Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
A) A foreign company is not doing something the government wants. This might be taking down certain information from the Internet (facebook, X, in particular) or not being sufficiently helpful in providing access to information, etc. These big consumer cases seem to mainly hit companies that are not perceived as sufficiently "pliable".
B) A foreign company is competing with local interests that are powerful enough to get in politician's ears. This is often re-sold to the public as some grass-roots "fairness" thing that will benefit all of us. To be fair, sometimes it is.
Which is to say, I don't see these enforcement actions as a "reversal of gravity" so much as a re-branding of its immutable laws.
Maybe not broadly, but have you seen hacker news?
The "invisible hand" effect is a powerful and just result of a free market. And so we should all fight to make markets more free, right?
A free market means perfect competition. No natural monopoly, minimal barriers to entry, etc.
The more a market is concentrated, the *worse it performs*. When you have a monopolist, they are effectively the same as a zero-representation government which sets fixed prices. The only difference is that instead of trying to accomplish whatever government objective, the price-fixing is optimized for extracting maximum surplus out of the system to benefit the singular corporate entity.
In aggregate, this minimizes economic activity.
The rhetoric coming out of SF around AI magically solving all of our problems (don't worry about climate change, the rising cost of housing, our crumbling government systems, our extractive healthcare system!) is like the stripped-down version of this perverse ideology: ignore all of the properties of the market system and say "because technology".
Propaganda pressure creates dogmatic ideologies and skewed value systems. There's no other way for them to come into existence.
Propaganda can certainly revive and manipulate them but they were already there.
Venice agrees.
To me, the current situation in the US is reminiscent of 25 years ago, when the Clinton DoJ had won an antitrust case against Microsoft—with the breakup of the company on the table!—but then G.W. Bush was elected, MS was given a slap on the wrist, and 9/11 happened almost immediately afterward, causing US v. MS to disappear from the public consiousness. Similarly, the Biden DoJ won an antitrust case against Google, with the breakup of the company on the table, but then Trump was elected with the backing of the tech billionairies, and it still remains to be seen whether Google will suffer any major consequences or just get a slap on the wrist and continue with business as usual. Remember that billionaires such as Leonard Leo are fully in control of the openly corrupt US Supreme Court, so anything that happens in court at lower levels can be overturned in favor of the billionaires. Apple is still appealing its temporary loss against Epic Games.
> People know that the system only caters to the whims of billionaires and tells the rest of us to eat shit.
Things will not change until enough of the people affected are willing to play equally dirty, and rescind any remnants of their morals. Quite some time ago, the French developed a way of keeping the worst excesses of their elite in check. It worked, although it certainly wasn't perfect or pretty. And then Robespierre came along and ruined it for everybody. [0]
We already live in a world ruled by lack of morals. Individuals hanging on to theirs will not make a difference. Sadly.
The rich in general have had enough of these gatekeepers. Epic Games has had it up to here!
The hyper dominance of some tech companies is making many billionaires uncomfortable.
On the glass is half full news: once again, the regular citizen wins big! … when their concerns happen to coincide with the powerful.
That's true with a caveat that the unlocking isn't for everyone but for specific members of the "investor class".
> To some extent having a market dominated by a couple beached whales is terrible for the investor class.
That's also true with the clarification that there's no homogeneous "investor class", redistribution of assets within that class is what moves the world today.
Also, while a couple of whale spots are definitely not enough for the number of candidates, too many spots are even a bigger threat, so you rarely see antitrust action as a means of opening another spot on the whale beach. Besides, there are other options for doing that, antitrust is the last resort.
Because the "oligarchy" people complain about isn't the cause of massive government corruption.
"Oligarchy" is the natural result of creating a massive politically controlled administrative bureaucracy in charge of most aspects of the business regulation, banking, and so on and so forth.
That is if you want to ensure a powerful oligarchy making decisions for the country the first step in accomplishing this is to make a big and powerful government to regulate the economy.
That is how you get all powerful billionaires.
It killed Bell Labs, and it would have killed LLM research at Google before it started.
Figure out how to protect research and I’m all for anti trust.
When we talk about Bell Labs and R&D, though, we usually aren't talking about the phone industry. We're usually talking about things from semiconductors to computer science. And yes, Bell Labs was very good for that.
You're the one who made the first claim, that Bell Labs was "bad for the industry". It's your claim; it's your job to defend it, not mine to prove it wrong. So let's see your case that Bell Labs was bad.
It doesn't make Ma Bell or their ilk any less awful.