For the broader media ecosystem, we used to have stronger regulations preventing individual entities (be them individuals of corporations) from owning certain percentages of the media ecosystem.
I’d be a fan of modernizing that concept, defining social media companies as being a part of the media ecosystem, and lowering that ownership percentage.
Force individual social media companies to be broken up into smaller entities, and force a rollback of a lot of the traditional media consolidation.
It's easy to imagine such things when it relates to owning all the movie theaters or television stations in a given market. But if it's just because people choose to type YouTube into their browser or upload to YouTube over competitors, how do propose to do it?
I would mainly focus on regulating inter-operability, and countering the network effects so that when you have more than a certain share of the media ecosystem you become defined as a “Major Media” organization, and that designation creates additional regulations that you must follow.
Some of those would be interoperability focused (so, YouTube could have competitiors that are only attempting to provide a competing front-end and ad-serving business, while being able to take advantage of YouTube’s storage, bandwidth, and video serving at or near cost, similar to how the MVNO’s are allowed to piggyback off the big carriers). Interoperability would be focused on allowing new competitors to reasonably compete with a slice of YouTube, without forcing them to compete with the entire business.
The biggest one would be forcing divestment of different aspects of the business. I would allow the data collection apparatus that is Google to own the media company that is YouTube. I wouldn’t allow the ad serving business to be owned by the same entity that is the video distribution and playback company. I wouldn’t allow Google to own any other media properties aside from YouTube.
Basically, if you’re a single entity that on its own breaches the ownership threshold, then that single entity becomes the entire business. Everything else must be divested or separated.
I’d be a fan of modernizing that concept, defining social media companies as being a part of the media ecosystem, and lowering that ownership percentage.
Force individual social media companies to be broken up into smaller entities, and force a rollback of a lot of the traditional media consolidation.