It’s amazing how well connected industries like big oil and big Ag seem to operate with impunity while the nascent bad boys are put under the investigation spotlight.
Perhaps Big Tech hasn’t hired enough lobbyists.
Perhaps Big Tech hasn’t hired enough lobbyists.
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.
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s&showYe...
An experiment: try counting the number of positive news articles about Google/Facebook you see and compare it to the number of negative ones.
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.
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.