one hour talk at Berkeley on the trade-offs involved in managing security and abuse on platforms. Do you want privacy or do you want to track and identify state actors? Do you worry about the power these companies have, or do you want them to bar some kinds of speech? Or all at once? Link
The empty promise of 'data moats' - a16z on how having lots of data probably isn't a big competitive advantage. Link
LinkedIn is the new Craigslist, ripe for unbundling with better products (yes, but I wrote the same thing in 2013...). Link
Disney wrote off its entire stake in VICE. Link
How McDonald's plans to reinvent the drive though with tech. Link
TikTok is the new music kingmaker, and labels want to get paid (there is nothing new under the sun). Link
Fun analysis of Snapchat's gender/swap filter. Link
😮 Cool things of the week
Farmers binge-watch Netflix in massage chairs as they drive their ploughs. Link
📊 Statistics
Google said there are now 2.5bn active Google Android devices. Doing the algebra, that means about 4bn people now have a smartphone. Link
Fascinating set of charts for the Japanese camera industry. The compact camera is now mostly gone thanks to smartphones, but the higher-end removable-lens cameras have stabilized, and at a much higher revenue than pre-digital, and lens sales are doing great. Also, the customer for these cameras is now younger and less male. Digital has opened up pro/hobbyist cameras even as smartphones killed snapshot cameras. Link
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