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Comment by troydavis | Hacker News Reader

(from another thread) Any attorneys want to weigh in on whether - or when - this becomes an anti-competitive/anti-trust concern, either in the US (FTC) or the EU?

Related reading:

* Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) Article 102, on abusive conduct by companies that have a dominant position in a market: https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures... . Any EU resident can file a complaint.

* FTC's guidelines for firms with market power: https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices, https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

* "Antitrust and Social Networking" (2012): https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1188... (PDF)

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I have already filed an FTC anti competitive complaint using a Wayback link of the post over coffee this morning. I encourage others to do the same. You don’t need deep pockets, let the executive branch do the work for you. That’s their job. Takes ~5 min.

https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/

If you’re in Europe:

https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures...

It may be important to highlight that both this new policy just as Musk's own straight-forward comments have already proven that bird site not only suppressed engagement with but also defamed its competition solely because they are the competition.

Especially companies - like the German and Japanese ones running the top 3 instances - or associations have the right to complaint even though Mastodon is not their own brand.

Awesome in stupidity, because there is also not a fake good reason like "there are bad content that we don't control there so we want to protect our users" but just "you should stay here and we forbid any link to a platform we don't own".

Also that it is not a rule that is there since ever, like apple could have done, but a sudden change after an already controversial situation.

It is awesome to see how Elon is behaving like a spoiled kid! I really hope that twitter financial will crash so that he will be ruined and the platform will be sold by the bank he used for the LBO.

automatic for the people, Tumblr edition

I don't know if it's "the" or "one of the" bank used for the LBO, but my understanding is that Financial has already partially left the building by stopping all their advertising on twitter after musk first week there...

Blocking direct competition is one thing, but what if Twitter starts blocking tweets about VW electric vehicles and promoting tweets about Tesla? It's a very strange setup - although not that different from Bezos' and the Washington Post removing all investigative journalism into the CIA / NSA while AWS seeks large services contracts from those government entities.

Washington Post removing all investigative journalism into the CIA / NSA while AWS seeks large services contracts from those government entities

That happened?

AWS got $10 billion from the NSA last year. Do you really think Bezos' Washington Post is going to be publishing anything that might derail contracts of that value?

Why would NSA stop using AWS just because WaPo wrote something about NSA? It doesn’t make sense, really.

Only thing that should really matter to NSA in regards to using AWS is, does AWS offer the products they need, at the price they want to pay.

Maybe what matters to NSA bureaucrats making contracting decisions is knowing that Bezos will give them lucrative private sector jobs? Maybe exposing these public-private relationships between black-budget agencies and private tech outfits is something Post editors are now reluctant to examine in any detail?

> "Amazon today elected Keith Alexander, a retired four-star general of the U.S. Army, as it newest board director. Alexander was previously director of the National Security Agency and chief of the Central Security Service from 2005 to 2014. (Sep 9, 2020)"

Just a coincidence, nothing to see here.

>Maybe what matters to NSA bureaucrats making contracting decisions is knowing that Bezos will give them lucrative private sector jobs?

So wouldn't that mean the last thing they'd do is raise a fuss about what some random WaPo reporter, that Bezos has almost certainly never met, wrote which has probably not even gone viral? Just ignore it and give AWS the contracts...no?

The last major work of investigative journalism of that nature at the post was "Top Secret America" with lead reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin (2010):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Secret_America

Feel free to point to anything even vaguely similar since Bezos took over the post.

When was the one before? They also didn't publish one for 3 years after 2010 and before Bezos bought the Post.

To be fair, WaPo (much like NPR) was always more a place to go for geopolitics whitepapers masquerading as reporting, it was usually places like NYT, The Guardian, or Intercept the that did adversarial journalism. Bezos didn't change much in that regard.

(Though I did cancel my subscription when they kept insisting on doing tracking even after I paid the guy... if you're gonna be like that when I try to hand you money for your information, I'll steal it and not give you a shred of what you wanted except for a bullshit IP and a fingerprint that claims I'm running WebTV.)

> adversarial

Watergate.

Also my impression has been that NYTimes definitely does geopolitics - Earth laughably and famously turned "flat" in NYTimes editorial pages*, not the Washington Post's /g.

The Intercept can not possibly be classed in the same group (of which I am not exactly a fan, but fair is fair).

New York Times is the establishment's (the fabled East Coast Liberals of yore) ideological platform.

Washington Post is the establishments institutional (i.e. Congress, CIA, Pentagon, State Department, ...) organ.

Wall Street Journal represents the establishment's (petite) capitalist class -- this is why things like Theranos get pounded on by WSJ: the petite capitalist class depends on the fairness of the system. Things like Theranos (and FTX) damage the faith in the system.

* https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/its-a-flat-world...

>Watergate.

Fair point, my bad -- I'm a millennial, that's before my time, I'm giving my thoughts as someone who became old enough to stop violating COPPA around "Indecision 2000".

>Also my impression has been that NYTimes definitely does geopolitics - Earth laughably and famously turned "flat" in NYTimes editorial pages

My impression was WaPo is run by the CIA, and NYT is run by like, at least nine eyes[1]. (With the usual France vs USA bullshit continuing on from the cold war playing out in the opinions pages)

>Wall Street Journal represents the establishment's (petite) capitalist class -- this is why things like Theranos get pounded on by WSJ: the petite capitalist class depends on the fairness of the system.

I can't comment either way on WSJ because heir paywall works too well LOL -- I haven't read it in years.

Forbes was good tho -- that's how I discovered one of my favorite journalists before they moved on to the Times. And I'm not exactly uh... petite... nor particularly capitalist myself. I'm a fan of democracy. Representative or otherwise, take your... pick... but capitalism is an economic system, not a political system, and conflating the two is the path to totalitarianism IMHO :-)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Providence [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#9_Eyes,_14_Eye...

archive.is - ft, wsj, foreign affairs. Have at it! FA has specially good fare, in fact, well worth the visit to the archives.

p.s. just read the whole thing. When did I conflate? Some do however reasonably point out that power comes out of the barrel of a gun and you need money for guns ..

>archive.is - ft, wsj, foreign affairs. Have at it! FA has specially good fare, in fact, well worth the visit to the archives.

Thanks, I'll use this.

>p.s. just read the whole thing. When did I conflate?

I'm just making conversation, it's not intended to be a debate where either side is going to be "correct" :-)

Both NYT and WaPo fail to allow true lateral thinking on their pages except for "special occasions".

>Some do however reasonably point out that power comes out of the barrel of a gun and you need money for guns ...

Power does come from the barrel of a gun, in a way, but people don't like to feel coerced. If you kill someone, their children, their parents, and their friends will be your enemies for life.

Real ultimate power comes from having untracable, encrypted communications paired with an opaque social graph, so your opponents won't know who to use that gun on other than themselves to end their sadness.

Anyways, we're far from where we started... thanks for the archive link... I will definitely use it.

I don’t see how this is a legal problem for Twitter, at least in the U.S. They are not a dominant force on the Web or even in social media; they have little market power. And any data that shows lots of people leaving for other social media platforms would actually help prove that competition is strong (ironically).

Free speech cuts both ways. It’s legal for Twitter to block links to Mastodon for the same reason it was legal for them to block the sitting U.S. President from posting.

Yes and no. Twitter is dominant for their slice of social media, as demonstrated by the fact that a lot of the people who think about leaving don't see viable alternatives. But I agree that US anti-trust law is so hands off at this point that there's no chance the FTC would do anything substantive here.

If you define Twitter’s market as “sites that do things very similarly to Twitter,” I agree they look dominant. I doubt U.S. courts would agree with such a narrow definition, though.

Twitter itself doesn’t seem to take that view of its own market, given that Facebook and Instagram are first on the block list—both products of Meta, a competitor with far more eyeballs and revenue than Twitter.

The FTC themselves say "a product market in an antitrust investigation consists of all goods or services that buyers view as close substitutes". So I don't think it's "do things very similarly to Twitter" as much as it is "serves the same need as Twitter". And as I said, looking at the discussions around leaving Twitter provides plenty of evidence that close substitutes are not available in the view of users.

Twitter is already actively regulated by the FCC and operating under a fairly strict regime.

Twitter is under a consent decree by the FTC related to user privacy, not market competition.

True, but that means that they are not too insignificant to be regulated.

You can browse all the companies that the FTC has consent decrees with. You don’t have to be large. The existence of a consent decree says nothing about their market position.

Twitter has very considerable market power. That's the term in law, not "dominant force on the Web" or monopoly. No-one can use market power to extend or preserve market power. That's precisely what's happened.

Apparently Twitter would likely loose in Germany if this ever gets in front of a court, ironically due to free of opinion -> https://sueden.social/@Anwalt_Jun/109536044985684272

Twitter is bought as a Us elections influence play. The majority of international employees have been laid off and it will be defaulting on its legal obligations in those countries as a result. None of this squares with his proclaimed mission.

People need to stop taking Elon at face value and instead look at the actions. He’s just plagiarizing the Trump playbook and got ahead of the biggest flaw Trump had, not having his own platform to continue operating once he got tried his coup.

At least elon is foreign born. Good god if he could be elected president I would sirhan the mother fucker myself.

I suspect this would factor heavily into any such concern-

"Additionally, we allow paid advertisement/promotion for any of the prohibited social media platforms."

Except that's not true.

> They said they allow you to pay to promote links to other platform, but considering how it was immediately reject from promotion it seems that automation is being used to make that line a... uhhh... total lie.

https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1604538254795198465

I believe it doesn’t fit the generic laws against anticompetitive practices, mostly because they don’t have dominance in any market. Compare Apple’s iOS stores.

There may be something in newer legislation which has made data portability a priority. And Apple has just changed its practice, but due only to very specific pressure.

So I’d say this is rather pathetic, but not illegal.

> mostly because they don’t have dominance in any market.

Keep in mind that at least the FTC generally considers a market to be, roughly, goods and services that are close substitutes for one another[1]. That is, if one good or service can be substituted for another, those may be in the same market. However, as the FTC's summary says, "evidence that customers highly value certain product attributes may limit their willingness to substitute other products." The size and breadth of a network is a product attribute that affects a customer's willingness and ability to substitute any other product.

For anyone else into this topic, "Antitrust and Social Networking" (2012) is a good place to start: https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1188... (PDF).

[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

Twitter’s inclusion of Facebook points to the idea that they consider it a competitor, and would be one far larger.

That doesn't mean Facebook is a substitute for Twitter (it obviously isn't).

They'll get back to you in 5 to 7 business years.

This will resolve itself one way or the other by then.

Interesting thought. Also curious on consequences.

Instagram doesnt allow links in posts.

this isnt a lot different from that imo

Twitter honestly isn't big enough for regulators to give a damn, only like 20% of Americans use it monthly

This policy also forbids linktree in bio, the thing you’re allowed to do on IG.

Twitter is already under an FTC consent decree.

aren't they a private company anyway?

To claim that they have a dominant position is very ovestated. Twitter is no bigger than reddit.

Twitter has - or rather, had - outside influence compared to Reddit due to the number of professionals in the media using it.

If that was even a valid argument it's extremely undemocratic to silence individual entities because they are influential.

Twitter is a good deal bigger than reddit. At least pre-Elon. 200MM+ DAU vs 50MM+.

This says they are comparable in # monthly MAUs

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

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