FTC to launch investigation into Microsoft's cloud business
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It doesn't matter at all what Matt Gaetz wants.
They are all in support of Lina Khan's position on anti-trust, as it aligns closely with the vision of LTSE (YC S17) plus their grudge/annoyance at the fact that late stage acquisitions don't benefit early stage investors as much as an IPO or SPAC, plus their annoyance at how early stage investors can't take advantage of the IPO "Pop".
This has been a major fissure in the tech industry for almost a decade at this point.
To be fair, Horowitz (the Z in A16Z) donated to Harris's campaign to lobby for the same thing as well.
One of the biggest donor yes, but not enough to move the needle.
Also, the presidency is not enough to move the needle - you need down ballot support from both houses of Congress as well, which is a relationship Musk did not build unlike other donors.
Elon has a huge amount of influence over khan's future and the ftc's ability to continue in its recent push to actually protect the American consumers.
DOGE is a presidential task force. They are impotent like any other task force.
If you want something to worry about with the new administration, worry about the shitshow that Senate confirmation will be for much of 2025 as Senate Leadership and the Executive will clash
> the ftc's ability
The Khan style vision of antitrust (which I strongly oppose as well btw) will continue under Trump as it did under Biden.
It has bipartisan support because of bipartisan donor relations.
Oren Cass, Lina Khan, Matt Stoller, and Rohit Chopra are all cut from the same cloth.
Can they just get people on the Acting title and not worry about senate confirmation?
No.
The people who get "Acting" titles only have a lifespan of a couple months AND they need to be existing members of the bureaucracy who are 1 level below the senate appointed role.
The US is not a parliamentary system like India, UK, Canada, or Australia where the executive has power over cabinet nomination.
The US's system was explicitly built so that the president is hemmed in this manner.
How do you know that?
Because it requires Senate confirmation.
The US has one of the weakest presidencies globally for that reason.
Other than foreign policy, presidents are largely hemmed by that fact.
I've heard this repeated multiple times, but I wonder how the FTC's policies can influence this?
> how early stage investors can't take advantage of the IPO "Pop".
Could you explain this? By IPO pop do you mean the difference between what the bank underwrites and what the initial . By early vs late stage investors do you mean seed vs series G, or pre-IPO vs post-IPO? I've thought that seed vs series G investors get the same class of stock? Or is there some restriction encoded into the paperwork associated with the investment?
By de-incentivizing M&A, and checking larger competitors to VC darlings by hanging the Damcoles sword of antitrust.
A decade ago Marc Andressen was lobbying Obama to work on this [0][1]
In Andressen's and much of his peer's eyes, most mid-late stage startups should be IPOing sooner than they actually are. And to a certain extent he isn't wrong.
Personally, I don't buy Andressen's argument - there is a reason we added added checks and balances in the IPO process.
> Could you explain this
To go public (just like any other fundraising stage), early stage ownership stakes tend to be diluted in order to attract later investors.
IPOs are a fundraising technique like any other, but the benefits tends to bias towards funds that target late stage or roadshow investors at the expense of early investors.
In the eyes of Andressen and his peers the IPO process needs to be simplified in order to make it easier for mid-stage startups to go public AND the incentive structures need to be changed so early stage investors (read VCs like A16Z) get outsized benefit.
For most funds, this really doesn't matter, but for the mega funds like A16Z, YC, Founders Fund, etc this is a make-or-break policy as most of their portfolio are mid-late stage startups that have been pushing off IPOs because they are too small for the current market, and taking acquisitions at what a number of early stage investors view as a suboptimal price - doesn't matter to the founder because they have cash, but it does to large early stage investors.
A direct listing or SPAC would be the ideal "IPO" method envisioned, but that has been cracked down on as well (and rightfully so tbh)
[0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2013/07/11/andreessen-talks-tech-boom-b...
[1] - https://www.vox.com/2014/6/26/5837638/the-ipo-is-dying-marc-...
Spam via SMS and calls hasn’t been conquered at all and it’s 18 years since the “donotcall” registry went live.
[1]: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/stop-unwanted-robocalls...
[2]: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-395670A1.pdf
Nice...
Either way, a human is not a robot. Ignoring the do not call list would be up to the FTC to police. https://www.donotcall.gov/report.html
A personal trick of mine was to answer those calls, ask them to hold, and leave them waiting indefinitely. I started a leaderboard with my friends back in the day, and the winner was ~40min.
And how you are disadvantaged by two robot vacuum cleaner manufacturers not merging? Would you feel differently if you worked for one of them?
You've cherry picked two examples. This is mud slinging and not genuine analysis.
I'm not familiar, but isn't the parent comment saying the sale was blocked?
https://nbcmontana.com/amp/news/nation-world/calls-federal-i...
No, I don't mind her going after anti-trust targets. I do mind her agency doing this in the final days of this presidency. This is all for brownie points and nothing else. Nadella will have a nice sit-down with Trump and this investigation will fly to the winds.
She started the job in the middle of 2021 and in 2022 the FTC blocked Nvidia/ARM merger and sued Facebook, Twitter, and Frontier Communications. This information isn't hard to find.
Meanwhile Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard and made OpenAI its "marketing bitch" (as Musk puts it). Somehow Microsoft always escaped the chains.
That is the idea, yes.
If they don't initially respond, just keep cc'ing them and politely sending emails 'hello, I'm just looking to follow up on this so that I don't have to escalate'. I promise you that this works
It does matter whether or not corporations let people easily delete their profiles and accounts, but that won't be solved by a small number of savvy people getting exceptions without actually convincing anyone that the greater principle is important. It will be solved either through regulations, or through convincing the vast majority of users that failing to fulfill this duty irrevocably damages that company's reputation. Regulators this year are just barely on the side of protecting consumers, and next year they will likely begin dismantling many of these requirements. When it comes to actual consumers, I bet barely 10% of people think it is important, and if they do they are convinced it is an inevitability, rather than the type of product defect that justifies them not using a service or product.
In the case of Microsoft, becoming an absurd squeaky wheel seems like a personally risky thing to do. Certainly such messages could be interpreted as violating some portion of LinkedIn's professional community policies. The parent organization of LinkedIn, which is of course Microsoft, could decide when those policies need to be more strictly enforced.
It felt like we were making actual progress in dismantling the cancer that is big tech right now
Also, since when did Ars syndicate the Financial Times?
https://www.ft.com/content/62f361eb-ce52-47c1-9857-878cfe298...
This whole thing sounds lame and feeble. I predict a thorough roasting in discovery that would prevent most of this from seeing a courtroom. It's difficult roasting your biggest customer, but Microsoft has done it before.
AWS announced a year ago they have Microsoft 365 for virtual desktops. Is it Oracle cloud that is incompatible? Ali?
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/bandwidth/ > Azure offers free egress for customers leaving Azure when taking their data out of the Azure infrastructure via the internet to switch to another cloud provider or an on-premises data center.
... So is that FAQ entry a recent change, or is the ftc claiming that there's actually some other charge, or...?
Why are there no details or examples? Is Ars this bad recently?
What details do you want? Im not shocked to hear Microsoft acting a little poorly.
What kind of fees?