Justice Department to Open Broad, New Antitrust Review of Big Tech Companies
wsj.com
wsj.com
I definitely feel like there’s this illusion of tech innovation coming from these big companies that suck up all the tech talent, but at end of day the best and brightest are working on optimizing ad clicks (FB, Goog) or getting people to buy crap (Amazon) or working on incremental hardware improvements (Apple).
If anything, I would hope any outcome against big tech would level the playing field when it comes to attracting talent, and create an environment where working on true “moonshot” tech was not so risky.
I'm more worried about ambitious and smart people putting their talents in investment banking and management consulting. Tech has been a great place to go for smart and scientific based people in part (at least) because it has been unregulated.
I'm not saying I'm against regulating big tech. But if anything, we need more people in the sciences and the sciences to be a good career choice over banking/consulting rather than to make computer science a somewhat less attractive career goal through more regulation (potentially leading to lower salaries).
Honestly, I think that is a big factor (along with a reaction to perceived political biases) in why people think tech companies need to be broken up, beyond any real or imagined monopolistic practices. Silicon Valley really shook up the business world at an accelerating rate over the past 2-3 decades, and it's threatening to people accustomed to the status quo, especially those who invested decades of their lives into a career in [finance, management consulting, high-powered law/politics] because they thought it was the best way forward.
Virtually nobody complains about bankers and businessmen taking their jobs with outsourcing and wasn't taken seriously. Automation and AI creating more productivity instead of just moving jobs? The "nerds" doing it? "SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING!" hysterical reactions and rage. If tech becomes involved in an industry suddenly it is the great satan like Tesla, or any of the artificial meat companies and spoken of as not a part of the industry in spite of larger and smaller existing players and even foreign businesses receiving more respect.
The mythical long lasting tech-bro insited as everywhere from countless hit pieces which hold homeowners blameless for rising rents along with other business jobs but engineers and programmers solely are clearly the great evil responsible for high rents.
It harkens back to deep feudalistic stupid where the peasants and aristocracy distrusted the merchant and miller for making money from working smart and being "anomalys" to the social order. Money not made through serfs or conquest? Clearly deeply unnatural and wrong. Just look at Belphegor - literal demonization of discovery and ingenious inventions. Judging by actions and impacts alone he should be an angel.
Actually, I can think of lots of reasons. It's certainly possible but it won't ever be simple and well-generalized.
One of the strongest defenses against monopolies is adversarial interoperability, because it blunts vertical integration. It allows a new competitor to replace one piece of the supply chain and still use the rest of it, even if it's operated by the same conglomerate competing with them for that one piece. Because then you can have five companies replace the five pieces one at a time and end up with competition on all fronts, without them having to find each other and coordinate ahead of time before any of them can act.
But we now have multiple laws conspiring to prevent that in tech. CFAA, DMCA 1201, EULAs, patent thickets, etc. We get monopolies because we passed laws that thwart competition. So how about we do something about those laws rather than adding new ones, when the incumbents are likely to have more influence in drafting the new ones than the average user or startup founder?
You can take the cynical view that people at Google are just trying to get people to click on things, which, true, is their primary business model. But you can equally say that employees of Google (who work on Search) are trying to provide a good search experience to everyone around the world for free.
Tangentially, for Amazon, they deliver some of the best customer experience I've seen. I can start a Live Chat session at 3 AM (with a human) when I have a problem. It's not just getting people to buy crap.
"Yeah, what we're doing to make a ton of money right now is skeevy and not adding any actual value the world, maybe even creating negative value, but we promise we're going to spend all of that money on research to advance humanity."
Google and Facebook actually did end up doing that, to good effect, but 1) was it worth it? (maybe, especially if we get benevolent superintelligent AGI directly out of it and Google / FB actually agree to not monopolize or abuse it), but 2) how many times should we accept that excuse from companies? If in the next 10 years, a hot up-and-coming new startup begins to grow rapidly and looks like it'll end up in the FAANG tier, should we also trust them when they say their questionable tactics are worth it because they're gonna spend that money on cool science stuff?
Apple and Netflix don't share the same problem, and that gives them a lot more freedom in other areas, too (but perhaps resulting in them having less total user acquisition potential than Google or Facebook; but of course it's needed less, since every customer is directly giving them money). Uber also doesn't share that problem, and they've contributed quite a bit to the community, though of course they have other problems.
The main problem isn't tech companies or monopolies, IMO; it's the tech companies that survive only by cannibalizing both non-paying users and non-paying non-users who happen to visit just about any website on the Internet (because odds are any given website is using Google Analytics or has some sort of Facebook or Twitter integration). It creates bad incentives.
Of course, there are also separate debates to be had over general issues of monopolization and working conditions (like Amazon fulfillment workers not being able to take bathroom breaks without risking accumulating points which may result in them getting fired), and control over different media platforms (like Google owning the only real video platform in the world and Twitter owning the only real microblogging / "town square" platform, and issues that may come from how they regulate users and content). The advertising stuff is just the cherry on top.
I do think trying to regulate or break them up over the content policing stuff would be a huge mistake, though. Staunch conservatives say they want them to relax their standards and stop being biased against conservatives; staunch liberals say they helped the spread of disinformation, racism, and fascism and should have tighter standards. I think if either side has their way, to any degree, it will be a disaster.
The main problem isn't tech companies or monopolies, IMO; it's the tech companies that survive only by cannibalizing both non-paying users and non-paying non-users who happen to visit just about any website on the Internet (because odds are any given website is using Google Analytics or has some sort of Facebook or Twitter integration). It creates bad incentives.
Wouldn't the world be a better place if the Internet had true micropayments? Culture would no longer dance to the whims of advertisers and executives at huge companies. There would be a more direct connection between creatives and consumers. Then again, we've tried instantly collated online mob rule in the form of social media karma. The nearest equivalents, in the form Patreon supported Instagram models and YouTube stars like PewDiePie and Jake Paul, on the face of it, don't seem to point us in the the best direction.
A huge irony is that the public wants free stuff, and historically has railed against micropayments. However, while they complain, it would seem that microtransactions are going strong, though they are arguably exploitative.
They work for certain kinds of things, but I don't think we'll see the day where people are regularly sending money for the right to open a blog or create an email account.
I don't really know what the answer is for large scale apps with non-paying users. Hopefully other forms of monetization become more popular.
But some kinds of companies should definitely look more into accepting donations and offering premium options in exchange for ad-free viewing plus extra features. I'm paying for YouTube Premium to avoid seeing ads (and they have like one premium show that's pretty good), and I think that's a pretty good deal.
But some new tech startup certainly doesn't have to be skeevy to make money or to be in a position to contribute to research.
That's not true. A lot of times, the projects will start before funding.
> But some new tech startup certainly doesn't have to be skeevy to make money or to be in a position to contribute to research.
That is true, but you're also missing the reality of startups. Just survival alone is hard. Stubbornly sticking to idealism doesn't help that cause, which is why people take money from both China and Saudi Arabia.
Playing Go against an AI opponent while in a 1970s, crumbling, subway system would make for a good analogy.
That said, industry can definitely do basic research work (e.g. Pharma does). But what google is doing is acquiring any company that might be a real threat to them.
Surely you jest.
Didn't they even crossover into biology on one paper? They're a profit minded entity yes, but no way is it all shaving nanoseconds off of click throughs.
When companies hire graduates who have learnt from researchers, some of these graduates end up in position to "innovate", quite a few years after the actual research has been done.
For instance, I'm going to talk about the field that I know best: programming languages (to keep it simple, I'm not talking of VMs or compilers, just the languages). Pretty much everything you see in Java, C#, Python or Go dates back to the 70s (with broader testing and quality of life improvements, of course), Swift gets a few improvements imported from the 80s, but not that many. The only industrial languages that seem to have real innovations are F#, Rust and Scala, which are three cases in which the actual researchers managed to convince (or found) a company to support the language.
Anyway, it's really, really hard to measure scientific progress, and if you look at companies to try and gauge it, you're looking at stuff that is typically quite old.
Edit: someone corrected me about nylon. It was invented between 1927 and 1938 my Dupont. But it was still a commercial Enterprise doing the r&d for it.
Looks like synthetic rubber and synthetic oil two major ones to come out of world war II https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/inventions...
It's having money without trying to optimize solely on future money.
However, while we do see this trickle back into civilian life, I imagine that if funding were directed towards solving civil needs instead (housing, food, water, environmental contamination, energy, community centers, schools, etc) we'd see very different things produced, and often more well suited for peaceful purposes.
The flip side of greater consumer safety is that there's less room to get things wrong, which in turn means it's harder to meaningfully innovate.
If my theory is correct, I expect the next paradigm shift will come from a country with less consumer/worker/civil protection. China (and to a lesser extent, India) are on my watch-list.
When I say this, people sometimes pigeonhole me as an anti-regulation nutcase, but that's not me. I don't know how I feel about this. There's a real Kantian dilemma, here.
A big recent tech-focused one that started in academia and is now in the hands of large companies is self driving cars. It looks like it may work, but then every started hitting those 1% cases and realized they can't actually ship a fully self driving car (and driver-assist features can lead to worse issues as people think they can trust the tech more than they should).
I would also note: in spite of "novelty" requirements for publication, we tend to see many of the same ideas recycled over and over. Which makes sense, because they tend to be good and useful ideas that may be fundamental to the discipline.
Agreed about ideas being recycled over and over in academia.
Regardless, I believe that my point holds: it's very hard to judge "scientific progress" by looking at industry, because most of the time, you're looking at stuff that was discovered decades earlier.
So at the very least, bell labs was the direct result of regulation, and pretty arguably just an alternate form of taxation (AT&T was also legally bared from commercializing Bell Lab's research outside of telecom)
1. I will admit that there are exceptions :)
2. Clearly, I should have written "industry" instead of "companies".
Barring any error in my memory Bell Labs was a pure research lab at the time, wasn't it, i.e. not an industry research branch, right?
For example, it's going to be pretty hard to get much innovation from academia in the area of operating planet scale networks/datacenters simply because they don't have access to such environments and the money to support it nor the day to day challenges of actually running something like this.
That said, much of innovation happening in companies is likely part of the secret sauce that makes the company successful so we're not going to see much of it make it out at the time the innovation takes place but over time companies and people working for them do open up about their solutions.
I think its not the risk that prevents moonshots, but the consolidation in the industry and the moats that are built around the bigs.
The network effect in social media and tech platforms works both to provide more value to users but also to stifle innovation - Amazon's customer is no longer the customer, its the merchant selling on their platform. Google and Facebook's customer is ad buyers. Think about how many new useful features could be built using the networks that are not ad-friendly. I find that Facebook and Twitter to be more like the preventer of socialization, rather than the enabler. They prefer you engage with products, videos and ads than each other, and when engaging with each other not in meaningful ways. The biggest roadblock to innovation that makes an improvement to people's every day lives is that if its not on one of the platforms or ecosystems that already exist it matters little
Google famously has lots of "moonshots" and publishes lots of research and open source code. It's too soon to say what's going to turn out to be a real advance versus an "illusion".
They called 15 million dollars in cancer research investment a "moonshot", as well as the various absurdly low x prizes (vs what they are asking for, and ONLY IF you succeed).
I have believed for quite some time that we entered a kind of minor dark age around the early-mid 1970s. Virtually everything we're doing now from spacecraft to AI to the Internet was invented before 1970. For some reason around that time we largely stopped making major advancements. There are a few exceptions (CRISPR/CAS9, graphene, Li-Ion batteries) but nothing since then compares to the insane rate of progress experienced in the 50s and 60s. We went from horse drawn carts to moon rockets and supersonic aircraft in 50 years with a great deal of the progress happening between 1940 and 1970. That's 30 years of a rate of innovation orders of magnitude beyond anything in human history.
I am not certain of the cause. It's tempting to blame proximate things like the rise of neoliberalism, de-funding of basic research, or bureaucratization of science, but I wonder if the cause wasn't something deeper. It really seems to me that everything went off the rails around 1973. Take this graph for example:
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/thp_201...
Right around 1973 is when the decline of the US middle class really started. The effect just didn't become really acute until after the 2008 super-recession.
Here's a few of the ideas I've brainstormed:
* Did the collapse of Bretton Woods (a.k.a. the Nixon Shock) break something about the fundamental incentive structure of the economy?
* Was the generation that grew up on television less able to think innovatively? Did they start taking power around the early-mid 70s?
* Did we get scared? Was the rate of progress during those years so fast that it caused some kind of deep subconscious "future shock" backlash that manifested in things like the luddite wing of the green movement or the rise of fundamentalist religion?
* Energy got much more expensive after the oil shocks of the 70s and after US production of the really cheap easy oil peaked. Maybe rising energy costs cut margin from the economy?
I'm open to suggestions. I really think "what happened in 1973?" is a historical mystery.
1) Moore law started at the seventies and its about to end within few years. It might be that we got too lazy?
2) The economy become much more market driven/competitive. I.e. management went from technical to financial. Hence when the goal of innovating is financial , it is much more short term.
The reason for optimism today are :
1) Moore law is ending, hence we should see many new hardware architectures and the software to follow.
2) Open source - companies can start innovating without the need to build basic staff.
I'm not convinced it's enough but it is pretty interesting.
With Moore law, it was always the case that general purpose CPU will always catch up to special purpose one (e.g. This killed sun and SGI), so it was hurting innovation.
And it also killed the Lisp Machines before that.
Why was the economy so great for median American workers between 1945 and the mid 1970s?
One factor was that the USA was the world's largest manufacturer and running an export surplus. It was relatively easy to run an export surplus and offer good working conditions to the rank-and-file because there was limited competition (self-imposed isolation from the world market economy by Communist states, various market economies still recovering from the war).
Some of the economically glorious post war Golden Age was also built on environmental debt. Businesses faced less regulation on environmental, health, and safety issues and correspondingly spent less on pollution control, worker protection, and compliance documentation. Just don't drink the water or be "unlucky" on the shop floor. Building a $10 million chemical plant in 1965 counts toward that year's economic growth even if it's going to become a $100 million Superfund site by 1985.
Another factor was that there was a huge prolonged bounty from basic and applied research that came out of the physics revolutions from before the war. Nuclear fission, quantum mechanics, and relativity were all known by the 1930s. By 1970 most of the low hanging application fruit had been plucked. There's still plenty of basic research to do, and we still find new applications over time, but we haven't had another physics revolution like QM that just pops out one delightful surprise after another.
this obsession with moonshot ideas is just as damaging as these big companies turning customers into statistics and sucking up talent and feigning innovation. long-term technological development simply does not occur in the united states. EVERYTHING is under accelerated schedules and thus entirely short-term. i do not know of a single entity other than possibly universities, although even they are suspect, in the united states that focuses on long-term research and development goals. there are many long-term investigations that are waiting to be undertaken that are not moonshot ideas. the united states has a real danger of falling behind due to this hyper-focus on short-term results.
So yes, we are stagnating scientifically, but it's not necessarily for no reason. The longer we keep running the economy as is, the more smart people are going to have to be allocated to figuring out how to keep up with the exponential growth our system demands. Unfortunately, no one seems to have cracked steady-state economics, so it looks like we'll be doing this for the foreseeable future...
Additionally, I don't know how we're supposed to keep up with this absurd need for exponential growth without leaning hard on technology (at least if we presume we don't want to wreck the planet more.) I feel like big tech is actually doing something important with regard to growing the economy disproportionately with the physical resources they consume.
That isn't really a thing. The 3% growth aligns closely with population growth (including immigration), and that's where it really comes from. If the average company makes widgets and the population grows by 3% then they hire 3% more people and sell 3% more widgets to 3% more customers, and the company is worth 3% more.
The unsustainable thing is really unlimited population growth, but steady state populations don't require some kind of cataclysm. They work a little differently, in particular people have to on average work longer before they retire because there are fewer working people to support them in retirement, but it's hardly mass starvation and nuclear war. And even the drawbacks are offset by things like automation -- not as good as both automation and population growth, but still probably not worse than your grandfather had it.
The real problem is that there is no iron law that says people have to spend their working hours on pie-growing activities like automation and honest medical research instead of pie-stealing activities like adtech and patent trolling, so if we have rules and institutions that make the latter more profitable, that's what we get.
If a tree falls in a forest, and someone turns it into some chairs, while planting at least one tree in its place, then that has made the economy more valuable (assuming there are people who want the chairs, and that leaving the fallen tree in place would be less valuable than having newly planted ones).
Zero percent growth means that every time someone creates something valuable out of less valuable materials, there has to be an equivalent amount of value destroyed somewhere. I suppose that entropy takes care of the destruction, to some extent, but it seems arbitrary to try to limit value creation to precisely match that level.
No, of course not. The bulk of that 3% has always been population growth, but economic growth outside of population growth is possible -- it's even beneficial -- it's just not mandatory. There is nothing forcing it to happen, and the bad thing that happens if you don't have it is that you don't have it.
But that's still not great. Humans have had periods of stagnation that have lasted hundreds of years, and nobody really wants to live the lifestyle of the middle ages anymore.
Which is the point. If people spend their time optimizing click through rates and suing each other then humans don't immediately go extinct, but we also don't get any further toward curing cancer or colonizing other planets. And that's bad, directly, on its own, not because of some nebulous impact on economic indicators.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(real...
But it's also kind of cherry picking numbers because that bracket starts just after the housing crisis and is measuring the recovery. The 2000-2010 bracket was 0.71%, compared to historical numbers around 2% (but also historical real GDP growth of more like 4%).
You also have to discount some amount of real GDP growth for the general category of "banks doing bank stuff" which increases GDP a lot on paper even though it's somewhere between net neutral and actually destructive of underlying value, e.g. credit availability and low interest rates causing higher housing prices and higher total interest paid which both get booked as GDP "growth" even though they don't imply any actual productivity increase and negatively impact quality of life for working people.
The result is that population growth is the majority -- but by no means the entirety -- of "real" real GDP growth. (There is also an interesting effect where population growth has non-linear effects, because more people results in both more minds working on productivity improvements and more people who can benefit from each of those improvements, resulting in a quadratic productivity increase with population.)
But it's concerning that real GDP growth per capita has declined from its historical norms since 2000, even though we now have even more "banks doing bank stuff" than we used to. And it's probably not a coincidence that this has coincided with increasing amounts of regulatory capture and business consolidation.
Don't know that I agree with some of the previous stuff though. Even if we assume a steady state population, if the economy doesn't grow every year, we're playing a zero or negative sum game literally by definition.
RE your second paragraph, I both agree and disagree. As far as I can see (at least the US system) is predicated on ~4-7% economic growth being the way that people systematically grow relatively small savings into a large nest egg for retirement (not that this appears to be working particularly well, see your comments on pie stealing.) If we assumed a steady state for the population and economy, I don't see how people working for average salaries can set enough aside for retirement (without pushing themselves to a pretty low standard of living) without the benefit of ~4-7% compounding.
I have a developer's salary, so I could probably put away a couple million cash before my retirement even without the benefit of compound interest paid by economic growth. That's not the norm, or even the average though. Participating in society/the economy has to be an attractive enough proposition to incentivize people to do it, or bad social problems start popping up. In a steady state system, I don't see how we can make an offer more attractive than "Enjoy your subsistence lifestyle up to retirement, so you can have barely enough to have a subsistence level lifestyle in retirement."
It's really two independent games that just happen to have the same prize for winning. The people stealing the pie are the bums regardless of whether any other people are growing it.
And zero sum games aren't always the end of the world. If everybody is fine in year zero and then nothing changes, everybody is still fine. Not as good as things getting better, but stable. The problem is if things are getting worse -- increasing levels of consolidation over time. But you can have that even in the presence of growth. It's an independent problem.
> If we assumed a steady state for the population and economy, I don't see how people working for average salaries can set enough aside for retirement (without pushing themselves to a pretty low standard of living) without the benefit of ~4-7% compounding.
Interest rates and ROI are related to GDP growth, but they're not the same thing. Time value of money is a thing even in the absence of economic growth.
Suppose every year Farmer Joe has to borrow money to buy seeds and pay workers to plant, grow and harvest the crops. Then after harvest he sells the crops and uses the money to pay back the loan. Every year it's the same, every year he starts and ends the year with the same amount of money, there is no economic growth, but the lender is still earning interest on the loan every year.
Meanwhile the lender is your 401K, so it makes money over time which you then spend down in your retirement and die with the same amount of money in real terms as your parents did, and so on indefinitely.
And the interest rate has to do with supply and demand for currency, for which economic growth is a factor (affecting demand), but not the only one. The other obvious big one is that the Fed sets interest rates (supply) by fiat, as well as other things like bank reserve ratios.
> Suppose every year Farmer Joe has to borrow money to buy seeds and pay workers to plant, grow and harvest the crops. Then after harvest he sells the crops and uses the money to pay back the loan. Every year it's the same, every year he starts and ends the year with the same amount of money, there is no economic growth, but the lender is still earning interest on the loan every year.
> Meanwhile the lender is your 401K, so it makes money over time which you then spend down in your retirement and die with the same amount of money in real terms as your parents did, and so on indefinitely.
I feel like you're making the assumption that the agents in this system don't make an attempt to consolidate (and obviously if and when they do, they will have varying levels of skill at doing so.)
It's the delusion that market mechanisms can create sustainable socially beneficial (vs. unsustainable and. socially parasitic) business models within these domain that's the problem..
There's much more to science and technology than "tech" companies.
Specific observation of mine is actually important tech takes decades to make it's presence felt. That's a totally different world than "tech companies" that are mostly fronts for ad dollar scams, casino's for international crooks, and laundromats for central bank money.
Lets talk solar panels, first developed in the 1950's. Variable Frequency drives first developed in the 1980's. Lithium Ion batteries developed in the late 1970's. All this stuff is decades old and still working it's way through the day to day infrastructure.
I feel like there are a bunch of biological and agricultural science stuff is coming, massive changes in the energy sector are coming, but it's painfully slow.
That's how science has always worked. It's rare to go from research to consumer goods in less than 10 years. Often it takes more.
Transistors invented more or less in 1947. Twenty years later in 1967 my parents bought a BW TV, with tubes.
LED's. First invented in 1927, practical devices 40 years later in the mid 1960's. Widespread use in lighting, not until 40 years after that.
Wasn't just this sort of thing said about the financial world? (That all of the brains were being sucked up by finance, because that's what paid the most for technical and math talent.) I remember talking to coworkers about 15 years ago, quipping that pretty soon, it would all just be enigmatic, undecipherable servers humming in server rooms, exchanging arcane signals, causing money to move around for inscrutable purposes.
Doesn't this fit the way people talking about YouTube and Google talk about "The Algorithm?" It just means that the enigmatic, undecipherable servers humming in server rooms have also begun to take over media and the culture. It's not just money moving around, commanded by machines for inscrutable purposes. It's now also the information, the connections, and the interactions comprising human culture itself.
Supposedly we're not yet at the point of AGI, but somehow we've already built the tools for the not yet existing AI overlords to control all of humanity. (In pAIperclips, this would correspond to "Release the Hypnodrones!")
If anything, I would hope any outcome against big tech would level the playing field when it comes to attracting talent, and create an environment where working on true “moonshot” tech was not so risky.
At this point, maybe we need all of the talent just to try and keep the "Hypnodrones" out of the hands of evil hackers?
This is like Bezos saying he’s getting into space because the planet is going to hell.
“Look at these problems I helped create. Everyone better let me guide us elsewhere.”
Thiel won’t openly admit it’s self aggrandizing leaders like him that distract people with babysitting his wealth, instead of allowing them to chase their own novel ideas.
I don’t consider myself a guitarist.
“Freedom to get stuff done.”, it says on the Fellowship site. For the few young folks that qualify.
The raw numbers tell the story better than a stat: some folks, not most folks. Most folks gotta shovel the money onto the pile so bits and pieces can trickle down at the rate he approves.
This isn’t limited to Peter Thiel. It’s the same old: kowtow to aristocrats.
He’s a first generation aristocrat who has gone on at length about the right of the powerful to dictate the outputs of the less powerful.
He believes he’s truly unique and above the rest of us, without seemingly considering none of us will lie down and die if an early end should be his fate (I hope it isn’t, of course).
Such a smart guy, I suspect he’d agree there’s no causal link between his existence and the rest of us. He leans on convenient emotional frameworks society has carried along for years.
Oh of course he does a bit of philanthropy to point at. How gracious of him to hand pick those who should have their minds to themselves!
He thinks Elizabeth Warren is dangerous. Says nothing about the doofus in Chief, but the contender with relatively little power. Be afraid of change! It might prove I’m wrong!
The common features of an aristocrat: money and indifference of those without money.
Or at least that’s my take given his writings. Maybe have a peak and see.
The origin of the word too has nothing to do with how the money is acquired. Just means “member of the elite class”.
It seems you’re attached to a romanticized/nostalgic spin on the term. Not concerned with the actual definition.
Pedantry fail.
Oligarch is more appropriate.
Aristocracy is rule by the Best
Now if they could just start improving the MacBook Pro again...
To name a few: - Google, FB, Amazon basically wrote the book on distributed systems (Read Designing Data Intensive Applications), both from a research perspective and a very well architected, open source solution
- Google, FB have profoundly impacted front end development with cutting edge Javascript runtimes and open source front end frameworks
- Amazon, Google, Microsoft have basically invented/popularized a way to do computing(Cloud), server management that has enabled tiny tech companies to become giants by outsourcing IT infrastructure
- Apple/Google have created devices, OSs, and software that is nearly impossible to live without these days, additionally creating platforms for millions of developers to make a living on(App Store)
- Amazon has set the bar pretty high for automation in operations and made 2 day shipping a thing we expect from everyone
There are many other things I can’t think of right now, but long story short most of the companies you listed do have crappy parts of their business, but have also made incredible platforms that 3rd parties can leverage to make a ton of money.
I caveat all of this by saying that there are some practices that I don’t agree with at all of those firms, but by and large they have gotten so big because they are platforms.
The smartphone is obviously a gradual (occasionally not so gradual) improvement on PDA's, app stores existed before them too, although usually belonging to the phone operator or network.
We hear about amazon because they're in the tech industry, I bet if you followed the logistics industry as closely you'd see a lot of improvements. Particularly outside of the US where amazon doesn't have the same footprint.
Most of the science behind these things is actually older. They industrialized it, removed the kinks, built upon actual experience, all of which is extremely precious, but I don't think it's as groundbreaking as people believe.
> - Google, FB have profoundly impacted front end development with cutting edge Javascript runtimes and open source front end frameworks
If you're talking about JITs, that's gradual improvements on prior work on JITs (started during the 60s, ignored by industry until Sun picked it during the 90s... for an academic project). Again, very useful, but not necessarily groundbreaking.
> - Amazon, Google, Microsoft have basically invented/popularized a way to do computing(Cloud), server management that has enabled tiny tech companies to become giants by outsourcing IT infrastructure
Again, industrialization on prior academic work (e.g. virtualization, distributed component-based architectures, etc.)
> - Apple/Google have created devices, OSs, and software that is nearly impossible to live without these days, additionally creating platforms for millions of developers to make a living on(App Store)
> - Amazon has set the bar pretty high for automation in operations and made 2 day shipping a thing we expect from everyone
Mmmmh... I was talking of "scientific progress", you seem to be talking of something different :)
If you recall, my point was that it's very hard to measure "scientific progress" by looking at industry, because industrialization typically happens decades after the actual discoveries/inventions. I think your point is that "industrial progress" may be good, which I'm not debating :)
Short-term control of the executive branch in the American system is fairly disconnected from the multi-decade incentives that move the directions of scientific research.
So at best there will only be competition only in those areas dominated by the sliver of companies that happen to offend the current White-house. And new entrants to the field can expect the same treatment. Of course, the companies targeted for breakup may just play ball and change their campaign contribution strategy.
That seems ignorant and simplistic (or maybe just using a definition of "innovation" that is less generic than I have in mind). The vast majority of employees at those companies do NOT work on the main money generating product, it's such a small number compared to the rest that it's a running joke inside companies "hey you guys make the money, we burn it".
I feel that there has been made a lot of progress in many areas coming from people working for those companies. Not saying that maybe more progress could have been made if those people worked for smaller companies or for academia but I completely disagree that big tech hiring lots of smart people just automatically means they're all spending time doing some "useless" (to your mind) thing.
Some of the very few things I'm aware of:
- large improvements to distributed systems
- large software building/testing frameworks
- maintenance, scheduling, utilization of large datacenter hardware and networks
- all sorts of specific features being pushed in open source projects (like the Linux kernel) to support these companies' usecases
There's a running theme in most of those things of course, it's all to do with operating large datacenters and that makes sense (and I'd argue that without having had bigtech it would be much less likely to have the business support/money to work on such problems).
Proprietary platforms that don't inter-operate are problematic.
Email is OK because like phone service providers anyone is free to run their own, and choose to use the services of a competitor while still inter-operating on a shared communications structure; much like actual postal delivery.
IRC is OK as a protocol (from the fair and inter-operable test), but was never designed to scale up to operate at this level.
Proprietary platforms, like Facebook, Discord, etc flavor of the week which have strong market dominance but which are closed are actively problems. That's an area where monopoly is clearly being used to keep out competitors and restrict innovation.
In Google's defense in this area they did try XMPP, and (as I recall) that experiment ended up as a failure since other platforms intentionally implemented a very poor baseline minimal interoperablity in ways that made communicating between platforms a very 'red headed step child' experience. That's why I believe whatever does come next has got to check all the boxes AND make them requirements of inter-operating, not 'extensions'.
It may now be possible to make an okay XMPP experience, but proprietary/custom protocols continue to be simpler to implement, better-performing, and less hassle overall. We need something completely unlike XMPP if we want good federated IM to become a thing; something that isn't a bloated, exotic, "extensible", "well-formed", streaming XML protocol.
That said, if Google wants to earn some much-needed goodwill, it could work on a new federated chat protocol. Something binary and concise that handles all of the modern emoji, stickers, outbound call initiation, bots, polls, etc. And if you could use it to build all of {Slack, Messenger, Telegram, IRC, Hangouts} on top of it, that would be amazing. Especially if it were federated and had a reference implementation.
Commoditize your compliments, right? Anyone at Google looking for a project for promotion?
The fediverse is coming along very nicely. Gab's joining of the ActivityPub network is a strong demonstration that you don't need to be part of a bubble to participate, and you don't need permission from anyone to join.
I think if Facebook, Google, and Twitter keep up what they've been doing, the fediverse has a pretty good chance of growing into something that can be used to reach sizable audiences.
I've been looking at ways to get my local, provincial, and federal government agencies to join the fediverse as well, as I think that's probably a better way to do public status feeds than relying on some opinionated Californian megacorp. I'm thinking maybe a slick publishing system that also proxies Twitter.
(INB4 “hurr durr spoken like a smelly nazi, flagged!”)
The Google that would even consider anything like that died when the founders left.
Every time I post about the government is rarely the answer I get push back. Be careful what you ask for...
That's why issues like free speech for all are so important. Someday, your enemies might be in charge and if you've been eroding human rights because you're powerful enough to do so, someone more powerful may show up and use the landscape you helped create against you.
The winning move for tech was to not become politicized and just focus on being a neutral platform. Hopefully this threat of regulation will scare some of the overt politics out of our industry and everyone will benefit.
While tech companies aren’t “becoming politicized” you better believe that the people who don’t share your interest are.
In this case, I see the threat of government intervention to be beneficial as tech will have to adapt to circumvent it or a whole new breed of companies will arise that have immunity baked in. Ideally this would be a focus on decentralization so that the government can't intervene in operations at a technical level.
tldr; our current big tech landscape are overly centralized and behaving badly. The government is not trustworthy but a fight between the two will help healthier tech companies emerge.
You notice that there is no attempt to regulate Walmart which is much bigger than Amazon?
I agree but that's not what this particular discussion is about.
At least we can agree this is all political.
Here's a list of companies and organizations[1] that actually push their politics aggressively. Maybe a couple of those take advantage of their market position less than the big tech companies.
I do think strengthened anti-trust legislation and actions would benefit the economy, but I don't think these companies are the worst offenders. It is a harmful perverse incentive to punish companies because they are not playing politics enough.
I’m 100% behind the idea of deplatforming trolls, even if they claim it’s a political message. “Don’t Troll” has been a good rule since Usenet days, and I don’t see why it should be otherwise.
I do however think that infrastructure companies like ISPs should be neutral. I don’t even consider hosting companies as infrastructure companies. As long as I have an internet connection, I can host whatever I want to.
Preserving the peace, protecting the rights (of others), protecting property?
Turns out that a platform full of Nazis or trolls isn't as popular as one that isn't. But that should surprise no one.
I don't think there is evidence to support this statement, but even if there were, pushing a political agenda is not an anti-trust issue.
[1] I have no idea about any of his beliefs or why he got deplatformed. I just know he’s been around forever.
I think that's debatable (which is precisely what the antitrust investigation is looking into).
Regardless, I'm not forced to stand up for them either. I don't agree with how they are operating and I'm glad they're being looked into.
Yes, I do feel the bar has to be a lot higher - as in burning babies at an alter besides cute kittens -for an infrastructure company like an ISP or a domain register to ban you.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-no...
> These large companies have been abusing their monopoly or near monopoly status to push their own politics aggressively.
When Apple refused to comply with the FBI's order to unlock someone's iPhone, were they engaging in unacceptable politicking? Are you arguing that the correct and "neutral" thing to do would have been to hand over everyone's data on request? Are you also opposed to the tech companies that support net neutrality and backdoor-free encryption? Do you actually get angry at ALL politicking, or only when their politics differs from yours?
It's really hard to discern which, if any, of the President's actions translate into real policy decisions.
https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/03/08/politics/elizabeth-warren-a...
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Of course, it's hard to establish a connection between what this president says and actual policy action on the ground, but this is also a president who has been open about his willingness to order the DOJ around, so who knows.
That's the whole reason why there's been a strong norm around DOJ's Independence. Without that you never really know what their motivations are.
> The review is geared toward examining the practices of online platforms that dominate internet search, social media and retail services, the officials said.
Interesting that Microsoft, the only company worth over $1 trillion, isn't mentioned.
The focus is on online platforms and they don't have anything dominating in that field. I wonder if it'll stay isolated to those companies or if Microsoft will get looped into this because they're so large.
Literally, I can’t think of one thing Microsoft is top dog in besides OS.
Apple -> These $%^&ers don't allow anyone to repair their own devices, they don't allow a different distribution method on iOS/iPodOS devices hence quickly evolve to unfair market advantage.
Amazon -> Undercut anyone at any cost while having the worst review system on our planet.
Facebook -> RIP privacy, just see the recent scandals.
Google -> Probably something involving Android...
Microsoft? Oh I can write a book about my terrible experiences with that company. I hated this company and everything it stood for for about 15+ years or so (at least 1995-2010). Recently though? Not so much.
Hopefully IE^h^h Chrome as well.
> Microsoft? Oh I can write a book about my terrible experiences with that company. I hated this company and everything it stood for for about 15+ years or so (at least 1995-2010). Recently though? Not so much.
Don't count on me for a book, but otherwise I think I agree to a large extent.
I still don't trust them though, and from time to time they tend to remind me not to let my guard down.
Granted, that was over 20 years ago...
Had Firefox been coming from a company that could be bought, it wouldn't have remained available to hit that 10%, and MS would have retained their chokehold on everything, possibly until the iPhone became significant (that arose from Apple, which MS literally invested in to be able to argue they still had competition).
MS today is indeed a different beast - but I've never been convinced the antitrust suits were misplaced. The market of competition was _broken_ and consumers suffered. Even if breaking up MS wasn't required to eventually rebalance the market, that doesn't mean all the steps along the way did nothing.
Never heard of this. Do you have a source?
Thanks to antitrust, they weren't able to force (as much) their garbage IE and Bing. The market was able to confidently invest money in creating other browsers which created better products.
I'd challenge that assertion outside the SV world. 2nd place definitely, but distant no so much, at least in the circles I work in.
https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/cloud-market-share-q4-2018-...
I would call that "distant."
> The review is geared toward examining the practices of online platforms that dominate internet search, social media and retail services, the officials said.
Trump has railed constantly that "conservatives are being censored" on Twitter and Google, which is utter nonsense, so this report in addition to the reports from last year of him wanting to tax Amazon just because Jeff Bezos owns WaPo and they don't print flattering stories of him daily sounds more likely to me the reason for an investigation than anything else.
It helps that Amazon is less overtly political than the other tech giants. Obviously their employees lean left, but with a few notable exceptions like refusing to sell Confederate Battle Flags they have been quite good about allowing different views to be expressed by content creators.
I'm starting to have my doubts about Google though. The quality of their search has been noticeably deteriorating, as has the gmail spam filter. The main reason I haven't switched to another service is that I didn't use a custom domain for my address. They are also overtly political with their YouTube demonitizing.
Not really. They've been removing, censoring and burying conservative authors for a while now. If you do some googling, you'll find plenty of articles about it.
It's worse - the attitude has been "if it can theoretically lower prices in the short-term it must be good for consumers" - they've totally ignored all the perils involved in large scale mergers.
ISP competition isn't going to happen, at least not in the wired/cable space. They need to be regulated with that reality in mind.
Wouldn't it make more sense for Utopia to just provide internet, given that they run and are directly charging you for the infrastructure?
Regulate internet infrastructure like any other utility and our problems are solved.
It's just that the market for cloud computing, mobile, search... Are so large they can support multiple companies so they tend to actually be natural oligopolies.
That's just a function of many founders' desire to flip their company for personal profit rather than building a sustainable long-term business. And a function of big-company executives wanting to further enrich themselves at the expense of their employees during big-co mergers.
With all due-respect, electricity companies haven't had to lay separate lines in the states since FERC Order Number 888[0,1] in 1996 I think it was and the EPA 2005[2]. The entire premise has been defunct for over a decade now.
From what I understand, if a line falls under the common carrier utility definition, the owner of the line cannot refuse access to other providers and can only charge a non-discriminatory tax/leasing-fee for use of the line.
I think that this is precisely why we see the back and forth about the common carrier definition with the different regimes of the FTC regarding ISPs and cable providers.
The issue - in the case of the cable companies/ISP providers - isn't regulation of the monopoly but the classification of their business and how the law then affects them. If they do not fall under common carrier utility rules, then the monopoly will always remain because even breaking them up - such as in the case of Ma-Bell - still ensure monopolies in those more localised coverage areas.
Back to the electricity providers: If the argument of utility providers having to lay lines had any merit, you'd still see telephone poles with hundreds of lines on them - originating from both operating and now-defunct providers (the worst be from the defunct providers because there's no maintenance on them) but we don't see this in the states (as far as I'm aware) today, yeah?
[0] - https://www.ferc.gov/legal/maj-ord-reg/land-docs/rm95-8-00w....
[1] - https://www.ferc.gov/legal/maj-ord-reg/land-docs/order888.as...
[2] - https://www.ferc.gov/whats-new/comm-meet/042006/M-1.pdf
I think congress will need to get involved if we are going to relax the requirements on consumer harm for anti-trust cases.
That message is clear.
The need to employ the lobbyists who not only put big petroleum in a completely unassailable position, but got the government paying vast amounts of money to that industry.
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=c&showYe...
>The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday faced renewed questions about its handling of its antitrust investigation into Google, after documents revealed that an internal report had recommended stronger action.
The 2012 report, from the agency’s bureau of competition, said that the agency should sue the Internet search company for anticompetitive practices
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/technology/take-google-to...
I'd say the bribes for both parties had been working as intended.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/01/googl...
I doubt it. Facebook getting away with a mere $5B fine from the FTC is a sign that the big tech companies aren't in much danger IMO
The threat of anti-trust, and perhaps trust busting, will spur competition and innovation. The US owes it to it's future citizens that STEM talent is not underutilized before it's too late, I support efforts to end this stagnation.
Or they could do part time. I'm sure there are a lot of people making $500k/year who would be perfectly fine working two days per week for $200k/year instead.
The founders and investors get a huge payday, the big companies get useful IP and employees, and are free to bury the product (see google graveyard).
It's sad. When startups release amazing stuff, they put pressure on the whole industry to up their game; consumers get better products, companies are forced to innovate, and good by-products come along.
But in the end, money talks.
(That doesn't mean I propose government action to prop up big companies. Just that one needs to think twice about breaking them.)
Is it possible that AG Barr could say, "We will go after you for anti-trust issues _unless_ you agree to weaken your privacy tooling", etc?
And if our legislators cannot do it, then that's is we the voters problem.
It's all in our hands.
Now - what is the vision? :-)
That said, political considerations do mean that Presidents are hesitant to overtly step in on specific cases and usually prefer to set general objectives. However the President can step in on a specific case if he wishes and that is actually explicitly part of our system. The President can set aside a conviction with a pardon or prevent it from being prosecuted in the first place.
No.
So big companies have generally donated to political campaigns and as such they should not, traditionally, have their investigations quashed because this would raise suspicions that there had been a quid pro quo.
Do you know/think/recall if that change a result of the Bush administration having a more lenient stance towards regulation, or was it a result of one administration almost always reacting to the prior one?
Big tech will likely drag this out as long as they can.
Unlikely. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-03/the-next-...
Justice Department Opens Antitrust Review of Big Tech Companies
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/technology/justice-depart...
Matt Levine: Facebook Negotiated Its Rules
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-23/facebo...
DoJ opens review into Big Tech’s market power
https://www.ft.com/content/4f008ab0-ad8c-11e9-8030-530adfa87... (http://archive.is/ktmWP) Also/earlier: http://archive.is/xQ0hI http://archive.is/Nt7kl http://archive.is/TiDIB
Big Tech Hit With Broad U.S. Antitrust Probe as Scrutiny Mounts
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-23/u-s-opens...
Also worth revisiting: "Fred Turner: Silicon Valley Thinks Politics Doesn’t Exist"
https://032c.com/fred-turner-silicon-valley-thinks-politics-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17669745)
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I suspect this to take decades to reach some conclusion. By then I'm not even sure how much of the original goal to the investigation will be reached.
This isn't to point the blame just at conservatives, who have historically been of the mindset that the government shouldn't interfere with business. Democrats haven't spent much political capital towards those ends either.
For 2.5 years president Trump has been raging at Bezos because he owns the Washington Post, and that has extended to Trump raging that Amazon needs to be taxed heavily. Despite playing the social media angle for all it is worth, Trump has been claiming that Facebook/Twitter/Google have been filtering out conservative opinions.
So pardon me for being suspicious that now the DOJ cares about looking into all of these companies. I'm for anti-trust regulation, but not when it is applied selectively for political gain.
Here is a counter example. 501(c)(4) organizations [1] are non-profits which have certain reporting requirements that are not allowed to do political work. Laws were changed, ostensibly to allow them to do some activities that were in the gray area -- the law said as long as they were mostly doing welfare/social work, then they could keep their status. PACs abused this by claiming they were 501(c)(4) organizations, which allowed them to shield who was bankrolling them.
When this was noticed, the IRS started looking into them. The right screamed bloody murder, saying the IRS was being used as a political tool of the Obama administration. And if that had been true, they would have been right to complain, even those the vast majority of those PACs were not really 501(c)(4)s. To this day it is claimed that this is what actually went down, when in fact the IRS looked into PACs from both parties. [2]
[1] https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-the-irs-classifies-nonprof...
This is a direct threat aimed at social media companies telling them they better not censor extremist content that is in favor of the current administration, no matter how vile it is, or else the investigations will go deeper and the consequences will be worse.
“I don’t think big is
necessarily bad, but I think a
lot of people wonder how such
huge behemoths that now exist
in Silicon Valley have taken
shape under the nose of the
antitrust enforcers,” Mr. Barr
told senators
If the ad business is required to let other search engines compete on the same terms as Google, it will remove the largest barrier to entry for small companies on search.
Splitting monopolies always come with extra strings attached, and this is a obvious one you can expect to be there.
It’s only not a good business model now because Google makes all these services free. These services could make money on their own if they had too.
1. Google Search+search ads
2. YouTube
3. Chrome
4. Android
5. Content ads
Mozilla seems to be doing just fine. I'm sure Chrome, Inc. could figure out some way to monetize itself.
Android is installed on over 2.5 billion devices worldwide. If they couldn't figure out how to monetize that, then they would have no business being in business.
Adsense/Doubleclick/whatever they're calling it right now makes billions of dollars per year.
All five parts would be monstrously large, powerful businesses on their own. The fact that they're all smooshed together stifles competition and innovation.
Android could be something, maybe, but if you remove Google's services and AI on the backend it's just a third rate iOS rip-off.
Content ads likewise rely on low cost networks, infrastructure, and having everyone's profiles available to them for ads targeting. Remove access to profile and make them fend for themselves, and it's an open question whether they'll survive.
I do agree with your last point though: having all these things as a single monolith presents an insurmountable obstacle for other companies to enter the corresponding markets.
Traffic stats show YouTube and Netflix [0] pretty close so people are obviously delivering video for profit.
This still means YouTube doesn’t need google’s infrastructure to stream video.
yes! they would have to improve or die! that's one of the points of anti-monopoly legislation and enforcement
They make their money from Google for being the default search provider.
Chrome could come to the same deal, but is it really splitting the company up then if they're able to negotiate a deal for big bucks from Google/Alphabet?
Every single reliable indicator is that Youtube is still barely profitable. But even then, they make their money from Google ads.
Android is installed on over 2.5 billion devices worldwide. If they couldn't figure out how to monetize that, then they would have no business being in business.
And it came out in the Oracle trial that Android has only made a $17 billion dollar profit since it existed.
(Sidebar: I hadn’t seen the “$17 billion profit” figure before. By any reasonable standard, that is a staggering amount of profit.)
I don't believe the same old anti-trust is the most effective method for dealing with these and future monopolies. Instead, a more tiered social responsibility program may be the ideal solution to continue and incentivize innovation while allowing society to reap the benefits of organizations that reach network monopolies.
If you're interested in exploring this line of thought I've published a brief article about it: https://bit.ly/2Yc57iS
However Apple? They have the best record on privacy and clearly iPhone and Mac are not a monopoly. Thanks to Tim Cooks deplomacy they also happen to be in the good grace of Trump unlike the others.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/13/supreme-court-rules-agains...
They have a monopoly on fruit named phones at the very least :-P
I've seen the argument made here and there, but I am not a lawyer and I don't recall well enough who I saw it from, so I don't know whether this is a good argument. But it's an argument being made by at least one company that presumably does hire lawyers, so it's probably not a terrible one.
Their record on privacy is unrelated as far as I can tell to antitrust, though; I'm not sure why you brought it up in this context.
In that case, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony have “monopolies” on their platforms?
The argument is that what Apple's doing inside there 'monopoly' is egregious enough to run afoul of these laws. Whether creating a music app on their system that is by default at a 30% revenue advantage compared to their competitors runs afoul of these laws is the question.
Monopolies by themselves aren't necessarily a problem it's when they leverage their monopoly position that there are issues.
Everything that people complain about with Apple us even worse with the consoles.
1. People complain about having to buy a Mac and pay $99 a year to develop for iOS. You can’t even develop on a PlayStation without signing an NDA and I couldn’t find anywhere reputable that knew the price.
2. The console makers also get a cut of every game sold on their platform - either physical or digital.
3. The platform owners - especially Nintendo - are much stricter about what they will allow on their platforms.
4. It’s much harder to “sideload” console games.
5. All of the console makers have first party games where they don’t have to pay a fee to themselves.
Whether creating a music app on their system that is by default at a 30% revenue advantage compared to their competitors runs afoul of these laws is the question.
Spotify hasn’t allowed in app subscriptions for years so they don’t pay a fee.
But on the other hand, I can “sideload” my own music and integrate it with my Apple Music library without paying Apple anything. Can I do that with Spotify? It seems like Spotify has more of a walled garden than Apple...
Yes FAANG companies have occasionally done bad things, but they contribute immense value. Gmail, Google Maps, Android, Amazon, AWS, etc. have provided immense value to billions of people.
I also think these companies are advancing state of the art software development, tons of open source software has been released Facebook, Google, etc. Google is doing cool things with AI, etc.
I suspect a lot of this action against big tech companies is the result of a politicized justice department that wants to take down "liberal elites". Why haven't we seen more action against other arguably even more harmful companies? (Larger companies, companies that destroy the environment, etc.)
I think people on HN are getting duped. In this case, their interests (enhanced consumer privacy) and Trump's interests (sticking it to the liberal elites), align on the surface, but the actual motivation of the Justice Department is much more insidious.
Currently google, facebook, twitter and others alternate between being common carriers and private networks depending on what best suits them, and limits competition, I think.
Regulation will be hard, but just clarifying the duty and liability to provide service and level of service. Currently, firms apply “terms of service” and don’t typically provide much insight into particular bans or limitations. If the phone company operated this way, it’s clear which regulator could intervene. Currently that’s not possible, but the platforms also aren’t liable for infringing content. It seems hard to practice selective enforcement, but not be liable when there is illegal material.