Microsoft started spending dramatically more money on "lobbying" following that.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Facebook acquired and repeatedly copied its closest competitors, no problem. Adobe buys up its competitors, no problem. Google aggressively pushes Chrome and fails to makes its own websites fully compatible with competitors, carry on. Apple refuses to give users the freedom to run their own apps on their purchased phones, no biggie.
Was there some kind of official policy shift, or did the government just give up?
https://www.history.com/topics/united-states-constitution/ci...
Again, all of this is conjecture. There's a lot of strangeness that surrounds the US intelligence agencies though, so I'm inclined to make some sense of it.
The US intelligence service is also a bureaucracy, and people seem to forget that. Just because something is "secret" doesn't mean it is romantic or Bornesque.
Context: I have not held a TS clearance or been employed with the US government nor contractor for a little over 3 years.
hunter-gatherer sounds about right on the money.
I've previously held a TS SCI clearance within an organization. I wasn't an S-2 guy, but worked with them and troubleshot stuff in the SCIF from time-to-time. I did some auditing in well-known buildings, blah blah blah.
Basically, the more secretive things get, the more bureaucratic and tedious they get. The more impossibly hard it is to do literally anything without at least 5 or 6 meetings to discuss the poteintal outcomes and risks therein. I suppose when you get to the kinds of things POTUS wants done right now, it could get weird? I don't know, never been in that position. But the amount of oversight and auditing that gets done by people that refuse to do anything that could risk their retirement? It is excessive. At more than a few points I found myself "preparing for the pre-inspection, inspection." That inspection, which would happen however often, was essentially always happening. You were either "learning from the last one" or you were "cleaning up for the next one". Just absolutely soul crushing.
I should also mention, even though some of the words I used above might sound interesting, it really comes down to carpeting. Carpeting sucks everywhere in the government. They can spend tons of cash on stupid meeting room tables for conference calls or whatever, but the thing you walk and stand on is just absolutely awful. Except in an executive officers office. The office that goes completely unused because they're out doing...whatever it is they do. Golf? Lunch? Who knows. Once you notice the little things like that, or light fixtures just looking like trash, you realize that all of the magical ideas people have about the big scary government is just kind of...quaint. Like things can be important or sensitive or whatever, but it's just not the way people imagine it being. It's too bogged down in the mud to be what people think it is.
Getting basic things like light fixtures changed out becomes a major hassle because, if it requires a dude on a ladder, now that dude on a ladder also has to have a clearance, and the room has to be sanitized. Don't forget to turn on the red light, so no one forgets that there is a guy up on that ladder! Getting one bulb changed can interrupt your work for at least an hour or two. It's insane.
Like, we had one cleaning lady. For a building of...a lot of people. Everyone loved her and treated her great. Do you know why that was? (Well, she was totally awesome and nice. But besides that.) It was because if she quit, there would be no one to replace her. That would mean every desk jockey in the building would be lugging their trash to the locked dumpster halfway across the parking lot in the hot sun. Then have to go through all of the fun stuff that goes with getting through the front door. They treated her like royalty!
Right before I left, they did actually get some young guy in there. If I had to guess, they went with him because they were hoping he would stick around for at least two to three decades.
It even comes with a handy Q&A technical FAQ like ensuring you can also get the chat of the person the target is speaking to, or why you might receive multiple copies of one message (a target that is synching on another device has all of that data forwarded onto the NSA as well, so you get repeat messages). Quite user friendly! I'd love to see the UI.
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Incidentally, I'm not saying you're lying. The reality is that most of government is just bureaucracy. The NSA has tens of thousands of employees, a budget in the tens of billions of dollars, and their fingers in everything all the way down to World of Warcraft. [2] The guy tasked with spying on elves and death knights (which, shockingly, never turned up anything) is going to have a different view of the agency than the guy who is doing things like spying on people's Skype conversations, or the person who is producing the metadata upon which people end up being killed.
[1] - https://grid.glendon.yorku.ca/items/show/74
[2] - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-nsa-was-spying...
Bush+Cheney did the PSP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_Surveillance_Pro...
The courts found that unconstitutional: https://www.aaup.org/brief/aclu-v-nsa-493-f3d-644-6th-cir-20...
Obama publicly condemned the Patriot Act, but extended it in 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Freedom_Act
Meanwhile Obama's VP (Joseph Biden) claims to have written the Patriot Act: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4876107/user-clip-joe-biden-w...
In '91, the FBI got Joseph Biden to introduce a bill banning encrypted cellphone calls in the United States (Subtitle B: Electronic Communications): https://www.congress.gov/bill/102nd-congress/senate-bill/266
This move by Joseph Biden was condemned by the founder of the EFF: https://www.eff.org/pages/decrypting-puzzle-palace
You can watch a gaggle of senators from both parties go to bat defending the PSP in 2013 here: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/hearings/open-hearing-fi...
After the PSP was found to be unconstitutional, you can watch another gaggle of senators from both parties go to bat defending the PSP in 2017 here: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/hearings/open-hearing-fi...
A notable quote from the above video from Senator Wyden suggests the 3 letter agencies are harvesting location data in mass from cellphone towers.
You see surveillance legislation move forward with support from both parties - often under the guise of protecting children or stopping terrorists. It's not a stretch to connect the dots between our 3 letter agencies working with legislators in the background to advance the surveillance state, and those legislators simultaneously working with MAANG on multiple fronts, to assume there is some level of crossover with the surveillance agenda. It would be more unreasonable to assume they keep their surveillance objectives isolated from their interactions with industry after the Snowden revelations - which showed us that they absolutely worked with industry to collect PII of U.S. citizens in mass.
Mostly think tanks, policy circles, and White House wonks over every successive Internet-age administration. All segments of the U.S. government pay close attention to, among many people, geopolitical analysis of all stripes, who can help them understand how to remain the world hegemon. The U.S. frequently commissions studies by outfits like Booz Allen Hamilton on geopolitical matters (you can browse the "DoD Reading Room" to read plenty of the these thanks to FOIA requests[0]).
"Breaking them up would hurt the U.S." isn't just a lobbyist argument, it's deeply understood at all levels of the government. The White House absolutely understands that Silicon Valley is part of the U.S.'s soft power, draws plenty of international students to the U.S., and helps the U.S.'s cultural hegemony. It's not just about the most popular social networks and search engine "belonging to them" (though that's obviously important, and an advantage no rational nation would give up); Google and Meta's R&D spending are also huge elements of the U.S.'s "artificial intelligence dominance" over China, and the U.S. will never break them up simply because it sees AI-dominance as one of the most important elements of its geopolitical strategy.
It's easy to get the impression that the government mostly deals with domestic politics; but at its root, it is deeply and overwhelmingly concerned with fundamental strategic questions. The government cares deeply about U.S. universities remaining the world's best; about immigration remaining high (Republican administrations too) so that it can attract as much skilled labor as possible, grow the economy, compete with China's 1.4B population, and avoid an aging population that would decimate the economy for decades.
Policy debates "inside the government" bear very little resemblence to the TV version the American citizenry is obsessed with.
[0]: see, for example, "The Future of Europe", a 177 page evaluation of Europe's future economic, industrial, demographic, and political trends. https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20... After you read it, you'll understand that the "policy debates" the masses are exposed to have very little resemblence with what preoccupies decisionmakers! The government, no matter the administration, is far more rigorous and strategic than people give it credit for.
Forcing windows, android, and ios on your citizens and gifting silicon valley a constant worldwide surveillance feed is incredibly harmful to long term interests. Forcing every business to use office365 to interact with any government office is a 1% income tax gifted to the american economy.
But there's no reason for countries like India not to do it. Russia did it; it's not just massive countries that can get away with it.
Could even mandate that any inter-operation occurs over open protocols with at least two implementations (many governments even have this policy for essential systems, they just forget to enforce it around microsoft).
In this case the example document you quote is rather poorly chosen and does not really seem "rigorous" at all. Most if not all topics the document touches are basically the same that monopolize "policy debates" everywhere all 24h of the day (immigration, nationalism, welfare, and immigration. did I say immigration?), and the conclusions are defended as poorly as your average comment from Reddit. The document does not even get the names of many regions and cities correctly; the grammar is at many points terrible; many of the figures and charts look as if made with Paint, and whenever they are not, they are screen-scrapped from random websites and then poorly JPEG recompressed. Heck, at some point they even use Google Trends as source...
My humble opinion about these "think tank" reports that get "leaked" is that they use "commissioned by X government" just to advertise themselves, and it's either false or meaningless. I'm quite sure that the "serious" government analysis, if they exist, don't get leaked since that would probably immediately ruin all the predictions.
1. Parliamentarians are legislators; they focus on laws, not policy.
2. Those policies have support from every party with significant representation. Hard to publicly debate it when everyone agrees.
Like most things, its a bit of a two way street.
From an intelligence perspective, I agree w huntergatherer that everyone's not under active surveillance. IMO the problem is:
- once you are its far cheaper and more complete to surveil than it used to be, and...
- the bar to be a "party of interest" is far lower than it used to be. We can see this especially as some tech filters downwards into local police stations.
Its also tremendously useful for FAANG/MAANG to ensure their interests are adopted by elected officials and US officials are pretty cheaply bought. Honestly two senior SWE salaries for a year would do it for most congressmen. Just like Altria, or energy companies, tech companies donate to both sides of the fence, solicit tax breaks from both sides of the fence and look to keep labor cheap and competition low so that their owners/shareholders/investors are enriched.
From a federal government perspective, we need these companies to be 'American'. It doesn't matter where they pay their taxes, how much they off-shore work, etc. these companies trade on the US stock exchange, make up one of the strongest economies in the world, driving capital and human talent from every corner of the world to the US.
Why slow all that down in the name of 'fairness', user protection, competition and a lack of predictability
More than that: Google actively prevents competitors from working when competitors would work fine without any extra "help"
It's not just government - every single day I'm seeing Americans being directly hostile against free markets and choice. A lot of people (and media) expect and demand that a single corporation builds all of their things and owns all of their data. Plenty of people get outright hostile and dismissive of anything and everything that might create competition with the brand they're religiously following.
Politics is just following the people.
Do they? I am not aware of many FB, Android or google fanboys. People just use it. But surely would use something better, if avaiable.
Religious passion is more happening with apple, but it seems to me, they lost faith quite a bit. People use it and are entrenched in the apple universe, but fanatic worship and praise I am hearing way less nowdays, than back in the day, when Jobs was alive.
Since this was the 80s and Reagan-style free market rhetoric was in fashion, this became the new law of the land.
Problem is, very few antitrust violations actually meet this standard, because most companies aren't buying other companies purely to jack up prices. The harm is a lot more subtle. If you remember the days of "disruptive innovation", that could be looked at as monopolists getting punished for being too large and ignoring new technologies. Now, because antitrust is basically not enforced anymore, incumbents just buy their disruptors and integrate them into the whole. Startups no longer exist to create new products, but to eat up chunks of a big company's M&A budget for that year.
I'm hopeful that Lina Khan turns the ship around on this but it will take a decade, at least.
The TL;DR version is that the MS case affected things, but so do a shifting emphasis in Congress.
> They not only lost that case, but the initial judgement was that the company was to be broken up.
That judgement was also vacated by the appeals court who concluded that the district court "failed to provide an adequate explanation for the relief it ordered".
Fortune magazine article about it from 2002 (hosted by CNN):
> For a couple of embarrassing years in the mid-'90s, Microsoft's primary lobbying presence in D.C. was "Jack and his Jeep." As the software giant's sole in-house lobbyist, Jack Krumholtz, then 33, had to battle endless traffic jams to get from Microsoft's suburban sales office to Capitol Hill. "Early on I spent most of the day in my Jeep Grand Cherokee on my cellphone," Krumholtz says. "I hit an all-time low on the day I was parked on a Capitol Hill side street reading through my mail with the laptop on the steering wheel."
> No longer. After the Justice Department filed its antitrust suit in 1998, Microsoft--a company famous for its disdain of government--undertook the largest government affairs makeover in corporate history. The company now boasts one of the most dominating, multifaceted, and sophisticated influence machines around, one that spends tens of millions a year. It's no great surprise that one of the country's wealthiest companies can bankroll a beefed-up lobbying operation when it faces a crisis. But what few people realize is that Microsoft has reached the very highest ranks of lobbying so quickly. Says David Hart, a lobbying expert at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government: "Microsoft has joined the top tier"--with such longtime heavyweights as Philip Morris, Lockheed Martin, and AT&T.
https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2002...
Bill Gates quote from 2020:
> "I was naive at Microsoft and didn't realize that our success would lead to government attention," Gates said, referring to Microsoft's antitrust challenges from more than 20 years ago. "And so I made some mistakes — you know, just saying, 'Hey, I never go to Washington, D.C.' And now I don't think, you know, that naivete is there."
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/14/bill-gates-i-was-naive-at-mi...
MS won the case on appeal and absolutely nothing changed in the US. Even the cited Wikipedia article says as much. There was never a time since IE was bundled with Windows that IE didn’t come with Windows in the US. There was also no browser choice mandate in the US.