As friendly as Facebook has been to the republican party, it doesn't surprise me that they aren't first in line to be prosecuted, if ever.
A good start would be defining a set of standard lens sizes so people could at least easily find and print replacement frames.
"Meanwhile <any phone/mobile/internet/health-insurance provider> nothing"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T#Breakup_and_reformation...
But even beyond that, regional monopolies for carriers are somehow okay?
I think it's just rent seeking/retributions for favours not rendered.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/agoodman/2014/07/16/theres-more...
> Within months, Oakley acknowledged to shareholders that the talks hadn't gone well and that Luxottica was slashing its orders.
> The company's stock immediately lost more than a third of its value.
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/12/luxottica.html
The fact that this isn't mentioned on Wikipedia might mean that Luxxotica has been very good at scrubbing their online persona.
It's on Wikipedia:
"Luxottica acquired Oakley in November 2007 for US$2.1 billion. Oakley had tried to dispute their prices because of Luxottica's large marketshare, and Luxottica responded by dropping Oakley from their stores, causing their stock price to drop, followed by Luxottica's hostile take over of the company."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica
There's even a sub-section on "Monopolistic pricing practices".
[1] > Luxottica's acquisition of Oakley has been criticized as potential violation of Antitrust laws. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakley,_Inc.)
I was in the US Army in the time surrounding the purchase. The amount of Oakley product that was purchased by both the government and individual soldiers should have been enough to keep Oakley afloat all on its own.
"This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to 'consumer welfare,' defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy"
It's an opinion piece stating that law ought to be changed, not that Amazon is doing anything illegal.
I never really quite understand how people think antitrust law applies to Amazon. I don't have expert-level knowledge of Amazon's various markets, but I don't think they have a monopoly in any of them.
Should we define a line between marketplace operators and marketplace competitors? Or at least define rules to better ensure fair competition?
From personal experience so, once Amazon loses the buy box, the measures to gain it back are more or less what other seller could do as well. No idea how much seller data they use in selecting private brand products so.
All the retailers have data on what sells in their store, they also have the data on how sales are influenced by shelf placement.
Amazon to me is a logistics company, along with their storefront and AWS. Their focus on margins and their competence to use data to drive their logistics chains is what's truly scary. They can optimize a lot of inefficiencies that exist in logistics right now just because of the involvement of different disjoint players.
Hoe all that translates into anti-trust law, I have no idea.
This is simply not true and displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how retail works. A retailer pays the supplier for the stock of inventory that goes on its shelves, Amazon does not. (It is only in very rare cases the supplier only gets paid for actual sales of retail inventory; generally this happens for new products offered on a consignment basis to demonstrate market demand.) Frequently, retailers will share sales data with their suppliers so that the suppliers can make more attractive products, because then they can sell more units to end customers or charge higher markups.
But importantly, with retail, the retailer is the supplier's customer, not you.
In contrast, Amazon does not buy the inventory from the suppliers, instead it charges them money to store their inventory in Amazon's warehouses. On top of that, Amazon uses its access to sales data of external suppliers' products to design competing products which it then offers for sale, utilizing its ownership of the platform to promote its own products above competing products. While both of these latter two activities are problematic, it is the last one that definitely runs afoul of antitrust law (and was what got Microsoft into trouble with the EU).
The problem with Amazon: it is using its position as the controller of the dominant online marketplace to establish a position in the market for individual categories of goods in a manner that interferes with the normal dynamics of the market.
That part seems entirely reasonable. Would you rather Amazon pay sellers for unsold stock? That seems like a sure way to get Amazon to reduce the number of 3rd party sellers they stock.
Whereas Google has something like 95% of mobile search, and actively consumes competitors or, allegedly, wields its monopoly to drive traffic away from them.
They're not concerned with the user experience under these companies, they're concerned about economic impact, which is mostly felt by people doing marketing on their platforms. Facebook is a social media company the way the Yellow Pages was a book publisher - it may be the most visible product they make, but it's not how they actually make money.
Google has done more to atrophy progress on the Internet than any other big tech company. It has used its monopoly position on search and ads to crush competition. Google has been "evil" for a very long time.
I don't buy it. Facebook has always been an adult network. It started as something that kept kids out. They opened up, but they dont need them. Eventually, when people get older they sign up for it. It't not sexy, its utilitarian. Their biggest risk to their business is more addictive products, not their customer age. People can get addicted at any age.
TiKTok, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube are still more commoner<>celebrity networks, while Facebook is a WhitePages and now a YellowPages too.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
I note the conspiracy theory that Cambridge Analytica threw the Brexit referendum via Facebook has essentially completely collapsed over the last month or so. CA certainly wanted their clients to think that such a thing was possible. They were fantasists, for money.
You have to have a pretty warped view on proceedings for this to be the case.
https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/...
https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/2847/documents...
The ICO spent three years investigating CA, and the report is very clear that the findings were that they had no effect.
If you add those together, Facebook controls an overwhelming majority of the social media market share -- way more than the relatively tiny niche held by Reddit and Twitter.
Edit: Facebook has 2603 million active users, Instagram has 1083M, Reddit has just 430 million. Twitter is estimated at 326 million. TikTok is the closest thing to a true Facebook competitor with 800M users, and a large share of them are probably concentrated in China -- and the Trump administration already tried to get them banned. (I'm excluding messaging services and YouTube here since they're a different niche).
Source is Statista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
Reddit is becoming into a weird beast because I've found theres a mentality of people who assume you actively subscribe to the stuff set by default hence why people get upset when you don't tout the same opinion. I've even had people ask me what I was doing in their subreddit, said I came from /r/all, and they basically said "yeah right." Reddit is probably going to dominate the online forum market since it's so much easier to create a subreddit than it is make your own website with forums.
My only beef with this is reddit silences things they don't like, and not just things that sound reasonable. My rationale is let these people be. They're dumb enough to discuss this garbage on your platform, so why not collect that data and just monitor it? Better than they go elsewhere and now you have no idea.
Also reddit trying to take their anonymous platform and make it so you act as a community member has always been weird to me. That makes sense for public people, not for general users. Especially when bot accounts just harvest upvotes. Twitter is basically what facebook used to be now.
All this proves is that the Alexa top N isn't a good metric of determining who is or isn't a monopoly. It's completely ignoring mobile apps (so Instagram/Whatsapp don't make an appearance), and it has no visibility into revenue. Reddit's current total valuation is in the small single digit billions. It doesn't deserve consideration in a conversation about the true gorillas in the field, i.e. the ones that are worth three orders of magnitude more.
Amazon on the other hand is worse, as they want to control all business segments they get into, even totally unrelated to their business of being a store that sells things. Using your dominance in one type of business to force everyone to also support unrelated businesses with no alternatives is one common definition of monopoly; think dominating railroads to force everyone to use your oil (Standard Oil).
It kind of gets tricky when you combine all that, but I assume that this would be a fun thing to argue infornt of a court I guess.
Google seems to me to be much more straight forward, they clearly dominate search and web ads. The latter with the exception of social, which would be facebooks domain. And with Android, Google is the second largest player in Mobile if you ignore hthe hardware aspect.
Not saying either company should be broken up, that's for couts to decide.
Wal-Mart, on the other hand, might be nearing that status as far as eCommerce is concerned.
Apple has 50% of the US smart phone market, in a 2 entity duopoly.
That is significant market power.
> to force everyone to also support unrelated businesses with no alternatives
Anti-competitive behavior does not require a singular firm, in order for it to be illegal. Instead, only significant market power is required.
Amazon does well from AWS, but hardly has domineering marketshare in the way Google does.
The idea that FB has a monopoly is laughable. Until Trump put the kibosh on them there was a real threat from TikTok. Zuck was getting desperate. Social media is very fickle.
Aapl as well only has a monopoly amongst high paying customers. Not sure you can call that a monopoly.
Google is a well defined monopoly.