Why big tech turned right | Hacker News Reader

Why big tech turned right

vox.com

11 pointsscarface_749 comments

> Many Democrats stopped believing that Silicon Valley was a force for good

... yeah, which happened because Silicon Valley has increasingly become less of a force for good and more of fountain of grifts (eg. crypto) and massive rent seeking.

I'm old enough to have lived through the obvious differences between the old greybeard Silicon Valley and the new finance bro Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley rotted from within, it wasn't forced to this rightward swing by Democrats (though the Democratic party is pretty feckless and horrible these days)

The problem is simple. Only 2% of the population has “let’s go after BigTech” on their priority list according to the article.

Breaking up BigTech doesn’t make their lives better.

While the Democrats trying to do a “Weekend at Bernie’s” on the American people and trying to prop up a senile Biden for far too long didn’t help, they have lost all of their allies - every corporation, unions, and they lost some support from Hispanics and Blacks.

Of course Democrats are never going to get Evangelical Christians. You will never be able to convince them with logic. I’m not saying they are unintelligent. But religion requires some degree of deprioritizing facts and evidence.

> Only 2% of the population has “let’s go after BigTech” on their priority list according to the article.

> Breaking up BigTech doesn’t make their lives better.

That's conjecture. What people think about tech regulation does not in any way correlate to how the regulation works in practice. Most Americans probably didn't understand why Microsoft was a monopoly, but that didn't mean they weren't abusing monopoly power.

One might even argue there's an correlation between resistance to regulation and the importance of that regulation.

And most people didn’t care about alternative operating systems and open systems. That didn’t affect their lives.

No one was sitting down to the dinner table in 1999 either talking about Explorer being bundled with Windows or after the remedies came through how great it made their lives now that it’s easier to run Linux on their 486

Just like today, people don’t care about the “App store duopoly” or how it keeps Epic from getting more money from loot boxes or how much more money Candy Crush could be making if it weren’t for the “Apple tax”. And that is what we are talking about. It came out in the Epic trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases of games.

It doesn’t make their lives better. The same can be said about going after Google, Amazon etc.

Okay, but that's still conjecture. Furthermore, antitrust regulation isn't about remediating the harms between users and businesses, but rather the harm to the economy that arises from a lack of competition.

Explorer, the App Store and AdSense are all perfect examples of businesses that depend on exploitation of their control to keep margins supernaturally wide.

That’s explicitly not how it works in the US. The entire theory behind monopoly enforcement in the US is “consumer harm”. It has been for over half century.

https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-laws-and-you#:~:text=T...

> This reduction in competition can harm consumers

So, you either didn't read the quote you just posted or you mistakenly think that the cause and effect are the other way around. The Clayton Act does not in any way prohibit harming consumers. This is dishonesty bordering on illiteracy, at this point.

So walk me through how the Microsoft lawsuit benefited consumers? How will splitting up Google and making them divest Chrome help consumers? How will putting more money in the pocket of the play to win game studios help consumers?

Same reason IBM helped run concentration camps by sending their engineers to work on the machines

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