States to Move Forward with Antitrust Probe of Big Tech Firms
wsj.com
wsj.com
Contrast that with e.g. home internet, where in many parts of the US there's literally just a single company providing internet connectivity, a single ISP, and it's illegal to start a competing ISP.
So take the e-reader market. Amazon was able to undercut everyone else on price by a wide margin. A question could be asked whether their breadth of business allowed them to sell at a loss for long enough to kill off competition. Maybe, or maybe not, but was that their intent? I'm not sure how much intent matters in these types of cases.
And I'm sure there's more here that could be perceived as anticompetitive. I'm just picking some obvious example of where an investigation might be useful.
This phenomenon on its own is not anticompetitive at all. You’d need evidence of something entirely different like regulatory capture to prevent competitors from market re-entry or lobbying for laws that favor existing market leaders.
You know, you might have shed some light on the core issue here. Usually for tangible goods, it is about choice, at an affordable cost. In the case of tech however, it is not about choice, but it is actually about access, at an affordable cost.
In theory, you could also just set up your own wireless mesh network to reach the internet. Its actually really simple: figure out the basic hardware, and then the software which goes with it, and then get the cooperation of your immediate neighborhood, and then the community at large, and don't centralize anything so you don't become branded as an ISP. Of course, the problem is that it is prohibitively expensive, at least in terms of time. So you might say "Well, it makes no sense. I will rather pay the very high price that my ISP charges". So you have just perpetuated the ISP's monopoly, because there is now one less person who has a good reason to potentially contribute to the wireless mesh network.
You can use Telegram instead of WhatsApp, but now you don't have access (because most of your friends are not going to move to Telegram just because you are such an amazing friend).
But here is the important thing: the fact that all these tech giants use every single dark UX pattern imaginable (to increase access on their products), and don't allow unfettered data export (to decrease access for competitors), means they are well aware of this and try to make access prohibitively expensive (again, in terms of time) if you chose one of their competitors.
I don't have a solution, but I think that is why the monopoly label makes sense.
Also, perhaps certain liabilities could come in to play where you might be responsible for harbouring dodgy content from some of your less scrupulous neighbours.
Centralisation makes absolute sense in the case of shared public utilities. This whole business of treating them as just regular businesses is just a cod to help make some fat cats fatter.
Right now, facebook is like a phone company that only allows folks to communicate with others using the same company. If you could see pages on other platforms and chat with users on other platforms - at least to an extent - that would open up some space for competition and overcome the most difficult part of building any "replacement" or competition to facebook.
All that said, I think this is probably a problem that is more complex than I make it out to be and it might or might not be a feasible solution. The first hurdle would be deciding on the standards for this stuff.
It's becoming clear that we might need to "unbundle" the other end of the loop. Although that's much harder to even define. Trying to mandate the Fediverse is a pretty extreme technical and social challenge in the first place, let alone when billions of dollars are at stake.
A small thing might be to replicate the US approach to movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic.... : allow services to be either content producers or content aggregators but not both, and enforce non-discriminatory licensing of content. I.e. if Netflix pays Paramount $X for a series, any other streaming service should have the right to also buy it for $X at the same time.
It’s not illegal to start a competing ISP anywhere. (It’s illegal under federal law for local governments to grant exclusive franchises.) But your comparison is interesting. Almost everywhere in the US, you at least have DSL and satellite service as competition. They’re lower quality alternatives that few people choose, but the same is true for DDG and Bing. I think you correctly perceive that ISPs have market power because they have little effective competition. But by that same logic tech companies have substantial market power in many areas.
And there are theoretical reasons why these markets would tend towards concentration. In the ISP space you have the tendency toward natural monopoly that comes with physical utilities. But in the tech space you have strong network effects, which are another kind of market characteristic that tends to limit competition.
>investors say that their companies have been summoned to acquisition meetings with tech giants who ordered them to take a lowball offer or be exterminated by the giant creating a directly competing, loss-leader-priced service that puts them out of business altogether.
https://boingboing.net/2018/06/04/thanks-milton-friedman.htm...
Also, perhaps some of the focus should also shift towards preventing such acquisitions (Google + YouTube, Facebook + WhatsApp), which the tech community at large can immediately identify as a potential monopoly threat. A simplistic way to do this would be to look at how much the company pays for the acquisition, but I am sure others here can come up with better metrics.
Also, Facebook should not be clubbed with the other companies in this list. What they are doing isn't some poorly defined "tech monopoly consolidation". They are just a completely fraudulent company headed by someone who should probably not be running any company. Tim Cook's point may have been self-serving, but he was absolutely right when he said that "if I were Facebook, I would not be in this situation".
Your argument implies that all Github does is service the Git protocol, but we all know it does so much more than that. From a cloud-based source control standpoint, Microsoft absolutely gained market control. An open protocol != cloud-based SAAS company.
e.: people mentioning "Github profiles" when discussing preparing for interviews.
* WKWebView is the only browser engine allowed on iOS.
* Apps can only be distributed through the iOS app store.
* No formal appeals processes based on established judicial principles for either Apple or Google.
If anti-trust is on the table it's the government who will be deciding whose ecosystem it is and exactly who owes what to whom.
You don't get to choose which phone the customer for your app already bought.
> Regulators, lawmakers and legal experts, however, worry that significant slices of the high-tech marketplace have become uncompetitive. Those include advertising, search, social media, app sales and certain retail sectors, among others.
If Google and Apple were operating in a truly competitive market, they couldn't get away with treating app developers so poorly. Because said app developers would just use a competitor. It's basically a duopoly.
Games are generally the only apps users are willing to pay for, and the games market is not only Apple and Google but also Nintendo and Sony and Microsoft (XBox). All five of those markets are closed to 3rd party stores.
Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and HBO Go and all the video apps are also closed to 3rd parties.
It should be obvious why console games are a different market from mobile games, but it's no different within console games. I always find it strange that people consistently point to that as something different even though the whole point is that it's basically the same, and they shouldn't get away with it either.
The best argument that there's a difference is that a lot of customers have both a PlayStation and Xbox so neither of them has a monopoly on those customers, especially if you count PC gaming as the same market (which is a lot more plausible than lumping mobile gaming in there). But then that's a relevant distinction from mobile apps, because the percentage of people who carry both an iPhone and an Android phone rounds to zero.
> Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and HBO Go and all the video apps are also closed to 3rd parties.
That's the same thing again. Most people have more than one video service (e.g. both Netflix and HBO), so neither of them has a lock on those customers. And substantially everyone also uses YouTube or another free video distribution service (cf. no F-Droid/homebrew on iOS).
Perhaps Big Tech hasn’t hired enough lobbyists.
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s&showYe...
https://mattstoller.substack.com/
It's the most informative resource I've come across on the topic.
Among many things you will learn about:
- The definition of "market power" and why it matters
- The details of US, EU and international antitrust laws
- Why most of the Big Techs are almost certainly in violation of these laws today
- Antitrust enforcement actions that are in the pipeline and what their repercussions may be
There are some important principles which are not widely understood and Matt's newsletter goes into them. For example, once you reach a certain level of success, it becomes illegal to keep doing some of the stuff that your company has always done. These principles often come as a surprise to people but they are grounded in a long intellectual and legal history that goes as far back as Adam Smith.
An experiment: try counting the number of positive news articles about Google/Facebook you see and compare it to the number of negative ones.
Only the EU has fined these behemoths and there's a large contingent of people that start crying discrimination whenever that happens.
We need to keep this topic under public scrutiny until these companies stop abusing their dominance. And it's not a smear campaign if the criticism is true.
The Tech industry has spent billions on PR. That spending propped up a massive media infrastructure — how many reporters cover the tech beat? How many of those reporters exist because their publication host events and conferences, run advertorials, print “Special Features”, etc. paid for in large part by the tech industry? — and the industry naively thought they had the leverage to control the narrative. They were wrong and now the massive infrastructure they built to help them market their products has turned on them. The amount of noise being generated is a function of the size of the “problem” but it’s also a function of the size of the media-industrial complex built by the industry.
Ag and Oil are also under scrutiny but you shouldn’t be surprised they get less attention. They haven’t spent nearly as much over the last decade twirling shiny objects to distract from poor business practices.
One aspect of the investigation claims that tech companies are stifling competition and that the big names are monopolistic. I'd argue that's as far from reality as possible - it's never been easier to start a tech company, and the barrier to entry is extremely low. You know a market with a high barrier to entry, and literal laws preventing new competition? Internet service providers. Investigate the ISPs instead.
The second aspect of the probe surrounds concerns about personal data and its aggregation. But why bother investigating how Google et al are handling this data when there are clear offenders who have behaved with gross negligence and suffered no consequences (Equifax)? If those companies are not investigated, what possible reason could there be to investigate Google (who have not suffered a large-scale data breach) other than politically-motivated harassment? You know what would be more productive than investigating big tech companies - passing actual legislation like the GDPR to set up a framework to prevent the kind of privacy issue these legislators are supposedly concerned with.
Your second point is just whataboutism. Investigating Google now doesn’t mean Equifax can’t be investigated later.
I am not trying to what-about around Google possibly having some skeletons in their closet - just pointing out that the company screaming "hey, I'm handling data irresponsibly" is not being investigated, but the ones that have been the target of techno-fear-mongering smear campaigns are. Makes me question that the motivation of the investigation is not actually to benefit the average consumer.
[0] https://fortune.com/2017/02/22/startups-2017-challenger/
Your first point is correct, however. Competition in some fields is declining; Amazon is the dominant internet retailer by a large margin. Google has even larger dominion over the online ad space, save for walled gardens. Investigation of large tech companies is justified on its merits. It is likely that some companies have not broken any laws, but there is value to investigation.
not if 'big tech' enables (russians|the people) to pick unfavored generals and upset the status quo
And I've also witnessed many successful social media platforms evolve in the post-Facebook era (Snapchat, Twitter, Tumblr, TikTok). There are also a plethora of small communities like DeviantArt, image boards, and specialty forums. My point is, of course cloning an existing platform won't pull populations away from it - users are sticky. That's true with any product. Folks need a reason to move, and once they have that reason, they're happy to do so. The beauty of social media is you don't even have to move, you can just have accounts in both places.
So I don't think the fact that a Facebook clone failed means that Facebook has a monopoly on social media. They might have a strong momentum with users that prefer Facebook-flavored social media, but given the market of all the different available platforms, it doesn't seem like there is a lot of demand for Facebook #2. Having a differentiator is the killer, and that makes the difference between G+ and TikTok.
Edit: incoherence
Microsoft did nothing to earn the trust (instead the broke the trust) and business of customers, why should they have succeeded?