Dont break up big tech, franchise it
Breaking up big tech is back in the news. The Department of Justice is suing Google for ‘monopolizing multiple digital advertising technology products,’ with concerns stemming from Google’s ownership of both the publisher (buy) and consumer side (sell) of the ads marketplace. Prior complaints have pointed to other issues, such as surreptitiously snapping up competitor companies as in the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) recently failed suit against Facebook. This increased scrutiny on big technology companies doesn't look like it's slowing down, with Amazon now in the FTCs headlights.
Yet solutions to these issues are taken from a prior era’s playbook, where forced breakups and halted mergers could retain competition in the economy. But TikTok threw a wrench in claims of monopolistic control, and the lack of any legislative action to set standards to guide courts has also left few satisfying remedies to more thorny questions around digital security, privacy, data management etc. Companies are left with competitive means to solve these problems, the largest recent quasi-regulatory shift coming from Apple implementing ‘App Tracking Transparency,’ or ATT, breaking traditional big tech tracking processes literally overnight.
In regulatory affairs, focusing on the core business operation & related data management has been traditionally where any regulatory action - public or private - has taken place. Rarely have the platforms themselves been thought of as ‘breakupable,’ but doing so might help solve many of the issues regulators and concerned citizens alike find with modern social platforms.
YouTube maintains over two billion active weekly users, and everyone gets the same user interface (UI). Features are not personalized to users interest, video content is, and any technology changes that YouTube incorporates are tested and rolled out to everyone, or simply stolen from rival platforms (looking at you, YouTube Shorts). With unification of UI, creating compelling content has become a game of chasing unknowable algorithmic favor on the one hand, and ever-increasing production budgets on the other. The era of casual social media is fading, leaving its users behind.
The solution to this problem, I believe, is relatively simple. Move the platforms one step down the stack, and license them. In a word - franchise social media. Instead of a single YouTube.com, let a slew of different companies license the rights to use the UI features, from design elements to AI recommendation models, to build better experiences.
Nearly every niche is going through an exciting time where technology is infusing and changing traditional models. In music, the proliferation of Digital Audio Workspaces like Ableton, coupled with rise in custom sound design applications like Neural DSP for guitarists, have led to an explosion of music making, with over 100k songs being released every day, up from 70k just 18 months earlier. Integrating these rapidly advancing music-making features into “musicians.YouTube.com”, “guitarists.TikTok.com”, “djent.Facebook.com”, etc would lead to far deeper audience engagements with that community, but platforms that serve billions would never adjust their platform to fit the desires of simple millions.
Franchising social media would solve several problems at once. Divorcing the technology from the companies that manage the content networks, their creators, and the hairy issues that come along with them would likely be a relief for engineering-driven companies like Facebook and Google. Platforms run by people closer to the creators would help solve opaque monetization issues creators currently face, and could open other paths toward revenue other than ads.
Regulatorily, it would mean that YouTube (for example) would be a middle step - a true technology provider - rather than both technology and content management system. The big tech platforms could still impose rules across any system using YouTube technology for their sites, but management would be similar to how ISPs manage their sites today rather than individual decisions over content safety. Free speech and censorship claims against big tech would disappear overnight as each community would set their own rules and guidelines. Disinformation would be more difficult to centrally proliferate. The fever pitched pace of online discourse would change with each community, and perhaps in society generally.
Millennials like me who grew up with the internet often miss the blogosphere days where you could get lost for hours finding new and unique content across a quickly expanding digital universe. Let the revolutionary technology companies that created these platforms continue focusing on engineering amazing things. But let the people manage their own communities. It would benefit us all.