Boom! Antitrust Bill Passed | Hacker News Reader

Boom! Antitrust Bill Passed

mattstoller.substack.com

88 pointsscyzoryk_xyz32 comments

I'm not understanding where or what he's basing his statements on? This seems to be the bill he's referencing: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/228 It's extremely short and can be easily read, it's a fraction as long as the article.

The bill seems to do nothing except change various filing fees, and give ~half a billion to the FTC and DoJ Antitrust Division. I base this on the text of the bill as well as the bill's description itself: "This bill modifies and expands the schedule for graduated merger filing fees and requires that such fees be adjusted each year based on the Consumer Price Index."

Yeah, the article seems to be more about promoting a certain political meta-narrative than actually analyzing the bill. Parts of it are misleading and it doesn't link to the actual bill, which any normal blogger would do within the very first paragraph.

The whole point of the article is to discuss the political meta-narrative. If you’re just looking for the substance of the bill, and you’re especially not interested if it hasn’t been signed into law, this article isn’t for you.

Most writers would have at least one paragraph dedicated to what the bills says. It will give readers a background on the subject before diving in.

I would suggest looking into all the work by this writer. This guy wrote a huge book on the subject, along with a regular newsletter, which this article is part of.

The article does exactly that under the subheading “The Substance”, and in the first sentence thereof also links to earlier articles expanding on the contents of the bill.

You linked to the Senate version, which contains one title.

The version that passed the House, and is discussed in the article, is here [0] and contains the three titles mentioned.

And given that it's effectively a legislative diff, a summary of its impact is useful.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3843...

Increases in filing fees will support an expansion of the FTC and DOJ Antitrust enforcement budget available to Lina Khan and Jonathan Kantor. These are two lawyers that Big Tech are particularly afraid of, accusing them of being impartial^1 and/or asking for their recusal.^2 One could imagine that Big Tech wants to foster divisiveness so that lawmakers cannot unite to support Khan and Kantor. Big Tech profits from divisiveness. It drives "engagement". It also derails any legislative progress toward regulation.

What Stoller is suggesting is that this bill's passing shows that lawmakers can unite in support of Khan and Kantor's proposed work.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-return-of-the-trustbusters-...

https://promarket.org/2021/03/22/senator-klobuchars-antitrus...

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/a-proposal-to-en...

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/19/technology/jonathan-kante...

2. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/14/facebook-asks-for-ftc-chair-...

Passed the House, not passed into law.

Time for another refrain of "I'm Just a Bill"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6MinvU93kI&t=20s

We're probably not going to hear or read much on that subject in the mainstream tech news.

I am glad it could make a blimp on HN.

This is just the EU trying to punish US big tech firms for success. /s

Every other hn thread on anti-trust law has a string of comments saying the above, so, just for fun, I will add it here too. It makes just as little sense.

https://archive.ph/wxTt8

(Due to gray modal dialog covering the page and making the article impossible to read)

Just click "Let me read it first"

I click archive.is or archive.org and then all is well. Batting .980+ with this strategy.

Suffice it to say, I don't respond well to modals appearing after a few seconds and/or when the page starts to scroll. It's just Bad UX.

There was a significant television ad campaign against this bill (before the autumn election ads started). They claimed many of our beloved tech apps and services would disappear or become very costly. I dont think the audience paid much attention to these ads.

Great as far as it goes; but there's many a slip 'twixt dress and drawers in Congress.

What could we do to fix "corporations" longer term? How about some sort of union-like "customer representative" on the board of directors? as well as a labor representative.

Personally I have issues with the legal recognition of corporations, even though it's at least theoretically open to all the real people its amazing how much it works out to be a class privilege in law.

Yet another cause to throw in the bonfire with "Tort reform." Pleasant bait for theoretical debates but any real world implementation is almost certain to be too complicated to ever get much agreement on.

Every acquisition over $100m should automatically trigger a review, especially if said company is a "leader" in ANY market, and looked at from the perspective of:

"Is the company removing this competitor from the market hurting competition in their own market in the long term?"

It's way better for the market to let the cash-rich large corporations attempt to develop their own competitor to a new threat they might see in the market than to allow them to buy that competitor.

It would've been better for us if Instagram was never bought by Facebook, Admob never bought by Google, and so on.

Sure, maybe they wouldn't have gotten quite as successful on their own, but for one perhaps Facebook wouldn't have become as strong as it became in the social media space (a good thing) or they would've been forced to create a NEW competitor, and we all benefit from more competitors in the market. Instead they removed one and made themselves even more powerful.

It would've been better for us if Instagram was never bought by Facebook, Admob never bought by Google, and so on.

What makes you think that?

Oligopolies are bad, competition is good or something

Because the essential feature of very large companies is their attempting to create a market where they can invest as little as possible and continue to extract revenue.

Well, I’m no expert. But a center piece of Matt Stoller’s argument has been that this problem has been solved before in the US. There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to reach for the same solutions. It doesn’t mean commerce or corporations should be torn down. Merely making certain maneuvers and strategies unacceptable, punishable, criminal (in extreme cases) would be enough to deflate the outsize power monopolies have. And I agree with this - Stoller convincingly writes about how the US was amazingly good at enforcing antitrust. Business communities simply did not reach for monopolistic strategies in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. And the US economy of that time was amazingly strong at that time, delivering prosperity, innovation and consumer choice.

The reason why it seems to be unachievable is that it seems too complicated/hard. But monopolies like Standard Oil were complicated too.

What the bill does NOT do is change the substance of antitrust law itself.

Oh..

The lead organizer of this campaign is Congressman Jim Jordan, who is the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee and a well-respected conservative

Well respected? The guy trying to overthrow the results of the presidential elections The guy who isn't the chair because the dems control congress.

Why would anyone write such an article on something that still has to go through the senate?

I actually had to check how delusional they were, because it wasn't clear, like maybe it started in the senate or this was just a procedural reconciliation for something that had passed in the senate.

Nope it only passed the house, and yep there are 3 months left before all outstanding bills get deleted from consideration.

And with 57% of the House voting for it, this “weird bipartisan coalition” would not be enough for the Senate, if the same distribution of support was mirrored (unlikely, lots of stuff passed the house). You would need 60% of the Senate.

> Why would anyone write such an article on something that still has to go through the senate?

Clickbait. I see this all the time, usually a headline about some crazy revolutionary new bill only to find out it either just got passed the house, or hasn’t even got that far.

I'm glad he wrote it and then plastered a big sign over it so that i couldn't read it.

I read that on a iPhone 4 and it was fine. Just click « let me read it first »

It’s a free article on substack..

This is discussed in the article.

One of the points is that there is a chicken-and-egg issue with antitrust bills, where Schumer was refusing to table discussions because he claimed there was no support. So a clear demonstration of support, even in the other chamber, is a significant and newsworthy change in momentum.

The other (related) point at the bottom is worth reading too. Basically the claim is that big-tech lobbyists were bragging about how they could stomp on even a small and common-sense procedural bill like this one. Instead they “stuck their necks out and got their heads chopped off”. That they had no good arguments and just ran a straight dirt campaign (on both D and R sides!) is a bad look that will be noted by the marginal Congressman.

Thanks, I had skimmed the article looking only for evidence that it had been voted for in the senate as well. That is an interesting wrinkle in how they addressed this.

My main takeaways were that there is a working, bi-partisan majority in the House in support of anti-trust, and this bill sets a precedent for further anti-trust work-- which seems worth publishing about. The big tech lobbying playbooks were interesting to read about too.

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