A Supreme Court Case That Could Give Tech Giants More Power

If paid, it was likely a disability insurance policy, so paying you wouldn't even affect their bottom line.

This is a common misconception. These fees come out of merchant profits. Otherwise, merchants would not care.

It could, but that's kind of a stretch. In terms of anti-trust the courts have the Sherman Antitrust act (1890). This is the substance of the law:

Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.

There is a little more elaboration in the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914) and later amendments, but not much.

The courts have been left to develop a large body of judge made law in this area because Congress has done so little legislating. If Congress wished to put antitrust law on a firm and detailed statutory basis, my sense is that the courts would be very glad to be rid of the responsibility of developing it almost out of whole cloth.

It's really easy. This is the nuclear option, but it's very doable: eliminate their Section 230 immunity [1]. All of these internet businesses and platforms are running markets online, but they face zero liability for anything bad that happens on their platform. It's what gives Google and Facebook such high margins. They employ a relatively small number of highly paid software engineers and let the buyers and sellers take it from there on their marketplace.

If they were actually responsible or liable for what happened on their platform, it would mean they'd have a lot more policing to do. And policing costs money. Customer service costs money (which is why there's no one to call at Facebook or Google when something's wrong with your account).

Suddenly those highly efficient, zero liability two-sided markets have a lot more frictional costs, and that will ultimately limit their power because the flywheel won't snowball as much.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

I rather think the latter. We’ve just now been able to shine light on 60 years of this bullshit social memes real costs

Cancer rates seem to have gone up. But then one looks closer and it’s diagnosis rates due to improved techniques.

Similar idea: we can measure effort better. Oh look at all the waste

I'm trying the "work for a tech giant and do a poor job" approach to this problem. I don't think it's working.

Additionally, we can avoid working ourselves for companies doing unethical things, like paying off academic researchers to make public statements supporting them, financing think tanks and lobbyist groups to push their agendas, and acting in blatantly anticompetitive ways. Sure, all of these tech giants have tons of people waiting to work there, but we can still reduce the pool of candidates, people who know better need to walk away. This not only reduces their talent, but means that talent is available to start and improve new competitors to the entrenched parties.

And I absolutely believe we need to advocate that legislators and judiciaries start taking a renewed look at antitrust enforcement, and we need to advocate for removing blanket immunities that these companies enjoy. Congress just realized in the past two years that these companies have a lot of sway over elections, and if anything gets Congress moving, it's protecting their reelection campaigns.

Technology doesn't change people's motivations - it simply rearranges who gets to fulfill their wishes a little.

As long as people want to live 'I GOTTA get mine, worry about the rest later', we're going to continue being the cancerous species that we are, biting the hand that feeds us (our community, our planet, etc)

Big gov't and big business go together.

When you use your credit card or debit card in a store, you swipe it in a Point Of Sale terminal.

That terminal connects, via network, with payment processing software managed by Visa (and other card suppliers) to authorize the payment and move the money from your balance to store's balance.

If you were to create your own credit card, how would that processed? Visa is not going to process your credit card.

In order to have your credit card processed you would have to convince stores to upgrade POS terminals to also talk to your card authorization network.

That's just not gonna happen which is why Visa is not going to loose their lock on credit cards.

The only viable solution would be legislation that forces Visa to process other people's cards, maybe via some standard protocol, at a reasonable price (and that price would have to be much, much lower that Visa's fees to make that workable, because you want to make money on processing fees too).

Of the companies you mentioned, only Paypal could really do this, and in fact, they did have some in-store options available, although they're apparently being shut down. It's really a marketplace problem though -- you have to have enough consumers so that it's useful to businesses, and you have to have enough businesses that it's useful to consumers. And you have to have enough clout that the rest of the banking industry won't refuse to deal with you.

Sure, but is that likely to actually happen? Just because Congress could possibly negate a court ruling doesn't mean there's nothing to see here.

Cell plans also have not gotten more expensive over 30 years inflation adjusted. When you include what you actually get in plans today, they've gotten cheaper vs 30 or 20 years ago.

Cable Internet as another example, hasn't gotten expensive out of line with inflation over the last 20 years. While simultaneously what you can do with cable Internet has dramatically increased.

Those other items on the other hand, have seen cost inflation dramatically beyond other consumer goods.

Telecom costs a median American $100 to $150 per month. That's more like the cost of a home insurance policy.

How that question is answered regarding AmEx will shape how future similar cases, many of which will involve tech, are judged. There's no equation between them; it's just what this decision will mean.