House lawmakers release anti-monopoly agenda for “a stronger online economy”
cicilline.house.gov
cicilline.house.gov
American Innovation and Choice Online Act https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/...
Platform Competition and Opportunity Act https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/...
Ending Platform Monopolies Act https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/...
Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching (ACCESS) Act https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/...
Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/...
My sense is that antitrust is as wrong a model for correcting this as the prior regime was that led to the creation of antitrust laws.
You can insert team blue or red in to either role depending on your political bias.
Either way though, you're under arrest xD
The GOP backed No Child Left Behind which was an abject failure. Back then, it was easy for the left to claim that they would do better when given the opportunity. However, now the left is pushing Critical Race Theory in schools which is equally stupid and damaging.
You can point to the left as doing a much worse job at this particular point in time but the reality is that both sides have made roughly equally stupid choices over the long run.
You can use “over the long term” to further any point you like because at one point the Republican Party was the liberal, progressive party before it adopted the original southern strategy.
Studying race and systemic racism in school is absolutely not “as damaging” as dictating the terms of school funding in a way that disadvantages the poor (and subsequently non-white people).
Also your argument is about the two parties being the same over the long term, but then you give a very short term anecdote, and one that isn’t very compelling.
I’m sorry to appear so argumentative but it seems you are falling into the trap of false equivalence on multiple levels.
To be fair, when people talk about CRT these days they’re talking about a specific set of beliefs about race, notably a variety of race essentialist beliefs. Reducing CRT to “merely studying race” is dishonest. Moreover, as race essentialist ideas are want to do, I posit that CRT does harm poorer people because it lets rich whites absolve themselves by way of ritual while characterizing poorer whites as the aggressors. Similarly, we prioritize issues that are almost certainly harmful for poorer communities of color, like (de facto or de jure) de-policing high-crime areas (we celebrate fewer police-related fatalities and sweep under the rug the enormous spike in murders).
Note that this isn’t a partisan issue. The best criticism of CRT comes largely from liberals, progressives, and independent conservatives (CRT seems like it should be a slam dunk for establishment Republicans but in increasingly normal form they are finding innovative ways to bungle it).
Critical race theory and Race essentialism are fundamentally incompatible theories of race. If you're equating the two, you, or whoever presented them to you, has a deeply flawed (or actively malicious) understand of one or the other.
CRT posits that differences among racial/ethnic groups are the result of, as wikipedia puts it, "social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors." Even its critics claim it relies too heavily on social constructivism - the literal opposite of essentialism. (Racial essentialism, in contrast, claims that "races" are biologically district categories that result in innate individual differences)
Of course, you used a throwaway account here, so you must, on some level, know you argument doesn't hold to educated scrutiny.
I knew someone was going to be pedantic which is why I phrased it as I did. The term is becoming overloaded, and we can either debate semantics or we can engage substantially and I’m choosing the latter.
> Of course, you used a throwaway account here, so you must, on some level, know you argument doesn't hold to educated scrutiny.
Your account is called “LordDragonfang” with 800 karma, so you're not exactly posting with your legal name yourself. No, I’m not using my legal name, but this is my main account. I post here regularly, in good faith, and overall my contributions have been well-received.
No it's not. This bad version you imagine isn't being taught to anyone.
> and we can either debate semantics or we can engage substantially and I’m choosing the latter.
It's not "semantics" to talk about what is actually happening and being complained about.
I know it sounds cliché, but that's the sign of a good citizen. You should distrust. Particularly since so much money is at stake. Anyone who doesn't distrust, is either being naive, or more likely, collecting on the graft.
I also share your concern that they want to have some convoluted anti-trust regime, rather than a simple, straightforward law that says no sharing of any user data for any commercial purpose at all, ever. With draconian penalties for any infraction. That would stop all this in its tracks, so you have to wonder why they let the privacy stuff go relatively unmolested?
The only answer I can come up with is that they fully intend to keep violating privacy. Maybe with different companies this time? Or different people collecting the money? But in the end, we the people are still getting shafted.
Better action would be reforms in contract law to limit binding Arbitration, make ToS unenforceable if they do not have at least SOME provisions in favor of the users (i.e stop allowing unconscionable contracts as Terms of Service), and stronger enforcement of Truth in Advertisement
For ToS, one thing that should absolutely be require for a ToS to be enforceable is a mandate that Vendors are required to provide exact justification for them terminating the agreement (i.e banning you). They should have to clearly define what EXACT terms you violate, and WHEN exactly you violated them. There should should be a mandated review process
For Truth in Advertisement, many of these companies and services use Bait and Switch tactics all the time, advertising their platforms as "Free Speech" or "welcome to all person" only to then clearly and objectively favor one political convention
One final thing I would prefer to see over Anti-Trust is some kine of provision that kicks in if the platform accepts "official Government Messaging" i.e if Twitter wants to allow an official government account on their platform then their should be additional requirements as that now does become an equality under the law concern if people are blocked for official communications.
If they do not want to have those additional strings on their platform then they can simply refuse in the Terms to allow for any Official Government Communication
That's like saying if FB buying startups like WhatsApp was a problem, then let's prevent startups from ever competing.
I think government can ban itself from using anything that isn't a federated protocol and should not be doing stupid things with private platforms.
I am unclear how that would that would add a barrier to entry.
Your arguments are largely similar to putting regulations on a Telco monopoly to give a little back as if there were competition. We know how that works, it doesn't address the problem and certainly doesn't make competition appear.
So again I fail to see how requiring a company to disclose to the user the exact reasons for their ban adds any additional burden on anyone. The company already knows the reasons, it simply refused to tell anyone under today's model
I think you have confused my statement with some kind of mandatory moderation scheme.
The problems come when doing right by their constituents is no longer the biggest thing that keeps them in office (e.g. instead of outspending opponents on marketing). Or when there are incentives that are hidden from the public.
You do know that for many of them they have a virtual lock on their seat and the incentive no longer aligns right?
For some/most, the primary driver can be characterized as self advancement.
There was a bill a while back to force bill contents to be narrowly scoped (I.e. no pork barrel spending). It failed, but that doesn’t mean we can’t push for its passage in the future anyway.
I always try to understand which votes they are trying to buy.
Seriously.
If we model politicians as individuals evolving through an evolutionary algorithm it becomes very clear that their fitness function has very few variables. Money and votes. Not sure what else.
Once they learned that votes can be had with promises, rather than execution, all was lost. Politicians are now experts at manipulating the audience for votes through promises (which are nearly always false).
They also manipulate the audience through incredibly creative naming of bills and programs. Every single one of them sounds amazing. And yet, nearly every time you actually study one there's plenty to be horrified about.
I have no clue how we fix this. If the fitness function that drives this species does not include an evaluation of actual results (valuable, useful, positive, consistent long-term results) they will never have the evolutionary pressure required to mutate in a direction that benefits the people and the nation. They are so deep into self-serving and party-serving territory at this point that we would have to make massive changes to the way things run if there is to be any hope of correcting the type of person who goes into politics and their behavior once at their respective throne.
Radical transparency. With all data of public institutions open for accountability, and a layer of independent people studying their areas of interest and creating explanations of actual execution and how it really affects us.
The free press used to be this, before it got captured and become part of the opaque system. With open distributed networks, we get a second chance to build such a counter-information system, and this time make it de-centralized so it cannot be captured by owning a single node.
If anything there's too little money in politics, not too much.
Tech companies did not start "targeting" one side for censorship, multiple internal reports have come out showing they actually have to be artificially lenient to right-wing views to avoid be perceived as being biased [1]. Right wing politics just has either a higher incidence of socially unacceptable speech, or a persecution complex - or more than likely, both.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/1/21544501/facebook-rules-p...
It will be really funny if Walmart stock rises due to Amazon being split, and hits the $600 billion.
"... at the time of the Commission’s or the Department of Justice’s designation under section 2(d) or any of the two years preceding that time, or at any time in the 2 years preceding the filing of a complaint for an alleged violation of this Act..."
Companies with strong financial engineering competencies will have no problem working around these limits.
Instead of the government picking winners and losers, how can the rules be structured to level the playing field for everyone?
This is how politics is supposed to work. You pick one organization (your government) that you bend over backwards to give everyone the ability to input to. Anything that starts to get too big for their britches, you implement controls for.
Then the regulatory arms race continues.
This doesn’t work. Beneficial ownership and common control would trace through the legal entities. If Amazon actually splits up its business, on the other hand, that’s fine! That’s good! No need for anti-trust action; they did it themselves!
Let's assume for a moment that Amazon spun out... something.
What specific problem does that solve? What specific benefit will the public/customers/clients/government receive? By what metrics is the split-up measure to measure whether it was a success or failure?
I'm genuinely asking. I'm not sure. If the metric is "no business shall have a market cap north of $X" then it's pretty easy to declare it a success! But that's not a very interesting metric imho. So what is the precise goal? And how do you know you've hit the goal and not made things worse?
In either case, metrics can be employed to test whether success has been achieved. Worker wages, consumer prices, profit margins, market concentration, etc. can all be employed to study the positive and negative consequences of antitrust policy.
Possibly a better solution is to make all of the sales and inventory movement data available to amazon internally, available to anyone externally too. For example, the private lable shenanigans would die off quickly with more competitive pressure enabled by giving external players access to the same data Amazon has internally.
The restrictions and remedies here seem fairly harsh. Of the sort you'd only want to cover monopolies (but-we-don't-want-to-prosecute-you-as-monopolies).
Telecom definitely needs its share of modernizing, but it should probably be more targeted.
Obviously, physical infrastructure is a bit harder to switch, but I have three major wireline ISPs here, four major wireless ones, and I believe two satellite services are an option too. Meanwhile, most Google services have no meaningful competition that isn't incredible niche.
Okay, but tens of millions of other Americans have only one broadband choice (if they have one at all). There is clearly a monopoly issue there.
Letting users sideload an alternative store the Android way seems like a pretty reasonable solution to me. The experience is pretty much identical to installing arbitrary executables from the internet on PC (in that sometimes your system will pop up a security warning but you can continue despite it). The key difference being people are used to doing that on PCs and not on mobile devices.
But the only alternative seems to be mandating that app stores host competitors, which feels too specific to make for good legislation in my opinion.
But there's another problem which is the Google Play marketplace has a nation's worth of advertising spend to throw at getting eyeballs on it while something like F-Droid... doesn't advertise? And while there are good apps there, the level of polish is nothing like what you see at the top of the Google Play store. People are just so conditioned by shiny trillion-dollar tech that human-scale tech seems old/shady/etc and no amount of legislation is going to change that.
I wonder if someone clever might exploit this loophole to kill the reverse repo market, which is almost hitting $600 billion daily. And technically it's run by the fed, which is technically a private entity. This is obviously an outlier within an outlier and God knows the government wouldn't let it's magical money maker come under fire, but it seems like with the right set of circumstances this going in front of SCOTUS could completely undermine how our entire concept of debt and lending works in the US economy.
Everything I'm saying is purely speculation. This actually happening is about as likely as the US admitting it invaded Iraq for oil (and a bunch of other more nuanced reasons). It's not about honesty; it's about money.
The Fed executes repos and reverse repos. It does not run the market. Primary dealers execute these through tri-party repo agents, which practically is like two banks.
Comcast likely does meet that 50M number, depending on how you look at things. They have ~30M residential customer relationships, but that's likely only counting each household once (as opposed to per person in the household).
AT&T's Q1 earnings listed 44.2M domestic subscribers, just considering WarnerMedia (HBO + HBO Max). Again, probably counting customers as opposed to household members that use the service.
Verizon's Q1 earnings listed 94 million "total wireless retail connections".
(While we're listing subscriber counts for video streaming -- Netflix also meets the 50M threshold, and Disney+ probably does.
Netflix has 74M US+Canada subscribers, but there are only 10M households in Canada... Likewise, Disney+ "only" has 40M US subscriptions but again, subscriptions vs household members.)
[0] "Our largest website, Walmart.com, sees up to 100 million unique visitors a month, according to comScore, and is growing every year." https://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/our-business
edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_wireless... says AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile all have >100M US subscribers.
"It shall be unlawful for a covered platform operator to acquire directly or indirectly... the whole or any part of the stock or other share capital of another person engaged in commerce or in any activity or affecting commerce." [0]
[0] https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/...
In any way every once in a while the US surprises me in a very good way. Congrats if it passes.
I believe you it's there, but I'm not sure your accusation + lack of content were a net contribution to the discussion
Yes it is there in the same section as the topic mentioned. It has too much of the text IMHO to include in its entirety. Just in case you try again here is the pattern to search for: "(A) compete with the covered platform".
>"but I'm not sure your accusation"
The poster "accuses" proposal based on a single item taken out of context from the relevant section. Meanwhile the same section includes said Exclusion clause.
>"net contribution to the discussion"
The net contribution is that the distortion by omission of the bill's section is being prevented.
I understood it as targeting companies whose products are used by Americans.
China or Russia then? Easy, just ban their services like they do for ours.
Then Huawei was put on that Entity List (or whatever it's called) and prohibited from doing business with US companies.
Huawei was the world's #2 phone producer after Samsung and rising rapidly, I think the forecast was that within 2 quarters it would be #1, overtaking Samsung.
One year later, with the ban still ongoing, Huawei fell out of the top 5, its sales having shrunk 60% or more (https://www.gsmarena.com/sa_smartphone_market_surges_24_in_q...).
I can definitely see how it could benefit foreign competitors, but at the same time the American tech giants are so largely ahead of the competition that it's hard for me to imagine a foreign competitor managing to overtake them. It might level the playing field a little bit, but it's not necessarily a bad thing, even from a US-centric point of view.
> in addition to gaining more users than Instagram, TikTok is also earning the attention of top power users. [2]
[1] https://digitalagencynetwork.com/tiktok-vs-instagram-who-is-...
[2] http://instagram-tiktok.com/tiktok-vs-instagram-which-one-wi...
> I cannot see how YouTube or Instagram could suffer or lose market share.
The references I shared make it very clear that Instagram is losing market share. Not sure why those dots were difficult to connect.
Moving on to your next point:
> Sounds like further evidence they need to be released from their mismanagement.
It's interesting you said that. Obviously a lot of people are in favor of breaking up Facebook from Instagram, but my guess was that it was always for antitrust concerns. More recently, I started to sense that an additional flavor has entered this conversation recently, something like "Facebook and Instagram would be better products if they were run by independent companies." I think what people don't realize is how much effort went into building the world's most sophisticated ad targeting platform, and how convenient it was for Instagram to benefit from Facebook's resources. Not to mention the shared spam/adult/community moderation, shared hosting, etc, etc. Breaking up those apps into separate companies would definitely increase their cost of operation and would slow down their rate of development.
I said that in the context of breaking up G/FB. Why isolate that sentence for no apparent reason? It was a very short comment.
> It's interesting you said that. Obviously a lot of people are in favor of breaking up Facebook from Instagram, but my guess was that it was always for antitrust concerns. More recently, I started to sense that an additional flavor has entered this conversation recently, something like "Facebook and Instagram would be better products if they were run by independent companies."
There is no additional flavor. Ask yourself why we bother about antitrust. It is to raise the level of competition. Do you believe innovation is best nurtured in a competitive environment? Literally, the title of the bill consists the words a "stronger online economy", for "innovation".
Pooling all your resources into ads targeting because you are comfortably sitting in a dominant position is exactly the problem. YouTube and Instagram with independent leadership would have the flexibility to focus on their market -- image/video media. That is why TikTok and Snapchat were able to catch Instagram with their pants down -- Facebook had no idea alternative forms media (and did not care) was possible and were simply focused on milking their existing platform. Better ads targeting does not bring in users, and market share is driven by users, not ads. Why does it matter if it increases their cost of operation and slows down their rate of development if the majority of their development is focused on ads targeting - an ineffective user growth strategy? The blame lies on nobody but Facebook or Google if their products have been losing marketshare in 2021.
The part we're disagreeing on is the root cause of the fact that Snapchat and Tik Tok managed to out-innovate Facebook (which is very similar to the root cause of what Facebook initially out-innovated Google). You're thinking that it's because Facebook was focused for too long on milking the platform, and I agree with that, but I don't think it's the root cause. The root cause in my opinion is that Facebook became a public company, and now it needs to chase quarterly results or the stock price will fall and its top talent will leave. The same thing happened with Google back in the day. If you were to spin off Instagram, it would still be a public company and it would still have the same boundary conditions on innovation that it has today - quarterly results.
In other words, my thesis is very simple - once a company goes public, you cannot expect it to be a leader in innovation anymore [1][2]. But don't cry for public companies - when one door closes, another one opens; public companies can very well continue to grow by acquiring innovation and market share, which is what happened with Facebook and countless other examples. But... M&A becomes easier when you have a balance sheet with a lot of zeroes on it. If you were to break up Facebook, the individual companies would have a smaller M&A budget, and that would weaken their sharpest weapon they have at this time.
[1] I interviewed at Facebook pre-IPO and met about a dozen of their top PM stakeholders back at the time, including the current CPO. As you would expect, the strength of that talent was just insanely good. Of those people, only Chris Cox is still there, but even he decided to leave for a while. At the end of the day, people are too motivated by money, and it hurts in two ways: those who have it are no longer working as hard, and those who don't have it can make more of it at pre-IPO companies.
[2] Google deserves a lot of praise for trying to escape that fate with with their efforts with X - Vaymo may or may not end up generating cash, but either way, my hat's off to them. Even so, X highlights another problem with innovation at a megacorp - unless your idea has a clear potential of being a 100 billion dollar company, it's not worth pursuing it since it won't make enough of a difference for someone with AdWords on their balance sheet. In contrast, there's plenty of VC to be raised as a startup seemingly trying to become a 1 billion dollar company and then eventually discovering that it can go further than that.
Instead of breaking them up though, we should simply be more stringent with anti trust hearings and merger approvals. There have been a few mergers recently that absolutely shouldn’t have been approved.
Recently? Competition bureaus have been green lighting consolidation in key industry sectors for bullshit reasons with bad evidence for decades.
Also, if we acknowledge that bureaus have allowed the over-consolidation of a number of industries, then why wouldn't we break them up?
The harm to competition is already done - we already have titans accumulating the lucre of uncompetitive margins. The market's health cannot be judged in respect of what margins currently are; they have to be judged in respect of what they would be under situations of proper competition.
that would actually encourage competition and functional markets without harming substantive efficiency/productivity gains from economies of scale, which, despite the popular conception, tend to be sublinear rather than superlinear. that's because coordination problems scale superlinearly with size (a la mythical man month), which in turn is why there is a optimum firm size both for the firms themselves as well as for the markets they compete in. markets (independent actors loosely coordinating via price signals) actually specifically arose to solve these very coordination problems.
Or we could just levy punitive corporate taxes on large companies over $100MM, and let market participants figure out the most efficient breakup arrangement. Come to think of it, this doesn't look all that different from what the Biden administration seems to be planning re: global corporate taxation.
moreover there's no reason to preclude one for the other. let's do both, and more, to make markets competitive and work for the common welfare, rather than decidedly favoring consolidation and capital-holders.
If you wanted to make the tax system "more fair" it would mean lowering the outrageously high taxes on the middle class, but that's not within the Overton window and not what you're talking about.
It will be interesting to see! I'll be fascinated to see the degree to which congress is willing to take on these companies, and the degree to which their views on what should be done are congruent between the parties. I wonder the extent to which differing views on that subject could scuttle any legislation that would really address the concerns.
Ad buyers are the consumers. You are the product.
That's a bit of a non sequitur.
Ad-buying businesses aren't, generally, rivals to the ad-selling platform. It isn't necessarily a bad model to treat them as consumers, or at least as proxies for actual consumers. The cost of monopoly rents being passed on to consumers isn't a particularly controversial proposition.
If there was a real competitor to Google, I would imagine they would try showing less ads.
If there was a real competitor to Facebook, who knows what changes they would make to the newsfeed.
I would hope we could get some competitors that make things better for the end user, worse for the ad buyer, but can still be profitable.
As for Standard Oil at the height of it's market dominance the price of oil went down drastically, and by the time it was broken up it was nowhere near as dominant - iirc it was in the high 60%s of market share.
The only monopolies that ever seem to truly exist and cause harm, are those that are granted special status and favors by the state.
Technology clearly helped, but you can adjust for that by compare to other countries telecoms which had the same benefits.
I can't remember how different my bills were, but I do remember all the jokes about how breaking Bell up made things worse.
In May 1984, AT&T implemented its first rate reduction in 14 years, knocking an average 6.1 percent off interstate long-distance prices. Long distance prices fell 38% by 1988 ignoring inflation. And continued to drop in the years afterwards.
Now how much this was a net benefit at the time really depended on how much you used long distance calling. Longer term it paved the way for people to call long distance ISP’s which made a real difference in early internet adoption.
I don't remember having to call long distance for an ISP though - dial up/shell ISP's sprang up in every lil nook and cranny :-)
A malevolent monopoly needs government support to sustain itself for long (like today's telecoms/internet companies). All of the natural monopolies that have existed without rent seeking either greatly benefitted the consumer (Standard Oil, Google, Amazon), or became less consumer friendly and lost their monopoly (Microsoft).
That isn't to say that the government shouldn't take extra steps to ensure powerful companies are upholding the spirit of the law (labor laws and liability laws, for example, at Amazon), but most of the anti-monopolist positions such as some described in the article seem horribly misguided and likely to have unintended consequences. Especially preventing acquisitions (how many talented founders start companies with the hopes of having an acquisition option) and preventing horizontal integration (would we have AWS and the rise of easy cloud computing if this law passed 20 years ago?)
that is charitable interpretation to say the least.. Once monopoly revenue is passing hands, who is to say that safety, service and responsible behavior strengthens? There are manifold examples of a whole range of outcomes.
A defense of oil monopoly markets is particulalry distasteful in light of a global, literal crisis due to oil consumption by the billions of barrels, right?
True, that could go bad.
> A defense of oil monopoly markets is particulalry distasteful in light of a global, literal crisis due to oil consumption by the billions of barrels, right?
Huh? Did you miss the point entirely? They're saying that a monopoly reduces the number of barrels, which reduces the crisis. What's distasteful about that specific part of the picture?
Historically the US was the largest economy with the largest monopolies, so yes that was true then. It's not necessarily true now or going forward since the US govt can only break up US monopolies but not their foreign competitors.
That said, it sounds like this bill 1) does not break up US big tech, and 2) is applicable to any enterprise operating in the US, similar to how GDPR applies to all companies operating in EU.
These are nothing like the current tech companies. Their monopolies were based on commodities. Oil hasn’t changed since standard oil was broken up. AT&T’s monopoly was based on access to real estate to build a network.
At least this is what is stated in the article. I have not read the bills.
EDIT: someone posted that these bills will equally affect American and international companies. I don't see how that's possible. Eg:
> The “Platform Competition and Opportunity Act” prohibits acquisitions of competitive threats by dominant platforms
Who is going to prevent ByteDance from acquiring every competitive Chinese company? Once they start doing that and we see some massive consolidation in China, ByteDance will go from being the most profitable private company worth $140B to being close to Facebook's $1T market cap. This is not some fiction scenario, it's literally how American companies got big as well. While I wish the American consolidation never happened, I am not sure if the right solution is to just prevent it domestically.
China's social platform ecosystem probably has more diversity than the US. This hypothetical doesn't work great since Tencent(WeChat) is it-least twice the size of ByteDance...
I do agree with the premise that regulation on American companies does have an effect on how competitive they are globally.
The US can make laws about how companies that operate in other markets can behave. The US can enforce those rules on any subsidiaries that operate in US markets.
This isn't even uncommon - we see it in (eg) mining all the time, where corporate regulators stop overseas takeovers from occurring.
A specific example of this kind of action: In 2016 the Obama administration block the Dutch Phillips company from selling (Dutch) Lumiled to Chinese investment companies.
More recently there was the (disastrously administed) attempt to force US ownership of TikTok as well as a less well known attempt to force the sale of Grindr.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170227090607/https://www.nytim...
With respect to "breaking up big tech" and it being harmful to US companies on a global stage, my guess is that over a long enough time period monopolistic companies tend stop being innovative since their motivations in how to derive profit shift. I believe that will end up being harmful for the societies and countries they exist in. Countries, societies, and industries which can stay competitive I think would benefit in the long run so long as they are not consumed by that global monopoly. In the short run it could be pretty harmful.
Just an opinion I'm not too strongly tied to at the moment. It would be interesting to see an economic study or something.
But big tech employs proportionately few, and pays no tax.
T-Mobile is/was German and is in a monopolistic position, but it doesn't have any specific advantage over AT&T or Verizon, and is subject to the same type of regulatory scrutiny over aquisitions, etc.
There's a lot of foreign pharma corps, but afaik, they don't do anything more monopolistic than US pharma corps. Same with oil and chemical companies.
Would be happy to consider something I missed, however.
That can be a problematic concept for online businesses with no local presence.
You can try and apply tariffs on imports, but policing imports, especially of services, is hard.
In practice, most multinationals are not too comfortable blatantly violating the law in large markets.
See also: the policy laundering that got us DMCA 1201 and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
Regulate "Big Tech" because they banned inciting violence on their platforms? Absolutely, that's freedom.
Name one that is an ACTUAL monopoly? Facebook? Apple? Google? Amazon? Vertical integration is NOT monopoly, and thats what many of them are doing.
I see a lot of arguments about these companies that are tantamount to "I didn't know how the world worked till I saw them do it and now I'm unhappy".
After starting to dig a bit further than this article into what some of these would contain, someone with some tech savvy needs to get themselves to the capital and educate our legislators.
As ultimately what these companies represent is toll road to the content others create.
As what these companies do is common sense. My own father created what became the modern search paradigm and was subsequently kicked off the project that later became yahoo.
So from my perspective what these companies do is not innovative.
In this case, it's advertisers.
Which is why all the antitrust suits are brought "for" the ad industry.
The mere fact that participation is effectively mandatory itself skews the market.
IMHO, an adversarial bidding process (under control of one party) is no replacement for a strategic adversary (capable of planning and executing strategy).
The former may prevent the most egregious price raises, but it's insufficient for creating the broader competition that ultimately drives prices down.
There is a peculiar dynamic as the market centralizes toward fewer marketplaces (for example two-sided ones like AdWords) such that buyers have to go there to find sellers and vice-versa, that results in sellers getting stuck in a race to the bottom, while buyers are stuck in a race to the top. It's like the dark mirror of the network effect. The market maker gets to siphon off the growing gap as fees of various sorts. Voila, monopoly rents.
FB isn't a two sided marketplace, but buyers are definitely stuck bidding against each other which causes the market equilibrium to rise. And even if you broaden the definition of the market fairly generously such that FB doesn't have a monopoly per-se, you've still got an oligopoly at best.
Anyone who worked in the space thought it was the most desirable property available, and wasn't surprised at the price given that Google was looking at social properties at the time too.
And no matter what people on HN thought, FB did buy Insta because it was a competitor:
The exchange was one of several potentially damning pieces of evidence in documents obtained by the U.S. House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, showing that Zuckerberg leveraged Facebook’s market power over competitors and bought Instagram because he was concerned about the fast growing company’s potential to turn users away from Facebook.
https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/facebook-bought-inst...
Just out of curiosity: which aspect of those arguments do you object to, if any? I'm not trying to be confrontational, just trying to understand your point of view.
There was a time where monopolies were "how the world worked", until the society collectively decided that it's not how the world should work. If Google and Amazon aren't actual monopolies, then maybe we need a new name and a new set of rules.
Really, I don't know what the lawmakers are thinking. Competition is alive and well on the Internet! Innovation has never been higher! Absolutely nothing has gotten worse since 2008! Boy I can't wait for the next version of Firefox. It totally won't be even more like Chrome this time.
If you put enough qualifiers on something you can make anything one-of-a-kind.
I think we should be less interested in whether these companies are literal monopolies and more interested in whether these companies represent a net harm to society (or even more narrowly, to their respective competitive landscapes). I don’t posit an answer, but I think this criteria will lead to more fruitful discussion than the fixation on monopoly.
What does matter is that these companies are very much engaged in the behaviors these bills would regulate. The point of the legislature is not to sit around and observe why a century-old law doesn’t technically apply to a modern problem, it’s to make a new law that does apply.
I don’t have an opinion on whether these bills are a good idea or not (although I definitely think big tech need some reining in). But whether or not these companies are technically monopolies has nothing to do with it beyond a bit of political rhetoric.
That doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That doesn't mean I can't or won't decry their putting thumbs on scales toward a certain type of bien-pensant ideology. That does mean that, overall, I am very, very glad that they are American instead of Russian, Chinese, or even British, French, or German.
Generally the solution is checks & balances, oversight, you cut / I choose, and similar mechanisms. (Off the top of my head, there may be others.)
https://hbr.org/2017/12/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-u-s...
The reason why this committee is bipartisan, I believe, is because social progressives on one side and free-market conservatives on the other are finally seeing the problem with today's monopolies. (Unfortunately this is just one giant problem out of many giant problems facing modern government, so maybe let's not position it as, "well if they can't fix X they shouldn't bother to fix Y and Z.")
I'm most interested in the platform monopoly legislation. There's an entire new legal vocabulary required to even talk about this. Or so I think.
"restrict or impede businesses users from communicating information or providing hyperlinks on the covered platform to covered platform users to facilitate business transactions;"
Does this make it illegal to ban spammers? (I havent actually read these. They are long).
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Subsection (a) and (b) shall not apply if the defendant establishes by clear and convincing evidence that the conduct described in subsections (a) or (b) would not result in harm to the competitive process by restricting or impeding legitimate activity by business users.
It seems a greater priority of this Congress is social reforms and the President and VP also have other priorities that are keeping Congress’ attention
I suspect this will end up like Florida’s embarrassing law to reduce deplatforming of candidates with weird exemptions carved out for favored businesses.
Wonder how they will feel knowing their representative is proposing legislation will likely hurt their financial well-being.
Edit: Why the downvotes? I think it’s an interesting dynamic between constituents and their representative.
If you're a rank-and-file employee in those companies and legitimately think these bills will significantly affect your financial well-being, you've successfully been brainwashed to believe that your stake in the company actually matters.
“Online platforms” == operating systems according to the first linked.
If that’s the quality of legislation… I’m unsure how to proceed.
/s
First, this whole suppressing conservatives voices thing is just totally unhinged from reality. The few tiny examples of this violate clearly defined platform rules (which pale in comparison to the giant gain of misinformation aimed at the right that’s free flowed). These companies and their products aren’t the same as a phone call, and you absolutely don’t have any constitutional rights if speech to it! They’re private platforms and anyone (eg Gab) can go and create their own.
If any company violated consumer’s privacy in accordance with constitutional rights, then current day lawsuits would win without any additional amendments.
This is both sides looking for a new boogie man, and will ultimately make America less competitive globally compared to a place like China where not only do their tech companies have massive integration across so many products (hello WeChat), but they have actual state support.
This is just populism aimed at all of those who didn’t make money in tech over the past 20 years, many of whom are jealous their industries got outsourced and therefore mad.
Just one of many analyses that have showed how the right in the US has majorly gained from being able to share misinformation and live in filter bubbles by platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The idea that Twitter/FB have political enemies is not supported by how they’ve been used, and is inviting an over-politicization of American life. They’re private businesses… not political affiliates.
Oh wait, that is literally how common carrier laws work. They are basically, forced to sell to everyone, and have to allow anyone to make speech over their network.
Instead, I am pointing out the ridiculousness of saying that every single instance of the governement "enforcing" speech, in the context of powerful platforms, is somehow some huge infringement on free speech.
Because clearly, we are OK with the government requiring phone companies, which are platforms, into allow most people to make phone calls.
Therefore, you cannot come out, swinging very hard, with this free speech stuff, when, if I were to guess, you are totally OK with phone companies being covered under common carrier laws.
So you need to either chill with this whole "free speech" argument, or you need to instead come out and say that common carriers are some horrible, really evil thing. Pick one.
Why can't tech products have integration across each other, without tech giants buying up every small startup that comes across their way?
However since you mentioned that, preventing M&A will not only prevent our bigger tech companies from being globally competitive by restricting their access to talent, it’ll shut off one of the main exit routes that’s made doing a startup far safer. It’ll mean failures will end up in $0 for everyone, less money in returns to a VC, which will mean less money in returns to the retirement funds and whatnot that invest in VCs (which is bad for all of our 401ks), so VCs will be even more careful about who they invest in, which means less capital going around for startups generally. That will reduce American competitiveness.
This is clearly false. All sorts of industry defined standards work quite well. When companies don't create interoperability it isn't because it is too hard...
(I am not suggesting that as a credible alternative).
Edit: See the lab leak hypothesis where big tech was suppressing and even banning people last year for questioning the approved narrative. And here's an example just yesterday with old school progressives being silenced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27493994
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/04/goog-n04.html
Facebook Purges Left-Wing Pages and Individuals
Where is the evidence? Because by in large, the use and effectiveness of these platforms in study after study goes the other way.
> posted a paper describing Geometric Unity online and went on Joe Rogan’s immensely popular podcast to discuss it
What makes someone an old school progressive, in your opinion?
I'm having trouble finding anything progressive about this person. His crackpot "theory of everything" has apparently been around since about 2013.
Those who were known as progressives prior to about 5 years ago. Eric and his brother Bret were self described progressives for decades.
> I'm having trouble finding anything progressive about this person.
Listen to his podcast The Portal to see. That he works with Thiel simply means that he is able to work with people who have different opinions. Guilt by association is lazy, as is dismissing a theory as crackpot, especially from a serious intellectual with the credentials (eg Harvard) to back it up.
The guy is clearly very bright. Perhaps you missed where he talked about the same theory with nobel laureate Roger Penrose.
Just because he might not be right about an extremely complex and hard to follow idea doesn't mean he shouldn't be studying it, discussing it, and engaging about it.
With these bills it seems like we are getting closer and closer to closing that frontier, and closing it for good.
Usenet is deader than dead (I have subscribed to some groups in thunderbird, but some of these haven't seen a post in several years), reddit is useful only in some small subreddits.
It seems like the end of an era. Maybe I should just, I don't know, log of?
Anybody else feels the same? Or better yet, know where the magic can be found these days?