I think the change is coming because Zuck couldn't make his end of the bargain with Congress.
It's a boilerplate deal. We've seen it with railroads, telecoms, sugar, cigarettes, etc. The industry gets a little too rowdy for the good of the country and other businesses. Congress gets them to testify for a few hours and makes sure that they tell a lie somewhere in that timeframe. Now, Congress has leverage on the industry. In return, the industry gets to write the laws surrounding themselves. They become, effectively, a poly/monopoly. Sure, the big gains are gone, but so are the losses. Your industry, yourself, and all your relatives and descendants will never be poor again. You make a tidy 3% profit for eternity.
Congress gave Zuck that deal. Clean up social media; this Russia/flat-earth/vaccine stuff has got to stop. But Zuck can't do it. The ML/AI approach gets you to 99.9%. But to actually clean up the mess and get all the plebs to take their vitamins again takes 99.999% (or something like this). You need real people monitoring the site, like China's 50-cent army. But those people cost way too much to make FB profitable. It's the same for all the social media sites. They don't have a business if it's a clean one.
It took a while (hey, it's Congress), but the folks on Capital Hill finally got the message that Zuck can't do it. But, look, it just has to be clean. The mess is affecting other businesses now. Those 5G towers are expensive and took a lot of investment, we can't have people just hacksawing them. So we're going to see the congresscritters start to find ways to get the job done. One way, per this article, is to split them up. Take all the Facial-Feature-books (NoseBooks? EarBooks? EyeBooks?) and clean them up or let them fail outright. I'm sure we'll see negotiations with Zuck in the near future.
But the end objective, powered by the hulking slow weight of congressional subpoenas, is the same: no more messes.
This works for FB but how about Google, Apple, and Amazon? FB's messes go beyond market domination as you point out. But for the others, where and when did they cross the line?
It's a boilerplate deal. We've seen it with railroads, telecoms, sugar, cigarettes, etc. The industry gets a little too rowdy for the good of the country and other businesses. Congress gets them to testify for a few hours and makes sure that they tell a lie somewhere in that timeframe. Now, Congress has leverage on the industry. In return, the industry gets to write the laws surrounding themselves. They become, effectively, a poly/monopoly. Sure, the big gains are gone, but so are the losses. Your industry, yourself, and all your relatives and descendants will never be poor again. You make a tidy 3% profit for eternity.
Congress gave Zuck that deal. Clean up social media; this Russia/flat-earth/vaccine stuff has got to stop. But Zuck can't do it. The ML/AI approach gets you to 99.9%. But to actually clean up the mess and get all the plebs to take their vitamins again takes 99.999% (or something like this). You need real people monitoring the site, like China's 50-cent army. But those people cost way too much to make FB profitable. It's the same for all the social media sites. They don't have a business if it's a clean one.
It took a while (hey, it's Congress), but the folks on Capital Hill finally got the message that Zuck can't do it. But, look, it just has to be clean. The mess is affecting other businesses now. Those 5G towers are expensive and took a lot of investment, we can't have people just hacksawing them. So we're going to see the congresscritters start to find ways to get the job done. One way, per this article, is to split them up. Take all the Facial-Feature-books (NoseBooks? EarBooks? EyeBooks?) and clean them up or let them fail outright. I'm sure we'll see negotiations with Zuck in the near future.
But the end objective, powered by the hulking slow weight of congressional subpoenas, is the same: no more messes.