It's insane, but not unprecedented. A quote from the Copyright Act, in the context of how the copyright royalty board should set rates:

To minimize any disruptive impact on the structure of the industries involved and on generally prevailing industry practices.

It was suggested that deleting the data would be more profitable for Facebook. Jhoegl thought "therefore, they won/t, because pollution!" followed logically. You decided this was an "analogy," rather than a profound failure of comprehension or logic.

Who gets your iTunes account after you die? Or you WoW account? Or Steam games? I think we could use some precedent for what happens to licenses/accounts/other things wrapped in the trappings of intellectual property after one's death.

Something like "you must allow a deceased to will his MP3s," that makes licenses more transferable, can't possibly benefit established monopolies.

How did you manage to reply to a post without reading any part of it? Unless you're implying Facebook having stale accounts is just as bad as flaming rivers... in which case, get some perspective.

Well, that's not quite right, either. The only reason, say, UPS can't deliver the mail is because it's illegal for them to touch your mailbox. Unlike roads, I don't think the public benefit of having a bankrupt, quasi-private agency deliver the mail outweighs the public cost of four million tons of junk mail and an $11.6 billion shortfall.

I'll agree that I'd rather see municipal broadband or government-leased lines than The Local Cable Monopoly.

I can't tell if you're trolling or just New.

I think you're missing the point. Sending a letter from New York City to Los Angeles isn't cheap because of Government Efficiency, and it's a poor example for AC to present to those "anti-government" types.

You picked a terrible example. The United States Post Office loses billions of dollars every quarter.

Your larger point is sound--government bureaucracy doesn't necessarily mean higher overhead. But, I would rather see the one-cable-co one-phone-co monopolies broken up. Arkansas of all places has terrific connectivity because the Comcasts of the world never bothered locking the market up.

I'm pretending the groom is the weatherman.

I find it ironic that the states who want to fine Google for Street View and recording stray broadcasts are preparing to DPI the entire internet.

Yes, I said "ironic." Come at me, pedants.

Yup; Dave's is hot. I dip Fritos into their ghost chili sauce, but that stops being pleasant after a half-dollar-sized amount.

Let me be the first to welcome you to Slashdot, an American technology site.

There is no "natural" monopoly in search, and switching to a competitor is so trivial it's sad. In America, at least, you have to do more than win a popularity contest to be a monopolist.

"But where's the ability to choose another map data provider?" you ask. It's in that bar, at the top of your browser. If anyone actually wanted Bing maps, bing.com is even shorter to type than google.com.

And if Google's spidering is "directly hampering"F a business' "ability to stay operational," they deserve to go bankrupt. Google respects robots.txt.