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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

As always, it's interesting to read any dissent to what sounds like "obviously a good thing": https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/P221202Section5...

There is also an interesting bit of back-and-forth between the dissent and one of the supporting statements: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Section5PolicyS...

I'm still inclined to think it's a good thing. I'm not educated enough on this topic to agree or disagree with any of the commissioners' opinions, but the FTC is clearly interested in sending a signal to the public.

I'm moderately optimistic, although it will be interesting to see what happens after the next presidential election. It's possible that the commissioners are concerned about it, and are trying to make some kind of mark and set precedent before they're all fired and replaced if a Republican (Trump?) takes office in 2024.

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One of the complaints:

"... the Policy Statement repudiates the consumer welfare standard"

This is a reference to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox, and in my mind, doing away with that is an indication that FTC is doing the right (and long overdue) thing.

But otherwise responded with no guidance as to what is and is not offending conduct. That doesn’t sound like the right thing to me.

The Sherman act and newer FTC act have been finding offending conduct just fine, the question is why these laws aren't being followed as written.

"It is under the word government, that the subtle danger lurks. Understood as a central consolidated power, managing and directing the various general interests of the society, all government is evil, and the parent of evil."

"A strong and active democratic government, in the common sense of the term, is an evil, differing only in degree and mode of operation, and not in nature, from a strong despotism."

This past century, common thought may have shifted to a more "dangerous evil" definition versus the original sense of "unenlightened, capricious will," nevertheless it is indeed a pleasant surprise that the FTC would act in a more "enlightened" (my opinion) or "long overdue" response to corporate misbehavior.

If they were really interested in sending a signal they would do something like shut down Amway. A company that is nothing more than a multi-billion dollar "legal" pyramid scheme which preys on the most vulnerable people in society operates with impunity and has for decades now. Literally brainwashes and robs MILLIONS of people on a daily basis.

The FTC, FCC, and SEC are toothless against billionaires. Just like the IRS, they mainly focus on harassing small-time crooks these days because that's the easiest thing to do. The large scale fraudsters operate with absolute impunity. If anything these organizations actually act as a barrier to entry for people looking to get into fraud, because if you don't get big enough fast enough they will come after you. But once you hit a billion in revenue, you are golden.

[deleted]

Amway. Amway and all the clones.

In the US you can run a pyramid scheme as long as you have enough money and political influence to do it “legally”.

That's not true. A pyramid scheme, legally, has no product but itself. Those are illegal.

For example, pay me $20 to join my company and you get the right to recruit people for $20!

Amway is essentially exactly the same except they add a product to the mix to get around the law. They still primarily profit from the "employees" rather than customers.

Changing the definition of a pyramid scheme, for the proposes of law enforcement, to something more akin to "profits primarily off employees" is what needs to be done.

> A pyramid scheme, legally, has no product but itself.

There are 0.0% of pyramid schemes with no product.

Because they are illegal. That's what the originals were though.

You pay some amount of money that gets you basically nothing (maybe a few pages of "how to recruit") and that's it.

MLM schemes are distinct in that they actually have a product and that's what makes them legal.

If you have model legislation handy, particularly the specific legal definition of scams like MLM, I'd be very grateful. Otherwise I'll poke around a bit, to see how UK phrased it.

> Amway

Literally the last word of the sentence before the sentence you quoted stated the very specific company name.

> they would do something like shut down Amway

While I agree that Amway and other pyramid schemes (including most crypto) should be shut down, it's not because they're anti-competitive. They're fraudulent, which is arguably worse but certainly different.

It's not really fraudulent. Most of the companies com plans are right there.

I don's see it as any more fraudulent then tech companies offering products for free or significantly discounted using investor cash to buy massive market share then once they have a monopoly jacking up prices or loading up search results with ads to the point you need to scroll down to even see search results.

Imagine if when google was first released it was nothing but ads and/or websites with more ads from its ad network

It is fraudulent. Fraud, racketeering, price-fixing, false income claims and operation as an illegal pyramid scheme. Sued many times in many countries. Banned from the UK and most of the EU. Several founders were indicted in Canada on criminal charges.

But somehow it's just not enough for the FTC to really do anything other than settle and let them continue operate.

like lotteries and gambling.

Multi level marketing is closely related but distinct from a pyramid scheme. The critical difference is the actual generation of profits and the health of the organization through time.

Franchise agreements can similarly look really sketchy on the surface especially with a large buy-in, but it’s hard to argue a Mcdonald's franchise agreement is a scam due to the real profits and costs involved. Which isn’t to say every franchise agreement is a good investment.

Where things break down for MLM is really the specific business model and percentages involved. If say 4% of a sales guy’s check gets sent to the chain of people who recruited him then no big deal. However, large percentages or large buy can quickly become very problematic.

Franchise agreements should have a very narrow path to the top of the chain. Maybe a state / locality, country, and global entity at most and that entirely for tax zoning / similar reasons.

Non-MLM franchises don't make their money from sublicensing at all. It isn't like one McDonald's franchise is being paid by other McDonald's stores. It's single-level marketing. So I don't know that the distinction is so fuzzy.

Some franchises are basically scams against the franchisee- subway and Quiznos were famous for not caring much at all and being willing to sell a franchise to anyone with some money (normally franchises are protected from similar franchises within a given area).

This is also SOP for the value-added reseller (VAR) scam.

One notable exception are car dealers. They somehow secured themselves durable lucrative carve-outs before the VAR thing matured.

I was bringing up one of the more sketchy parts of many MLM companies, the out of pocket cost before someone can actually make money selling product.

The point was buy in can absolutely be used as part of a scam see many 90’s MLM “companies”, but it may also be part of a perfectly reasonable business model.

There are plenty of bad franchises (remember Quiznos anyone?) but McDonalds is probably the best counterexample. Opening a new franchise is almost impossible these days and McDonalds does a lot more due diligence on someone acquiring an existing franchise (with right of refusal) than anyone ever did on SBF or FTX.

Even the scammy MLMs these days come with buyback clauses due to FTC agreements so the MLM meme of someone getting stuck with a garage full of product they can’t sell is largely a leftover from the 90s.

So, I know a little about this, unfortunately. My "shameful past job" at one point in the 90s was working for a company that basically made small-business CRM+accounting software you could customize to drive any MLM scheme you could think up.

Amway's not the best example, since they actually sell real goods and because Amway's sellers' best customers have almost always been the sellers themselves. In other words, many sellers used it as a way to buy goods at "wholesale" and never really had any intention of reselling them. At one point, I think that was even part of the Amway pitch, particularly at the time they were inexplicably popular for their (expensive and therefore in theory a better deal discounted) water treatment products.

I don't think there's a price advantage there compared to Costco or online, though--much of what made Amway fade into the background starting in the mid 90s.

So too Stella Dot, Mary Kay, Cutco/Vector, probably Herbalife and even Transamerica, etc. They sell real stuff, whether or not the pricing makes sense, and you can technically turn a profit on it, whether or not the market is really there, so they're not technically considered a pyramid scheme in the scam/illegal sense.

Now, I'm not saying they're good ideas--at all--and they absolutely operate on hype and pipe dream every bit as much as those awful timeshare presentations. They have the same exponential market saturation issue as any pyramid scheme and the same diminishing returns--but they are generally not considered fraudulent, just obnoxious.

The really awful pyramid schemes mostly just sell "new seller kits" to prospective targets that teach them how to sell "new seller kits" to their targets, have no real product or way to make a profit, and the entire rollup is those kits and other overhead fees. They're the financial equivalent of a chain letter.

I'm pretty sure those do get action taken against them if they're identified. The biggest problem there is most are pretty small, take a bunch of people's money, then burn out once it's all rolled to the top ranks who founded the scheme and new marks aren't easy to find.

While I understand your point, I think society should treat all of this as a distinction without a difference. Herbalife et al. should not be allowed to prey on the vulnerable, regardless of if they happen to sell a “real” product or not. It’s not a real business selling a real product.

Other countries rightfully have seen it this way for some for the companies under discussion.

I'd be fine with a new definition that made them illegal, or at least put such heavy truth-in-advertising laws on them that nobody in their right mind would bite given the real numbers you can expect. They're absolutely exploitative.

I probably made the mistake of speaking a little too specifically for the US situation, though. Here, the criteria are (modulo nuance) roughly what I said for the FTC to care.

I thought some government office made them disclose how many people made how much, but it doesn’t really do much to shut down the scams.

At some point you have to give up.

My heart agrees with you. My brain demands a way to define vulnerable in a legally and Constitutionally acceptable way.

I guess a starting step would be people with psychiatric ailments or learning disabilities. I knew a couple that had both between them and spent all their time trying desperately to survive while falling for every scheme out there. This was America in the early 90s and they were in their late 40s so surely dead by now, because nobody survives to an old age in the U.S with that kind of weakness.

At what point should the government step in and take away the right of a citizen to enter into contracts?

I had an aunt for whom this would have been (and was) the case, but she was 1 in 50K level of mentally incapable.

What about taking away the ability of a corporation to offer them contracts? I hesitate to call that a "right".

When you take away one side’s ability to enter into certain contracts, you take away the other side’s as well.

It's a great example. Sued many times in many regions. Unable to operate in some countries where they aren't able to pay off politicians and government bodies. Founders have faced criminal charges in several countries and had assets seized. Fraud, price-fixing, false claims, tax evasion, racketeering, and the list goes on.

It's a great example because there is just so much about it. It's not some obscure company that has never been sued or never been found guilty. It's a company run by people who commit fraud and get away with it because they are just so wealthy.

It is a criminal organization. They have even pled guilty to criminal charges in the past. But somehow they just get to pay a fine and keep on going.

The whole point of my comment wasn't to focus on Amway but just to point out how ineffective the FTC is. Even when the activity is criminal and/or flagrant they are powerless to actually do anything to stop it. At best you get some modified legal jargon.

Idealistically, I don't disagree. I just meant they're not a great example of something I'd expect the FTC to knock down with a new stance here.

They don't break (current) US laws in terms of being a pyramid--not going to get into their history of fraud, racketeering, etc, which isn't an FTC concern.

Anyway, I know you're basically making a "this cause is more important than that cause " argument, but of course a stricter stance specifically re: being anti-competitive wouldn't touch them at all. They don't lead a market in anything anymore.

What I realistically would expect this to bring down, if anything, is the walled gardens, where they exist on devices that have become so central to our lives that this amounts to broadly restricting what goods or services you're able to consume. The wording of what they released seems very specifically crafted to highlight walled gardens and similar concepts, at least where there's arbitrary action in the name of rent taking happening as well.

I suspect this--along with the anti-competitive payment system decision from the Epic case--is the shot across the bow for Apple and Google to either loosen up on iOS and Android (and very specifically, App Store and Play Store) or be targeted.

That'd be good enough for me, for now. I don't like MLMs either, and this may be a first world problem, but it's a daily one I face.

They don't break the laws because they pay off politicians to write them in their favor. A few years ago they tried to make it explicit and get it written into law that they would be exempt from investigation over the whole "pyramid thing" permanently. They failed then, but give it another few years and they will succeed.

The whole walled garden thing is mostly trivial nonsense. At worst Apple and Google will pay a small fine and a few thousand people will be able to more easily sideload some stuff. Maybe. Probably not though. If it gets to this these companies will simply modify the law so that it doesn't apply to them.

Unfair competition is an American virtue these days. Fair competition is seen as "being weak".

Even this policy statement wasn't approved 4-0. It was 3-1. You've got government bodies that are so politically divided that you literally can't even get FOUR people—WHO RUN THE FTC—to agree that on a simply policy statement that basically says, "Unfair Methods of Competition bad." The dissenting commissioner wrote a 20 page book why she doesn't support this.

And you know what? I mostly agree with the dissenting commissioner. Not wholly because of her views, but because in practice this will be used to harass small(er) business. It will have no material impact on Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Apple.

Your last point is a really good one. We saw that kind of captive behavior with the FCC too, particularly during the last administration with that one yahoo that was running it for awhile.

I too don't see how an anticompetitive rules can be used to thwart MLMs (like Amway).

But IANAL, so I'd need an ELI5.

Either way, I support overreaching rulesets against gig economy biz models with onerous penalties. eg Repeated radical cashectomies.

Scams like Uber, where Labor has to supply their own Capital to participate, receive no benefits, have no collective bargaining, get shunted into arbitration, and are excluded from profit sharing.

That's just wrong.

> I don't think there's a price advantage there compared to Costco or online

Yeah, my parents bought some amway stuff regularly, because in the 90s outside of the US it was actually a good deal on cleaning products. The closest wholesale mall equivalent for us was ~3h drive away.

>They sell real stuff

Whether or not they sell real stuff is a distraction from the real question. To figure out if it is a scam, you need to look at 1) where profits come from (is it from "selling" the product, or is it from recruiting sellers and "selling startup kits".) If most of their money is from people buying "be your own boss and own a business kits" then that is the product. 2) The next question is if that product they are selling (the kit) is a scam or misrepresented pipe dream.

Even if they sell a product, you need to ask if the product is the product. If all the money is from a pyramid of recruiting people to recruit people to buy startup kits, there should be some kind of action taken against them. The distinction becomes more obvious when you look at something like Cutco/Vector, where there is a product company and a marketing kit company.

In essence you can have two identical companies with two identical business models, and one can be a scam and one can not be a scam based on execution. If the business derives profit primary from sales to end customers, then everything is above water. If millions of "own your own businesses" end up with garages full of unsellable product, its a scam.

I recognize this interpretation takes away the agency and culpability from the person who joins a scheme, buys a bunch of stuff in hopefulness, and fails to execute as a salesperson. I also recognize that markets can dry up, and what was once above water can start to look like a scam. But these companies prey on those types of people. And if preying on vulnerable people is your business, its a scam.

What does “literally brainwashes” mean? I don’t think “brainwashing” is actually a well defined concept. Can you link to an explanation that would clearly exclude persuasion?

"Literally" means figuratively, now. In much popular usage, at least. "Figurative brain washing," is quite clear.

I taught my children the correct usage of the word "literally", after we watched an irksome YouTube video in which the host made significant abuse of the word.

Now whenever they hear someone say "literally", they double check with me: "Daddy, is (xyz) a figure of speech?"

I find the behavior both cute and precocious.

The battle has been lost and ‘literally’ lies with its siblings ‘very,’ ‘really,’ and ‘truly.’ I suspect ‘actually’ is in danger.

Verily.

It's literally (figuratively) meant figuratively for literally (literally) hundreds of years, depending on context. I was always a language stickler growing up but am becoming more measured in most areas of life as I age and discover the subtle nuances of literally (figuratively) everything, and as long as I'm understanding someone figuratively (figuratively), I won't question their language.

I should clarify, I'm more interested in the use of "brainwashing" than the use of "literally" which I agree has entered common usage to mean figuratively.

> If they were really interested in sending a signal they would do something like shut down Amway.

Sure, if the signal was “we just want to get beaten up by the courts for trying to turn a regulatory agency into a lawless dictatorship”.

> The FTC, FCC, and SEC are toothless against billionaires

None of them are in primarily aimed, legally, at indivduals, regardless of wealth.

> Just like the IRS, they mainly focus on harassing small-time crooks these days because that's the easiest thing to do.

I don’t think a review of the actual enforcement record of any of those agencies supports that claim. Vonage, Harley-Davidson, Weber grills, Westinghouse outdoor power equipment, OpenDoor Labs—just to cite FTC enforcement actions in the last couple weeks—aren’t small actors.

I think one of the interesting signals they are sending is that, in an era where increasingly law seems to feel like ‘whatever you can construct a Supreme Court majority to uphold’, there are other elements within the constitutional checks and balances, and executive agencies enforcing legislative intent is one such important component.

> whatever you can construct a Supreme Court majority to uphold

I find the same thing with liberal courts. For instance with the second amendment. We clearly have a problem here with the court system reflecting their own personal views instead of what’s written in law. But the problem is not coming from the right. Unless your point is that when a court doesn’t agree with you then they’re wrong.

It was not a partisan point. Constructing a court majority goes both ways.

But so does constructing an FTC commissioner board majority! Note that commissioners are seven year senate-confirmed presidential appointees. Similar oversight bodies exist for other federal agencies.

This is a useful reminder that such positions are intended (endowed by powers by legislation, in fact) to set rules and govern executive behavior without stuff having to go to the Supreme Court.

It sounds good as long as the White House doesn't try to use the FTC as a political weapon to disadvantage their opponents. Like going after Amazon for their union stance or Facebook for their censorship stance.

Amazon and Meta are both obviously engaging in "unfair methods of competition". To blame moves from the FTC on anything else seems like a pointless, truth-agnostic move.

The FTC is free to investigate whoever they want, but if it only ends up being companies the White House opposes then that doesn't seem to be furthering the goal of increasing competition. There is the obvious bad behavior of cable companies in uncompetitive markets or the recent consolidation of movie studios or even car dealerships. I will reserve judgment until the FTC announces their targets.

don't forget news and oil and food.

It's much more complicated than that. For one, you're conflating targeting industries vs targeting individual corporations.

One of the core jobs of the president is deciding which lawbreakers to go after. This is needed because (among other reasons) the government is far too small to enforce every law. In general the President is supposed to set general parameters but not pick specific individuals or companies. Deciding a specific sector's violations are more pressing is squarely within the traditional discretion of the executive branch.

Social Media and Online Retail are big nothings compared to Finance and Health Care. Finance shenanigans cause global recessions and health care is consuming 20% of GDP and growing. Since politicians and journalists love Twitter though, we get to hear more about that instead.

On the other hand, healthcare companies aren't an integral part of a cycle which leads to armed mobs.

The other thing to remember is that healthcare costs, while significant, are both familiar and legal, and the government uses the regulatory powers which Congress has granted it. Finance similarly has existing agencies and laws and while there are periods of lax regulation which end badly most people would say that the problem is regulators choosing not to use their powers or Congress underfunding staffing rather than an unclear question of how to handle a particular problem. In contrast, something like what should be acceptable on social media doesn't have public consensus and runs into thorny constitutional issues. It's understandable that this gets more attention, especially a time when one of the major political parties is making unfounded allegations in an attempt to keep their voters active.

So basically you're saying "if he goes after my guys I'm against it even if there is evidence of wrongdoing?"

If not, then why not look at the merits of the case?

If police only gave speeding tickets to those with Trump bumper stickers, would that not be a misapplication of the law? I think most people would think that is wrong even if they all happened to be speeding.

> If police only gave speeding tickets to those with Trump bumper stickers, would that not be a misapplication of the law?

Surely that depends where you live. Seattle (where I live)? Yeah, that would be obvious discrimination. A few counties further inland? Probably not statistically significant.

I’m not sure how or if that reasoning applies to FTC purview, but my intuition is that corporations of the size that might warrant interest aren’t likely to be partisan targets in any stable or persistent way.

The difference here is that these "Trump bumper sticker" cars are going 100+ over the speed limit -- why the fuck would you waste your time arresting 10 people going 5mph over instead?

The cable companies are much much worse than Amazon.

What you're saying makes it seem like you think that any big tech monopoly is a Trump bumper sticker, and that any enforcement against them is unfair.

Sure, if there's a trend of abuse, there are remedies, lawsuits, elections, impeachment, etc.

That trend doesn't exist now, and you can't use it as a shield against the law and commit crimes as you please.

Both the previous administration and the current one have expressed issues with those companies, and they couldn't be more opposed to one another.

Most of these big companies are anticompetitive at the very least. Every acquisition over the past decade has been a move towards oligopoly. Add to that widespread union-busting behavior, manipulation of the American people by spreading political or foreign psyops, exerting control over self-contained markets, etc... there's a lot of behavior that's been allowed over the past few decades that should have been reigned in.

Sounds like what you're describing is that certain companies have become scapegoats. Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Tesla, and Microsoft all add a lot of value to people's lives both through the products they sell as well as the tax revenue they provide for the greater benefit of all. They aren't the primary drivers of any of our society's largest problems. We could quibble about exactly what those are, but they'd probably include: the high cost of health care, the high cost of housing, climate change, immigration, pollution, crime, etc. And yet these companies occupy the headlines constantly, and evidently the mindshare of our legislators instead of those issues!

> Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Tesla, and Microsoft all add a lot of value to people's lives both through the products they sell as well as the tax revenue they provide for the greater benefit of all.

That's a very bold claim, and one that I think is generally untrue and possibly extremely so. That might be true for a wealthy software engineer, but I don't think it's true for most people. For example, anyone who doesn't own a Tesla has benefited exactly 0 from the company's existence. If you don't order from Amazon or aren't doing lots of Google searches... same. And in fact, some of these companies - like Amazon, Meta - take far more than they give back. Amazon has killed local stores nationwide, on demand delivery and packaging is awful for the environment, etc. Meta just consumes attention and spreads misinformation.

> They aren't the primary drivers of any of our society's largest problems.

Except in some cases they quite obviously are. Amazon is the case study for abusive workplaces. It's the poster child for foreign-produced, cheap knockoffs. Meta is credited for spreading misinformation that has resulted in the near-destruction of our democracy. Apple, Microsoft, and many others have been implicated for using slave labor in their supply chains. How many products sold on Amazon are products of such labor?

I think it's important that we examine these issues critically. These are not benevolent super-corporations. Sometimes they do good, sometimes they do evil, and either way it's generally on a huge scale due to the scale of the companies.

> Amazon and Meta are both obviously engaging in "unfair methods of competition"

I don't think that's obvious at all. Give specifics.

From my casual understanding, Amazon is executing the same vertical integration strategy used by Standard Oil which resulted in its breakup.

Standard Oil was vertically integrating around oil -- what is Amazon vertically integrating?

Selling things. Almost all the things.

Selling things is selling things. That isn't vertically integrating. A good example would be selling and shipping now that Amazon is getting into delivery as well.

Amazon ships more packages through its DSPs than anyone. But I don’t see them doing delivery as anti-competitive. It is highly integrated and streamlined however.

They put a absolutely massive amount of resources on solving delivery. And they probably do it better than anyone. You couldn’t split that out without totally breaking it.

Basics; AWS; Prime Video; Advertising.

You don't get to deny vertical integration just due to them being involved in everything.

The entire sales process from searching & reviews to delivery. There are allegations that Amazon uses their data to identify the most profitable areas to set up their own competing brands and may even force sellers to disclose information which is helpful in this regard. If true, it seems pretty clear that a sensible antitrust rule would be to split those functions into separate businesses with strict rules about what non-public data they're allowed to exchange so the Amazon Basics guys don't have any information about what's selling where which you couldn't get.

My local pizza place is vertically integrating marketing pizza, making pizza dough, making pizza, selling pizza, and delivering pizza.

It’s not the vertical integration that matters but the amount of market power a company has. My pizza place: almost none. Amazon: significantly more than none.

Or Tesla for their union stance, which famously halpened more than knce over the last two years?

The FTC is an independent federal agency, and the President doesn't have the same amount of control over it that he has over federal executive departments.

For example, the President could fire the Secretary of Labor at any time, for any purpose, because executive department heads serve "at the pleasure of the President." The same is not true for FTC commissioners, who are statutorily protected from firing except for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." SCOTUS held in Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935) that an FTC commissioner could not be removed by the President for policy reasons, because it was explicitly granted non-executive powers by Congress.

His power to issue Executive Orders to independent agencies is unclear, and often Presidents will "recommend" they do things, rather than "direct" them, as he would an executive department.

>> It sounds good as long as the White House doesn't try to use the FTC as a political weapon to disadvantage their opponents. Like going after Amazon for their union stance or Facebook for their censorship stance.

> The FTC is an independent federal agency, and the President doesn't have the same amount of control over it that he has over federal executive departments.

Isn't that the same as the FCC? We all know what happened with it and Net Neutrality during the Trump administration.

If it's staffed/led by the right people, it could act as a semi-autonomous political weapon.

You think Trump lead the repeal of Net Neutrality?

Fortunately most of the worst examples the anti-net neutrality crowd used never made sense from both a business model and technology perspective.

Trying to turn the internet into tiered internet packages like early 2000s cable companies offered would be a disaster even without neutrality laws. There's probably a reason the only real-life example in history that Wikipedia lists was some bottom-of-the-barrel Portuguese mobile network that experimented with a discount plan that never took off.

The lobbyists either bought into the bullshit benefits like everyone else or more likely were just taking the default anti-gov interference position.

The internet is so far from ever being the extremely limited centralized platforms that cable offerings were that the analogies never made sense if you spent any amount of time considering them.

It's difficult to staff with people who don't have opinions, and sometimes those opinions coincide with or bend towards other nexuses of power.

But finding an uncorruptible, unopinionated, independently-minded civil servant... who also values service over salary... is a pretty tough ask. ;)

There’s a difference between having opinions while sharing the goal of having a functional system and being Ajit Pai. There are many civil servants who put aside their personal politics trying to make the government succeed.

You're not wrong, but it's important to remember that Ajit Pai was not a civil servant – he was a political appointee. Civil servants are career government employees, whose jobs are not tied to an election, administration, or term in office.

Civil servants necessarily put their own personal politics aside, because in all likelihood they will serve under several different political administrations. That is not the case, nor the expectation, for political appointees.

Good clarification — I was thinking the appointee level because this thread was talking about the overall direction of the FTC, and I was looking for a comparison which most people here would be familiar with where you could see the difference between people who differ in priorities versus those who seem to think the agency should not exist.

I should have clarified that my next sentence was switching to refer to the people who implement policies set by the senior levels: there are many people who do not agree with all of those decisions but will try their best to implement them because they want to make the country more successful or believe that a law needs to be enforced even if someone on their side broke it.

We all know that a sample size of 1 can prove anything.

Less well known: it only requires one exception to prove a proposition false.

Not to mention: individual citizens have next to no insight into what really happens within various governmental agencies. And culturally, the tendency is to assume that one's preferred beliefs are true.

Don't kid yourself, this is being weaponized. Anytime the government does anything, it is not to help you or me.

It will be used in ways not intended. The Sherman Act has been used by many politicians to go after their political advisories.

If the FTC wants to do this, then they need to go after the banks for their anticompetitive practices. How about Apple?

In the 90s, Janet Reno went after Bill Gates. It wasn't because of the browser in Windows. It was a result of Microsoft's reach into Congress, helping turn Congress over to the Republicans. Microsoft's execs didn't want the tax increases that were coming, so they went all in for Republicans. After the election, Reno directed the DOJ to prosecute M$. What a circus that was to see. Then, you know what really hit the fan, Microsoft backed Dave Stirling in California. Democrats were going to do anything they could to destroy M$.

Can you imagine someone going after Google, or Apple, because they won't let others put software on their devices? How anticompetitive is the Apple Store? Can I please remove Chrome off my Chromebook, and use Firefox? Google and Apple donate heavily to Democrats, as does Microsoft today. You're not going to see it used where it needs to be, related to technology, IMHO.

I'm not picking on Democrats, there are plenty of anticompetitive right leaning companies as well (The Banks, Oil & Gas Industry, Agriculture...).

fyi, arguments become immediately less convincing when they include "m$"

(or make a lot of politically one sided claims without citation)

> fyi, arguments become immediately less convincing when they include "m$"

OK... but deviantbit's comment clearly presents Microsoft as the victim of corrupt government officials, which isn't really compatible with calling it M$. It seems more likely that the use of M$ in "Democrats were going to do anything they could to destroy M$" is to present M$ as a label given to Microsoft by the Democrats in order to make it easier to attack. He's trying to tell you that arguments based on the epithet "M$" are or should be unconvincing.

M$ was what Democrats would call Microsoft to demonize them. Just as Biden is demonizing the oil industry. Biden mocked the entire oil industry for making $100 billion dollars. Yet, Apple made $155 billion in 2021.

No democrat has asked Apple to turn those profits over, or wanted a wind fall tax. Why? Apple donates heavily to Democrats, and this is why you will never see an anti-trust suite.

You can be upset with this, but that is reality.

> Anytime the government does anything, it is not to help you or me.

So you believe the government is entirely a self-serving, wholly corrupt organization, that does nothing to help the people?

This is an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary proof.

Or are you assuming that everyone here is among the moneyed elite, and claiming that the government's actions are directed at reducing the power of that class to benefit the common people?

That would be much closer to the truth, but is certainly nowhere near as absolute as you make it sound.

Whatever your intent here, the absolutism you display makes your statement patently false to anyone who has any real understanding of how governments—or, indeed, nearly any large organization—work.

The dastardly National Parks system! (I’m also pretty happy with the FAA, Library of Congress, NOAA, NIH, NSF, etc)

>Anytime the government does anything, it is not to help you or me.

This is a Regan Republican era talking point. Government is supposed to work for the people but for the last 40 years it has been used as a boogieman to push agendas which are actively not in the interest of the people.

In the US much harm has been done by under staffing and purposely slashing budgets of organizations that benefit the people. The amplification of "government doesn't help" comes from those regulated by the government. OSHA enforcing safe working environments? "Government meddling in my business driving my costs up!" IRS auditing, catching tax cheats, and closing loopholes? "Government stealing my hard earned profits!" Look at the attacks on the EPA since they are trying to protect vulnerable waterways that property developers want exploit and manufactures want to dump into.

So let's fund and staff the FTC and let it go after all of them. We need government in our corner going after the Banks, Big Tech, Oil, Commercial Agriculture, Pharma, etc.

The narrative needs to change so we aren't dealing with these issues in a reactive way.

>Like going after Amazon for their union stance

why the fuck not? It helps the american people vs helping a company

Because that is what the National Labor Relations Board is for.

Amazon is good for some consumers (people who value convenient shopping and fast shipping) and bad for others (people who really like independent shops). It’s also good for some employees (people who couldn’t have found a better job elsewhere) and bad for others (people who could have found a better job at a business that got outcompeted by Amazon).

Whether it’s a net positive or negative force is basically too complex a question to answer without resorting to an overarching unfalsifiable ideology like neoliberalism or socialism.

However, rule of law, predictability, and stability are unambiguously good for everyone. Attacking businesses or people on pretexts unrelated to the underlying reason a politician wants to hurt them is a hallmark of corrupt countries.

If we decide as a society to legislate stronger union protections then sure, enforce them against Amazon (and everyone else), but it seems bad for that to motivate selectively enforcing unrelated antitrust laws.

Independent shops can still exist… just not the useless ones. Amazon is known for more generic commodity items, but if you want premium brands you often still have to go direct to manufacturer. In fact the “independent” shop niche is probably why Shopify even has a market.

> good for some consumers (people who value convenient shopping and fast shipping) and bad for others (people who really like independent shops).

It's bad for them too once the monopoly is strong enough that Amazon can stop caring about those things.

Preventing monopolies isn't done because it satisifies some abstract sense of justice, it's done because they genuinely hurt consumers in the long term, even if the monopoly became a monopoly because they were really good for consumers to begin with.

I never argued against going after monopolies.

Amazon is a two-sided market. I don’t think “monopoly” is a good description of a company that’s also a monopsony.

There’s more of an argument that it’s a monopoly employer, but they’ve been raising wages.

The problem is that this two sided market is being regulated by a company.

Everything you describe is fair game for the FTC to consider.

Amazon’s stance on or relationship to unions is not a reason for the FTC to adjust its stance.

It seems very tonedeaf to describe the welfare of Amazon employees in terms of the health of the job market. Have you considered the employees who can't find a better job elsewhere, but also feel insufficiently compensated for their time? I believe it likely that you'll find more in that group than either of the two that you described.

Why go after Amazon specifically, with a profit margin ~2%, instead of other companies like Apple, for example, with a profit margin of ~30%? It seems like the latter would have much more room to raise employee salaries.

I think that's a very easy question to answer, but I'm going to do so with another question: who do you think employs more stateside? Apple's profit margins obviously come from their use of overseas manufacturing - certainly an ethical problem too, but not the same problem. I'm concerned with the people building their phones as well, but Amazon employees are in my immediate vicinity.

I really can't think of a more apples-to-oranges comparison (pun not intended). The only thing Apple and Amazon have in common is that they're the A's in FAANG.

Presumably because Amazon is such a notorious neat grinder in how it treats its "boots on the ground". They don't exactly have the goodwill necessary to shake it off since mkst people's relationship with them is out of convenience rather than fanaticism. Also unlike some brands with the ability to conveniently ignore where or how their unsafe/underpaid sausage is made (in China) they also get shit for squeezing the hell out of their workers domestically where they can still complain about the mistreatment publicly.

> Have you considered the employees who can't find a better job elsewhere, but also feel insufficiently compensated for their time?

How would the FTC going after Amazon help these people?

Those are the people most in need of unions.

I never argued against the idea that Amazon should be forced to stop union-busting. I think you need to re-read my original comment.

> insufficiently compensated for their time

You've just described the job market. If this employee cannot find better paying employment (assuming that the job market is operating efficiently) then it is either a skill issue (This hypothetical employee is not sufficiently skilled to demand a higher salary) or a demand issue (There is insufficient demand for your skills in the market).

We can have a fruitful discussion around job market efficiency (e.g. is Amazon a monopsony employer in some local markets), but objecting to the tone of the comment feels very out of place when this is the language that we use to describe the economy.

> Amazon is good for some consumers (people who value convenient shopping and fast shipping)

Amazon is awful for people who value fast shipping. They used to let you specify your shipping speed! Now the only option they offer is "it'll get there when it gets there". They also feel free to deliver things well after they claimed they would, once they're willing to give you a delivery date at all.

I actually canceled my Prime subscription this year specifically because Amazon's approach to shipping is so abusive.

Because it has no jurisdiction to do so, and there is no law being broken. You want to give a federal agency the power to discretionarily decide what vaguely "helps" the American people? And what about when a political party you don't favor gets into the presidency and appoints his own chairman to interpret that vague mandate?

>as the White House doesn't try to use the FTC as a political weapon to disadvantage their opponents. Like going after Amazon for their union stance or Facebook for their censorship stance.

Hm, lets think for a second and wonder why someone might consider Amazon or Facebook an "opponent" of the government. What's the argument here? That corporations should be immune from the government enforcing a level playing field?

> obviously a good thing

I mean, a law against being a jerk would be great too, but the problem is that everyone thinks the other guy is the jerk. And when we actually try to write rules down for this stuff it gets problematic quickly.

fwiw, I believe if you ask anyone who has interacted with any of the relevant (to competition) agencies globally, any law/rule which gives them more power is obviously bad. The humans who work there tend to be clueless about the specifics of an industry and imagine all kinds of nefarious intent everywhere. They are often intelligent people, but just don't understand the industry.

> The humans who work there tend to be clueless about the specifics of an industry and imagine all kinds of nefarious intent everywhere. They are often intelligent people, but just don't understand the industry.

Sometimes that's a good thing. "Understand[ing] the industry" often means buying into its bullshit and looking at the world from its self-interested perspective.

Fair point.

I mean this with complete sincerity but perhaps given current market, business, and global conditions, perhaps we should assume nefarious intent anytime a company breaks a rule in a way that causes them to profit? It's not like evil or shady behavior is in short supply.

The question is mostly what should the rules be, and how much leeway do you give an administrative agency to decide what they are and if they are being broken.

At least in the US, there is a very reasonable argument that the administrative agencies have overstepped.

As an example, from the FTC:

"Unfair methods of competition, the policy statement explains, are tactics that seek to gain an advantage while avoiding competing on the merits, and that tend to reduce competition in the market".

Who decides what "the merits" are, and who decides what the "market" is? They play a lot of games with these definitions. What are the merits in the smartphone business? Did apple abuse their position to unfairly take over the camera business? Is "cameras" even a market anymore? Is a camera so clearly part of a smartphone that it does indeed meet the definition of "merits"? Is Amazon abusing their position in e-commerce to take out the delivery business (fedex etc) by offering "free shipping" ? Is AWS abusing their position in IaaS to unfairly compete in the "server cpu" market? Is that even a market? Or is it not because x86 chips and ARM chips are thought of as different? Read the current case brought against Meta. The definition of "market" is... really pretty awful. Someone is just trying to make their career.

> At least in the US, there is a very reasonable argument that the administrative agencies have overstepped.

Only if you ignore most of the text of the congressional acts that have created them. If the FTC's charter consisted of that one paragraph, it would be a reasonable criticism. It doesn't, and it's not.

It's true that there's a reactionary movement in the current SCOTUS that comes up with very odd interpretations of these congressional acts (like concluding that CO2 is not a pollutant, and thereby can't be regulated as one), but just because Amy Coney legislates from the bench that the sky is green doesn't necessarily make it so.

This reply is spot on. A vague policy statement means that the FTC itself can't be and won't be held to any standard. They might define Ecommerce one way when it helps with Amazon's prosecution and define it another way to help with Facebook and Google's prosecution. I read the policy statement - it's so broad that it's meaningless. Just lobby the politicians and hope and pray they keep the FTC at bay is not the way to run a developed country.

Yes, letting Boeing tell the FAA whether their planes are safe has worked so well.

I'm talking the agencies who get involved in competition law. In the US that's the FTC and the DOJ, and others in different jurisdictions. It's pretty different from the FAA. The FAA is the aviation authority. They are presumably stacked with folks who understand a lot about aviation.

> fwiw, I believe if you ask anyone who has interacted with any of the relevant (to competition) agencies globally, any law/rule which gives them more power is obviously bad.

And if you've ever interacted with an abusive corporation, you'll see that any rule, or lack of rule, which gives them more power over you, their customer/employee is obviously bad.

I, as a customer/employee/tenant would generally like my bank to not run off with my money after betting it all on red, my employer to not retaliate against me for reporting abuse, and my landlord to not throw me out on my ass because I complained about a rat infestation in his building.

Without any rules against unethical behavior, most organizations with power over you will happily turn to it, and will drive their more ethical competitors out of business.

Tis true. It's a conundrum. Do you give power to the regulator which will help them stop the bad guys, but also enable them to be bad guys at the cost of the good companies, or not?

Free market folks argue that the market can figure out every one of those things you mention. But most of them understand it isn't a free lunch.

It is a conundrum, and it is one of the hardest political problems for humans to solve. It's half the reason we have politics.

I generally think that a case-by-case approach, with clear avenues for both rulemaking and redress, with democratic (direct or representative) control is a good starting point for solving this conundrum.

I allude to the problem of finding market solutions for ethics problems in the last part of my previous point. Markets do not optimize for ethical behaviour. Largely because of information assymetries, largely because people are not perfectly rational agents, largely because of the power imbalance that exists in many of them, and also largely because people are poor at measuring specific examples of long-tail risk.

Good rules also reduce market friction, because they let me make reasonable assumptions, like 'This product is probably not going to kill me when used as instructed, because it adheres to X, Y, Z objective standards', instead of having to go down an endless rabbit hole of 'Buyer beware, do your own research!'

>> Markets do not optimize for ethical behaviour

This is speculation and pedantry, but: What if they do? What if they already weed out 90% of it, and the remaining stuff that you notice is the optimal amount given the cost to weed it out (no matter how said weeding is done).

Pedantic counter-example and Exhibit A: The endless litany of unraveled crypto scams that keep getting bigger and better, year over year. There's one that's going bust right now.

It's the poster child for a perfect market environment, where everyone involved is simply trying to optimize their returns, and there are next to no rules. It's also full of hucksters, thieves, conmen, liars, and flat-out frauds, to the utter detriment of any legitimate commerce in the space.

You don't think the market could sort this out through time? Free market believers don't think the market will sort out every problem overnight - it is pretty much the belief that the bad players get shaken out over time.

The harder ones seem to be healthcare (massive info asymmetry) and anything related to pollution (externalities). The market has had time on those and not done so well.

Even if they did, it would be idealized free markets that did that.

Not the very much non-ideal, largely non-free markets we have, rife as they are with information asymmetry, non-commodity products, buyers with urgent time needs, and a host of other aspects that utterly invalidate the Free Market Will Solve Everything gospel that so many try to preach.

The argument isn't that the free market will solve everything. It's that there isn't a better solution. It's a lower bar.

Well, that's trivially falsifiable.

A competently regulated market is better than a "free" (ie, unregulated) market in nearly all situations.

On what planet does one falsify a claim by simply making the opposite claim?

I would go a step further and argue that markets optimize for institutions that will seek to consolidate monopoly power and destroy the freedom of the market in which they formed. They specifically optimize for unethical behavior, as a natural consequence of the incentive systems in place. I argue that this is true even if there is not a large bureaucratic government to take advantage of for regulatory capture.

Basically, classical economics is predicated on a knife-edge equilibrium that ironically needs government intervention in order to prevent people from deviating.

For a while I reread William Langwiesche's 2003 article in The Atlantic* about Columbia's last flight[1] every year or so. I find it very easy to empathize with the insiders who actually understand all of the minutiae and imagine the frustration of dealing with outsiders who didn't understand any of the details or all the decision processes you and your team had already been through.

The point was that I didn't want to make the same mistakes, and I wanted to remind myself to be wary of "inside scoop" types of opinions, or placing too much weight on "reports from the frontlines", because I recognized that I was overly biased in this direction. Outsiders views, or fresh perspectives, as well as insights from a big picture also have value.

Every long gone institution or industry that now seems absurd with hindsight, also necessarily had some internal logic if it ever existed for decades.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/columbi...

"It's possible that the commissioners are concerned about it, and are trying to make some kind of mark and set precedent before they are all fired and replaced if a Republican (Trump?) takes office in 2024."

It is also possible that this is an incorrect interpretation despite its position as the top HN comment. Note I am not saying it is incorrect, I am saying it is possible it is incorrect. Anything is possible, right. Well, almost.

FTC Commissioners are appointed for terms of seven years,^1 and no more than three can be from the the same political party. The Senate must confirm nominations. The President chooses the Chairperson. See 15 USC 41.

Commissioners frequently resign before their terms expire, but I am not aware of any instances where a Commissioner, or all five of them, as suggested by the parent comment, have been been "fired" for political reasons. Perhaps an astute HN commenter can cite one.

1. The exception is if they are filling a vacancy left by someone who leaves before their term expires.

There's an aphorism about how the best way to get the right answer to a question is to post the wrong answer.

It's called Parkinson's Law.

Clever

You win.

Cunningham's Law.

Q.E.D.

Or nerd sniping, for the layman.

> Commissioners frequently resign before their terms expire, but I am not aware of any instances where a Commissioner, or all five of them, as suggested by the parent comment, have been been "fired" for political reasons. Perhaps an astute HN commenter can cite one.

Precedent didn’t seem to restrain 45.

45 remains the favored candidate to run as the GOP nominee in 2024 Presidential election.

"45" appointed two Democratic Commissioners and one Republican when he was in office. One is still serving and voted in favour of withdrawing the 2015 Statement on Section 5. The 2015 Statement came under Obama's watch, not 45's.

"Tech" proponents try to politicise any regulation that threatens their privacy-disrepecting, anticompetitive and deceptive "business" practices but that strategy is doomed to fail. At this point politicians on both sides are annoyed by the "tech" company nonsense, perhaps for different reasons.

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