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.
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.
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.
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...
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.)
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.
Basically, how would you stop Google from shadow-running Google Ads? What would stop them from preferring Google Ads?
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.