Private antitrust cases are going through the courts | Hacker News Reader

Private antitrust cases are going through the courts

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104 pointstoomuchtodo74 comments

I wonder why they explicitly mentioned Warren Buffett. I'm assuming that means something to some group, but I have absolutely no idea what I'm supposed to read into that.

I think it means the writers expected more people to have heard of Buffet than of Versisign.

I'll believe it when I see it. What are the actual remedies going to be? More piddly payouts that net each customer 57 cents?

The penalties for monopolies need to be RUINOUS. The sword of Damocles should be hanging over every company and every individual with decision-making power at every company.

Law is slow and gradual. I'm not sure if States can break up companies, but these build undeniable precedent for when the feds get around to suing. So I wouldn't underestimate these cases just because they aren't the case that will be remembered in history

> I'm not sure if States can break up companies,

States used to pull corporate charters if you weren't operating for the common good.

That needs to come back.

I'm tired of all the proverbial wrist-slapping. It's the cost of doing business. Let a wronged consumer give a monopolist CEO some physical wrist-slapping, on a public channel. Perhaps then it has a bigger chance of stopping.

I actually think - the reward for reporting a monopoly and providing evidence- should be the allowance to take part of that company and run with it. As in - i report on solid evidence that google is a monopoly. Fine- have AddSense and run with it, or take youtube. Like the whistle blowing becomes a company founding event. The shareholders in a ex-monopoly get to choose which new horse too back. The thrust-busting state entity , should only be involved as a peripheral rubber-stamping agency of the legality of the process and as evaluators of the solidity of the evidence. The falling to pieces and becoming fresh competitors should feel natural.

Why can't antitrust be a class action lawsuit?

I mean ... all those Ticketmaster fees.

[flagged]

True. I would expect a big reversal at some point, with confiscatory tax rises. The Democratic base is angrier than I've ever seen it.

We have to fail to succeed again.

Yes, if history has taught us anything it's that the pendulum will swing back. Sometimes it takes a decade, sometimes it takes 500 years, but it always comes back. Hopefully we'll be alive to see it!

The problem we've consistently had is that when Democrats run they say they're going to do something about these megacorps and then when they get in years pass and the corporations have only swallowed even more of each other up. Then Republicans say they're going to lower taxes and streamline regulations and they get in and government revenue as a percent of GDP never really goes down and the number of pages of legislation keeps going up.

It would be nice if either of them would actually do the thing they say they're going to do.

There are pretty big differences between the parties but one thing they both do incredibly well is bold-faced lying the to public.

Its all a game to these clowns who have been in power for 40+ years. Chuck Schumer & Mitch McConnell are different sides of the same coin and that coin ain’t in our pockets. That coin belongs to the multinational billionaire class.

When things become really bad lying won’t help anymore. The more delayed the response the more violent it will become

The lies are indistinguishable from facts these days, which doesn’t change your assertion of violence IMO - just that it’s unlikely to be targeted at the actual problem

No, the lies are so bad, self contradictory and illogical that they stand out quite easily. They are very easy to expose as lies. The problem is that there are so many of them that it makes focusing harder on the problem at hand. But we don’t need to be stupid and start laboriously fact checking everything, we could be much smarter than that. We could localize the sources where these lies originate.

>It would be nice if either of them would actually do the thing they say they're going to do.

It would be nice if voters voted. It would be nice if voters actually gave the Democrats enough power in Congress (and POTUS) to enact the legislation they want instead of being obstructed by Republicans at every single turn.

Mitch McConnel famously obstructed Obama and prevented him from seating a SCOTUS judge because "it's too close to an election" that was a year away.

So when you call out Democrats as doing nothing, please realize it isn't for lack of trying, it's for lack of power that the people didn't give them.

The US has had antitrust laws on the books for more than a century. Obama was President for 8 years and Biden for 4. How many megacorps were broken up? Why are Visa and Mastercard still a thing?

Obama had control over the House and Senate during his first term. Republicans filibuster things that Republican constituencies have strong objections to, but they're not going to put up a strong defense of Hollywood or Facebook etc., so why didn't they go after the villains in their own house?

Why didn't either of them pardon Snowden?

Why didn't they make deals to do things that are good? There are reasonable things Republicans want that it's the Democrats who strongly oppose, like school choice, or loser-pays for civil court cases against non-megacorps. If you're not willing to give any of that stuff up and you want them to give up things that their constituents oppose, of course they fight you tooth and nail. But if you could find a way to be objective for a moment, some of the things your side wants are bad or at least not great and you only want them because their interest groups are in your tent. Instead of finding a compromise where the public gets screwed to benefit the interest groups on both sides, you could find a compromise where the interest groups on both sides get screwed to benefit the public. Yet they don't.

>Obama had control over the House and Senate during his first term.

Not for the full term, only 2 years, where he got ACA enacted. So don't act like he had completely free reign for 8 years, or that he didn't get anything done.

>Why didn't either of them pardon Snowden?

Nobody would pardon Snowden, he ran. Obama let Manning off pretty easily because she came to justice, and he said if Snowden wanted to face justice, he'd likely be free in the U.S. right now.

>Why didn't they make deals to do things that are good?

ACA was good for millions of people. Republicans are set to erase that. No, both sides are not the same.

>There are reasonable things Republicans want

Like what? Ending birthright citizenship? Ending gay marriage? Ending a lot of things vulnerable people depend on? The damage Repulbicans are doing is a very long list. No, the Democrats do not have an equally long list.

I'm going to go any further than this with you, it's pointless.

> Not for the full term, only 2 years, where he got ACA enacted.

The US still has about the highest healthcare costs in the world. If that's supposed to be what success looks like, it's not great.

> Nobody would pardon Snowden, he ran.

That's just an excuse. Demanding that he face a trial is conceding that he would be prosecuted, which only proves that he was right to run. Justice for what he did is a pardon.

> ACA was good for millions of people. Republicans are set to erase that.

ACA was incremental progress that barely made a dent, and could easily have been a bipartisan bill if bipartisanship was still a thing. Half the reason Republicans are always talking about repealing it is that it was full of their ideas and they want to "repeal and replace" it by making some minor tweaks so they can claim the credit for the modest benefits because neither party can be bothered to address the bigger problems with the US healthcare system.

> No, the Democrats do not have an equally long list.

The Democrats play coy. When they pass laws to enrich the megacorps or special interests, they tell you they're defending the little guy, as if simply claiming that conveys the right to be indignant if someone wants to subject their proposals to an analysis of qui bono.

As I said before, I'm going to go any further than this with you, it's pointless. Your opinions are not my opinions. I think you have a distorted perspective of reality, so it's not going to accomplish anything by trying to point out your errors. The Democrats voting record proves you wrong, but I doubt you've ever seen it. BOTH SIDES ARE NOT EVEN CLOSE TO BEING THE SAME.

As things are going, the Democrats should be buliding an army and preparing to fight a war.

The Democratic base is tired of reaching across the aisle only to have their hands slapped and be met with disapproval and silence. This will all be a huge blow back very soon but it also means the angry people will look to revenge. And revenge means a D Potus coming in and doing things like firing every Republican they can, attempting to redirect funds.

A lot of flip floppers often quote “both sides” talking points but both-sides-arguments only really apply in the context of what has happened historically and lack of willingness to set new precedents (I need all the flaws to also win mentality). Those arguments aren’t helpful in the actual solution to the problem. Even though the arguer isn’t exactly incorrect.

IMO, the only revenge that will work is by making laws forcing both sides to legislate. Idk what that looks like but not legislating has led to interpreting the law as acceptable behavior for the team to win, not interpreting the law as applied against the acting individual. However something like a legislation quota sounds messy and easily abused in a country of lobbyists.

The only other solution is getting non-term limited people to agree to term limits.

A political comment is about to be the fuel that shoots me over 1k karma. Apply your down-votes here to help keep me grounded.

The best solution would be a reform of the voting system. It has become clear over the last decades that a two-party system slowly radicalizes both sides. It is also very problematic in the face of single-issue voters. But the two-party system exists just because first-past-the-post voting makes it a strategically bad choice to vote for anyone but the two dominant parties, and makes party-internal reform hard by making it a nonstarter to split a party, no matter how severe the disagreement.

Now first-past-the-post made some sense in the 1700s, but with the vastly improved communication of the 1900s and 2000s it's just a bad voting system. Basically anything else is better.

Someone has to do those reforms in the first place.

Right. During stable times, neither party would take such a risk. Big reforms occur during unusual periods where a system experiences shocks and its limits are tested. If there was ever a time for voting reform it would be the 2028 term, assuming that Democrats actually manage to capitalize on the historic moment rather than capitulate and shift right while campaigning on some limp slogan like "back to normal."

"All that is necessary for evil to win is for good people to do nothing", and 1/3 of the people of voting age did not vote in 2024 - they did nothing, they just didn't care.

You can reform voting all you want but if a significant portion of people still aren't voting then it's not going to do much for the country.

The direction of political discourse hasn't been toward "radicalization" per se. Democrats have only moved slightly to the left of where they were in the early 1970s, but the majority of that movement has taken place since 2011. Republicans, OTOH, have been moving rightward at a steady and near-constant pace since 1971, though they did start shifting faster around 2001. This has lead to Congress becoming significantly more conservative over time. Keep in mind, the Democrats would be considered just slightly left of center in most European countries.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/10/the-polar...

TL;DR: there's no "radicalization" taking place in the Democratic party. It's the Republicans that are driving it.

I agree with this. I was once an independent. The dysfunction of the Republican party ended that.

That is optimistic scenario. Pessimistic one is that this will be irreversible because remaining agencies and wealth will be used against opposition.

My thoughts as well. However, the pendullum will swing harder this time

> The Democratic base is tired of reaching across the aisle only to have their hands slapped and be met with disapproval and silence.

Perhaps the Democratic base should stop "reaching across the aisle" the way they are because it clearly isn't working. On any given issue, Republicans generally understand the Democratic position on things and reject it. Democrats rarely understand the Republican position. That makes it sound like "reaching across the aisle" is a bit more of "preaching across the aisle" than truly attempting collaboration.

> And revenge means a D Potus coming in and doing things like firing every Republican they can, attempting to redirect funds.

This already generally happens, and more power to the Democrats who want to swing the pendulum hard on the Republicans after this one. The fact remains that for the last several administrations, if you were high up in one of these organizations, you would have to expect to get fired or demoted when the other party gets into power. If you want to see the history of this, the EPA has some of the most visible examples. The situation that's new is the wholesale gutting of entire agencies at the direction of a third party (Elon Musk).

> IMO, the only revenge that will work is by making laws forcing both sides to legislate. Idk what that looks like but not legislating has led to interpreting the law as acceptable behavior for the team to win, not interpreting the law as applied against the acting individual. However something like a legislation quota sounds messy and easily abused in a country of lobbyists.

I completely agree with you here. The administrative bloat of the executive branch is largely because the legislature has abdicated the power to write the rules on all but the broadest basis to the executive branch. The executive branch is run by only one elected person who has the power to change quite a bit about its operations.

> Democrats rarely understand the Republican position.

This is an extremely shallow and incorrect take.

This has been studied several times. The most famous study was Johnathan Haidt's.

> On any given issue, Republicans generally understand the Democratic position on things and reject it. Democrats rarely understand the Republican position.

The Republican position cannot be understood if all they ever do is reject any legislation from the opposing party as opposed to collaborating.

Reaching across the aisle doesn't mean "preaching across the aisle". That's a pretty bad faith argument.

Democrats don't have radically different ideals. Most are moderates as are most Republicans. To reach across the aisle refers to picking popular issues amongst both parties and attempting to negotiate on legislation, exactly how a functioning country should operate. Republicans have instead slapped the hands of anyone attempting to create legislation out of bad faith that they are not the side generating the good will.

This tracks consistently with the other side of the Republican party that wants to regress the country not create new legislation.

The Republican position is fully understood, that is no mystery. Why they choose to not fix bad legislation or not modernize legislation is entirely based in avoiding any idea of bipartisanship so they can point fingers and shrug off blame.

The Republican part is no longer making a serious effort to govern.

But, if we survive Trump, I would expect trials for treason.

> The Democratic base is tired of reaching across the aisle only to have their hands slapped and be met with disapproval and silence.

You mean, like the Democrats have been doing since the Obama administration? The ACA was not a bipartisan bill, it was a jam-down, and that attitude only continued. Pendulum-swing indeed.

The solution is the same one Lincoln pointed out. The people aren't fooled anymore, so if you really want to do something, you can't just shuffle the problem around for campaign donations and not actually fix it. You have to make an honest attempt to support the good of the people. At the moment, President Trump is seen as the one doing it, because the Democrats have so clearly been acting against the interests of the majority of their constituents in favor of ideological luxuries. We're done with that for a while.

> The ACA was not a bipartisan bill, it was a jam-down

No, it wasn't. It was watered down substantially.

Yes, it was: https://www.forbes.com/sites/physiciansfoundation/2014/03/26...

You’re both right, it was done without Republicans but it was watered down for moderates on both sides. It was passed because it was a smart play against those opposing groups.

You missed my paragraph about both sides arguments.

It was “jammed-in” because Democrats got tired of Republicans opposing everything. A bipartisan effort was risky that it would be altered to be undesirable. Even so it was altered to be pretty moderate overall. Either way it was jammed because of revenge tactics I’m discussing.

You might be surprised to learn (it surprised me too!) that the new FTC leadership has affirmed Khan and Kantor's 2023 guidelines on anti-trust and stated they will carry forward with them.

It's an odd situation where more aggressive anti-trust posture is actually rather popular with Trump's base. Anecdotally, I know several 2024 Trump voters who cite Khan's FTC as the thing they liked the most (or only) under Biden.

I tend to agree with you otherwise, but this issue does have a bipartisan consensus forming and it's unwise to seek conflict where you share values.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/trump-enforcers-affirm-li...

For all the weight that carries in an environment where an un-elected billionaire can come in and ransack the place at a moments notice.

On some level I hope he tries. There's already mounting hostility on the populist wing of the right towards Elon. Going after anti-trust might just be the bridge too far.

And frankly, given his public comments about and noted vitriol towards Lina Khan and the FTC (and his own tendencies towards seeking monopolies) I assume at some point he'll try.

Further, purely speculating: it may be he already has tried. It's indicative that we didn't immediately see him go for the FTC. He's too small of a man to not have wanted to for personal reasons, and too greedy to not have wanted to for long-term business reasons. I have to wonder if he was restrained from doing so on account of (correctly) predicted blowback from such an action.

Seeming to come down on the side of John Deere and DuPont subsidiaries and spinoffs is not a smart move. These are hot issues for the populist wing of the party who want to purge what they label as the "Con(servative) Inc" wing and routinely make hobbyhorses of issues affecting farmers in flyover states.

well then you will be surprised by the facts. trump just sided with khan on this issue

> Further, purely speculating: it may be he already has tried. It's indicative that we didn't immediately see him go for the FTC.

Pure speculation. It could just as easily be frog boiling. I guess we'll all find out soon.

He has started by going after the groups that are investigating his companies. USAID investigated overpaying for starlink in Ukraine. FDA doesn't like neuralink. The FAA investigates every time he blows up a rocket and showers debris into the airspace. The IRS has audited his tax filings before and he expressed frustration about it. He hasn't done anything the FTC cares about yet, though.

Having an extreme regulatory posture, which is then lifted for friends and family, is typical in developing countries. The barriers make it so that your friends' companies do not get significant competition.

“For my friends: everything; for my enemies: the law.”

Americans are going to be very surprised when they figure out what happens to the government when the country becomes a third world Latin American state.

At least those of us that did live through the turmoil in these countries can see what is going on.

American exceptionalism shield them from learning from others mistakes

> what happens to the government when the country becomes a third world Latin American state.

That has been the goal of their immigration policy since the 1960s.

what are you talking about?

> the Trump administration ratified that the merger guidelines from the Biden administration are a fair reading of the law.

You clearly don't read Matt's newsletter if you're trying to paint that he's somehow a Trump fan. The point is that the administration has taken some surprising stances affirming some pro-labor results, but probably not in a way that's more than posturing.

Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents, please don't post shallow dismissals of other people's work, please omit internet tropes, and please don't use HN for political battle. This is all in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

(I'm not arguing with you politically btw—just trying to avoid what predictably leads to repetitive and generic, and therefore bad, HN threads.)

People are, unfortunately but rightfully, angry. I don't envy you your job the next few years.

For sure they are rightfully angry. From a moderation point of view, should we let that anger, however rightful, break this site for its intended purpose? I don't see what good that would do.

(I realize you weren't arguing for that)

Sometimes I wonder whether you were ordered to take a "neutral" editorial stance that was favorable to tech nazis or whether you did it by accident.

In the end it doesn't matter all that much. Getting trump and musk in power was the most significant project you've ever contributed to, and you're going to be hearing about it for the rest of your life.

No one ordered me to take any "editorial stance" about anything. In fact no one at YC has ever ordered me to do anything. That's one reason I'm grateful for the job.

The only people "ordering" me are HN users with strong feelings. Some even say things that feel like threats.

p.s. I'm not sure why, but your comment got me thinking about the lines "everything is political" and "neutrality is not possible"—lines I mostly agree with and (believe it or not) keep in mind while moderating HN—yet which somehow push people to a place where the only thing they feel they can do is destroy each other.

It must be possible to recognize how (nearly) everything has a political valence and (nearly) nothing is neutral, while still finding some option other than banding with one tribe to destroy another. Yet that is the pressure we all seem to end up feeling. To that my answer is no—I don't believe it is the only choice, political though everything may be.

Do you read books dan? This exact justification comes up over and over again in the descriptions and in some cases regretful memoirs of other oppresive movement collaborators from the past century. Your comment could have been written by a newspaper editor in 1978 south africa, or 1935 south carolina.

You haven't found a hidden middle ground that no one else was competent enough to navigate to or courageous enough to stand on. You are simply doing useful things for a tech fascist movement, and it's to their benefit that you keep doing them.

I do read books, yes! Of course I only look at the pictures.

> This exact justification comes up over and over again [...] in some cases regretful memoirs

I doubt that they exactly regretted not "banding with one tribe to destroy another", and I do mean exactly, since I was careful to be precise and that is your claim.

If you can find examples, I'd be interested. I might even look at a book or two!

Allowing people to have their view of the front page unaffected by flags would be trivial. But some who don't want too discuss this don't want other people to discuss it, either, they precisely don't want people to have discussions unimpeded by sophistry, in their absence.

Calling that out isn't "tribalism", and you boiling it down to that, and other generalities, as if it's people being "mad" that other people have a different flavor of ice cream, while there's by now been (at least) FIVE people doing Hitler salutes during speeches means you're not up to speed or not treating this as seriously as you probably think you do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhJdH63d6zM

https://cdapress.com/news/2025/feb/22/town-hall-security-det...

> The identities of the men who dragged a woman out of a legislative town hall in the Coeur d’Alene High School auditorium on Saturday remain a mystery, with event organizers claiming no knowledge of who arranged the security detail or which company was used.

^ that's how you get that. Everybody is just "doing their part", looking the other way.

That's also how you get people posting endless walls of text about the topic they insist should not be discussed on HN, or doing mental gymnastics every single time the Nazi salute is mentioned, ignoring once again what dozens of people have told them in reply to it the first of the dozens of times they did that.

> Allowing people to have their view of the front page unaffected by flags would be trivial

If we did that then HN would be a completely different place—it would become a current affairs site. That's not the mandate of this place.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Does a site dedicated to intellectual curiosity have a right to exist on the internet? Your argument implies that it does not. I think it does. HN isn't trying to be all things—it's trying to be one thing. You can't play a game if you keep importing rules from other games. You certainly can't play, I don't know, checkers, if you let people treat the checkerboard like a rugby pitch.

HN has been through many rings of political fire over the years. At such moments, a vocal subset of users always demands that we suspend HN's rules and submit it to the flames. Current events are much too important not to! they argue. Well, current events are always more important than everything else on HN's frontpage. That has never not been the case.

We haven't done that, for the simple reason that it would destroy HN for its intended purpose.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I think time has shown that we made the right call on those occasions and that the community is grateful we did. Once one has been through a few of these swings, the pattern becomes so recognizable that it's hard to interpret it as anything but a normal side effect of macro fluctuations.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I may be wrong, of course, but if civilization really is coming to an end, HN won't matter anyway, so the risk calculation isn't particularly complicated.

If you really believe that this time is different and civilization is being destroyed, shouldn't you be doing something more impactful than spending so much time on an internet entertainment site, breaking its rules and arguing with the janitor? It seems to me that the amount of energy some people invest in this trivial activity is incongruent with the urgency of their rhetoric.

As a thought excersize I've been going through your comments @dang to see what the state of moderation currently looks like.

From what I can tell it is a very difficult job right now and I do not envy that.

I read through this last reply and it did make me smirk because I think your reply was quite pointed and apt.

I do wonder though if you internally down weight the effect HN has on the overall tech sphere.

It seems like it is sort of the "online salon" of the tech and I think people have come to see HN as a source of ... guidance(?) in a world of such poor online discourse.

I think the last few years have definitely shown the power that online sites have to not only effect discourse but to sway elections and much more.

I'm not saying that is currently happening with HN but I do think it's worth reflecting where HN sits in the world and whether it has the proper tools to not succumb to the world of online bots / trolls.

Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn't but it appears to a large number of people (who may hold more influcial positions in tech than might realize) that it does matter.

Anyways just some thoughts.

Thank you for the thoughts! I appreciate what you're saying. You may be right. It would be hard to measure, of course.

Yeah but only bots don’t care about this. So bots and trolls like me are the only ones left.

>The Trump administration is tearing down every regulatory part of government capable of limiting corporations

Even Trump is against Big Tech. We're seeing right now how much of that brown nosing is making him look the other way. It's not a certainty

Also, the government isn't in entire lock step with trump just yet. People are still trying to do some good while they can.

Trump is for whoever brown noses the most. He has no independent preferences. Big tech gave him millions, now he's for big tech, but only the ones who donated. Most of them figured out that Trump is for sale to every bidder and got in line. Don't be naive.

I agree. I also note that Trump also isn't credible in the slightest. He could take all that money and decide to "only" break up a few divisions instead of the biggest sectors. Very few people are coming out of this unscathed. Even among billionaires.

.com domains are essentially a public resource, created mostly be public investment (e.g.: tax money).

It's completely absurd that it has been handed over for "administration" to a private organisation with operating margins of roughly 70% on $1.5 billion in revenue.

This is essentially money that belongs to the public (and should go back to public infrastructure). Instead, legislation ensures that this doesn't happen.