Antitrust Cop Says Big Tech Looks a Lot Like Standard Oil | Hacker News Reader

Antitrust Cop Says Big Tech Looks a Lot Like Standard Oil

gizmodo.com

19 pointsredbell9 comments

Oh, stop. If you couldn't break up Microsoft in 2001, you've got no case against anyone else. In fact, MSFT still has much more monopoly power in an economic sense than any other company. If you going to break up "Big Tech", you need to start with MSFT.

This is a whataboutism. Break up Microsoft too if that’s what’s required.

Not whataboutism at all, merely pointing out that the phrase "Big Tech" has an understood meaning that is basically "the set containing Google, Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Amazon". Microsoft has been de facto excluded by ignoring it. Which makes me think the whole thing is political, or possibly an extortion attempt by politicians that the set of Big Tech doesn't contribute to their campaigns.

If they can't break up even one of the FAANG companies they have no chance at Microsoft. If they ever want to take out Microsoft they had better set precedent. Repeatedly banging their head against Microsoft would be a great way to pretend they want reform without ever delivering it.

You have a good point, but if they don't break up Microsoft first, or at least in parallel, all the regulators are doing is opening up new fields for Microsoft to monopolize.

Your “understood meaning” might be peculiar if it includes Twitter and not Microsoft. It’s hard to imagine that the source or even Gizmodo’s editors meant it that way.

Twitter is “big” in terms of social cachet, which matters for the free speech debate, but isn’t going around and gobbling up and fortifying verticals and horizontals the way the others are. And it’s that perpetual blob-like absorption of industry that worries economic regulators, not free speech stuff.

Your frustration might be rooted in your own idiosyncratic way of classifying things (as a tech worker? as a social media user?).

Why did you interpret the outcome of that case as meaning they couldn't?

Reversing Judge Jackson.

So they're going to pound the table again instead of doing their homework like last time when they didn't even bother to define the area of monopoly properly? Lawyers don't scream their strategy from the mountaintop before the case if they want to win. Odds are good that this is just performative bullshit slinging.

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