Microsoft Faces Broad Antitrust Investigation from US FTC
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Microsoft 365 has Word, Excel etc. but they are slowly transitioning to the web.
On one hand Trump and the Republicans hate these corporations, and would love the opportunity to take them down a notch.
On the other their entire governing agenda is about deregulation, dismantling of federal agencies and being pro-business.
Interesting situation to be in.
Paul Krugman (who I often disagree with) had a good article on how the rise of tariffs will be perfect for crony capitalism: the executive branch can't pick and choose who pays income taxes, but currently the executive branch has extremely wide latitude over tariffs, and especially, who gets exemptions. Watch as corporations line up to pledge allegiance in order to get tariff exemptions.
I'm just completely at a loss at how this behavior, which would have been looked on with disgust on both sides of the political spectrum until very recently, is now so readily accepted.
my dude, we passed that in 2016
Jeff Sessions appropriately recused himself from investigations into the Trump campaign, because 8 years ago we still expected the Justice Department to act impartially. In doing that, Sessions got nothing but the deep ire of Trump, solely because he wasn't willing to act as the President's personal lawyer.
Now, though, both Gaetz and Bondi have basically fallen over backward saying they'll do whatever Trump asks. The only reason Gaetz wasn't confirmed wasn't because he said flatly that he would weaponize the Justice department, but it was because he's basically loathed by everyone on Capitol Hill (IMO the sex and drug allegations were more of a convenient out to not confirm him rather than the true reason for his withdrawal). The current situation is completely without precedent in my lifetime.
I think they're realizing that you don't win at party politics by failing to have a party, and the party is more than just cheerleaders and fundraising. They're clearly not done consolidating power yet, considering the withdrawal of Gaetz and the lingering of a few impeachment representatives.
Hopefully what he gains in consistency and teamwork isn't totally overshadowed by the fact that his loyal people are, in many cases, not longtime government officials.
It was surprising to see just how corrupt/archaic the then system was, by modern standards.
But yet the country still functioned.
My takeaway was that the existence of the civil service at all, rather than its particular virtue, dominated value. There's benefit from even a pretty corrupt one!
This kind of government is described in the US constitution.
The agencies as they currently function (creating rules) isn't "described in the US constitution". We got here via a combination of practice, legislation and court decisions over decades and decades and decades. And recently court cases are swinging back against the power of the agencies.
It is not reasonable nor sensible for Congress to shift towards defining in minutiae every detail about how the laws should be implemented. Which are then locked in stone until a new bill is passed. Or not passed as in the case with Congress these days.
Because as we've seen time and time again innocent mistakes will be made and you want them rectified as quickly and easily as possible.
Regulatory agencies are constrained by the laws that Congress passes.
Where there is ambiguity (of which there is an infinite supply) the precedent was to leave up to agencies to interpret it. As opposed to requiring endless new bills to be passed.
Right now there are over 100,000 rules in the code of federal regulations across 50 volumes: https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/CFR
Here is another link for you: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R43056/9?utm_s...
Search for "major rules". Think about those.
They are constrained only by what is nowadays extremely broadly written legislation. Just read anything like dodd-frank, written by incompetent fools who left it so broad that it said both nothing and everything (no constraints in practice) - and is now the source of 100s of rules across various agencies.
Yes, precedent, part of my point. The constitution says nothing about it. The first regulatory agency came about 100 years after the constitution - that isn't by chance.
It hasn't always been like this. It wasn't envisaged.
>Nothing in the constitution talks about congress passing [stuff]
Yeah, because the constitution was intended to allow Congress to pass laws that define the rest of "the government". The constitution is not supposed to be the _only_ law.
>It hasn't always been like this. It wasn't envisaged.
The founders knew they couldn't predict the future which is why they set it up so Congress could make laws. Again, the whole thing is working as designed.
Now, you could say that these laws have had unintended consequences, or no longer serve their purpose, or need modification for current times, etc etc. Those would be policy positions, not the sign of some constitutional crisis.
And critically, it would be the role of Congress to correct, not the president. Now, yes, absolutely, voting for president is a way to enforce checks and balances on Congress when they are not responding effectively. However, completely eroding all checks and balances on _Executive_ power in the process, which seems to be happening now, doesn't look like a great move to me.
If congress is doing the wrong thing creating these entities (and many believe they are), the idea of checks and balances is for someone else to stop them, not themselves. The checks on congress are the president and the courts.
The Westminster system on which almost all of the world's democracies are based rely on an independent, unelected civil servants who serve the government of the day.
You will never get well-run governments if you require every person involved to be elected and an expert on politics and not on specific subjects e.g. renewable energy policy.
If a country elects a bunch of bad eggs, it all falls over. There isn't a way around it.
But instead of paying ransoms, result would be concentration camp. We were calling them "Labor camps" because communism is not Nazism. However sign "Work to Freedom" was used on the entrance of such camps.
Oh, honey[1].
If the apparatchik remains spineless and lets them get away with it, there'll be some remnants the supposed agenda, but I think the real agenda is whatever makes them money. Already people close to him are charging others for access to him/cushy jobs[2]. Gosh, I'm trying to re-find this commentary account where it's headlines out of Washington but written like the way western media writes about some despotic African nation, but maybe I just need to wait until January.
Heck, Trump even bilked taxpayers by charging SS members a lot of money for accomodation in Mar-A-Lago or Trump Tower, and they had/have to stay there because they were guarding him [3]...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0_JfAZ5vlc [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/11/25/trump-epsht... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/politics/trump-...
As to giving free hotel stays to the government, I'm not well attuned to the conduct of the ultra-rich, but in the reasonably comfortable ranks of the GS-teens, I assure you no one is lining up to spend his own money to make government work, despite the enormous escapes from brain damage that can often be achieved for relatively little money by just going to Staples, Home Depot, etc. and just resupplying the office on one's own dime.
It's by far the least absurd thing about Trump, who also got a press conference in a garden centre car park between a sex shop and a crematorium, which was then was mocked by furries who turned it into a VRChat environment, and the lawyer presenting that press conference got disbarred for trying to overturn the election; while the man himself has 34 felony charges for falsifying business records to hide showing he paid off a porn star that he claims not to have had sex with even though the sex part and the payment for silence is totally legal just you need to not lie about how much you spend in total on campaign finance and business expenses.
I think that's the kind of setup that Douglas Adams or Armando Iannucci would use.
Oh, and I almost forgot about the gold-coloured toilet.
Trump never used this language. (He was also aggressive against Big Tech in his first term.)
I'd argue it is disingenuous to say his rhetoric is not primarily taping into popularist sentiments.
This reminds me 1984 with its war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
Now add to that your "monopoly is free market" koolaid.
One thing I want to call out is that everyone thinks Satya is some kind of soft, nice person. He joined Microsoft in 1992. He is 100% part of the old Microsoft guard. Sure he may have continued Ballmer’s bet on Bing/services into Azure/O365/etc and turned the company’s valuation around. But he is definitely familiar with the entire playbook of Microsoft using its existing products, existing contracts/renewals, existing capital, existing staff to copy others, bundle, undercut, and keep taking over market segments that under fair competition would go to other more deserving companies like startups.
I don't think people really fear the Microsoft old guard anymore. HN loves to wave around the Halloween documents as evidence of Microsoft's persisting evil, but the remaining Windows users can't be made to care. If anything, most of the Windows/Microsoft product users I speak with want the old user philosophy to return.
Ironically, the advertising, data collection and service revenue abuse of Windows doesn't appear to even be a serious concern from the looks of the report. They're more interested in Microsoft's abusive B2B contracts, which have been reputably sketchy for years now. Burning down your operating system for the sake of service revenue isn't illegal - if it was, Tim Cook would have been put behind bars a decade ago.
This is what consumer protection looks like; for modern Americans. Don't forget that, the US government does not give even the faintest shit about your awful user experience if the OEM plays fair ball. Feeling free yet?
Also, splitting off Internet Explorer turned out to be entirely unnecessary, it died of stagnation all on its own.
Without it would have taken much longer.
A company doesn't have to have a pure, simple monopoly to have adverse effects on the market and consumers, or to reap monopoly rents.
There is a big difference between having 99% of the market, and having 20% of the market.
This could be a pretty big boon to self hosting if successful.
Microsoft is fucked up company. They should not own office, cloud, GitHub, LinkedIn, crm, gaming, AI, OpenAI, and much more.
I hope trump breaks them in thousand pieces.
When I voted for harris i was actually voting for lina khan