Calling for Antitrust Reform | Hacker News Reader

Calling for Antitrust Reform

blog.mozilla.org

286 pointscpeterso199 comments

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/299...

6 Republican and 6 Democrat cosponsors. I like when they work together :]

I only skimmed the bill but wheneven I see both parties working together I know I need to be extra careful and look for hidden dangers because I am cynical like that.

Isn't it even worse when only one party sponsors or works on something? It could signal that they are completely willing to ignore the sentiments of the other half the congress represents.

“Other less than a quarter”.

Well, it's more like each party has a core 25 to 30% and the rest are independent moderates and then the core of the other party --so when one party does something it's more or less representing 25 to 30% of the voting pop. So the other are 70 to 75%

Voting population is also typically less than half. 2020 US election was an outlier at 66.8%.

If only one party wants something, the other party will loudly and thoroughly catalogue everything wrong with the idea and throw extra at it to see if the smear sticks. There'll generally be loud warnings of a problem.

If they are cooperating, that means it might be something really nasty that, eg, lobby money from the military-industrialists supports.

Whenever the media hails some great bipartisan agreement, I get briefly optimistic. Then I look into the details. Invariably I find they included the worst things from each side. Most often, our pockets are being picked.

My experience has been when they work together, it's because it's good for them and bad for us.

It does not sound like a healthy democracy. Why?

I am currently going through it and I was initially leaning against it, but I am slowly starting to lean closer.

The bill among other things prohibits covered platforms to:

>> 7) materially restrict or impede a business user from accessing data generated on the covered platform by the activities of the business user, or through an interaction of a covered platform user with the products or services of the business user, such as by establishing contractual or technical restrictions that prevent the portability by the business user to other systems or applications of the data of the business user;

Unless I am reading it wrong, does it only apply to info you put on platform?

>> (4) materially restrict, impede, or unreasonably delay the capacity of a business user to access or interoperate with the same platform, operating system, or hardware or software features that are available to the products, services, or lines of business of the covered platform operator that compete or would compete with products or services offered by business users on the covered platform;

That seems like a win. What are the arguments against it?

>> (3) discriminate in the application or enforcement of the terms of service of the covered platform among similarly situated business users in a manner that would materially harm competition;

This feels important. I don't see any teeth though. Please correct me if I am wrong.

I am much less amused by:

>> 8) materially restrict or impede covered platform users from uninstalling software applications that have been preinstalled on the covered platform or changing default settings that direct or steer covered platform users to products or services offered by the covered platform operator, unless necessary—

where it 'security' is a simple way to bypass it ( because that is easy to claim ).

This Techdirt piece describes that lawmakers fixed none of the problems and actually exempts a lot of actual monopolies such as telecom (Example: AT&T and Verizon) and retail (Example: Walmart and Target): https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/27/senator-klobuchar-fixed-...

Techdirt/Copia Institute is a lobbyist which is sponsored by Google. Mike Masnick reads like a Google public policy playbook, because that's what he's copying from.

Any evidence that Google pays masnick or techdirt?

Mike's own website: https://copia.is/ (scroll down to sponsorship logos) Copia has also been listed on Google's own public policy transparency website in the past, though it's absent at the moment.

EDIT: This version of the disclosure is still up: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/trade_association_...

Note that the Google Public Policy Team's explicit purpose is to influence laws to be favorable to the company. Paying "think tanks", lobbyists, and political action groups is explicitly about avoiding government regulation for Google, as Mike is doing here.

Interesting, and good to know.

The part I don’t get is that Google is listed right next to Yelp, who are the #1 advocates for regulatory action against Google.

That's because Yelp can only extort businesses if Google puts them at the top of search results, instead of providing a quick link to unbiased reviews on Google Maps.

They are listed as a 3rd party org. In the same list as the EFF, Public Knowledge, and the Democrat and Republican Attorneys General Associations.

That's pretty much a catchall term for groups on this list. But every organization on that list is paid by the Public Policy team, whose goal is to influence the law in a favorable direction for Google. That both includes funding politicians (like governors) and people who will write favorable statements for Google online (like Mike Masnick).

How the hell are Walmart and Target, stark competitors in the same space, both monopolies?

An oligopoly, then? A cartel?

These anti-monopoly laws always end up as “make restrictions preventing new competitors at some cost the big companies can easily handle”.

Always? All anti-monopoly laws, ever?

That’s a hypothesis explored by some authors, like here: https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/big-busin...

Libertarian is a word for people who are too bashful to describe themselves as Feudalists.

Yes, that's why the biggest companies are constantly lobbying to pass antitrust legislation. Because of the extensive history of small upstart competitors being destroyed in antitrust cases.

At least there are only two.

Imagine how awful if we had 5 or 10 monopolies in the same market!

People are to focused on the mono-part.

IMHO appropriate laws should be applied to any company which directly or indirectly affects some "high" threshold of people. Or another way to think about it would be if it's practically impossible to enter a market even with a decent start capital because of it being dominated by a small number of mega cooperation it's not (much) different then a monopoly.

What does it matter if there are 1 or 5 companies which effectively undermine competition in a harmful way. It's either way harmful.

Having 5 companies that actually compete for business wouldn’t harm consumers. Having 5 companies that avoid competition would, and that’s called a cartel and it’s already illegal according to the anti-trust laws (the Sherman and Clayton Acts).

Oligopoly is only marginally better than monopoly.

A cartel is illegal yes, but proving a cartel is dam hard. And depending on jurisdiction requires proving that the companies actually had some "agreement"/"communication" wrt. their non-competing (as far as I remember).

But if you look at markets all around the world having situations with the same harmful dynamics as cartels but for legalities not counting as cartels is not uncommon.

Monopolies might be harmful in that sense, but the issue is that monopolies tend to happen naturally as a company grows and expands into a national corporation, which is the most textbook definition of capitalism and the american dream. In general antitrust laws are meant to 'allow' competitors to exist should a new competitor attempt to challenge the incumbents, but they're not an attempt at forcing competition by hurting those incumbents.

> happen naturally as a company grows

It happens because (especially but not only the US) economics system is designed to feature monopolies as it's a efficient tool to economically suppress/control other countries.

And as far as I know some of this laws where meant to force competition. It's just lobbyist have effectively defused/removed/reinterpreted them.

There are huge swathes of the country, rural areas primarily, where Walmart is the only local option.

It's worse than you think. The definition of a Covered Platform is so overbroad that basically if you allow any kind of user interaction on your website (or OPERATING SYSTEM!) then yours is a covered platform. So imagine you run a restaurant and allow for a customer feedback form that is visible on the website... congratulations, you've now become a covered platform and are obliged to allow other people to sell products on your website. No, I'm not kidding. That is precisely how badly written this thing is.

Doesn't the bill text also have thresholds that need to be met (such as revenue, user quantity, etc) for you to be subject to enforcement?

Does that make it any better? "Oh, hey, here's this absolutely horrible law, but don't worry, it only applies if you're successful."

Yes, if the intent is to regulate monopolies.

You know what you call a small cap monopoly?

Not a monopoly.

Let's say I make a miracle drug for people with a rare disease, patent it, and it costs $0.01 to produce, and I'll watch people die unless they pay me >$1M.

Am I a monopoly since I only have a few million in revenue?

Not in the sense that we're worried about here.

I feel like I shouldn't have to spell this out, but we're using "monopoly" in the sense of "monopolistic abuse specifically enabled by large revenue and/or platform gatekeeping."

Whether you think other kinds of monopolies are a problem or not is immaterial, because we're talking about a specific type of monopoly, that a number of us do have a problem with.

I have several friends who work in antitrust consulting. My understanding from listening to them talk is that monopolists are defined with respect to a market, and defining the relevant market is a task in itself. Surely the defining characteristic of a monopolist is that it has a high proportion of the market share for a given market, and it is not required that the market in question be large? You can have a monopoly over a small market.

Afaik, that's the (modern, post-1918, [0]) definition of a monopoly under Sherman Antitrust Act (of 1890).

And specifically, that a monopoly's nature and actions "[must] suppress or even destroy competition." Think duck typing.

Unfortunately, US vs ATT was never decided, as ATT volunteered to be broken up in 1982.

But the broader approach seems to have been that small monopolies are not harmful to the public good, as they face the potential of competitors (sometimes, larger ones) expanding from unrelated fields into their business.

It's only when a successful company leverages its success into a size (and dominance) that makes competition impossible that it becomes a legally actionable monopoly (by restricting even the possibility of competition).

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Board_of_Trade_v._Un...

Ooh, I didn't know this. I will go to the next discussion with my antitrust friends armed with my new info. Thanks for sharing this!

Under WTO rules, pharmaceutical patents are subject to compulsory licensing meaning a competitor would be allowed to use your patent whether you like it or not. Yes you would be entitled to a royalty but the rate is unlikely to be as egregious as 1 million dollars per unit.

If you create such a miracle drug why on earth would we want a policy that lets people die?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli#Daraprim_price-...

It seems like the system in fact pushed back on Martin's pricing

He only got reprimanded because of how braizen we was, accepting news interviews and showing no remorse for the insane price increase. Without the news focus he probably would've avoided jail time (he was just released last month serving over 4 years of his 7 year sentence).

ehh... the whole idea for this bill is to prevent use of advantages gained from monopoly to create additional monopolies.

Yes. The thresholds are insanely high - like 1 in 8 people use it. Literally. 50 million US MAU or 1 billion worldwide (a smaller threshold of 100k business customers). And a market cap of 550 billion dollars (which automatically adjusts with inflation).

> which automatically adjusts with inflation)

For reference:

> adjusted for inflation on the basis of the Consumer Price Index;

Hmm... I wonder if this sort of verbiage might make much more of an impact on a hundred million working class Americans' lives if it were applied to other sections of the US Code...

"It could but not alone but it helps." coming from an stranger in the Internet working in one of the few countries where salary is adjusted for inflation.

Linux has more than 50 million US MAU, no?

Not as an online platform, no. Or at least not as one owned by the Linux Foundation or Linus.

AICOA 2(a)(9):

  ONLINE PLATFORM.—The term “online platform” means a website, online or mobile application, operating system, digital assistant, or online service that—

  (A) enables a user to generate content that can be viewed by other users on the platform or to interact with other content on the platform;

  (B) facilitates the offering, advertising, sale, purchase, payment, or shipping of products or services, including software applications, between and among consumers or businesses not controlled by the platform operator; or

  (C) enables user searches or queries that access or display a large volume of information.

It's an "operating system" that certainly meets (C) and arguably meets (A) and (B) as well.

Linux is a kernel, on its own it does not meet any of these criteria. An "operating system" would be something like Debian or Ubuntu, and at least the latter one has already had scandals regarding advertising.

Unless operating system is clearly defined, I absolutely would not assume that it must mean something more than kernel. These are legal stipulations, they are meant to be interpreted by an audience. They're not meant to be razor-thin in what they cover.

Right, Linux might count, but what is the "Linux Corporation" with the 50,000,000 MAU? It's not "is the program used by that many people" it's "does the company or individual have that many users". That's also why the company needs a market cap of more than 550 billion.

So I guess it would hit Android and maybe FireOS Linuxes.

> It's not "is the program used by that many people" it's "does the company or individual have that many users".

I'm not sure where you're getting this from. The bill doesn't actually define "monthly active", so you should construe it as liberally as possible when wargaming possible ways it might be used in practice.

> That's also why the company needs a market cap of more than 550 billion.

Check the conjunction between (II)(aa) and (II)(bb). It's 'or'. If you have 1B global MAU (again, Linux), the $550B threshold is irrelevant.

The big issue explained in the Techdirt piece is how it only has a chance of passing because it's a trojan horse for other companies to sue the big companies (FB, Google, Apple) for the moderation decision they make, including Google downranking spammy sites that nobody likes being sent to.

That's not "antitrust reform". It's so narrowly drawn that it affects only maybe Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Read the definition of "covered platform".

Arguably it's a bill of attainder.

Any antitrust legislation will be targeted at trusts.

Not arguable. Bills of Attainder refer to criminal laws and are specifically to stop government abuses of personal liberty. Corporations don’t have a guaranteed right to consistent laws, otherwise they wouldn’t spend so much on lobbying. The knife cuts both ways.

Huawei has argued that sanctions against their company constitute a bill of attainder.[1] The provision that an executive can have 100% of their income from the company seized, though, is arguably a criminal provision. But looking at the history of bill of attainder cases, this probably won't be considered one.

[1] https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/LSB10274.pdf

That's related to national security, which has (little to) nothing to do with antitrust?

Also, I don't really think the courts would agree with you based on their interpretation of civil forfeiture laws. The only unusual thing in the Huawei case is that it happened to someone with serious money.

> That's not "antitrust reform". It's so narrowly drawn

Almost by definition, anti-trust law is only going to narrowly effect a few companies.

If a company isn't huge already, then the whole motivation for applying anti-trust law goes away.

The whole point of anti-trust law is to narrowly target only a few of the very worst offenders in a market.

Why does size matter in this context?

For example, Apple will likely be forbidden from making a device where the selling point is that it only runs code from their own app store, but if some random Android company does the same thing by vastly modifying AOSP/their hardware to the point where it can't be rooted and can only install apps via their own store, why are they not punished? as a consumer I'm equally harmed in the same ways by both companies, the only difference is that, in the second situation, my freedom being violated is less important when 50 million other americans aren't also suffering at the hands of that company.

I think the difference lies on the number of people affected. The philosophy behind those laws is that it's generally a bad idea to let one single company (or very few companies) control the pipe from which so many economic activity flows.

> Why does size matter in this context?

Size matters in anti-trust law as the larger a company is, the more market power it has, and therefore more ability to have anti-competitive effects on the market.

> but if some random Android company does the same thing..... why are they not punished?

Because in standard anti-trust law theory, the same exact action done by a smaller company is legal, but can be illegal if done by a larger company.

The reason being that a smaller company is unable to anti-competitively control an entire market as well as a larger company can.

> as a consumer I'm equally harmed

Anti-trust law does not agree that consumers are equally harmed by a large company, with more market power, engaging in anti-competitive practices as compared to when a smaller company, with less market power, does the same.

As in literally yes, according to the law, certain actions are only illegal if a large company does it, and literally yes a smaller company is allowed to do the same exact thing simply because they have less market power.

So the key difference of size is the ability to find alternatives. If a monopoly is abusive, you rarely have any options. If a smaller player makes an abusive play, consumers will abandon it and it will fail. Google and Apple are a duopoly but since they've both decided on the same abusive practices, consumers have no exit without government intervention.

Basically, antitrust works in a world that expects the market to correct things, but patches a design flaw (monopolization) which prevents the market from doing so.

I don't think you know what a bill of attainder is. How is it punishing the companies?

    > (2) BUSINESS USER.—The term “business user”—
    > [skip a little]
    (B) does not include a person that—
    > [skip a little]
    > (ii) is controlled by the Government of the People's Republic of China or the government of another foreign adversary.

Might want to read not only the article but the actual legislation. This is an interesting snippet that says interesting things about how Congress is looking at the broader business situation. Someone believes that the PRC/CCP needs to be explicitly addressed.

So is this good or bad for them I wonder?

The word “adversary” seems to imply that it’s antagonist but hmmm.

It says that companies controlled by the PRC do not count for establishing monopoly status, and that companies can take steps to prevent those companies from exfiltrating data even if the act would normally forbid it. It's very against China

It means that users in China do not count towards a monopoly. So american firms are allowed to monopolize the Chinese market without restrictions in this bill.

1) Does anybody have a digestible summary of what the the AICOA actually does and how this law might be abused? In this article they glossed over what effect they think it might have, but I don’t think they simply spelled out what the law actually is, or went over any possible unintended consequences.

2) Whether or not Mozilla’s opinion here is right is something I’m not quite sure about, but what I’m sure about is that Mozilla comes across badly. They lost their extremely big league in the open web by focusing more about woke politics than the tech, and now are whining that they can’t compete. Boo hoo. You have millions and millions of dollars in resources. Build a better browser rather than writing about political censorship and other nonsense you’ve been doing in the past years.

If Microsoft can use Chromium backend for Edge than so can Mozilla, but here they are complaining that Google needs to allow them to compete. Geezus Mozilla really is something special, and not in a good way.

Why does the world need another Chromium reskin? What's the point of a Firefox that's just Chrome? How is it competing to slap your brand on top of a competitor's product like you're reselling wholesale electronics from an overseas manufacturer?

Look at Edge's market share and explain to me how Mozilla is going to deliver a better Chrome reskin than Microsoft with a tiny fraction of the budget.

The point is that Google does not prevent them from competing. They (Mozilla) are the ones proverbially shooting themselves in the foot. Mozilla to me seems like a cult of grifters in denial with ADD that never even attempt to focus on improving their browser (especially on Linux) and instead would rather build iPhone password managers and act like they aren't enabling a lot of anti-privacy telemetry and data collection by default.

Mozilla is effectively the arm of Google that Google points to to argue they’re not a monopoly. It’s silly - I’ve heard more about Mozilla doing these performative stunts than I have about the actually trying to build a better browser.

What do "woke politics" have to do with Mozilla's failure? What is woke about that company to you in particular? Their political leanings are basically unchanged dating back to before Chrome even existed.

> What is woke about that company to you in particular?

My main issue is them getting involved in them supporting censorship, deplatforming wrong-thinkers, and more nonsense. Plenty of articles about this here: https://reclaimthenet.org/?s=mozilla

> What do "woke politics" have to do with Mozilla's failure?

1) The more time and effort they spend focusing on non-technical issues is time away from the one thing that matters.

2) Also, the more they appear to be favoring certain political views, the fewer conservatives, libertarians, centrists, etc may want to use them. When a company starts favoring one political side over another and loses its appearance of non-bias, especially when it concerns information flow, it's hard to trust them again. DuckDuckGo made the same fatal flaw of trying to be explicit about bias and though there's some noise in the stats, it looks like their search results have peaked as well. Without as many users, you can't progress nearly as quickly.

> Their political leanings are basically unchanged dating back to before Chrome even existed.

I'm not sure, but I can't remember them supporting the censorship stuff until a bit more recently. Even when they were pretty gay friendly and whatever, they never supported censorship as far as I can remember.

Although I'd probably be described as "far right" according to some opinions, I still use Firefox for the sites where IE won't work, because the alternative is Chrome. I loathe all their politics, but still further hate the fact that all browsers seem to be going down the same (Google-lead) path.

When it comes to computing, the enemy isn't really "the other side" politically. It's Big Tech. I agree that the politics are a distraction, and that might actually be the intended effect --- to distract away from the monopoly that's forming. Both sides should realise and unite against that.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple all need their monopolies controlled and broken up. Developers and software need a reality check on their pay levels and valuations. We should get back to building more real shit instead of being the world's provider of advertising and PII theft.

"We are disadvantaged by the fact that current and future Firefox users, many of whom are privacy and security focused, cannot easily install and keep Firefox as their preferred browser because of confusing operating system messages and settings."

uhhh really?

Maybe privacy focussed users have just moved somewhere else or given up and installed Chrome after disasters like Firefox Focus, Firefox Suggest, Leanplum or the TV series Mr. Robot extension that was silently installed.

Privacy focused users who want to use the worst privacy OS in the history of the world have a hard time installing our privacy focused browser so they can use the default privacy suck search engine that is Google!

I don’t know if anyone actually says that with a straight face.

> Firefox Focus, Firefox Suggest, Leanplum or the TV series Mr. Robot extension

Yeah there was a lot of controversy around how Windows 11 made it difficult to change the default browser

[1]: https://geeks.afela.org/news/microsoft/microsoft-reverses-wi...

Maybe people who are privacy and security focused shouldn't use operating systems that track you. This is like trying to save a sinking ship by keeping your shoes dry.

Privacy is not a binary state, but rather something of a spectrum ( and partially a reason as to why Google and others try different avenues for siphoning data ). Every little bit helps a little bit depending on your tolerance and skill level. I genuinely do not expect my mom to run FF with appropriate plugins from a scrubbed VM each time she wants to check something. But I can give her some sane defaults instead.

I agree with your general point, but ignoring an issue just because there is no 100% solution is not reasonable either.

> ignoring an issue just because there is no 100% solution

But that isn't what I'm proposing. I'm saying that when you buy a vehicle, and the driver's-side door, by design, unchangeably, cannot be locked, maybe you shouldn't buy that model of car, rather than try to hack privacy into the vehicle by adding an aftermarket passenger-side door with laser tripwires and barbed wire.

AICOA feels wildly vague to me. It would make it unlawful to

> materially restrict, impede, or unreasonably delay the capacity of a business user to access or interoperate with the same platform, operating system, or hardware or software features that are available to the products, services, or lines of business of the covered platform operator that compete or would compete with products or services offered by business users on the covered platform;

TikTok and Snapchat compete with each other as "social networks". Size restraints aside, given that this law pretty much only affects like 4 companies, would this mean that Snapchat not building a cross-platform API for allowing an ad to be posted to TikTok would be illegal? It would seem like Snapchat is "materially restrict[ing]...the capacity of a business user to...interoperate with the same...software features that are available to the products...of the covered platform operator [TikTok] that compete...with products...offered by business users on the covered platform [Snapchat]".

Also, you're not allowed to

> preference the products, services, or lines of business of the covered platform operator over those of another business user on the covered platform in a manner that would materially harm competition

I really like this when you think about the problem that it's trying to solve (Amazon ranking Amazon products at the top, or Google showing Google Flights above all other services). But in practice, how in the world is this enforceable/provable? Let's say you Google "flights from tucson to denver". If it shows Google Flights in the search results at all, whether it's above Expedia, or Yakak, or United, or something no one would use for that flight like Emirates, couldn't you argue in court that it's "preferencing the product of the covered platform"? How do you explain the output of a blackbox ML model? Even if you can exactly prove why a result was ordered the way it was, how do you prove that it's preferencing it? Doesn't any ordering according to the likelihood that a user will engage with the service have a chance of "harming competition"?

If I had a VC firm, should HN be forced to give my post looking to hire the same prominence it gives their own?

Should grocery stores not be allowed to market their own brands?

Shouid a TV network not be allowed to market its own shows above that of competitors?

If any of those entities have a functional monopoly, then yes they will (and in my opinion should) experience restrictions on those activities. The bill is drafted to target the big players.

Antitrust laws aren't meant to be fair, they're specifically intended to make business harder for the monopolies affected and easier for their competition. They're meant to put a finger on the scales to counterbalance the massive anti-competitive advantages afforded by having a monopoly. The most benign of actions can make competing basically impossible when they're performed by a company that has complete control over the market.

We do this because monopolies in a vacuum are self-reinforcing and that leads to dysfunction in the market. Monopolies don't have to have a better product or service to remain a monopoly - the power to crush the competition afforded by having captured the market is often enough to maintain it.

Which one of those “monopolistic” companies are actually legally a monopoly?

For instance, does poor little Walmart - the largest retailer in the US - really need help competing with Amazon?

Much more travel already goes through Priceline than Google. Do people really not know about Priceline from the years of Shatner commercials?

Google is unambiguously a monopoly - they have a 90%+ market share in search. Whether or not they're engaging in anti-competitive behaviour is the big question - whether or not they have a monopoly in search is not really debatable. For example Standard Oil, the 20th century poster child for monopolistic abuses and origin of modern anti-trust law also had a market share of ~90%.

[EDIT because I found bad data about Walmart] Walmart is definitely also a monopoly or close to it - they have a share of ~70% of the grocery market, and should also be subject to restrictive antitrust rules, or even broken up. They don't have a monopoly in online retail where Amazon controls over ~55% of the market. But the fact that Walmart has a monopoly in one industry does not say anything about possible anti-competitive behaviour by Amazon in another. Amazon's not quite a monopoly in online retail yet but it's definitely trending in a worrying direction.

By what definition is 55% a “monopoly”? And by “breaking up Walmart”, what do you suggest? That they are forced to remove groceries from their stores?

In “online travel sites”, Google is a tiny player.

https://www.statista.com/topics/2704/online-travel-market/#d...

I'm going to be honest, the only real way the government is going to be able to fight these 'monopolies' is slowly and surely funding alternatives, and implementing a few general regulations here and there that impede them

these giant overly scoped anti-trust pushes will probably go no where and are to easy to fight

Selective enforcement and executive orders are replacing rule of law. This is impossible to decipher and interpret consistently. It goes the other way too, in that these platforms have a monopoly on de facto immunity from other regulatory action like illegal user content, hate speech, and accessibility. You are looking at the intractability and obsolescence of centralized governance in a digital world.

Yeah Mozilla, wasn't it you who lended credibility to those pay-as-you-go wannabe "standardization bodies" W3C, WHATWG in the first place? To give us our modern web of shit nobody wanted, and where nearly every bit of the tech stack, from HTML (WHATWG), CSS (W3C), HTTP (IETF) was foobar'd by Google via their puppet organizations? That the HTML 5/WHATWG "process" and CSS is anti-competitive crap and unproven as a spec is already evident by no new browser engines having been coded from scratch; in fact, both Opera and MS (!) stopped development of their browsers due to completely and utterly unwarranted complexity.

But you Mozilla stood by cheering, and taking Google's money, alienating your user base and sinking money into side projects instead.

Calling for new antitrust law seems just a multi-year detour to keep the status quo when there's an enforcement and bribery problem: how was Google able to acquire DoubleClick and YouTube, and Facebook to acquire WhatsApp with Zuckerberg basically lying to most governments in the world?

So you want a law to force Firefox onto iOS, including its inferior and power hungry rendering engine? Personally I'll be returning to using Mac OS later this year (after having used iOS the last three years), specifically to get away from the crap that fscking need-to-restart-now FF, and the frustratingly stalling or regressive PC hardware and O/S landscape has become.

Why can't Mozilla offer a a way to make a recurring donation, Patreon-style, or Github-style?

It should be locked to specific projects though: Firefox, Thunderbird, MDN, experimental projects, etc.

Of course introduce gold / platinum / titanium / etc tiers for corporate donations, along with donations from private persons.

They are already a non-profit, making this tax-deductible would be a piece of cake.

They actually did for MDN, it's called MDN Plus: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus

Ask for pureness meant we do not deal with the dirtiness. Moz can bite its feeding hand. The real question is where are those who ask for pureness … I am not paying but you continue to fight for me?

Longtime Firefox and Thunderbird user. I can't speak about Apple but in my experience on Android, Windows, and Linux it is trivially easy to install Firefox and make it the default web browser. Just earlier today I was browsing HN on Android in Firefox and two articles that I opened would load and display initially, but then the page would go blank and show only white. Refreshing showed the same behavior. So I switched to browsing with the DuckDuckGo mobile browser for now.

So I was pretty frustrated to read this article. It's over-the-top self-congratulatory. Sheesh Mozilla, spend your time and money fixing and improving your product, and people will tell their friends to use it. Instead of lobbying the government based on misinformation about how hard and scary it is to make Firefox your default browser.

There is a good argument over the use of limited resources, but, as we likely all know from experience, best product does not always win -- the default product wins ( at least to a casual user ).

I have some minor beefs with Mozilla, but not for fighting MS over defaults, because it is a bad use of those resources. Last time I checked, Win10 still has a very annoying tendency to reset defaults after update ( please correct me if I am wrong; it is possible this was finally corrected ).

John Oliver also covered tech monopolies recently.

Tech Monopolies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXf04bhcjbg

Here's Mike Masnick's response over on Techdirt on that. A big swing and a miss which is rare on Oliver's part: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/06/14/john-olivers-big-whiff-j...

I disagree. He has covered three big topics in his jokey rants which I happened to know intimately and he’s gotten them horribly wrong all three times. Like embarrassingly wrong. To pretend all the rest are hard-hitting and well-researched would be some hardcore Gell-Mann amnesia.

Same. Used to enjoy it until it touched some topics I’m very familiar with — gosh they are as bad as any other one-sided crap out there, only more entertaining and hence more persuasive to outsiders. Like, all important facts counter to their narrative are withheld, it was painful to watch. I decided it’s just a comedy show after all, and gradually stopped watching. I’d rather shape my world view with a range of not-so-effective propagandists than a single very effective propagandist.

I think he's mostly right here in identifying the problem. I'd agree with the linked comments on this post that the solution (and AICOA as discussed by the link for the post) is likely bad/inadequate.

the irony of this being on mozilla.org while ostensibly using google's money to post it.

If an injured war veteran is paying their internet bill with government disability payouts, are they not allowed to criticize the government on the internet?

How's does gecko power tor?

Tor browser.

Yes I know but it certainly doesn't power tor, coming from Mozilla it seems a bit poor technically.

lol thought this said antirust reform

what is Mozilla's business model?

None. Just being bank-rolled by Google's money.

>A fair playing field is vital to ensure that Mozilla and other independent companies can continue to act as a counterweight to big tech

You literally exist on Google revenue provided in order to prevent antitrust litigation, hardly independent.

Doesn't Google outbid Bing for the role? Would it be existential for moz if they had to take Bing's smaller bid?

Why do people act like that's some kind of "gotcha"? To me that fact gives it more weight, not less.

Because Google has been the weakest when it comes to privacy measures.

And so when you're giving them money, data, traffic and users you're increasing their ability to set the privacy agenda and promoting a single search engine, single browser view of the world.

It's hypocritical and short-sighted.

Mozilla is every bit as weak when it comes to privacy defaults.

not quite, a lot of the weakness comes solely from the fact of it not being used super widely and as such being easier to finger print.

Through then the moment flutter became semi successful any hope for preventing/limiting fingerprinting was lost as the only way I know of to prevent fingerprinting through WebGl and similar is by not allowing it's usage. I.e. only allow it for special use-cases like games and tell the user of the drawback of reduced privacy. But flutter needs/wants that tech for normal websites...

At the end of the day their very existence has enabled Google to argue 'We're not an abusive monopoly. See? We fund this very outspoken open web technology company'.

I'm pointing out the hypocrisy of claiming independence when they are fully dependent on tech giants. The end result is a delay in the courts using already existing antitrust law to address the problem.

Mozilla may be getting played. Yet they don't only take money from Google for defaults. And at times they've used other defaults in the US too, like Yahoo.

There is still value there, and the good need not be enemy of the perfect.

Independance and financial reliance are two separate things. Getting money from Google doesn't make them a group company.

Their whole point is that it's not a fair playing field, so independent companies don't stand a chance. Therefore even decently sized companies like Mozilla have to suck on the teat of the Big Tech behemoths.

If anything that lends weight to the message. Like an ant calling out the elephant.

You can rationalize it that way, I get it. However, last I checked Mozilla has a lawyer as their CEO. Why do you think they haven't tested this idea in court if the message is so good?

The blog post you are writing comments about is literally about working to get the law changed.

Courts apply the existing law. The existing law puts very few constraints on big companies using their power. That is exactly why Mozilla is urging Congress to change the law.

Did you read the blog post at all? It answers this question.

The answer is that they are trying to change the law.

>Did you read the blog post at all?

Did you read the bill at all? That's more important than the Google-funded PR piece.

This bill they are promoting contains nationalistic or sinophobic text. I could see a targeted party like Apple moving their argument from 'It would negatively impact user experience' to 'China could hack our users if we allow other browser engines' and it'd be totally cool under this bill.

It's a shit bill with a very narrow scope that's easily evaded.

> You literally exist on Google revenue provided in order to prevent antitrust litigation, hardly independent.

Google used venture dollars to grow to a scale that they could fund the biggest browser team in the world, show download links on the web portal every single person on the planet uses, and pay OEMs to pre-install it. They then bought in early into smartphones and distribute devices with their browser and Google defaults.

They use their browser to show preference to other Google products, and they cripple ad blocking tech to make more revenue.

Firefox had a healthy percent of browser market share before Google showed up. This is like private equity buying the land your business sits on and giving you a pat on the back for job well done.

I am far from anti-capitalist, but you have to realize these monopolistic moves are harming competition and making the tech landscape harder for everyone else to compete.

Most of the people I know moved to Chrome because Firefox was sucking sixteen variations of arse and getting worse.

And how is this invalidating the open letter?

Does such message stop being true depending on who said it?

> exist[...] in order to prevent antitrust litigation,

How does it exclude independent acting.

It literally requires independent acting of the pseudo competition as if not it would count as a cartel and make antitrust actions _easier_ not harder.

The reason they might not be seen as a real competition is not because you do control them, it's because you have so much more money and monopoly-like power that you don't fare their action no matter what hey do.

(Corrupt execs aside) What other forms of revenue can Mozilla use? Everyone thinks Pocket is a meme, no one really cares about Mozilla VPN, any attempts at making money will be seen as Mozilla turning for-profit. Donations? Lmao. Good engineers are extremely expensive to buy.

Realistically their business would not be able to function without tech giants funding it. The only reason those tech giants fund it is to both continue to promote their own products and to reap the benefit of arguing that it is to foster competition. This is a longterm no-win situation for Mozilla.

I guess I could see government drafting bids for developing browser technology (make a national security argument like this stupid bill does) that Mozilla would be able to win. Of course then we'd have articles written by people freaking out about government influence.

There you go. Mozilla also knows it and the CEO has admitted it. [0] After 14 years of promising to live without Google's money, [0] they still cannot find a way to make money and are chronically reliant on Google bank-rolling them as over 80% of their revenues are from Google. Thunderbird, Firefox VPN, Firefox OS, all failures.

They are essentially on life support. A joke to achieving their mission statement without being dependent on their anti-privacy foe's money and are the weakest counterweight to big tech.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

What are the alternatives? How should Mozilla fund itself? It's the same problem that every piece of open source software has: developers cost serious money and relying on unpaid volunteers is unsustainable as well as dangerous (see https://xkcd.com/2347/ for the appropriate meme).

Some projects have attempted to solve that problem by providing enterprise consulting (MySQL), SaaS hosting (Elasticsearch), getting funded/acquired by a megacorp (Google, IBM, Oracle)... but for Mozilla and its various projects I can't see any way of monetization.

> Firefox OS, all failures.

Again, the same problem: Google and Apple have probably sunk dozens of billions of dollars into Android and iOS. It is impossible to create a viable competition against such massive amounts of money, even Microsoft with its advantage of many years of experience with Windows CE / Windows Phone and the bankroll of being Microsoft has failed.

maybe focus on building the browser better and allowing donation for it instead of spending money (including any donation) on rubbish executives/political causes?

Donations are a notoriously fickle beast. Other than Wikipedia, no successful open-source project is being dominantly funded from donations - and one might argue that Wikipedia only gets so many donations because their funding drives are pretty damn obnoxious (Yes I'm aware that it's Wikimedia Foundation but let's be honest the side projects are pretty much irrelevant). To make it worse, even the behemoth that Wikipedia is creates barely 160 million dollars a year in revenue [1]. That is orders of magnitude less than the amount of money that Google, MS and Apple have at their disposal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...

> Some projects have attempted to solve that problem by providing enterprise consulting (MySQL), SaaS hosting (Elasticsearch), getting funded/acquired by a megacorp (Google, IBM, Oracle)... but for Mozilla and its various projects I can't see any way of monetization.

You see, they had a good chance with doing the exact same thing with Rust and creating a consultancy around it, but they threw it all away. Erlang and OCaml also still have consultancies around their languages as well and I already suggested something along the lines of that before, but for Rust [0].

Instead, they wasted it on the Rust Foundation and threw away their trademarks where it has been hijacked by the same companies competing against Mozilla. An opportunity wasted.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24144350

The vertical monopolies enjoyed by tech behemoths are absurd. Ever since the Internet Explorer antitrust case [1] it should be clear that things like Apple disallowing other browsers in iOS or Google promoting its own sites in search results are illegal and anticompetitive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

Apple allows other browsers. They don't allow other browser engines.

And I actually don't see how cementing the Chrome engine's dominance on iOS as well as other platforms is good for the web. Because inevitably that is what will happen as just like in the IE days, websites will only work on that browser as it offers the most proprietary features. And why would you develop for multiple browsers when Chrome is available on all platforms and has such dominant market share.

People really need to be more careful with this because it could make the web less private, less secure, less driven by a spec and more beholden to Google's interests at the time.

I thought you could change your search engine. I just did it on my iPad: Setting > Safari > Search Engine

https://9to5mac.com/2021/02/09/duckduckgo/

The comment you replied to did not mention search engines at all. Yes, you can change your default search engine.

You're right. I misread browser engine as search engine.

That won't work for any up and coming search engine. They're not allowing you.com or any other smaller search engine that can't afford it.

Safari on mobile has lagged behind standards for a long time, because doing so wouldn't strengthen their app business.

E.g. webrtc. Safari still lags behind many things.

When you call people to be careful, you are missing the conflict apple has internally. Between the two, i choose chrome any day of the week because that's what allowed web to progress this fast

The web has been progressing too fast, and most of the things that Safari has held back on are features that developers want but users don’t, like push notifications.

Push notifications exists in app and it's easy to categorically disable it. I am absolutely happy that i have a few pwas installed on my phone that lets me do stuff on phone and desktop together.

The fact that i had to/have to install an app (zoom, etc) to accept a conference call is sad.

I'd rather enable push notifications on a website than have to install a whole new app if I want them.

If push notifications are so bad why does every mobile app spam me with them?

All of these things "users don't want" are right there for use in App Store apps. They're only held back from the browser because they want you to give them 30%. In some cases they literally added features to Safari but restricted them for use in advertisements only (WebGL for one example, IIRC) because the features aren't the problem, the problem is developers accessing customers without paying 30%.

Many push notifications are spam that developers want to send and users don’t actually care about. But more than that, the fact that you actually downloaded an app is much higher proof that you want to get notifications than just going to a site and clicking yes on a dialog. Dialogs basically mean nothing because users will just click yes without thinking about it.

Then you want solution to notification problem. Very specific issue vs broader "web sites are bad, apple is doing good" issue.

> The web has been progressing too fast

How many Apple engineers does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: None, they just declare darkness to be an innovative new feature.

I joke, but they did recently reveal that they're adding a toggle for Dark Mode in Safari:

https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/01/safari-feature-light-da...

Chrome extensions (which are sadly still disabled in android chrome) actually can fix this without new feature (beauty of extensibility, i guess). Dark reader extension is fairly good.

Agreed that web push is abused by media websites.

This is the the most important feature in when converting from a mobile app to pwa. For example, how can my applicant tracking app tell the user they have a new job candidate? How do you alert a user they have a new message on mobile without being able to use notifications? Without proper support for mobile apps from the browser, we're stuck with even more invasive native apps.

Maybe there’s a counterfactual timeline where Apple didn’t nuke Flash on phones, hmm… interesting to think about. I think I’m happier with apps rather than apps-in-the-browser in the end, and this might be a similar contrast - it’s technically interesting to have browsers do more or do everything but I’m not convinced it’s the best for users living in software ecosystems.

If the distribution of the app is gatekept by apple, it's problematic. That's why apple hasn't invested much in web.

So because Apple takes time to add features in a secure, private and efficient way they are being accused of lagging behind standards.

And you literally just described the inherent problem. Developers will move to the platform that gives it the most flexibility and features. Users follow. And we end up back in IE days with less diversity and less competition.

That's generous. Apple also ships buggy implementations despite taking more time to ship. Then taking years to fix, if ever. And rarely backporting fixes to older releases.

Exactly this. "Slow because careful" is only charitable.

The "standards" which are mainly controlled by Google?

Between the two, i choose chrome any day of the week because that's what allowed web to progress this fast

I don't call that "progress" --- perhaps progress towards a Google monopoly, if you really insist. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Change is Google's weapon. They can churn the standards all they want in order to outrun competitors because only they are big enough to do that. All that "pushing the web forward" BS was merely an euphemism for Google to take control of the Internet with its gigantic army of ADHD-driven developers.

I mean... So far, most things that I consider "standard" have been _fairly_ meaningful for consumers, and open for everyone to use, free of charge.

I am extremely happy when I don't have to install an app, including when video chatting (which zoom is extremely guilty of).

If you believe the only reason people are using and developing for Safari is because of Apple's monopoly, then that's a real cost or harm to users and developers isn't it? Compared to a theoretical or possible cost of a Chrome monopoly that may not happen. And if it does, then that's what antitrust is for.

I don't want to give Apple a monopoly to protect me from a different monopoly. I want to give power to antitrust to protect me from all monopolies, include Apple's and Google's.

I teach antitrust to grads and undergrads.

It doesn’t do anyone any good to call any of these firms “monopolies.” It’s not accurate, not for any of them.

Nor was monopoly the issue in the Microsoft case (that was about bundling).

There may be reasons to look at antitrust law and to change it with some of these firms and their behaviors in mind but “vertical monopoly” isn’t an accurate characterization of any of them.

What do you prefer? Vertically bundling monopsonies?

A monopsony is something completely different. A monopoly is a single seller, a monopsony is a single buyer.

^oligopoly

Maybe the words as used in court don't reflect the generally understood meaning well.

Controlling and overcharging use of (one of the few) roads to the market, even in the case there are other roads farther away, and you can build your own road at an incredibly unfeasible cost, is what most people understand as a monopoly situation.

Arguably this is what Apple and Google are doing when they charge exorbitant fees from developers targeting their platform.

When a company can loose money on a competiting company just to drive the competing company out of business; I call that a monopoly.

No not monopolies like we had like the Bell telephone, but we have 2-3 huge companies that collude and stifle competition.

Proving collusion is hard these days though. Too many fresh faced MBA's who are atheists.

(I'm a Watch Repairer. I can't buy parts from The Swatch Group, or Reichmont. Why do we even have The Sherman Anti-trust Act if it's never used? I'm not saying dissolve these obvious conglomerations, but let's not encourage them. Why was ATT and T-Mobile allowed to combine. To tired to go on, but tired of ogliopolyssssss.

> When a company can loose money on a competiting company just to drive the competing company out of business; I call that a monopoly.

You can't just redefine what words mean if you want to be taken seriously.

Especially when what you described is a legitimate and very common business tactic [1]

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lossleader.asp

When it's done to force competitors out of a market it's called predatory pricing [1], and it is not a legitimate business tactic. It is illegal in many jurisdictions, and generally considered unethical even where it's not specifically outlawed. It is also considered a strategy to achieve a monopoly or near-monopoly pricing.

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

You should read the link you posted.

That only applies when one of the competitors is effectively a monopoly anyway.

That's incorrect, and accusing people of not having read something is against the site guidelines.

Predatory pricing just needs to be done from a dominant market position, which is absolutely a label that applies to the giant tech firms being discussed. You only need to be in a market position strong enough to wield the pressure needed to force competitors out of market. You absolutely do not need to be effectively a monopoly.

> When a company can loose money on a competiting company just to drive the competing company out of business; I call that a monopoly.

But this may happen even on a highly competitive market, if one company is a large established one (say, controlling 10% of the market), and the other is a small startup. Just make the key differentiating feature which the new competitor is bringing free in your established product for some time. Implement it first, if needed.

It happens all the time in the laundromat business - if you try to open one near an existing one you better be ready to withstand months or years of “25 cent loads” and other such fun things.

> Why was ATT and T-Mobile allowed to combine.

AT&T and T-Mobile did not combine, that purchase was (one of the few mergers) blocked by the DOJ under the Obama administration.

T-Mobile did later (2020) buy Sprint, but it was in a far worse position economically than T-Mobile was in 2011 at the time of the attempted AT&T purchase.

> Proving collusion is hard these days though. Too many fresh faced MBA's who are atheists.

What does a person's religious beliefs have to do with hiding collusion? That's a helluva straw man to pull into the conversation, and it completely derails your first point.

I was nodding during your first paragraph, then did a double take to make sure I read the second right.

> At trial, the district court ruled that Microsoft's actions constituted unlawful monopolization under Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed most of the district court's judgments.

> I teach antitrust to grads and undergrads.

Consider updating the curriculum? My understanding is that the bundling was actionable because they were considered a monopoly.

I'm not sure whether by "bundling" you are referring to Microsoft bundling IE with Windows, but if so, that was actually one of the findings that was specifically vacated by the appeals court:

These arguments all point to one conclusion: we cannot comfortably say that bundling in platform software markets has so little "redeeming virtue," N. Pac. Ry., 356 U.S. at 5, 78 S.Ct. 514, and that there would be so "very little loss to society" from its ban, that "an inquiry into its costs in the individual case [can be] considered [] unnecessary." Jefferson Parish, 466 U.S. at 33-34, 104 S.Ct. 1551 (O'Connor, J., concurring). We do not have enough empirical evidence regarding the effect of Microsoft's practice on the amount of consumer surplus created or consumer choice foreclosed by the integration of added functionality into platform software to exercise sensible judgment regarding that entire class of behavior. (For some issues we have no data.) "We need to know more than we do about the actual impact of these arrangements on competition to decide whether they ... should be classified as per se violations of the Sherman Act." White Motor, 372 U.S. at 263, 83 S.Ct. 696. Until then, we will heed the wisdom that "easy labels do not always supply ready answers," Broad. Music, 441 U.S. at 8, 99 S.Ct. 1551, and vacate the District Court's finding of per se tying liability under Sherman Act § 1. We remand the case for evaluation of Microsoft's tying arrangements under the rule of reason.

Monopoly is a red herring term that inadequately covers the space of abuse of market power. It’s easy for abusers to argue they’re not monopolies as a means of dodging the important bit. Hell you have plenty of people eager to do it for them. See comments on this very article on HN.

So is bundling a more productive attack vector?

It is worth expanding a bit on why it is inaccurate to call them monopolies. A lot of people aren't sure what the word means.

I'm suspect there is a substantial cohort that thinks making a much better product makes a company a monopoly.

I agree. I dislike calling them "monopolies". If we use inappropriate language it's easier for opponents to undermine fair arguments.

But how do we deal with this much power ?

The bill "will facilitate innovation and consumer choice by ensuring that big tech companies cannot give preference to their own products and services over the rich diversity of competitive options offered..."

Sure that's one way of seeing a small part of the problem. But it misses so much.

A fair digital market is one thing. A viable technological society that isn't a cloaked form of fascism is another. More than "consumer choice", it's about the RIGHT to have choice - subtle difference but bear with me please.

If I exercise my moral prerogative to say "I will not use any Microsoft products because I believe they are a morally repugnant company" I may currently lose a job. Not because Microsoft are a "monopoly" but because my employer limits my choice. Or I may not get medical treatment because my local healthcare provider only gives access through a Microsoft portal. The problem subsists outside the scope of Microsoft (or Google or whomever) qua monopoly.

Where I think the European Digital Markets Act gets thing a bit more right is it's crafted within the European Interoperability Framework (an older and maybe more ambitious project).

The object isn't to weaken concentrated dominance or self-preference, but to guarantee the user has a choice including the choice NOT TO USE a technology in the case there seems to be "only one choice". An employer, health provider, payments processor or local government would have to provide alternatives or opt-outs without prejudice. That would allow genuine alternative service providers (not necessarily commercial) a foot in the door. It's a different approach that starts bottom-up instead of top-down.

> "I teach antitrust to grads and undergrads."

ah, there it is, the ol' "i'm an expert" ploy that we were just talking about elsewhere, and then redirecting to a semantic non sequitur to divert attention away from the core issue of unfair markets. note that you can talk about the nuance of the subject without misdirecting it this way.

(the term 'monopoly' is being taken too literally here, thinking that that's cleverness, when it really indicates a positional weakness because of the revealed impulse to divert)

I go with the FTC's definition: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

Which uses the term monopoly as shorthand for monopoly power, and they define as "a firm with significant and durable market power"

> I teach antitrust to grads and undergrads.

If you teach economics class on these subjects, then you must be familiar with the terms "horizontal integration" and "vertical integration".

Lets say 1 company has "horizontally integrated" the entire market along that horizonal. What would you call that?

Now do the same thing for "vertical integration".

Once you have thought about both of these questions, you will know why people are using the term "vertical monopoly".

Google literally positioned the Chrome team in the SF office building shared by Mozilla, then did PR stunts like baking cakes and crap to create pretext to poach key employees to cripple the org.

Originally the intent was they were a search company, that would pay well, and folks could donate to charities... like Mozilla. Then they decided to start their own browser, and... well here we are today.

Mozilla was in "corporations should be able to do whatever they want" camp when something else was in question.

reap what you sow

What something else? Be more specific

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

> We are further challenged by app store rules designed to keep out Gecko, our independent browser engine that powers Firefox, Tor and other browsers.

Ironically, getting rid of Apple’s browser restrictions will likely result in website developers writing their sites just for Chrome.

With Chrome now available on every platform, it will be cheaper and easier to only support that one browser.

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