Elizabeth Warren Came Up with a Plan to Break Up Big Tech
newyorker.com
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This would really change the landscape if implemented. On thing that it would do is force the companies to innovate themselves, knowing that they can't just acquire every innovative company that challenges their dominance.
And this would equally apply to Apple and Google who have a number of apps on their app stores. This would then lead to even more bundled apps on the phone e.g. Garageband which would decrease competition.
Most of these policies are really not well thought out.
If the vast majority of people shopped at one supermarket, and that supermarket's most popular products were largely it's own brand products, and most industries that competed with such products had largely shrunk to providing specialty alternatives or cheap knockoffs because it was so hard to compete, then there might be a case for breaking that supermarket up.
Just some random thoughts, in different contexts:
1. Buying the cheap mega-supermarket can lead to non-obvious degradations in your community (e.g. you find yourself in a news desert because the local paper went bankrupt, following the closure of the local stores who advertised there).
2. Competition keeps competitors honest, but if one company gets too much of a lead, it's competitors give up leaving fewer market-based checks on its behavior (even if it was fantastic and awesome in the first place). Eventually prices will go up or quality down, as the never-ending quest to provide increasing shareholder value continues.
3. The real costs may not be reflected in the sticker price. For instance, you pay for Facebook and Google with your data and privacy, not your money. A competitor that directly charges you $20/year may actually be a better deal.
Ummm... that's exactly what I said. In response to
"The line is not 'you are not allowed to ever do this' but 'this particular instance is hurting competition'."
I replied
"I don't think they can specifically address a single entity like that: the laws have to be applicable across the board"
I am really not a fan of Walmart but I do shop at Costco and Target occasionally and I try to check both when making meaningful household purchases to see which one's cheaper. At some level, they do have to compete with each other on price and service.
Yes they distort their respective markets and put pressure on suppliers, but so does walmart and other big retailers. So if the law comes into place, it shouldn’t be limited to the online space
If there's only 1 Walmart store in a small town (no competitors near by), does that mean they can't sell their house brand there?
What about a Walmart in a town with a Target and 80% of the sales are at Walmart? Can Target sell their house brand if Walmart can't in this scenario?
I believe the line is drawn at ‘large-scale winner-takes-all players’. It doesn’t necessarily have to be fair but it is supposed to benefit the entire economy. As long as there’s a relative balance between the economical power of competitors no measures are required.
You think it's easier to open a physical store to compete with Walmart than to spin up an ecommerce site to compete with Amazon?
On the other hand, I do not use ANY one-stop site for online shopping outside of Amazon.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-... -- 49% of ecommerce, 5% of total retail [1] https://www.pymnts.com/consumer-insights/2018/walmart-amazon...
Regarding the ecommerce market share I’d like to know the current numbers and the trend over the years. One should not wait for 99% to start taking measures, all competitors will be dead by then.
Regarding the physical stores Amazon isn’t really trying to capture it as the barrier to entry is much lower than online and margins are low anyway.
It’s extremely difficult to project forward 10 years in tech.
> It’s extremely difficult to project forward 10 years in tech.
I think this is a common misconception. Tech giants rise mostly because they create new markets. Since their beginnings nobody beat Microsoft on operating systems, nobody beat Google in search, nobody beat Facebook on social network market share.
The point would be that once you're dominant in a market it's very hard to be moved away and it takes more than a decade. I find it hard to believe a 1T dollar company can be outcompeted during less than a few decades.
Also as the tech/online market matures things naturally tend to slow down.
Isn't this just another way of saying survivor bias? They are big because they survived and out-competed the competition, no? There were and are other operating systems, other search engines, other social networks. And sometimes even having the same things said about them... Think MySpace before Facebook. Until they got conquered.
These giants are huge because the internet -- to some approximation -- has no geographic boundaries. It's much easier to consolidate and hold power when you don't have to literally expand to every corner of the world where people physically live to capture them. Amazon and Facebook can acquire entire towns with nothing but a few more servers in the rack.
I’m not sure if MySpace could be considered a giant at the time. Sure, it had popularity and market share, but it was not spraying billions around buying up competition or consolidating its business (Instagram, Whatsapp).
So Facebook didn’t take down any giants, instead it won a fair market competition. That was my point.
The plan we are discussing is a plan for national scale governance, and since your example is not on a national scale, the plan would not apply. If the isolated town wishes to enact their own laws to regulate Walmart, they may do so.
The locals may govern themselves locally. National leaders govern on a national scale.
Sears too once had a "monopoly" on mail order products. People marveled at how amazing it was that you could order a product, mail in a check, and receive the product six weeks later, all without stepping into a store! Now they're bankrupt.
The whole concept of a business "controlling" the market is ridiculous. Amazon operates in a highly competitive, low margin industry that requires a tremendous amount of logistical overhead to function. The minute they stop innovating, they're toast.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. You pay for that software even if you're unused to putting a dollar-price on its cost.
Hard for me to get too worked up about tech giants seeing as using them is optional and alternatives abound. I don’t see how my life is made worse if someone else buys a MacBook.
None of the things that do irk me about tech companies (security breaches, unethical advertising, spread of fake news, and so on) would be addressed in any way by a breakup.
Try participating in modern society without an Android or Apple smartphone or tablet. It's still possible, but becoming more difficult each day.
(And to clarify, I don't mean "leave your phone at home today". I mean not owning a smartphone or tablet at all.)
Those are two examples. What about Standard Oil for instance? AT&T?
I think Walmart fits that definition. Any sufficiently-large brick-and-mortar business inevitably expands to have an online marketplace, whether it's their main line of business or not.
Your average grocery-store chain would only not fall under these regulations for lack of size.
A significant quantity of stuff sold with the Kirkland label is just whitelabeled, with varying degrees of hidden-ness. Their recent beer for instance is labeled Kirkland up top, but also have the company (Hopf Malz something), and it's a pretty trivial amount of digging to get to the underlying Gordon Biersch.
I don't know where you draw the line though
* white labeled but not really because it's still got the original name on it
* white labeled without the original name
* self produced
Probably you could get finer grained than that too.
So it's entirely possible that you could pass a law banning large chains from doing whitelabeling, but actually you'd still get the same stuff on the shelves with their original labels and it'd be fine.
Or it's possible you could pass a law banning chains from selling their own produced stuff, but still have whitelabeled "house brand" be ok. But then if you were equitable about that in online space, - amazon couldn't sell fire phones or echo dot alexa things, but they could sell an "amazon choice" if it's just whitelabeled. So idk.
Going in another dimension, you can introduce the kind of wonkiness you get around "made in the USA" labeling on products which have all their parts manufactured elsewhere and then some trivial last step done on US soil.
The centralization benefits are not geared towards consumers, and they never were.
What I mean by that is that Apple isn't the only company that could vet apps. Anyone could put together a list of "trusted" apps into a software repository/store and you could pick whichever one you trusted and use only it. This is already how Linux works.
In the long run, this is probably even better for people who want to only run vetted apps. Apple's app store policies have to cover everyone who runs iOS, which means that even with the best intentions, they can't be as permissive or as strict as some people want. If Apple wasn't in that boat, you could have an app store that had much harsher rules about data collection, performance, and permissions.
My experience has been that specialized platforms usually produce better results for their target audiences than generalized alternatives. As the sole gatekeeper to iOS, the best Apple is ever going to be able to provide is a generalized storefront.
- Brick and Mortar stores buy inventory and choose from what they own to sell inside their stores.
- Online platforms make revenue by being open to anyone to sell their own inventory through.
You still need to outbid existing inventory space, which is not the same as an open platform for anyone to sell through.
In contrast brick and mortar has no idea what does well until they start buying the product to sell themselves.
Would this not apply to Walmart and Target too?
If this only applies to digital stores, then yeah, it's total bull. Because Amazon could just build some stores like Target and Walmart.
Bundling Internet Explorer into Windows was only disallowed because Windows was a monopoly.
There was a court case about it, and then they lost the case, and then Bush took over the White House and the DOJ just completely dropped the whole case, so MS was never punished nor made to unbundle IE.
IE is still bundled in Windows to this day.
If this hadn't been the case, we'd be farther along now.
I don't see how, for example, Explorer being free held anyone back.
Do I need to spell this out any more for you?
Besides, many other browsers are available on Windows. ActiveX failed in the marketplace.
And no, at the time, many other browsers were not available on Windows, as they had a tiny market share, largely due to how incompatible they were with sites.
ActiveX failed eventually because of the rise of Javascript, and also because ActiveX was a giant security nightmare.
...or it could cause Google and/or Apple to spin off their app store as an independent company, and allow other independent companies to offer their own competing app store.
Not really. CostCo and supermarket house brands are often manufactured by the same companies that makes name brands. Also retail stores aren't "marketplaces" like Amazon is, they buy the products they offer. In short, it's often not competition, just a way to segment customers.
Amazon, on the other hand, runs an actual marketplace AND competes in it, which has different dynamics.
Though, personally, I'd rather Amazon shut down its marketplace and go back to something more like a traditional store. Either that, or they need to be make responsible for the rampant fraud that they've allowed in their marketplace.
Target on the other hand have an online store but you are always buying from Target.
So if the law considers "online marketplace" from "online store" then it doesn't apply to Target.
Forcing then to cut costs and corners (hence the adulterated meat scandals a few years ago) and bullying them into paying for in store promotions even big companies like Heineken have been shaken down.
The big 4 probably should be forced to divest themselves of their audit functions as well.
If Wal-Mart started allowing anyone to set up shop and sell there, it would be a more apt comparison.
Apple and Google will have to spin out divisions that sell apps on their app stores. They can still partner under this plan, but must be independent entities. What’s the problem there?
I sure hope not!
The 80/20 rule for insurance companies is a good example - now they have an incentive for prices to go up, not down.
Of course, in some of these cases, it only increases the stranglehold. Because now no one else can be a large app distribution platform and an app dev for instance. (Think about it, Steam and Epic would have to really think about the way forward.) Or, famously, for Netflix, no one else can distribute video and create video. So Disney would be forced to license their stuff to Netflix. The only reason Netflix started creating content in the first place was because the creators wouldn't license their content to Netflix. So now Netflix can dump all of that content creation, confident that content creators will be forced to license their offerings to Netflix. Not only that, Netflix can be confident in the knowledge that large content creators would never be allowed to go into distribution.
It's like American Sugar. It's not only when you have your own stores, it's also illegal if you only sell to certain stores. Basically, American Sugar had to sell to all stores without discrimination. Anything short of that means that you are still in the business of distribution. So in Netflix terms, it means that whatever deal that, say, Hulu or Amazon Prime gets, Netflix would get too. Or else Disney is colluding with Hulu to skirt their restriction on being a distributor.
For businesses like Netflix, plans like Warren's are music to their ears. I bet creating all that content is a huge part of their costs. Now they can dump all of that, and acquire content at the same terms as all their competitors.
So any way this whole thing shakes out, Netflix wins. Because whatever it costs, it costs that much for everyone, and Netflix gets the same content catalog as everyone.
I'm no business expert, but that doesn't sound likely at all to me. There's a reason why ISPs are always trying to vertically integrate with content production. Moving bits around is a low-margin business.
Only the new law ensures that none of it will be running on their competitors machines. A stricture mandated by law for Natflix.
That's the brilliance of the law! (Well, for Netflix anyway.)
And if you think House of Cards and Stranger Things are as valuable as franchises as Star Wars, Star Trek, and the Disney Archive, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. As far as content swaps go, you happily make that trade every time.
Who really benefits if Valve stops developing games?
Having said that, Valve would probably be way below the 25-billion-dollar revenue threshold that Warren proposes.
You see incorrectly. Valve has released Underlords (doing well) and Artifact (doing badly) in the last 7 months, while also continually updating Dota 2 and reaching an all time high in quality.
If the rule only affected online house brands, it would tilt the field in favor of Walmart, Costco, and Kroger, who could all continue selling their house brands in stores. For e.g. Kroger, where online sales are a tiny percentage, this would essentially represent a carve-out.
Looked at another way, this could be seen as a tax on people with mobility challenges. (Because no house brands on the delivery services => higher costs.)
What exactly does this mean? Google ads can't show on Google search? Couldn't they just lease out ad space to whatever Alphabet company gets spun off to handle search? Same thing with Amazon basics.
¹ I mean by law, not technically unable.
Firstly, it's not simply about drawing some arbitrary lines between search and AdWords and saying, right, split done. Other companies have to be able to compete on equal footing. Today Google is one company with a unified infrastructure for everything. It's not a bunch of unrelated businesses loosely strapped together as Warren seems to be imagining. For instance "undoing" the merger of DoubleClick would be impossible as DoubleClick doesn't exist anymore, in any form. One of the first things Google did after the acquisition was reinterview everyone and fire about half the staff. Their tech infra is long gone, etc.
So what does that mean in practice. Well, the ad auction has to run physically very close to the search engines, because search responds very fast which means ads must also run very fast. This would be hard for other firms to do well because Google datacenters are often built in the middle of nowhere for various reasons. If a search has to hit a Google DC then go back out and across America to some other DC run by some other ad firm, then search latency will go up and people will search less, or more likely, those ads will just miss their deadline more often, won't run, and lose out to son-of-AdWords which is faster.
Could competing firms run colocated in Google datacenters? Maybe. Google Cloud exists. But you can't choose in Google Cloud to run in space allocated next to existing Google services, in fact their locations constantly change and isn't public. Ads datasets and processing requirements can be very large. If a building is full, and a new ad company says "to be competitive we must be physically close", that means something else has to move out to make space. To what extent is Google allowed to say, no, we need that space to run Maps servers or something like that? How often can Google force co-located servers to move? Does a regulator start micro-managing Google's datacenter space?
Now what about the rest of the integration? Clickfraud detection involves deep integration between web search and the ads system. Is Google obliged to make all that infrastructure on the web side available to any ad firm that requests it? What stops me creating a trivial "legit" ad firm, obtaining all of Google's secrets and then selling them to click fraudsters for massive profit?
In theory all these problems can be solved, but likely only by creating constant political fights, everywhere, all the time. And for what? Warren is engaged in leftist populism: the vast majority of people in the real world don't care about splitting tech firms up like that. Even in anti-US-tech Europe, polls show people's top concerns are usually immigration and terrorism. "Can other firms compete in the AdWords auction" doesn't appear in the list at all, it's a non issue.
I’m sure it was really inconvenient and difficult for the once-shared infrastructure of Standard Oil or AT&T to be broken up among different companies, but it was necessary. Google can’t hold the market hostage because it’s “too big to be split”. Changing the status quo is difficult, but that doesn’t mean “too hard, just leave a monopoly, oh well!”
I think it means they couldn't both be google, any more.
[edit]: to be specific, they couldn't both be alphabet companies anymore, I worded that sloppily but following the quoted material.
Worst outcome would be that your search history would be up for sale to multiple companies unless an exclusivity deal was financially more reasonable (or the backlash could be argued to make the sale unprofitable in other ways).
It would also be interesting to see how other parts of the company are split up and whether their sole source of revenue would be charging for previously free services to customers or out right selling user data to the Google Ad division or whatever company will pay the most.
Meanwhile Google Ad would have to be doing it's due diligence in buying this data. Does it make sense to pay for redundant data when someone runs google ads, analytics, recaptchas, and apis, does that mean the slow death of one.
Meanwhile google cloud might be making bank charging all the little googlets as they slowly transition to azure or aws.
Definitely be a huge shakeup though it's reasonable that transition plans and deals would significantly slow this down to a longer time scale rather than over night.
- US Constitution, Article 1 Section IX Clause 3
Undoing the mergers sounds like ex post facto law. I'd appreciate it, Senator Warren, if you would amend the constitution first. And I can't wish you luck with that amendment.
You can certainly pass laws to undo a merger or (equivalently) break up a company.
But you can create a law that Amazon (and potentially others) will be in violation of, and following proper trial, they are broken up.
Also, just to reinforce the point other folks have mentioned - that clause doesn't work like that.
I don't know man?
My reading, at least how I understand it, they wouldn't be allowed to claim that they "innovated" their way into those other markets either.
I think if they are "platform utilities", they just can't do any of the other stuff period. Doesn't matter if they write the code themselves.
That said, it only seems to apply to marketplaces and platforms, not to regular retailers. I'm not sure what a LAR/VAR counts as, though.
It'd be interested to see if this law would interact poorly with partner product reselling - "Oh yea, if you buy our CAD module we'll throw in a free copy of CAD with it" might actually come afoul the law, depending on the specifics. I'm sorta okay with losing that though.
I've been with the company since we were less than $500M.
So at what arbitrary point do we cross from being a good guy to being an evil corporate titan that must be broken up? I don't feel like we've gotten evil; it feels like as we've grown we've built a greater capacity to server our customers better.
TBH I don't see any difference from her platform then the one Trump had, which is to turn back the clock and make America like its in the 80s, perhaps just with less racism.
There are tons of reasons why it would make sense to purchase a company, that would never be profitable on its own.
AdWords vs AdSense https://www.google.com/search?q=adwords+vs+adsense&ie=UTF-8
Breaking them up doesn't mean that Google Search may not monetize by placing AdSense ads, it means that the Corporate structure exists such that Facebook could offer monetization to Google Search at a competing price.
And with disparate boards/shareholders.
A part of Microsoft’s 2001 consent decree with the DOJ was they couldn’t dictate what middleware couldn’t/ should be installed. The second order effect of that is bloated terrible PC’s with massive security vulnerability surface area.
https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/tip/Microsoft-PatchGua...
Basically, how would you stop Google from shadow-running Google Ads? What would stop them from preferring Google Ads?
Not true. They make money by monitoring their customers' online activity and using the data to target ads, which they sell to advertisers.
I can't take anyone's reporting or opinion on FB and Google seriously if they don't understand this extremely important distinction.
If you can target with enough granularity, which is fairly typical of these modern ad networks like Facebook/Google, then you have the data about those users who click through by the fact that they saw that targeting. It may not be perfect data, but it's close enough to be incredibly valuable to companies.
I can't buy an email list from Facebook with salaries attached, but I can target those who have a salary in the range I'm interested in and see who I get through.
You're right that this is a distinction, but I think it has very similar outcomes.
I don't care about being shown ads for products I might buy. I care about targeted disinformation being fed to "persuadables" in order to affect massive political upheaval (current political breakdown in the United States, Brexit in the UK, other instances all across the globe in smaller nations.)
The only important thing here is that e.g. Facebook has the data and sells access to nefarious actors. Selling the data "directly" or not isn't the point.
That's only half the truth. In real-time bidding system, personal identifiable information is actually sent to advertisers at scale.
It's not directly selling the information, but advertisers who make generate too little revenue can't participate in those RTB platforms, so there is effectively a minimal amount that advertisers pay per potential click, so close enough to actually selling the data.
If you were strip Google to just search and Facebook to just Facebook then they would have to more aggressively go after advertising dollars to ensure they are growing revenue. And since they would've already been broken up they would surely do this by invading privacy even more.
Surely the smarter move is to focus on heavily regulating their ability to track users. And make approaches like Apple did with WebKit mandatory.
The first is how many industries are against it -- Google's not the half of it. Google would still make a mint if all they could do was show ads for car insurance when people search for car insurance and so on. But meaningful privacy regulation would effectively prohibit the likes of Equifax, and then you would get huge pushback from the finance industry and realtors.
Then there's the fact that a lot of politically powerful government surveillance agencies want all your stuff to be in The Cloud instead of on your own device where they can't read it, so they'd fight it too.
And the biggest problem is that you need the rules to be good rules that are at the same time effective without destroying small entities and entrenching the incumbents, which is really hard and there is a high probability they'll screw it up (especially with the aforementioned constraints), but doing it wrong can easily be worse than doing nothing. Then you don't get privacy but you destroy the upstart alternatives that might have made it possible for the people who most need it, or could have presented a challenge to the incumbents given more time.
The problem is you don't just need some law to be passed, it also has to be a good law, which is the really hard part.
And it's a lot easier for Equifax than tech because if Equifax would dry up and blow away it would only make the world better. Their entire business is doing the thing nobody should be doing at all. No part of what they do actually needs to be saved.
The problem with Google is that they also make a search engine. We need search engines and email providers and video hosts to continue to exist even if their funding source changes. So it's no help to pass a law that just makes them impossible, or makes it so that nobody can do it unless they're a multibillion dollar corporation. That makes it worse rather than better, because competition is the greatest practical method of thwarting corporate misbehavior. Laws alone can't do it -- see also pre-breakup AT&T, post-breakup AT&T and Comcast, various failed attempts at totalitarian communism, etc.
Especially if you make rules that cause the incumbents to get so big and entrenched that it becomes inevitable that they capture the regulators.
The best thing laws can do is to ensure that competition is thriving. But most of them in practice do the opposite.
Regarding competitive markets being the antidote to bad behavior, that's simply counterfactual. Examples from Uber to Boeing to Wells Fargo to Foxconn to Equifax itself prove that simply because you have strong, viable competitors does not mean that you have to treat anyone or anything well.
And the truth is that many markets are naturally winner-take-all. In the absence of regulatory releveling, there is no natural market force which prevents behemoths from emerging and creating the regulatory capture you fear. The conclusion to draw from that is that regulatory action must be taken before capture is possible, and therefore potentially before actual abuse. Such is the position we are broadly in with giants like Amazon.
Can you find the quote that says "it can't be done" instead of saying it's really hard and there is a major risk that we screw it up and make it worse? Because I've been saying the same thing since the first post.
> And yet, Equifax is unquestionably less abusive than it once was.
That's debatable. It's only differently abusive. They collect different kinds of information now than in 1969, but they collect more of it now and sell it to more people, and have invested a lot more in ensuring regulatory capture. The legislative response to that data breach should have been that their industry would cease to exist, so the fact that it hasn't demonstrates that the relevant legislators are under their thumb.
> It's clear that legislative action is both possible (contrary to your point in your first post) and survivable (which you imply isn't possible in the more recent post).
You're still using Equifax as an example, which I've already explained the problem with -- they don't need to be saved so anything that hurts them is irrelevant and comes at no significant cost.
> The odds that regulatory action could be taken which left intact much of the good that Google does while curtailing its most egregious abuses seem correspondingly good to me.
How? So much of what they do is ML on large data sets. They use the same data for targeting ads, but they also actually need it to provide the service. How do you propose to make Waze operate without user location data? But regardless of the ads, the risk is then that they know too much and it could be compromised or used for more nefarious purposes in the future. It's inherently a trade off which will be more acceptable to some people than others, so what's needed isn't laws prohibiting what they're doing, it's more competitors who do something different for the people who prefer better privacy.
> Regarding competitive markets being the antidote to bad behavior, that's simply counterfactual. Examples from Uber to Boeing to Wells Fargo to Foxconn to Equifax itself prove that simply because you have strong, viable competitors does not mean that you have to treat anyone or anything well.
Why are you holding up uncompetitive industries as examples of strong competition? Boeing is the only major US commercial aircraft manufacturer and one of only two in the world. And all of your other examples, even the ones with limited competition, have done well for their customers. But you are not the customer of Equifax. You can't choose not to patronize their service, in the way that you can choose not to use Facebook or Gmail and block all of their tracking bugs with browser plugins. The problem is the limited competition, which comes from laws like DMCA 1201 and the CFAA which prohibit adversarial interoperability and lock customers into vertically integrated platforms.
> And the truth is that many markets are naturally winner-take-all.
Hardly any real markets are winner-take-all. Making them that way is the primary goal of regulatory capture, which is why enabling it by passing rules that destroy small competitors is so problematic. Even classic textbook examples like utility companies are only that way because of rules that favor large statewide entities with uniform rates and build out requirements that exist to implicitly subsidize rural areas at the expense of urban ones. There is no natural market force preventing a new ISP from forming at the scale of an individual neighborhood, it's only regulatory capture by the incumbents (or other political forces that have the same effect).
> Such is the position we are broadly in with giants like Amazon.
Amazon is the least monopolistic of all the tech companies. They have a single digit percentage of the US retail market, maintain their market share almost entirely through competitive pricing and compensate their employees as well or better than most of their competitors do. The people complaining about them aren't customers, they're sore loser competitors who don't like aggressive price competition.
At this stage of the election cycle a few presidential elections ago Obama was promising socialized medicine if elected, what we got from a democratically controlled house and senate was Obamacare. This is what always happens.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jul...
> In the 2008 Obama-Biden health care plan on the campaign’s website, candidate Obama promised that “any American will have the opportunity to enroll in [a] new public plan.”
[0]https://thinkprogress.org/flashback-obama-repeatedly-touted-...
Google is growth oriented because it has so much money that it can experiment with things. Maybe that’s dumb?
An example of the type of business relationship Warren probably wants to encourage: the way Google pays Mozilla to keep Google Search as Firefox's default search provider.
So, if Google were split up into Google-the-search-engine and Google-the-ad-agency, Google Search's main source of revenue would still be from ads—but it'd be via the separate company of Google Ads, paying Google Search for ad placement.
This would almost certainly lead to less privacy. Google Search, instead of just sourcing ads from Google Ads would have to open bidding to a wide variety of ad networks.
That means your personal search history wouldn't just be accessed by Google, it would be publicly available to any upstart ad network that wanted to bid for Search ad placement.
Aren't you assuming that they are not already giving it all they've got?
But, saying that breaking them up would only make them invade privacy more in your view, that's the view of someone in an abusive relationship. Whether or not Facebook and Google are violating your privacy rights should be a separate question that calls for other regulatory action, regardless of the entity's size. We need to have both conversations.
Disclaimer: I work as a lowly grunt for Google, but my opinions are my own and do not represent them.
Walmart?
Then why not telecom? By the same logic shouldn't Comcast no longer be allowed to own NBCUniversal?
Or for media - would Disney not be allowed to launch their new video platform thing? Does Newscorp also have to be broken up? Certainly they have platforms for distributing media, but also a staggeringly large amount of content being generated.
1. why only online, and not also physical? (Are there just not large enough physical marketplaces?)
2. What about walmart (in the context of online) - would they need to divest their online marketplace too?
3. What about telecom/media industries? Would they need to be broken up as well?
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/7/20758388/elizabeth-warren-...
I can't buy reams of data from Google. There are data brokers out there, but big adtech companies won't sell me the source of their ad success. Most of the data market is composed of smaller companies which don't run ad networks and wouldn't even come close to the eye of an antitrust program.
I'm not really complaining but even tech savvy people can underestimate just how much of their information is out there.
The only difference is that Google/Facebook/Similar get to pretend to be clean, even though they are the enablers.
Running enough ads with your own tracking on SV platforms, will get you the data you want about your targets.
What am i missing?
Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. do not "own" anything. They are businesses that exist in a fiercely competitive environment in which consumers have zero loyalty and will gladly switch to the next hot thing at the drop of a hat. These businesses are successful because they continually innovate and deliver products that people want. There's no guarantee that any of these companies will still be around in a decade, much less "own" the market they operate in.
And monopoly regulation put an end to that and allowed Netscape to come in and make it a competition.
It was really an absurd case considering that 100% of internet users use a free browser these days.
Netscape was selling their browser before Microsoft got smacked down by the DOJ.
In fact, Microsoft's bundling of IE with Windows was some of the strongest evidence showing that they were abusing their market position. By bundling a free alternative they basically destroyed the market of for-pay web browsers, and killed off Netscape while they were at it.
There have been quite a few technology IPO's over the last couple years and I'm sure many of these companies were approached by incumbents but did not sell. And some of these companies will become giant slayers.
Also, even if we wanted unregulated capitalism and natural selection of markets, we would need to first eliminate the existing monopolies, oligopolies, and externalities, since they all cause market failure.
Trade in the market creates wealth. The efficiency of the market lowers the costs of goods. These two things work together to make everyone richer.
> Also, even if we wanted unregulated capitalism and natural selection of markets, we would need to first eliminate the existing monopolies, oligopolies, and externalities, since they all cause market failure.
Market failures are only made worse by government intervention. Unforeseen negative consequences distort the market which causes more problems.
Yes, I agree. That's basically why politics exists.
> Market failures are only made worse by government intervention.
This is a blanket statement that doesn't really make sense. There is no way to correct externalities without regulation, right? Genuine question, I am obviously not an economist. Government intervention distorts the market, which is desirable in some cases. This seems like a pretty uncontroversial statement. There would be a market for paid assassinations, but we've made that market "worse" by outlawing them. I feel like it's impossible to argue that the market is always "right".
> Unforeseen negative consequences distort the market which causes more problems.
Government intervention doesn't have to be unforeseen. Good regulations are announced in advance, and businesses are informed during the legislation process and given guidelines to adapt and comply.
> Government intervention doesn't have to be unforeseen. Good regulations are announced in advance, and businesses are informed during the legislation process and given guidelines to adapt and comply.
You seem to not understand what is meant by "unforeseen negative consequences". These are results of a policy which weren't foreseen by the proponents of that policy. Often, policies meant to have positive_effect_A have negative_effect_B, C, D, etc. Sometimes they entirely fail to have positive_effect_A and even have the opposite of that effect. Rent control is one popular example (meant to reduce the cost of housing for the poor, but in reality raises the cost of housing by reducing the supply). Sometimes nobody sees these issues coming, but often opponents of the policy point out these problems but the policies are pushed through anyways, due to emotional support.
Now for the rest
> This is a blanket statement that doesn't really make sense.
Yeah it is a little too absolute, I should have said "Market failures are rarely improved by government intervention, and often made worse".
> There is no way to correct externalities without regulation, right?
Common misconception. Often externalities are caused by government policy in the first place, so reversing that policy can fix it. Another option is increased liability tort law: allow individuals to sue for damages and you'll quickly see companies make changes.
In my opinion, one of the policies with the most negative consequences is the creation of "limited liability corporations". Of course when the owners and operators of a firm aren't liable for the actions of the firm, they don't have a vested interest in instituting internal policies to limit the firm's harm.
> Government intervention distorts the market, which is desirable in some cases.
Desirable to some, again it's subjective. Often distortion is created and used by rent-seekers at the expense of everyone else.
> There would be a market for paid assassinations, but we've made that market "worse" by outlawing them.
Assassinations are in an entirely different class of action, one which is not part of an ideal free market. A free market is one in which all interaction is purely voluntary. Violent crimes, fraud, theft, etc are actions in which the victim did not consent.
Actions which violate consent should be illegal, and the justice system should be focused on taking every possible action to make the victims whole. This is different from how the justice system currently works, which is focused on punishment of criminals rather than reparations to victims.
Market failures result from actions which do not violate consent but do still cause harm to a third party. Air pollution is one strong example, and regulations for that (and other forms of pollution) are the most justified regulations IMO.
People will also bring up "natural monopolies" and "oligopolies" when talking about market failures. However, there is very little evidence of a hostile monopoly or oligopoly ever existing without government assistance, while there are countless examples of cartels failing and diseconomies of scale destroying large organizations.
> I feel like it's impossible to argue that the market is always "right".
Because "right" is subjective, that is impossible. There are things like so-called "price gouging" in disaster situations which many people perceive as wrong, but in actuality are a necessary signalling behavior of the market in order to allocate more resources to those areas. Banning such things only results in shortages which _do have_ measurable negative consequences.
We can look at metrics like cost-of-living adjusted standard of living, inequality, innovation, economic growth, etc and all of those correlate strongly with how free an economy is.
I am having trouble putting my thoughts in order to respond. One thing I can say is that I agree with your criteria for justifiable regulations, I think I (and Elizabeth Warren) just have a much more expansive definition of "harm to a third party". I think a lot of important harm is not captured by metrics like average standard living and economic growth and "innovation", and I was unable to find any correlation between inequality and the Fraser Institute's economic freedom ranking.
> There are things like so-called "price gouging" in disaster situations which many people perceive as wrong, but in actuality are a necessary signalling behavior of the market in order to allocate more resources to those areas. Banning such things only results in shortages which _do have_ measurable negative consequences.
It doesn't make sense to talk about appropriate market behavior in a disaster situation, which can never be a functioning free market. In a disaster, buyers are forced to buy immediately, they cannot shop around, compare products, and choose not to buy if the price is too high. A key feature of a free market is that nobody is forced to buy or sell. High prices are only an effective signal when there is a low barrier to entry to enter the market, and willingness to pay roughly correlates with need. Neither of these are true in a disaster.
This is similar to healthcare, another "market" that by definition cannot be free and should never be treated as such. Participants are coerced into buying, knowledge about quality and price of goods is hidden from buyers, comparison shopping is impossible in an emergency, and ability to pay has nothing to do with need. A market cannot function when many mandatory purchases cost more than many participants' net wealth.
Friendly reminder that (1) through (3) are the actual stakes of the policy, not what Vaheesan says to the reporter about forcing companies to "behave in more socially responsible ways." That editorializing will never, ever become law, and it is entirely secondary to the actual debate here.
Essentially you take the "last mile" (from home/business to exchange) and either turn it into a full public utility or turn it into a private utility that needs to treat all service providers equally. You ban the private utility from also running an ISP on their own network.
You'd still get service from an ISP (inc. Comcast), they would run the exchange side of things, rent space on the last mile utility (fee used for maintaining/upgrading it), and their competition would do the same.
Competition would substantially increase, prices would fall, and we'd stop laying redundant cabling just due to "ownership."
Of course, it may be easier to do this for electricity, where the fundamental technology doesn't change quickly anymore (as far as I know), than for internet connectivity, where we are still undergoing fairly rapid technological change, relatively speaking.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation_of_the_Texas_elec...
I'm not saying there aren't problems with large companies, tech or otherwise, but how exactly are they depressing wages? Who's getting screwed?
That is the scarcity mindset. Instead, engineers should be getting million+ salaries instead of the measly 150k+.
I think you mean a X/10 Engineer. A -10X engineer would have to work backwards.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/06/18/733510647/appl... which references https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/536-...
While this depresses jobs more than it does wages, it makes it equally as hard for a competitor to compete on the cost of labor as suppressing wages would do. Either way, the net effect is to suppress competition.
A greater problem comes when a market dominator extends their power into other market niches controlled only by cost, like generics and foodstuffs, as Amazon especially is doing.
One solution is to disable entry of a monopolist into these downstream markets, as Warren is proposing. But a more lasting redress must somehow diminish the company's position of monopoly.
SWE's who do not get hired at all because there are so few competitive ecommerce, search, online advertising, and social networking companies.
From a politician's perspective, it may be a far more powerful vote-getter to have policies where 3X people are employed at $70K than one where X people are employed at $210K.
https://taxfoundation.org/warren-wealth-tax-constitutionalit...
Sounds like she might have a case, rather than just naked pandering.
I think it’s good to have a variety of intellectual positions and to work the best possible policies, and to ask if we would be better off without some some sacred cows
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxvi
https://jonathanturley.org/2019/02/20/reductio-ad-absurdum-a...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/elizabeth-warren...
This article, for the wealth tax, basically makes the argument that the justices should stay true to their 'originalist' principles and uphold it, rather than actually examining the law.
I think this is the best precedent for something like this: When the court ruled that a federal tax on property was unconstitutional, which is similar to what Warren is trying to do. The court has ruled on this in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteenth_Amendment_to_the_Uni...
> ...Congress cannot impose a duty or tax upon personal property...
Like everything involving new laws and the constitution, it will fall to the surpreme court to decide whether or not it is constitutional.
> When, therefore, this court adjudges, as it does now adjudge, that Congress cannot impose a duty or tax upon personal property... including invested personal property, bonds, stocks, and investments of all kinds...
Its unconstitutional.
You could argue that the preceding parts of the constitution prohibit a wealth tax, though, and that the 16th doesn't carve out space for one.
https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/amen...
At that point, there would be a lot of pressure on state legislatures to ratify an amendment. Anyone who voted against it would be putting a target on their back in the next election.
> When, therefore, this court adjudges, as it does now adjudge, that Congress cannot impose a duty or tax upon personal property... including invested personal property, bonds, stocks, and investments of all kinds...
The court has clearly ruled on this issue in the past.
(video of monkey getting a grape and the other monkey getting a cucumber)
Yes to all three, so it would be caught by this law as it is stated here.
No they aren't. They are examples of the government's power growing and being manipulated. There's no power to manipulate if the government stays small.
So many of our problems today are the result of a government that is so large and powerful that it is more profitable to direct resources to lobbying instead of directing resources to providing better goods and services. When government is small, there is less incentive to corrupt it.
I think the idea of "Big Government" is amorphous, in that is calls into question the purpose of a governing body.
Who, or what, should be the governments number one priority? It seems universal that keeping its citizens safe (military, police) and supplying fundamental services (roads, fire departments) are accepted by all but the most jetpacky libertarians. Do we believe that we have the capacity to extend other foundations of wellbeing to be rights as well? This is the crossroads we're at with healthcare, protecting the environment (by investing in clean technologies and slowing down the harm we're inflicting through other practices), and living wages?
That's what I see as the crux of this conversation. Who does the government work for? And who SHOULD it be working for?
The people that employ them: taxpayers.
There is no reason that we should be passing any legislation today without attached measurable criteria for success and criteria of measurable side effects that might be impacted. If the legislation does actually measurably improve something or causes unwanted side effects, it should be removed automatically. In 2019, we absolutely have the technology to run the government the exact same way as tech companies.
So many of the services the government provides could easily be metered and we charge citizens directly based on what they individually consume instead of indiscriminately taxing people to pay for those services.
We, the people, we are not angels. So we need government to protect us from each other.
But those people in government? They aren't angels, either. So the trick is to have the government keep us from harming and oppressing each other, without the government harming and oppressing us. That was the point of the "limited government" idea, and the Constitution - government couldn't do everything; it could only do a few specific things. That is, they optimized for minimizing the harm government could do, rather than for maximizing the good.
And it's worked reasonably well, though not perfectly, even while government grew enormously compared to the original idea. Still, the fact remains that government is not run by angels. Those programs that you think are a good idea? Imagine that they're being run by selfish, foolish, corrupt people. Are they still a good idea? (Some may be. Surely not all, though...)
Reminding people of who the government works for may help, somewhat, for some time. But it won't really fix the problem.
Not entirely true [1]. For one thing there were close and similar models at that time. For example yellow pages were given out for free and advertising was sold. Second there were (and still are) many local newspapers that make money solely off of advertising. And along those lines I would argue that even paid newspapers are close. Why? They give a great deal of value for the small amount that is paid in exchange for viewing advertising. Ditto for tv broadcasts the content is free (as long as you have a tv set) and they make money off advertising.
[1] And I wouldn't call something that in no way could have anticipated the future in the way it rolled out 'a flaw' anyway.
The mainstream position in the antitrust world, even among liberals (at least until recently), is that Bork's theory is generally right. (For example, Barack Obama's antitrust appointees would generally have agreed with it.)
What Bork did was bring economic models (i.e. math) to bear in antitrust analysis. Before Bork, antitrust law was basically run on judges' intuition about whether business practices were good or bad. After Bork, there is more structure to the analysis--if we are trying to figure out whether things are good or bad for consumer prices, there's an economic framework we can use so that we're not just making random guesses.
You can quibble with the math, but it seems crazy to go back to a world where we just say "big mergers are bad." Some mergers are bad, sure. But some are not. For example, I have yet to hear anyone explain why Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods is bad for anyone other than other grocery stores (who have to try to compete as Amazon figures out grocery delivery).
1. Hardware manufacturers be separated from software manufactures
2. All hardware sold must have available appropriate documentation to write software for it.
3. Hardware and software be purchasable piecemeal, even when also available as a pre-configured bundle.
For example, for Google to sell a Google Home device they would:
1. Have to have a company, Google Home:Hardware, that produces the physical device and it's documentation
2. Have a company, Google Home:Software, that implements the software for that device, and perhaps bundles it.
3. These companies can collaborate, e.g., through support contracts, but any documentation made available to Google Home:Software must also be made available to purchasers of the physical device, separate from Google Home:Software.
Advantages of this approach:
1. This supports the "Right To Repair" movement.
2. Production of hardware has a very high cost-of-entry relative to software, making it prohibitively expensive for new entrants to compete. This allows smaller entrepreneurs to build software on existing hardware designs, bringing new features to consumers.
3. New competition will help to naturally break the anti-consumer monopolies and oligopolies currently existing, because they will have to compete with features that they currently refuse to implement, fix issues they currently refuse to acknowledge.
4. As a re-iteration of 3, would provide more consumer choice. Where as right now an individual may like the hardware features of one television set, they may dislike the software features if it (privacy invasion and phoning home?). Consumers could mix and match.
Although I've focused on tech with Google, this is applicable to many industries: smart phones, TVs, smart home devices, farming equipment, vehicles, robotic vacuums...
The only downside is that there's a lot of overhead (imagine if a software project you worked on needed this amount of formality every time you talked to a UI designer or database engineer).
In essence something companies already do since they're split up into separate sections/departments/groups.
Maybe they even split services such as HR into a consulting services organization that they all rely on.
This is not the way to foster innovation. It’s a way to produce a bunch of meaningless middlemen.
Bork was the first Supreme Court nominee to earn his own eponymous verb. Bork was put through a ringer similar to the one Judge Kavanaugh went through recently.
Per Google, the verb 'bork' means "obstruct (someone, especially a candidate for public office) through systematic defamation or vilification."
So whenever I hear about some kneejerk proposal to break up tech I expect to hear someone propose that Facebook should be broken up into two companies: one for surnames A-M and another for N-Z.
I think the only tech company where you could make any case for being anticompetitive right now is Amazon. Fedex and UPS exist largely at the whim of Amazon. Any online retailer is now at a severe disadvantage to Amazon itself as well as Amazon marketplace sellers.
Second place are the two app stores.
We're living in an era where China's tech giants are tools of statecraft and not subject to the same level of scrutiny as US companies. The Chinese market is artificially restricted from competition. By any measure of government intervention China cheats here. It doesn't really seem like the right time for the US to kill the golden geese.
Regional monopolies are far less of a threat to politicians operating at the national scale. So much of what we are observing comes down to people and institutions vying for power and trying to neuter those people and institutions in competition for that power.
This is Silicon Valley (big tech) versus Washington D.C. (big government) versus NYC (big finance).
Today, the notion of Microsoft as a threat to the world seems quaint and laughable, though at the time it was deadly serious business.
In my opinion, the FAANG monopolies will pass, just as the MS-IBM hegemony passed. Something new will emerge - a 5G-based tech, maybe, or a Chinese AI or quantum machine - that will render the current tech giants irrelevant. Warren's plan is pointless and probably would be counter-productive.
Interesting considering they are the most valuable company in the world by market cap.
Addendum: Currently, MSFT's market cap is higher than Facebook, Google, Apple, and AMZN.
The point is that few are talking about Microsoft as a monopolistic threat anymore; alternative technologies (Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android) have come along and knocked them off their once-dominant position.
Why not break up other industries, like some of the giant food and household companies and the shit they're practically poisoning us with. It feels like pandering to go after "big tech" constantly.
These industries are just hard to break into. Who is going to compete with Google at search at this point? We watched Microsoft throw money at and fail miserably. Social media comes and goes, Facebook the website is dieing, Facebook the company is will be around by running other social media, opinions of Facebook specifically aside why is that a bad thing?
We need politicians that are younger and in touch with the world. But still, anything but Trump at this point unfortunately.
Are you actually asking this question, or is it like when Trump says that he won't pass gun restrictions because the real problem is mental health, but also won't raise the budget for mental health?
I think it's easier to make the (internet) tech case because they tend towards pure rent-seeking models rather than production or innovation. Warren isn't proposing breaking up hardware companies, car companies, or companies that make consumer appliances; "tech" is a shorthand for internet rent-seekers.
I don't know how anyone can make the case that there isn't innovation and production isn't the end all be all of a functioning market. You can't buy goods and services that you aren't aware of and even if you are aware of them, you need a way to buy them.
25 years ago I couldn't type something into a box, discover a product that satisfies a need/want related to that query, buy it and have it delivered to my home in 24-48 hours all from the comfort of my home while I sit in my underwear.
Once upon a time you had to pick up a big yellow book, hunt around by category, find some businesses that may or not be related to what you're looking for if you find any business at all, make some phone calls, eventually get in your car, drive there, taking out cash from the bank along the way. The alternative was catalog companies if you knew that a company existed and had a copy of their catalog (or you had to wait for a catalog to be delivered).
And even long before that the only option was to go down to the local market and buy whatever was produced locally. If it wasn't produced locally, then you had to produce it yourself or you were SOL.
I don't get why we're focusing on tech here. Idk how you can say it's pure rent seeking with no innovation? The examples given were the usual social media sites and Google, Apple and Amazon.
> In the 1990s, Microsoft — the tech giant of its time — was trying to parlay its dominance in computer operating systems into dominance in the new area of web browsing. The federal government sued Microsoft for violating anti-monopoly laws and eventually reached a settlement. The government’s antitrust case against Microsoft helped clear a path for Internet companies like Google and Facebook to emerge.
https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...
And then goes on to confuse the Web browser with search:
> .. Aren’t we all glad that now we have the option of using Google instead of being stuck with Bing?
There are three reasons I'd avoid this comparison as a selling point:
1. Little of substance came from the Microsoft case:
> On November 2, 2001, the DOJ reached an agreement with Microsoft to settle the case. The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel of three people who would have full access to Microsoft's systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure compliance.[30] However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
2. The market handed Microsoft its richly-deserved smack upside the head with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. There's no reason to believe that Google, Amazon, or Facebook will be immune to this process of marketplace disruption.
3. The AT&T Anititrust case seems more applicable in that it deals with a network. After the successful breakup, long distance rate fell.
> The breakup led to a surge of competition in the long distance telecommunications market by companies such as Sprint and MCI.[5] ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
From Warren's blog again:
> First, by passing legislation that requires large tech platforms to be designated as “Platform Utilities” and broken apart from any participant on that platform.
This raises the question: what's actually new here? What about the named companies is so different from previous monopolies that new laws are required?
The discussion in the New Yorker doesn't seem to address this issue. There are antitrust laws on the books. They have been used in the past. What specifically prevents them from being applied today, other than political will?
But when you do read her policies, you can see she hasn't thought about these problems at all. She's basically just doing what the loudest, most ignorant complainers and pundits are saying to do.
She doesn't seem to understand that Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon present incredibly different problems. Beating them all up with the same stick is pointless and won't fix any of the problems.
The fact that they are big isn't really the worst of the problems they cause. In incredibly simplistic terms, Facebook is bad because of what they do with your data. Google is bad because of what it does with all the rest of the data on the internet. Apple is bad because of what they won't let people do. And Amazon is bad because of what they will let anyone do.
Chopping them up into smaller entities won't solve any of those problems. None of it addresses any of the problems at all. But in a time where doing anything is far more important to people than doing something useful, it gets traction. She also clearly does not understand section 230 of the CDA, and would like to get rid of that, which will do nothing but ensure that only the big companies--even broken up--will ever be able to compete.
The same kind of thing applies to the wealth tax idea. It's just a base appeal to class animosity. There's no nuance, and even if it did happen, it wouldn't make that much difference in our overall tax revenues. Certainly not enough to fund the kinds of programs she wants to fund. If you want to fix taxes, you have to shut down loopholes for wealthy people and corporations. The latter will make much more of an impact than the former.
I'm certainly on board with higher taxes to a certain extent. But this is just pandering to angry people who don't think the world is fair, and that's not healthy for society.
All of this really makes me question her bona fides on topics I really don't know anything about. Is it more of the same shallow pandering? I haven't really heard any good policy ideas from her so far, and as much as I want to like her as my kind of candidate, I just don't have any reason to believe she'll do anything worthwhile if she does get elected aside from not being Trump. Which is valuable to me, I admit. But . . . is a huge swath of awful social, tax, economic, and tech policy actually better than having to deal with the buffoonery we have right now? I hope we don't have to find out. I suspect that many people will not like that choice and keep things as they are.
Also, it’s policy proposals like these that are going to push Trump to win in 2020. All the Democrats are suggesting more and more socialist policies, while popular with their base.. is pretty detached from the middle and right side ideologically. People want cheaper products, more money and stability. Focus on that.
The only voters that are going to move from voting Democrat to voting Trump over the breakup of big tech are people who work in big tech.
By ripped off, I dont mean, I over-spent, but rather I was forced into buying something due to having only a single choice, while not even knowing the ultimate price I will pay.
Where I live in the US -- there is ONE and only ONE broadband provider. If you ask for the price, they give you the three month promotion price. If you press them really hard, you get the ultimate non-promotional price. Then you get the bill and there is a "wire fee", "regulatory recovery fee", "line charge" and all manner of all surprise charges that you didn't agree to except in some blank-check-fine-print fashion.
Say what you might about privacy etc, but my immediate, acute pains are with real monopolies like my broadband provider -- not with which free photo sharing app I need to use
Telecom: https://www.wired.com/story/elizabeth-warren-unveils-plan-ex...
Pharma: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kzvy4w/elizabeth-warren-i...
Warren's entire shtick is having a plan for pretty much everything.
You must be living under a very heavy rock if you don't think she's going after pharma and telco companies. She spent half of the last debate ripping on pharma companies.
1. Applying her [awesome] CFPB approach to telco where you cant just spring mystery charges post-hoc and hang customers on a contract they didn't agree to.
2. Allowing multiple broadband providers to compete
2. A number of items that would help with that are included in the article. Changes to utility pole ownership, encouraging municipal broadband alternatives, etc.