Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Just yesterday, Facebook put on a good show back and forth.

If one day, a former co-founder or executive of a large BAT factory comes out and thinks that a large factory is already too large and needs to be split into several small companies in order to benefit the development of science and technology ecology, I am afraid the whole industry will be amazed.

But this is happening in Facebook.

Yesterday, Chris Hughes, the co-founder of Facebook, who started a business in a dorm and left office for more than a decade, published an article claiming that Facebook is now too big. Zuckerberg is in charge of three core communication platforms with billions of users-Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp-with one person holding the lifeblood of the flow of information. He also believes that while Zuckerberg himself is sane, Facebook has ignored security in pursuit of traffic. At the same time, Zuckerberg has been surrounded by a small circle that can only agree, so that both Facebook and Zuckerberg have become "very unAmerican" and "very dangerous" beings, calling for the use of antitrust law to use the power of regulators to force the break-up of Facebook.

Soon Facebook responded, and Nick Clegg, vice president of global affairs and communications at Facebook, made a statement saying that Facebook was currently very successful and should not be split. At the same time, he stressed: "the accountability of technology companies can only be achieved by setting new rules for the Internet." that's what Mark Zuckerberg called for. Zuckerberg is meeting with government leaders this week to further advance the work. "

It is no exaggeration to say that the seemingly absurd topic of "breaking up the tech giant" has become more and more intense in the United States and even entered the government proposition.

Venture capital encounters resentful tycoon: what trouble does Facebook cause?

The idea that tech giants need to be broken up has been repeatedly mentioned by the media, academics and government officials in the United States in recent years. The most influential recently is Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who proposed on a political tour that she would break up giant technology companies such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple if she was elected president of the United States.

The core idea of Elizabeth Warren is that as tech giants become more flat, market competition will become more opaque and more problematic. According to Warren, 50 per cent of ecommerce companies build platforms through Amazon, and 70 per cent of internet traffic flows through Google and Facebook products. Technology giants build a platform and put competitive products and their own products on a unified platform, which is likely to restrain scientific and technological innovation. Amazon, for example, can launch similar products in its own brands by knowing which products have better sales data on its ecommerce platform.

At the same time, as wealth accumulates, giant companies can make unlimited mergers and acquisitions of their competitors. For example, Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram, cutting off competition directly from the source and delaying innovation as a result of competition. In this context, capital has shown a serious risk aversion tendency, the number of technology start-ups has fallen sharply, and the first round of financing of technology start-ups has fallen by 22% since 2012.

In addition to the impact on technology products themselves, Warren also puts forward two aspects of the impact of technology giants on society as a whole.

The first is the data threat.

With the precedent of Facebook, the tech world is almost jittery. Warren believes that because of the lack of competition in the technology industry, China, the giants are no longer so concerned about the data security of their users. Moreover, under the oligarchy, user data is too centralized, and technology companies have stronger manipulation of user data.

The second is speech control.

Because of the excessive concentration of social media products, tech giants are likely to control their speech in a more secretive way. Warren claimed that his campaign ads were repeatedly blocked in Facebook because his campaign ads proposed a break-up of Facebook.

Why did the break-up curse of the giant befall the technology industry?

The term "regulatory invalidation" repeatedly mentioned by Warren refers to the unique anti-monopoly law of the United States, that is, trust law.

Since the United States Congress passed the first global anti-monopoly law in 1890, the related antitrust movement has been subverting the interest division system of American business. In view of commercial monopoly, "split" is a means often used in the United States. As a result of the first antitrust lawsuit, the Petroleum Standard Company, which monopolized US oil resources at that time, was split into 34 small companies. The last antitrust ruling was in the 1980s, when Reagan broke up the communications giant AT&T, splitting AT&T, which once exceeded the total turnover of Mobil, GM and Eysenck, into a parent company and seven subsidiaries.

In the IT industry, the most well-known antitrust lawsuit takes place in Microsoft. In 1996, the US Department of Justice launched a suspected monopoly investigation against Microsoft over the bundling of Windows and IE browsers, which also resulted in a break-up of Microsoft. But the final ruling was that Microsoft was not split, only accepted the fine, and opened part of the Windows system source code, allowing PC vendors to freely choose OS.

The result was ridiculed at the time, when it was thought that the Justice Department was only trying to collect protection money, not to mention that there was almost no PC operating system available in the year 2000 or so when the lawsuit ended.

After Microsoft, antitrust litigation entered a long period of silence, almost "letting go" of the entire Internet and mobile Internet era. The reasons for this can be divided into the following points:

First of all, the Internet product itself is open, the user does not have the migration cost. If users are not satisfied with a product, they can directly move the mouse and fingers to leave.

At the same time, for a long time, Internet products are just doing traffic business, and the trend of data monetization has not yet emerged. The situation that Internet giants rely on the number of users for exaggerated capital accumulation and technology accumulation has not yet occurred.

Finally, in the alternation of Internet and mobile Internet, capital and venture capital are very active, the competition in the industry is fierce, and mergers and acquisitions of "buyout the whole track" are rare.

But in just a few years, all this has changed.

Under the future scientific and technological armaments, the plight of the separation of science and technology giants

There is also another voice about the break-up of the tech giant. But these opponents are not for the platform of the tech giants themselves, but that the break-up of the tech giants at this time will make the United States fall behind in the global technological competition.

We know that the world is in a very tense moment for scientific and technological innovation in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, space technology and so on. All these scientific and technological innovations have high barriers and need the support of talents, capital, data and computing power. We have to admit that these resources are not in the hands of start-ups or capital, but in the hands of technology giants, not to mention that technology giants such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and other technology giants are already leading the innovation of these cutting-edge technologies in the United States.

In this battlefield, China, the biggest rival of the United States, has a greater advantage in terms of volume-a better foundation for the sinking of the mobile Internet, a greater pool of future talent, a wider amount of data and not inferior capital capacity. Under this premise, it seems that Chinese enterprises do not need "monopoly" to gain a large part of the so-called "monopoly" advantage of American enterprises. If the American technology giant splits itself again, will it not slow down its own progress in technological research and development?

From this point of view, the split dilemma faced by the tech giants today is somewhat similar to that of Microsoft: the monopoly of the giants has indeed had a negative impact on the industry and society as a whole; but in the technological competition for a long time in the future, people also have to rely on the tech giants for innovation-the split of the tech giants does not allow startups to get the number to compete in the future.

Warren has gained a big boost in opinion polls because of calls for a break-up of the tech giants, according to media reports. Especially under the assistance of Facebook's former roommate, it has been pushed to the forefront about whether Facebook will be sued and in what form.

At present, for the present, there may be two ways of litigation against Facebook, one is to carry out antitrust litigation to split Facebook according to Warren, and the other is to sue for Facebook's merger and acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram. As for the final mode of litigation, the future is likely to be related to whether there will really be a break-up among the tech giants.

The break-up of any American technology giant may open up uncharted territory for Chinese companies.

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