Facebook, Amazon etc....
- Thread starter Raoul
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I hope he at least paid for dinner.
He just used this tactic
He just used this tactic
It won’t be the last, he’s done it literally 30 times.
Did Zuckerberg have to go to this? And is there anything preventing him (or anyone else) from giving snarky answers to every question from a grandstanding Senator?
"Are you angry about this?"
"Not really. Mildly disturbed but my fortune soothes me"
"Are you angry about this?"
"Not really. Mildly disturbed but my fortune soothes me"
Have you seen his script? It must be Arial 50, max one sentence. The guy is scrolling through his dossier, wtf.
On the NBC streams it's at around 01:48h
(for context: am only now re-watching)
Obligatory Obama Reference 
Senator Kennedy has a lot of Grandpa Munster going on.
No. thing is they are technically not hiding it, it surely is included in t&c's and that's in line with what regulation intends. The fiction is, that you as user are fully aware of what you are agreeing with when signing up with facebook because you got the possibility (another fiction) to read the stuff. If you're unhappy you can always chose not to sign up. So obviously you could charge facebook on ethical grounds, but the bigger miss here imo is with regulators failing to acknowledge the giant screw-up current regulation is.
I think that monopoly or not isn't even the real question because anti-trust regulation doesn't depend on that. My take is as follows:
markets work best in competition*
actors dont naturally want competition
govt must ensure actors not disciplined by competition to not abuse this freedom
govt does it by:
a.) prohibiting extrinsic (mergers) growth (intrinsic (better product) is ok, would be unfair to punish the 'winners')
b.) manually oversee action by companies not disciplined by competition (monopoly is the extreme case but
it goes further e.g. companies with market share 50% plus etc. ideally in every specifically designed market without competition this varies a lot by country standards)
*please note that what exactly the best form of competition is, is afaik not really an area of scientific agreement
Edit: to come back to the topic there is imo a real debate necessary on whether or not facebook is being disciplined by competition in the market of digital targeted advertising. i am no expert on that field but to me it seems like there is only google and their products differ a fair amount in their specs i.e. facebook has much more data on people's connections and has a much more personal environment to place ads in (surely google is still sad they lost out on that russian ads job back in 2016) compared to google that has more meta data about peoples behavior and a more neutral environment.
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No support on Cafe for mp4?
Can't help but think that this will turn out to be disingenuous. Facebook doesn't directly use your microphone for ad targeting... however data collected from the mic is available as a source to some advertisers and they can use it to target.
Guess his shortness and always framing himself to be taller bits weren't made up.
This has to blow up soon, there’s too many people that this is happening to.
He's getting grilled again by old congresspeople who are obsessed with proving they are hip enough to know about tech and social media.
I doubt that is the case at all. I'm sure they'd be the first to admit to knowing little about tech but it is their job to hold hearings. They rely on their staffers to prime them well and their intelligence to be able to follow up during the hearings. I'd like to see all the people scoffing about these old farts perform in the variety of hearings that these old guys go through on different subjects on a daily basis.
I'm not sure the Google analogy is correct. Very early on Google was an advertising company not a search company while Facebook has always been a data collection company. Google also always had a plan to monetize whereas Facebook really got lucky as they fumbled around for over half a decade before they eventually stumbled upon their core economic equation for success.
Google was also an actual innovator without whose innovations would have delayed the development of certain internet technologies.
Facebook was a completely different beast in the social network sphere which already existed. Facebook really had no core innovations. They lurched around for years just trying to boost their user base based on their lucky "cool factor" of coming from Harvard - If Zuckerberg went to University of Virginia not Harvard no one would have ever switched to FB from MySpace.
It was mostly luck rather than anything Zuckerberg did that allowed Facebook to win the social network battle (as opposed to innovation in Google's case). Facebook went 5 years without turning a profit (2009 was first time) and then when it finally turned a profit it was because of app sales and partnerships rather than the advertising model they eventually found.
It was never even a given that Facebook would even remain a profitable company and not fold before 2012 or so when they finally figured out how to leverage all their data into advertising. Unlike with Google's search advertising (Yahoo wasn't anywhere near Google on monetizing search at the start), Facebook is extremely lucky MySpace never figured out the advertising model and instead focused on the failed strategy of music. Also you're right that Google is now a technology company but Facebook still isn't really. At its core its still a data company not a tech company which is really part of the problem.
I have to finish watching these hearings today, Zuckerberg disgusts me though. I can't think of any other tech billionaire who got so lucky and lacked any noticeable skills. Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy, Larry Ellison... Zuckerberg's name does not belong to the pantheon of legendary computer scientists and technology pioneers. I'd rather Myspace founder Brad Greenspan was in the role that Zuckerberg is in now, he would have been much better suited to it than lucky Zucky.
Google is actually in its third iteration now. It started as a search engine company, then transitioned into an ad based company and is now in the process of transitioning into an AI company.
I should add that Facebook did have innovations they just weren't tech innovations, they were more business development/data collection innovations.
For instance, Facebook's marketing originally was based on distributing to universities and for first year or two Facebook required a .edu email to sign in. They exclusivity to college students was key to their success for several reasons - it built up a generational user base at exactly the right age that would be core users for the next decades, it spread through the Ivy leagues first and then to other .edu which gave it a cool "elite" factor, and this requirement for a .edu began the trend of encouraging people to use their real names and provide more real information to the social network because it seemed exclusive and thus secure.
For instance, Facebook's marketing originally was based on distributing to universities and for first year or two Facebook required a .edu email to sign in. They exclusivity to college students was key to their success for several reasons - it built up a generational user base at exactly the right age that would be core users for the next decades, it spread through the Ivy leagues first and then to other .edu which gave it a cool "elite" factor, and this requirement for a .edu began the trend of encouraging people to use their real names and provide more real information to the social network because it seemed exclusive and thus secure.
Huh? Google didn't transition from a search engine company to an ad based company, it just started using more ads on its search engine and other areas. Its search engine still brings in most of its revenue, through ads.
It was search engine based in the late 90s before it became a profitable ad based business. The objective was search optimization. Their valuation didn't start going up until they added a more comprehensive ad revenue model over time, followed by developing internal apps and making external acquisitions in the early to mid 2000s.
But... They still make most of their money by being a search engine.
In the present yes, but they are transitioning models again - this time to AI.
But they haven't transitioned before! Google has always been about making shit tonnes of cash on their search engine and then doing loads of other side projects, some of which are successful (chrome, android) many of which fail (Google+, project fi). Just because they are now doing that with AI doesnt mean they're changing their model.
I just don't get what you're saying. How exactly did Google transition from a search based company to an ad based company just because they put ads on their search engine and started spreading out into other areas of the internet? How are they transitioning into an AI company because they are also investing in AI?
Sorry I wasn't comparing their business models, just their approach to the question of monopolies. Google are unquestionably a monopoly if you look at their core business, but they dipped their toes into smartphones, laptops, wearable tech, AI etc. with the pretty transparent objective of redefining themselves as a "technology company" to avoid regulation. It also helps their brand but often they lose a lot of money in the process so the net effect on profit is debatable. Facebook are a very different company but employing the same logic when claiming they're not a monopoly.
I don't agree with that. The search engine is the service they use to draw people in, it doesn't actually make any money per se. The adverts are what bring in the revenue.
Google Adsense could actually exist without the search engine and it would still make a tonne of money.
There was a time int he late 90s when they were just one of many search engine startups looking for ways to monitize themselves. Yahoo was a leader at the time with the likes of Google, Excite, Hotbot, and a slew of others attempting to compete for the same space. At that time they were search engine based where ad revenues were either minuscule or non-existent. They didn't become a full on ad business until a couple of years later.
This theme that it's facebook's genius that allows people to connect for free is amusing. It's not as if I and the person I communicate with pay our internet providers to supply the infrastructure we need to do that... Amazing how many specific things he has no knowledge about too...
That's the thing though, you said it there, the search engine is still what draws people in.
All I'm saying is Google's search engine is still at the core of their business, obviously. I mean, it's the most visited site in the world. But you are right in that they'd still, now, have a good revenue stream purely from AdSense.
My point though was that you specifically said it’s the search engine that makes money. If Google had just the search engine, they would be making next to no money (certainly no profit)
If Google had just just their Adsense, they’d still be making tens of billions of pounds.
The search engine is a talisman at best. It does help them make money, but their business model is built around adverts right now.
True. The search engine was a brand builder that eventually allowed them to monetize themselves through what eventually became their ad business. You have to first draw people in in fairly large numbers before you can monetize. Just look at the likes of Facebook from 2004-08 - rapidly emerged out of nothing to become the biggest social network - largely for free, which then allowed the idea of monetization to actually mean something.
I see what you are saying and to a point I can agree that Google definitely monopolizes search but IMO that's just because their innovations were so far ahead of Yahoo and everyone else their monopoly on search was inevitable. Even now, Bing is just not nearly as good for any of my searches.
The key is I don't think Google is just superficially redefining themselves to avoid regulation (and I have no idea how Congress could have even regulated Google in mid 2000s). Google really has been reshaping the entire company for the future as a broader technology company or as Raoul puts it an AI company rather than a search/advertising company. Social media advertising is more effective than search advertising. So they've spent a lot of money gobbling up every promising AI start-up during the last 5 years and they have really been pushing their departments to innovate and derive broader tech based revenue.
As you say, they're moving into AI now. It's mostly academic right now and costing a lot more than it is making them. At some point that will change dramatically as they will have a vast array of incredibly powerful tools which they will hire out to solve incredibly complex optimisation problems for regular people, businesses and governments of all sizes.
Zuckerberg looks like that fecking Android from Star Trek.