Lina Khan, Big Tech Critic, Will Lead the FTC | Hacker News Reader

Lina Khan, Big Tech Critic, Will Lead the FTC

npr.org

156 pointstomdell106 comments

Text-only version

https://text.npr.org/2021/06/15/1006807299/lina-khan-promine...

(Was having problems retrieving the full blown version.)

A review article from Lina Khan that explains the new New Brandeis Movement, a move back to Brandeis type antitrust from Borkian antitrust that started in Reagan era.

The New Brandeis Movement: America’s Antimonopoly Debate by Lina Khan https://academic.oup.com/jeclap/article/9/3/131/4915966

"We learned long ago that liberty could be preserved only by limiting in some way the freedom of action of individuals; that otherwise liberty would necessarily yield to absolutism; and in the same way we have learned that unless there be regulation of competition, its excesses will lead to the destruction of competition, and monopoly will take its place." – Louis Brandeis

Has a single law review article done more to propel anyone’s career or drive policy than the Amazon Antitrust Paradox?

It's quite silly and not the greatest look for the country. I mean, to some people it is the greatest look -- the DEI story and the heroic "brilliant youth" narrative.

But appointing someone so inexperienced to such a high office is not something you do you if you are serious about governing.

How do you personally benefit from an Amazon with fewer competitors? I’m not sure if even ordinary people who work for Amazon benefit.

You’re complaining about someone who represents your interests, as opposed to representing the interests of someone you’ll never be, a billionaire.

Amazon has many retail competitors. Maybe they have pricing power in AWS, but otherwise, I do not see evidence of them having control of the retail goods market.

Even for AWS, they have Microsoft and Google as competitors and a few other companies too.

Amazon is in such a monopoly position that it is able to force sellers to cover the price of prime shipping (incorporating the shipping price into the display price) and then penalizes their display rank when they list lower prices on websites where shipping is separate from product price. Forcing suppliers to raise prices on unrelated sales is a classic monopoly move, like when MSFT forced OEMs to pay for Windows licenses on computers sold without operating systems.

And those sellers cannot go to Target or Walmart or Home Depot or advertise their own website?

We have Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal making it very simple to pay for things with a simple click, just like Amazon. Amazon has inertia, but it’s not exactly in a high barrier business. Walmart supplanted Kmart, and Amazon was able to gain share from Walmart.

The switching cost is visiting a different website. If you have a good product at a price people we willing to pay, the internet makes it very possible to survive without any big retailer’s help.

The bigger problem is probably someone cloning it but with 50% cheaper materials and selling it for 70% of your price, one that I’m sure many sellers on Amazon’s flea market are aware of.

They can advertise and sell on other websites, but if they advertise below the prices they advertise for on Amazon, then Amazon pushes them out of the search results box. Something like 90% of Amazon sales happen due to products being put in that box.

What? The whole point of "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" is that we should abandon the "consumer welfare" standard. Meaning that we should gut Amazon even though it provides enormous benefits to consumers in the form of low prices. Lina Khan may represent the interests of Amazon's competitors, but she certainly doesn't represent the interests of consumers.

The problem with the "consumer welfare" standard is that it traditionally only considers a single variable: Cost. But consumer welfare can and should extend beyond that. But if you try to get customer service from many of these monopolies, you'll see plenty of consumers falling through the cracks. Google abuses people's privacy, eliminates competitors, kills off services people rely on, provides literally no customer service... but because their core services are "free", the consumer welfare standard is often considered inadequate to deal with an absolutely reprehensible and societally harmful company.

And what's really crazy is: Competition tends to force companies to compete on treating consumers well. Protecting competing businesses protects consumer welfare pretty darn well, and it provides room for innovation which stagnates when a single company dominates a field.

> get customer service from many of these monopolies, you'll see plenty of consumers falling through the cracks

That's true of many non-monopolies too. And Amazon is widely known to have pretty good service. Conversely, no cellular company has ever had a monopoly in the US but a number of them are famed for poor customer service.

I can call Verizon or Comcast right now and get someone on the line in minutes. Usually they can solve my problem too. Get Google on the phone though. (Amazon actually does deserve credit here, their customer service isn't the worst, by any means. But they have a litany of other issues, like a work environment where people have to pee in bottles to make quotas...)

Even Metro has quick 24/7 phone support. Which, given the sad state of their online self-service options, has been the only thing that's kept me with them as long as I have.

I'm not sure there are any companies where you don't pay them anything and they have easily accessible phone support. Do you happen to know of an example? I never had any trouble getting support from Google when I was a Fi customer. On the other hand, I'll bet I couldn't get support for web search over the phone for love nor money. Similarly, I doubt I can call up Facebook or Twitter's customer support lines, although perhaps I am wrong.

> where you don't pay them anything and they have easily accessible phone support

They're still getting paid for your services. If my ad attention is equal to dollars, why don't I also get customer service for it?

I'd argue the idea that you shouldn't pay for services, and that you shouldn't expect to get customer support, are both examples of failures of the current antitrust regime.

Phone support is, unfortunately, a hard to find commodity anywhere in tech these days. Generally I have only selected web hosts and domain registrars that have 24/7, US-based customer service. I used to have a few options, now there's very few. :/ You're lucky if they have a ticket system they respond to in less than a day.

Because, well, since you're not paying you're not the customer.

To add onto that, if we manufactured more here, it might raise the price of goods, but if those goods are of higher quality and they last longer it might be better for the consumer in the long run. You might even extend this to looking at the environmental wins of having better wuality products that stay out of the landfill.

Absolutely agreed. Additionally, the more we manufacture here, the more competitive with overseas we eventually become. We'll never reach price equality, because we have labor standards, but we can get closer than people imagine today.

That's not even that bad IMO. I'd love to see other places bring up their labour and environmental standards!

Indeed. In my ideal world, the United States would set expectations on labor and environment that a foreign company needs to meet for their products to be imported to the United States.

We can't tell other countries how to operate, but we can set a bar for who we do business with, and we have the market power to encourage foreign entities to meet those standards.

Shame we didn’t just have a president who was trying to bring back manufacturing.

> absolutely reprehensible and societally harmful company

This is such an exaggeration. Google is not "absolutely reprehensible and societally harmful".

Amnesty International disagrees. (I think it would be off-topic here to give a lengthy account of Google's human rights abuses, the way they harm women and minorities, and the money they invest in politicians which are also very detrimental to society, with sources, but suffice to say, my description of them is, at least, a defensible position.)

My read is that people are seeking a means to an end. Means: whatever she’s writing. End: reducing Amazon’s scope of business.

If you’re being intellectually honest, the source of low prices is Chinese outsourced labor, not monopolies. Amazon could vanish tomorrow, and shit will still be cheap.

Who are some alternatives in the antitrust space, then? Elizabeth Warren?

Since when are 32-year-olds "so inexperienced"? Maybe she's got different experience from prior appointees but 10+ years of high quality experience is IMO, more than enough. Most people are at the top of their game at that age.

She has been out of law school for 4 years.

To play the DEI's advocate I'll call this sexism.

Additionally: while 32 might set a new record, it's not by _that_ much -- Collier became chairman at 34 in 1976.

For better or for worse, the law is much more complicated now than in 1976.

I get where you're coming from, "so inexperienced" is probably overstating it. But she's been out of law school for four years, and I feel like saying most folks are at their best then discounts all the experience and learning that come from working another 30 years in the field (for, say, a 62-year old).

4 years out of law school is what I was referencing.

I stand by my phrasing. She had (presuming usual timelines) 3 years of work between undergrad and law school. She went from law school student to law school associate professor (on the strength of her viral rewview article).

She has 0 non-academic work experience and will now be regulating entire industries.

In context, that's "so inexperienced".

Most people are at the top of their game at 31? Uh, no. No. Maybe in startup lala land, but in this kind of role, 31 is "learning the ropes" territory.

I've met Lina Khan. Silly doesn't come to mind.

One of SpaceX’s rocket leads was 27 at their first successful launch.

And how is that comparable with an appointment to the number one top position in the authority over thousands of regulations governing thousands of companies etc.

Also I think i's safe to assume you don't just "get appointed" to the lead team in SpaceX you need to actually "show" that you have what it takes.

I'm not saying she won't be good, I'm just asking how can we trust?

At least she's not on the backend of her mental stamina. +1 for being hungry. Unlike congress, who today ignored the homeless ( or pick your) crises to make Juneteenth an official holiday. I'd like to see a lot of under 40 year olds governing if that is the result of "experience".

I suppose they’d rather have Feinstein in charge

It's not like she was dragged in off the street. She's an associate professor at Columbia Law.

more than that, she has direct experience within the FTC and related government bodies [1]:

- 2018, worked as a Legal Fellow at the FTC in the office of Commissioner Rohit Chopra

- 2019, began serving as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law

- Lead the Democrat's congressional investigation into digital markets and lead the investigation into digital markets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Khan

Yes, she wrote a virally-popular law school review article in 2017. It aligned with a ton of political interests, which no doubt helped buoy it as high as went.

She then got invited to do some fellowships, advisory roles, etc... while stepping from law student to associate law school prof. None of that exposes you to the inner workings of industry.

Surely, she's a very smart and capable person. But there's a lot you don't learn in academic settings.

Regulating trillions of dollars worth of industry with only a theoretical understanding of the market, acquired only from a regulatory perspective, does not inspire confidence.

Please be more dismissive and patronizing of a person you know very little about. A DEI story? You are showing your insecurity.

It has been explicitly trumpeted widely. The admin itself has highlighted it.

I'm not saying it's bad, I'm saying it seems like there are narratives motivating this orthogonal to good governance.

Are you saying she, with zero industry experience, is the most capable person for the job?

Why, was Joseph Simons was so amazing?

Although it's not a review article, but maybe Bork's The Antitrust Paradox, which the Amazon Antitrust Paradox works hard to refute.

Robert Bork had already been Nixon's acting-Attorney General at that point. He became acting AG when AG Elliot Richardson refused Nixon's order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and instead resigned. Deputy AG William Ruckelshaus also then refused to fire Cox and resigned. Bork then became acting AG but he did not refuse to fire Cox.

Bork's legal career was not propelled by any singular brilliance.

Bork's legal career was not propelled by any singular brilliance.

Well there was the whole Blockbuster rental history thing during his confirmation but that’s more like fun/interesting pub-trivia than anything necessarily “brilliant”.

I agree, there ought to be more original ideas in law, besides “Whatever earns me a plum clerkship.”

"Whatever helps me pay off my student loans."

Conservative voter here. I like Khan for the position. Let's see if she's able to make some progress.

"policymakers' hearty appetite to rein in Big Tech".

Rein them in from doing what exactly? Buying companies and making people rich?

They're making the wrong people rich: Not the good ol boys who support conservative christian causes. They're eating old businesses.

This is a threat to the existing donor class in Washington, which has embarked on a project since 1968 to build power through political donations, the courts, and crushing labor.

This is exactly right. Big tech doesn’t have a unionized workforce, and thus do not create solid blue votes- so they will never be favored.

Big Tech has been playing with fire warning up to democratic politicians.

Why would a Dem controlled President, House, and Senate care to preserve your so called “conservative christian causes”?

It requires bipartisanship in the Senate. Why is this the only thing Dems and Republicans can agree on? It's hard for me to not see it as a power play on both sides.

This is an extremely cynical take on antitrust law. Unjustifiably cynical, at least for now.

Granted, America has done such a piss-poor job of actually enforcing antitrust laws already on the books that it's hard not to read into this enforcement now as the end result of someone refusing to play ball.

Antitrust law has always been cynical and just a tool for those who lost to use favor to get something from those who won. Will the FTC go after the AMA and the healthcare industry? The cable industry granted monopolies by local communities? Go after industries that are hated and bankrupt people?

Or will it go after services people love, that are free, or that revolutionize industries?

Do people actually love these services at present, as opposed to five or ten years ago? The bipartisan move towards antitrust is undergirded by bipartisan grassroots discontent.

There's a weird[1] dynamic where people dislike "big tech" but are wildly favorable towards individual big tech colonies: Google, Amazon, Apple all have favorability ratings in the 80s and 90s, while Facebook, Twitter, and Slack have much lower ratings. Interestingly enough, being a monopoly seems to be correlated with _higher_ favorability.

Your assumption about the implications of bipartisan support seems a little Pollyanna-ish about the degree to which politicians represent their constituents on any given issue.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2... (I couldn't find individual company numbers for 2021)

[1] I guess this isn't that weird, given that similar inconsistencies shows up in all sorts of polling.

> The bipartisan move towards antitrust is undergirded by bipartisan grassroots discontent.

Depends on which companies you're talking about. There's widespread discontent about social media companies, but the left and right wing of the political spectrum have opposite and incompatible discontents, so I don't think it's justifiable to call it "bipartisan grassroots discontent". The non-social-media "Big Tech" companies remain extremely popular and well-regarded in surveys of the general public. Google, Amazon, and Netflix were 3 of the top 5 most loved brands of 2020, losing out only to mail carriers (and Google took second place, ahead of UPS). Google and Amazon each have two of the top 10 spots (Google + YouTube, Amazon + Amazon Prime). The idea that there is roiling popular discontent about the activities of Google and Amazon is entirely a media fabrication.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/995767/consumers-most-lo...

> Not the good ol boys who support conservative christian causes.

Two words: Peter Thiel.

You joke, but there are hidden costs to limited competition even if the full effects of the efficiency due to vertical integration and economies of scale is passed to consumers in the form of reduced prices.

The efficiency from vertical integration come from global optimizations that aren't possible for separate organizations. The negative side of that is that there is less interest in finding new ways of using each of the components and finding reusing pieces of the infrastructure.

While these optimizations are economically positive in the short term they can delay innovation that would otherwise occur.

Take a look at Google - they had a cloud before "Cloud computing" was a thing. But when they built it, it was so tightly integrated that it didn't occur to them to sell the Cloud infrastructure (after all, it wasn't the "product", it was the process).

It took someone coming in later and building a less tightly coupled system for their applications to realize that it could be a product on it's own. Sand now Google is playing catch up as they have to undo all the shortcuts they developed that only work in their system.

It's worse today with all the content moving to walled gardens. Unlike when Google started, content is increasingly being locked away. The only way to search Facebook is to use Facebook search (or get Facebook's permission).

At the very least these tech giants should be forced to offer the same APIs they use themselves. Expose the natural gaps within the integrated stack for others to build off of. That should push things so that interoperability would be at least possible.

The capacity for a corporation to get away with evil acts is directly proportional to that corps power.

This is why I've always liked the idea of revenue-neutral progressive taxes on corporate revenue. Tax economy of scale.

Ex. Zero corporate taxes on the first 100k of revenue. For every order of magnitude above this revenue is taxed at ~1% more.

$1M in revunue -> 1%

$1B in revenue -> 4%

$100B in revenue -> 6%

Then reduce other corporate taxes to make it revenue neutral. In the most extreme case, the 1% figure or the curve could be tuned so that this is the only tax corporations pay.

This would be a massive boon for competition. Small businesses would be easier to start. Businesses may choose to stop growing: if you're making a healthy profit, don't jeopardize your margin in a perpetual struggle to amass the most power, leaving room in the market for competitors to coexist and meaningfully compete on quality.

This discourages acquisitions and encourages companies to split: if your economy of scale isn't yielding enough to justify the tax, you could spin off multiple smaller companies that would each be more profitable. The capacity for corporations to do evil is directly proportional to concentration of power. Smaller companies won't be able to afford as many lobbyists and lawyers to subvert regulation, their threats to move their businesses will be less existential for municipalities and they'll get less-sweet sweetheart deals. Being "Too Big to Fail" would be unsustainable and wasteful. The only mergers that would occur would be where the resulting economy of scale exceeds the increased tax burden.

It could also vastly simplify tax accounting, which would be a nice bonus.

Lets not forget who the Gov is. These same companies they talk of going after are the same companies that run the Gov/Country. 4 years from now nothing will have changed. Theater for the masses...

I do not believe this is quite right. Government will protect its own power. If big tech is getting too powerful, the government chop it up into little pieces.

I think it is a forgone conclusion that google will be split up, apple will lose their app-store monopoly, etc.

Big tech has bought the government a long time ago. Corporations run America. I am willing to make a friendly bet with anyone that nothing serious happens. No one is getting broken up. There might be some hand slapping but that is all.

well congrats to all the progressives who work for big tech and voted Biden, here is karma completing the woke circle.

"As a man himself sows, so he himself reaps" — Mahabharata

I smell some hope in this "completing". Let me dispell it: the cycle has just begun. Biden said that in the next 10 years things will change more than in the past 50. P.S. and yeah, I was one of those voters.

Meh, nothing of substance will change through government action. We’ll all clutch our pearls and hope big daddy gov will come to the rescue, but just like Microsoft in the 90’s, a technology paradigm shift will level the playing field and bring a new crop of tech giants to the forefront. Ironically, our kids will be crying “monopoly” with this new batch of companies.

I suspect the outcome of Trump's social media ban review will depend a lot on how Big Tech feels it's being treated by the FTC in 2023.

This is fantastic news! Tech monopolies need much more scrutiny, and honestly, they need to have parts of the business model excised.

Apple's control of mobile computing and commerce, Google's takeover of the web, Amazon reaching into every business: Apple should be mandated to allow web downloads of apps, Google can't ethically be in charge of Chrome as a product, and Amazon can't operate so many business units to siphon off and destroy smaller businesses.

It's really nice to see Lina Khan was supported as a bipartisan appointment. It's good that she's young too -- she understands the technology, unlike a lot of our policymakers that struggle to comprehend the systems at play.

The government moves slowly, but they're clearly starting to dip their toes in. Change is coming.

If you're a capitalist, you want lean, fierce competition. What we have now is not that.

If you're a small business, startup, or free software proponent, this is a score for the home team. Let's keep it up! Keep calling and writing your legislators.

I see a conspicuous lack of ISPs in your list.

Well, the solution to that is municipal fiber and a return to net neutrality.

edit: while we're on that topic, I'm actually a little less concerned about that. Where I live I can get Comcast, Google Fiber, AT&T, Verizon, T Mobile, etc. Data caps are an issue, but they're nowhere near as bad as Apple telling me what I can and cannot run on their devices. Or Google swallowing the web with Chrome, Amp, ads, and the rest.

ISPs should be run by governments, just like other utilities are or should be. Market forces don't make better infrastructure.

The lack of market forces make no infrastructure

“So lets improve municipal transportation options by putting a multipurpose device in everyone’s pockets that connects to this completely parallel wireless network, which is yet to be built, connected with high bandwidth cables underground - no it wont use the telephone poles why do you ask - and itll will have a random pricing scheme, so …. what does the county board think of how this fits in the budget?”

The federal government has heavily subsidized internet infrastructure that in some cases was simply not completed.

We don't have to chuck out private enterprise but I think we can crack the whip on the private companies squandering public funds.

Rural electrification never would have happened without government intervention because it's not profitable. That's how all infrastructure behaves and why it should be run by government for the benefit of every citizen. Your "example" does not reflect reality.

ISPs are run really badly. I know ISPs, they are not run by the best and the brightest. They all wish they could do more with their access to networks and data but in reality, they just dont matter compared to Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon. ISP not the ones indexing all your info and using it to target you with ads. ISP not the one algorithmically censoring you.

They are also not the ones building platforms, buying their competition (startups), putting small businesses out of work. No idea why people are so angry about ISPs - Dumb pipes for the most part.

Based on the complete lack of movement from AMZN and related stocks, I have to guess no one is particularly shaking in their boots (or, it was known that this was going to happen).

The party is over for the computer nerds. Back to the bottom of the social pecking order.

Well, they broke up IBM and Microsoft, didn't they?

The people running the monopolies are nothing like the vast majority of "computer nerds" in the industry working under them.

Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Satya Nadella all have some solid "computer nerd" background. Tim Cook, maybe not so much, but if I had to guess, Apple is the one who is going to make it out of this in the best shape, if only because congresspeople love their iPhones.

And regardless of leadership, there are hundreds of thousands of computer nerds who are doing quite well at these companies.

I don't doubt the engineering chops of any of these people. You can say the same of Gates, Page and Brin, and so forth. But it's an extraordinary claim to say that in their present forms they are in any way in the same "social pecking order" as computer nerds.

And yet their fates are intertwined.

The employees can always go work for tech companies that aren't big monopolies. For example, startups.

Currently, it's worth noting that the exit plan of half these startups is to get acquired by one of these monopolies, have their products killed off, and be assigned to do mundane bugfixes for core business competencies.

Isn't that partly because of the same problem of the mass concentration of wealth and power into a few key players? If you have less room to strike it out on your own right, then you're dependent on a bigger fish to snatch you up. Who's to say that if the playing field was more level then more startups would have the ambition to become their own would-be monopolies? Either way, the vast majority of the "computer nerds" in the OP are different from the founder class that would be more directly impacted.

And accept a fraction of the salary! Which is what is meant by "party's over" I'd think. The big companies not only pay the highest wages but exert upward pressure on other employers who would like to hire the same people. There are also non-monetary benefits to working at a large employer, like the greater variety of available assignments, generally better benefits (OK, sort of monetary), greater number of educational/training opportunities, and so on.

Regulatory concerns or not, it's unlikely that the bull run of the past decade would've continued indefinitely.

And there's plenty of post-unicorn little empires (Uber, Twitter, AirBnB, Robinhood, etc.) that probably command as great salaries as the monopolies. Not to mention there are other big tech companies that don't seem to be in regulators' crosshairs- Microsoft, Oracle, even Netflix.

Neither Amazon and Apple are known to pay as great salaries as Facebook/Google, and as mentioned it's debatable whether their stock prices would've continued in as explosive growth as in past years.

At any rate, if one was to break up the big companies (which isn't even likely to happen), who's to say that AdSense Inc. or Instagram wouldn't pay as well as they did when they were internal teams?

It’s no secret that large companies typically offer better pay and benefits across industries. And even Amazon and Apple have excellent pay compared to most other companies.

Would Square, Stripe, Snap, Coinbase, Lyft, Twitter, Dropbox, et al really command lower salaries, FAANG RSUs vs. options aside? There’s a reason for why Facebook average turnover is like 2.5 years and Google average turnover is 1.1 years, there are options outside them in the industry. Even a cursory glance at Levels.fyi shows that Adobe pays competitively, and doubtless they're not the only older established company. Like I said, there’s still Netflix.

The big monopolies, and really just Google and Facebook, might set the pace for comp and other employment practices for the industry, but they're far from the only game in town.

Google and Facebook set the bar for other companies to match or even exceed to attract talent. Without this pressure, I’d expect salaries to drop significantly across the board.

Again, I keep mentioning there are other highly competitive corporations out there, and have mentioned multiple. At this point all of these companies are competing not only with Google and Facebook, but each other. The turnover rate at Google and Facebook would not nearly be as high as they are now if there weren't compelling alternatives. So at some point, the most distinguishing aspects would be 1) the specific FAANG equity (which as mentioned, might not nearly be as game-changing as in previous years), and 2) the FAANG name, which some of these other companies certainly give a run for the money for.

Yes, you got my meaning.

The computer nerds are the ones who get screwed in the equity game, it's actually the CEOs of these companies pushing them down the pecking order. Check how many founders and upper managment come from fraternities.

I was referring to the ability of developers at big tech companies to command half-a-million a year comp, competitive with some doctors, lawyers, and consultants. Those days could be over if Congress gets it’s way (though I hope not).

Of course CEOs are in a whole different social and compensation stratum, but that’s a different story.

Probably a little early to say that.

I think the social pecking order is a little bit deeper than you're accounting for.

I believe technology has a key part to play in a more fair, yet still highly efficient, marketplace.

The government should think about supporting or even mandating technical frameworks or protocols for information exchange and commerce. For example, much (although by no means all) of what Amazon does with it's product sales that provides a lot of the value is provide an information service that collects and queries a wide range of product data.

Cryptocurrencies are the starting point for this. Along with other types of decentralized systems which provide, despite the name, the best ways we have to operate large scale systems holistically (as well as democratically).

But to take a step back, rather than mandating protocols that could easily become dated and detrimental, prescribe or at least very strongly encourage systems for sharing, subscribing to and consuming those protocols. Maybe things like package registries, or perhaps package registries for smart contract programming libraries.

But overall, I do not think that we can have effective government that is not integrated into society in a high tech way. And despite the track record of governments being horrible, I doubt we can function without them.

Wow! A lot of downvotes this time with no comment! That's how I know it was a good idea! And I should keep making the comment over and over regardless of how unpopular it is. Because the unpopularity of my comment is a hint that I know something that other people do not.

> Because the unpopularity of my comment is a hint that I know something that other people do not.

It may be. Or it may be that you're saying something that's obviously bogus to everyone else. Downvotes only give you one bit of information, and it's orthogonal to the "right/wrong" axis.

Bogus in what way I wonder?

Historically, ideas that were "obviously bogus" were often unpopular.

And many ideas that are actually wrong are also unpopular. "I'm right because they don't like me" is not the best reasoning.

Yeah. "Right ideas are often unpopular" is not logically the same as "unpopular ideas are usually right".

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