Links to the individual bills:
American Innovation and Choice Online Act https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/...
Platform Competition and Opportunity Act https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/...
Ending Platform Monopolies Act https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/...
Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching (ACCESS) Act https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/...
Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/...
I fundamentally distrust these people (on both sides) which will make it hard to not presume there are perverse incentives in these bills, but I’m open to it.
My sense is that antitrust is as wrong a model for correcting this as the prior regime was that led to the creation of antitrust laws.
I fundamentally distrust these people (on both sides)
I know it sounds cliché, but that's the sign of a good citizen. You should distrust. Particularly since so much money is at stake. Anyone who doesn't distrust, is either being naive, or more likely, collecting on the graft.
I also share your concern that they want to have some convoluted anti-trust regime, rather than a simple, straightforward law that says no sharing of any user data for any commercial purpose at all, ever. With draconian penalties for any infraction. That would stop all this in its tracks, so you have to wonder why they let the privacy stuff go relatively unmolested?
The only answer I can come up with is that they fully intend to keep violating privacy. Maybe with different companies this time? Or different people collecting the money? But in the end, we the people are still getting shafted.
I trust them to respond to incentives, chief of which is to do things they think will keep them in office.
The problems come when doing right by their constituents is no longer the biggest thing that keeps them in office (e.g. instead of outspending opponents on marketing). Or when there are incentives that are hidden from the public.
> do things they think will keep them in office.
You do know that for many of them they have a virtual lock on their seat and the incentive no longer aligns right?
For some/most, the primary driver can be characterized as self advancement.
Eh, if you actually look into public opinion, you'll be glad that politicians don't listen more to their constituency.
> I fundamentally distrust these people (on both sides)
I always try to understand which votes they are trying to buy.
Seriously.
If we model politicians as individuals evolving through an evolutionary algorithm it becomes very clear that their fitness function has very few variables. Money and votes. Not sure what else.
Once they learned that votes can be had with promises, rather than execution, all was lost. Politicians are now experts at manipulating the audience for votes through promises (which are nearly always false).
They also manipulate the audience through incredibly creative naming of bills and programs. Every single one of them sounds amazing. And yet, nearly every time you actually study one there's plenty to be horrified about.
I have no clue how we fix this. If the fitness function that drives this species does not include an evaluation of actual results (valuable, useful, positive, consistent long-term results) they will never have the evolutionary pressure required to mutate in a direction that benefits the people and the nation. They are so deep into self-serving and party-serving territory at this point that we would have to make massive changes to the way things run if there is to be any hope of correcting the type of person who goes into politics and their behavior once at their respective throne.
> I have no clue how we fix this.
Radical transparency. With all data of public institutions open for accountability, and a layer of independent people studying their areas of interest and creating explanations of actual execution and how it really affects us.
The free press used to be this, before it got captured and become part of the opaque system. With open distributed networks, we get a second chance to build such a counter-information system, and this time make it de-centralized so it cannot be captured by owning a single node.
I've thought and read about this a ton and the best I've come up with so far radical democracy (in certain key areas), randomness and a pluralist party system.
Money is not a big deal in politics. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
If anything there's too little money in politics, not too much.
It doesn’t have to be the way you’re describing.
There was a bill a while back to force bill contents to be narrowly scoped (I.e. no pork barrel spending). It failed, but that doesn’t mean we can’t push for its passage in the future anyway.
The problem with getting rid of pork-barrel spending is that it removes the one incentive for reps to cooperate on legislation with people they'd otherwise oppose. The only remaining force in legislation post-pork-barrel is ideological extremism.
This is a pretty poor solution for trying to get people to cooperate. If people are opposing good legislation just because it is being proposed by "the opposition", then the system is broken. Better to solve the problem directly, rather than some unplanned round-about solution with pretty clear downsides.
It might be stricken down anyway. Did you know that a bipartisan effort to grant the president line-item veto power succeeded during the Clinton administration, but was struck down by the Supreme Court?
I think it's important to point out here that neither side really understands tech but one side was viciously against any form of antitrust with these companies until the absolutely foolish decision by these companies to start targeting that one side for censorship. Their employees demanded it as did the Democratic party leadership. And they did their thing and lost the only friends they had on this front. Any GOP politician who tries to block this will have no leg to stand on within their own party. Something that would have been unthinkable 2 years ago is now a popular action because the base hates these companies so much now. They managed to turn Alabama Republicans into people who hate large corporations as much as your typical Berkeley protester. Based on this I'm assuming that Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey are surrounded by sycophantic idiots.
>until the absolutely foolish decision by these companies to start targeting that one side for censorship.
Tech companies did not start "targeting" one side for censorship, multiple internal reports have come out showing they actually have to be artificially lenient to right-wing views to avoid be perceived as being biased [1]. Right wing politics just has either a higher incidence of socially unacceptable speech, or a persecution complex - or more than likely, both.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/1/21544501/facebook-rules-p...
I have the same feeling. I do not trust the "except for organizations operating thematic parks" from Florida republicans nor do I trust the Democrats who have collaborated both at party and official level with the very people they claim to fight against.
Good cop bad cop routine.
You can insert team blue or red in to either role depending on your political bias.
Either way though, you're under arrest xD
They are not equivalent, though.
Plus it’s a convenient way to never have to improve—we just have to be a little better than the worst caricature of the other side! “Why are you criticizing my tribe when the other tribe is literally Hitler?”
No, full stop. The two American parties are not equivalent in their modern forms.
You can use “over the long term” to further any point you like because at one point the Republican Party was the liberal, progressive party before it adopted the original southern strategy.
Studying race and systemic racism in school is absolutely not “as damaging” as dictating the terms of school funding in a way that disadvantages the poor (and subsequently non-white people).
Also your argument is about the two parties being the same over the long term, but then you give a very short term anecdote, and one that isn’t very compelling.
I’m sorry to appear so argumentative but it seems you are falling into the trap of false equivalence on multiple levels.
Anti-Trust is not the best path
Better action would be reforms in contract law to limit binding Arbitration, make ToS unenforceable if they do not have at least SOME provisions in favor of the users (i.e stop allowing unconscionable contracts as Terms of Service), and stronger enforcement of Truth in Advertisement
For ToS, one thing that should absolutely be require for a ToS to be enforceable is a mandate that Vendors are required to provide exact justification for them terminating the agreement (i.e banning you). They should have to clearly define what EXACT terms you violate, and WHEN exactly you violated them. There should should be a mandated review process
For Truth in Advertisement, many of these companies and services use Bait and Switch tactics all the time, advertising their platforms as "Free Speech" or "welcome to all person" only to then clearly and objectively favor one political convention
One final thing I would prefer to see over Anti-Trust is some kine of provision that kicks in if the platform accepts "official Government Messaging" i.e if Twitter wants to allow an official government account on their platform then their should be additional requirements as that now does become an equality under the law concern if people are blocked for official communications.
If they do not want to have those additional strings on their platform then they can simply refuse in the Terms to allow for any Official Government Communication
A laundry list of new barriers to entry is going to prevent consolidation in an industry?
That's like saying if FB buying startups like WhatsApp was a problem, then let's prevent startups from ever competing.
I think government can ban itself from using anything that isn't a federated protocol and should not be doing stupid things with private platforms.
The only thing in my list that could even remotely be a barrier to entry would be the additional requirements of official government communications, which IMO would be a good thing because I dont think there should be any official government communications happening on any of these platforms in the first place.
I see no way that would be true, for example there should be no problem with a video platform telling a user that "Your Video @ 22:50 violated Section 5 of our TOS"
I am unclear how that would that would add a barrier to entry.
One of the bills (The "Ending Platform Monopolies Act") specifically targets companies with $600 billion market cap (AAFG), and misses Walmart by around $200 billion (it currently has market cap of less than $400 billion).
It will be really funny if Walmart stock rises due to Amazon being split, and hits the $600 billion.
What's to stop Amazon from splitting it's retail business into separate legal entities entities by category to stay under the arbitrary limits? Or increasing 3rd party GMS, decreasing Amazon direct sales, and decreasing the 3rd party sales royalties to capture market share and stay under the revenue targets?
Companies with strong financial engineering competencies will have no problem working around these limits.
Instead of the government picking winners and losers, how can the rules be structured to level the playing field for everyone?
> What's to stop Amazon from splitting it's retail business into separate legal entities entities by category to stay under the arbitrary limits?
This doesn’t work. Beneficial ownership and common control would trace through the legal entities. If Amazon actually splits up its business, on the other hand, that’s fine! That’s good! No need for anti-trust action; they did it themselves!
It depends, if 3rd party marketplace and direct sales were split up into separate independent companies, the "sold by Amazon" items could easily flow through as 3rd party marketplace sales. And they would also be free to sell "sold by amazon" items on any other platform, even competing directly with the 3rd party marketplace and leaving it to fester. Product listing quality is already about on parity with eBay so it's not a big stretch.
Possibly a better solution is to make all of the sales and inventory movement data available to amazon internally, available to anyone externally too. For example, the private lable shenanigans would die off quickly with more competitive pressure enabled by giving external players access to the same data Amazon has internally.
> If Amazon actually splits up its business, on the other hand, that’s fine! That’s good! No need for anti-trust action; they did it themselves!
Let's assume for a moment that Amazon spun out... something.
What specific problem does that solve? What specific benefit will the public/customers/clients/government receive? By what metrics is the split-up measure to measure whether it was a success or failure?
I'm genuinely asking. I'm not sure. If the metric is "no business shall have a market cap north of $X" then it's pretty easy to declare it a success! But that's not a very interesting metric imho. So what is the precise goal? And how do you know you've hit the goal and not made things worse?
Some forms of antitrust enforcement exists to protect the worker, other forms exist to protect the consumer.
In either case, metrics can be employed to test whether success has been achieved. Worker wages, consumer prices, profit margins, market concentration, etc. can all be employed to study the positive and negative consequences of antitrust policy.
In the presence of financial engineers, you can't have it any other way.
This is how politics is supposed to work. You pick one organization (your government) that you bend over backwards to give everyone the ability to input to. Anything that starts to get too big for their britches, you implement controls for.
Then the regulatory arms race continues.
In 100 years, $600 billion market cap is going to be more common due to inflation. I think this way of setting the limit could be really good for future generations.
The limit is indexed to CPI.
I noticed that too. I read the language to imply that momentarily touching it would be enough to classify any business as a covered platform (assuming the other 2 tests are met also).
"... at the time of the Commission’s or the Department of Justice’s designation under section 2(d) or any of the two years preceding that time, or at any time in the 2 years preceding the filing of a complaint for an alleged violation of this Act..."
They'd be given a waver, they've paid their bribes unlike FAANG etc.
Hard to tell from the summaries. I hope this addresses ISPs too. Comcast, AT&T seem to operate like a cartel.
It doesn't.
Spoiler: they don't! The ACCESS act, for example, applies only to services with > 50 million MAU and either sales or market caps over $600 billion. Since there has never been any company with $600 billion annual sales, it applies to only 7 companies in the world, and really only 6 because I don't think Saudi Aramco really qualifies.
> Since there has never been any company with $600 billion annual sales
I wonder if someone clever might exploit this loophole to kill the reverse repo market, which is almost hitting $600 billion daily. And technically it's run by the fed, which is technically a private entity. This is obviously an outlier within an outlier and God knows the government wouldn't let it's magical money maker come under fire, but it seems like with the right set of circumstances this going in front of SCOTUS could completely undermine how our entire concept of debt and lending works in the US economy.
Everything I'm saying is purely speculation. This actually happening is about as likely as the US admitting it invaded Iraq for oil (and a bunch of other more nuanced reasons). It's not about honesty; it's about money.
> technically it's run by the fed
The Fed executes repos and reverse repos. It does not run the market. Primary dealers execute these through tri-party repo agents, which practically is like two banks.
Walmart is close to that $600B sales number (~$560B revenue in 2020), but not quite there. Their website claims 100M MAUs, though, so they'd be covered [0].
Comcast likely does meet that 50M number, depending on how you look at things. They have ~30M residential customer relationships, but that's likely only counting each household once (as opposed to per person in the household).
AT&T's Q1 earnings listed 44.2M domestic subscribers, just considering WarnerMedia (HBO + HBO Max). Again, probably counting customers as opposed to household members that use the service.
Verizon's Q1 earnings listed 94 million "total wireless retail connections".
(While we're listing subscriber counts for video streaming -- Netflix also meets the 50M threshold, and Disney+ probably does.
Netflix has 74M US+Canada subscribers, but there are only 10M households in Canada... Likewise, Disney+ "only" has 40M US subscriptions but again, subscriptions vs household members.)
[0] "Our largest website, Walmart.com, sees up to 100 million unique visitors a month, according to comScore, and is growing every year." https://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/our-business
edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_wireless... says AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile all have >100M US subscribers.
Personal opinion? Good.
The restrictions and remedies here seem fairly harsh. Of the sort you'd only want to cover monopolies (but-we-don't-want-to-prosecute-you-as-monopolies).
Telecom definitely needs its share of modernizing, but it should probably be more targeted.
The fact that ISPs don't even come close to those numbers is a good example of why tech companies are a much bigger problem than ISPs. ISPs are the monster under the bed big tech has been paying people to scare you with so you don't look too closely at them.
The competition for my ISP is not a click away.
> Installing another app store on their phone OS (which has no competition) requires several steps involving disabling so-called security protections and then side-loading the store.
Letting users sideload an alternative store the Android way seems like a pretty reasonable solution to me. The experience is pretty much identical to installing arbitrary executables from the internet on PC (in that sometimes your system will pop up a security warning but you can continue despite it). The key difference being people are used to doing that on PCs and not on mobile devices.
But the only alternative seems to be mandating that app stores host competitors, which feels too specific to make for good legislation in my opinion.
But there's another problem which is the Google Play marketplace has a nation's worth of advertising spend to throw at getting eyeballs on it while something like F-Droid... doesn't advertise? And while there are good apps there, the level of polish is nothing like what you see at the top of the Google Play store. People are just so conditioned by shiny trillion-dollar tech that human-scale tech seems old/shady/etc and no amount of legislation is going to change that.
It’s safe to say that the main revenue driver, Google Search, has easy-to-switch-to competitors like ddg or bing. Android is an indirect revenue driver since it defaults to Google search but it’s far from the majority way people get to Search.
> Obviously, physical infrastructure is a bit harder to switch, but I have three major wireline ISPs here, four major wireless ones, and I believe two satellite services are an option too.
Okay, but tens of millions of other Americans have only one broadband choice (if they have one at all). There is clearly a monopoly issue there.
For the vast majority of people on dense urban areas, it is.
The "Platform Competition and Opportunity Act" looks like it would ban big tech companies from buying almost any other companies:
"It shall be unlawful for a covered platform operator to acquire directly or indirectly... the whole or any part of the stock or other share capital of another person engaged in commerce or in any activity or affecting commerce." [0]
[0] https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/...
That would certainly make the internet a lot more interesting.
Or it would force the bigcorps to divest their social platforms and run them at arm’s length, maybe just as shareholders/investors.
So why take risks and innovate if there is less purchase exit opportunity? Who writes these laws?
Rephrased: “Why burn VC cash with a never-profitable business model if you can’t become a money-losing growth engine for a tech giant to leverage to more effectively sling ads?”
Isn't it better if companies try to innovate and come up with products that can stand up on their own? Ie the goal should be to not exit in the first place.
Yep. Any supporter of free market ideas ought to want more firms competing in each market.
Why not just work for big tech directly if your ultimate end goal is to have your work be purchased by big tech? It's a lot more stable and you'll probably make more money.
Worse working conditions, less interesting work?
You conveniently omitted the Exclusion class that makes the excerpt posted above quite reasonable. The only thing which is not completely clear to me is whether the items listed in the Exclusion class are combined using OR or AND.
In any way every once in a while the US surprises me in a very good way. Congrats if it passes.
I can't find what you're referring to in the source document.
I believe you it's there, but I'm not sure your accusation + lack of content were a net contribution to the discussion
>"I believe you it's there.."
Yes it is there in the same section as the topic mentioned. It has too much of the text IMHO to include in its entirety. Just in case you try again here is the pattern to search for: "(A) compete with the covered platform".
>"but I'm not sure your accusation"
The poster "accuses" proposal based on a single item taken out of context from the relevant section. Meanwhile the same section includes said Exclusion clause.
>"net contribution to the discussion"
The net contribution is that the distortion by omission of the bill's section is being prevented.
the problem with “breaking up big tech” is it only breaks up american companies. it has a long run impact of letting foreign companies take over american market share
Maybe I’m taking you too literally here but none of the bills in the article talk about splitting companies up. The bills mentioned limit acquisitions of their competitors, increase funding for merger investigations, require data portability, limit self-preferencing on platform, and limit self-preferencing across business areas.
At least this is what is stated in the article. I have not read the bills.
"Breaking up big tech" or "throwing monkey wrenches into their gears" is related enough that it might be worth paying attention to the OP's overall point - we're applying these rules only to American companies which will automatically a) help Chinese companies like Tik Tok compete against Facebook and Snap, and b) disincentivize them from opening US offices. Why isn't there a 6th bill saying something like: "because we cannot control Chinese companies directly, we'll control them indirectly through American app stores or what have you." I know it's a pipe dream, but we better dream quickly or those companies will get so big that we'll be all using a Chinese OS soon enough and then that last ability to control any aspect of their business model will be gone.
EDIT: someone posted that these bills will equally affect American and international companies. I don't see how that's possible. Eg:
> The “Platform Competition and Opportunity Act” prohibits acquisitions of competitive threats by dominant platforms
Who is going to prevent ByteDance from acquiring every competitive Chinese company? Once they start doing that and we see some massive consolidation in China, ByteDance will go from being the most profitable private company worth $140B to being close to Facebook's $1T market cap. This is not some fiction scenario, it's literally how American companies got big as well. While I wish the American consolidation never happened, I am not sure if the right solution is to just prevent it domestically.
> Who is going to prevent ByteDance from acquiring every competitive Chinese company
China's social platform ecosystem probably has more diversity than the US. This hypothetical doesn't work great since Tencent(WeChat) is it-least twice the size of ByteDance...
I do agree with the premise that regulation on American companies does have an effect on how competitive they are globally.
Fair point. I wasn't sure how closely the original commenter had read the article so I figured some clarification would be helpful.
With respect to "breaking up big tech" and it being harmful to US companies on a global stage, my guess is that over a long enough time period monopolistic companies tend stop being innovative since their motivations in how to derive profit shift. I believe that will end up being harmful for the societies and countries they exist in. Countries, societies, and industries which can stay competitive I think would benefit in the long run so long as they are not consumed by that global monopoly. In the short run it could be pretty harmful.
Just an opinion I'm not too strongly tied to at the moment. It would be interesting to see an economic study or something.
> Who is going to prevent ByteDance from acquiring every competitive Chinese company?
The US can make laws about how companies that operate in other markets can behave. The US can enforce those rules on any subsidiaries that operate in US markets.
This isn't even uncommon - we see it in (eg) mining all the time, where corporate regulators stop overseas takeovers from occurring.
If a business does business in the US then the US can (and does) make laws demanding reporting of corporate ownership. This is usually done as part of tax law. See for example https://www.internationallawoffice.com/Newsletters/Private-C...
A specific example of this kind of action: In 2016 the Obama administration block the Dutch Phillips company from selling (Dutch) Lumiled to Chinese investment companies.
More recently there was the (disastrously administed) attempt to force US ownership of TikTok as well as a less well known attempt to force the sale of Grindr.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170227090607/https://www.nytim...
They de facto require a break up. The wording is so broad that it makes it essentially impossible to operate multiple lines of business. The only real option is to split up/divest enough to get under the market cap limit.
Historically, breaking up monopolies has been very good for the end consumer. Bell Labs and Standard Oil both ended up being good things.
Instead of breaking them up though, we should simply be more stringent with anti trust hearings and merger approvals. There have been a few mergers recently that absolutely shouldn’t have been approved.
In both of those cases, consumers were being overcharged for good and services in a variety of concrete economic ways. It's not analogous to the current situation, I don't think. It's not like a broken up Google or Facebook would cease showing ads or show fewer ads. If anything, they'd show more, as we can see from all the random clickbait news sites that are more ad than material. It seems possible that a broken up version of these would be better for ad buyers, but (with my consumer hat on), I don't really care about ad buyers that much. It's hard to picture the broken up sites offering better services.
It will be interesting to see! I'll be fascinated to see the degree to which congress is willing to take on these companies, and the degree to which their views on what should be done are congruent between the parties. I wonder the extent to which differing views on that subject could scuttle any legislation that would really address the concerns.
> It's not like a broken up Google or Facebook would cease showing ads or show fewer ads.
If there was a real competitor to Google, I would imagine they would try showing less ads.
If there was a real competitor to Facebook, who knows what changes they would make to the newsfeed.
I would hope we could get some competitors that make things better for the end user, worse for the ad buyer, but can still be profitable.
> ... but (with my consumer hat on), I don't really care about ad buyers that much.
Ad buyers are the consumers. You are the product.
> No, ad buyers are businesses. As much as business interests have been trying to redefine negative impact on consumers as including out-competing rival companies, that’s not what it means.
That's a bit of a non sequitur.
Ad-buying businesses aren't, generally, rivals to the ad-selling platform. It isn't necessarily a bad model to treat them as consumers, or at least as proxies for actual consumers. The cost of monopoly rents being passed on to consumers isn't a particularly controversial proposition.
A rancher doesn't provide a pasture because the cattle are their customer.
The Standard Oil claim is historically false. Kerosene prices fell dramatically during Standard Oil's tenure [0]. The competition did not benefit from Standard Oil, but consumers benefitted dramatically.
A malevolent monopoly needs government support to sustain itself for long (like today's telecoms/internet companies). All of the natural monopolies that have existed without rent seeking either greatly benefitted the consumer (Standard Oil, Google, Amazon), or became less consumer friendly and lost their monopoly (Microsoft).
That isn't to say that the government shouldn't take extra steps to ensure powerful companies are upholding the spirit of the law (labor laws and liability laws, for example, at Amazon), but most of the anti-monopolist positions such as some described in the article seem horribly misguided and likely to have unintended consequences. Especially preventing acquisitions (how many talented founders start companies with the hopes of having an acquisition option) and preventing horizontal integration (would we have AWS and the rise of easy cloud computing if this law passed 20 years ago?)
Standard Oil is also a special case because a monopoly on the supply of environmentally harmful stuff is actually good for the environment - by the very action of charging a higher price, it helps compensate for a negative effect that would not be priced in otherwise. Breaking up Standard Oil was just a bad idea, all around.
> Once monopoly revenue is passing hands, who is to say that safety, service and responsible behavior strengthens?
True, that could go bad.
> A defense of oil monopoly markets is particulalry distasteful in light of a global, literal crisis due to oil consumption by the billions of barrels, right?
Huh? Did you miss the point entirely? They're saying that a monopoly reduces the number of barrels, which reduces the crisis. What's distasteful about that specific part of the picture?
Not actually true - Bell Labs was a government created and enforced monopoly, so the break up definitely helped people but it did not earn its 'monopoly' status.
As for Standard Oil at the height of it's market dominance the price of oil went down drastically, and by the time it was broken up it was nowhere near as dominant - iirc it was in the high 60%s of market share.
The only monopolies that ever seem to truly exist and cause harm, are those that are granted special status and favors by the state.
The big benefit was long distance calling. Breaking up the bells quickly resulted in dramatic price drops.
Technology clearly helped, but you can adjust for that by compare to other countries telecoms which had the same benefits.
Local rates went up before stabilizing, long distance rates quickly tanked.
In May 1984, AT&T implemented its first rate reduction in 14 years, knocking an average 6.1 percent off interstate long-distance prices. Long distance prices fell 38% by 1988 ignoring inflation. And continued to drop in the years afterwards.
Now how much this was a net benefit at the time really depended on how much you used long distance calling. Longer term it paved the way for people to call long distance ISP’s which made a real difference in early internet adoption.
>Instead of breaking them up though, we should simply be more stringent with anti trust hearings and merger approvals. There have been a few mergers recently that absolutely shouldn’t have been approved.
Recently? Competition bureaus have been green lighting consolidation in key industry sectors for bullshit reasons with bad evidence for decades.
Also, if we acknowledge that bureaus have allowed the over-consolidation of a number of industries, then why wouldn't we break them up?
The harm to competition is already done - we already have titans accumulating the lucre of uncompetitive margins. The market's health cannot be judged in respect of what margins currently are; they have to be judged in respect of what they would be under situations of proper competition.
yes, and the focus on tech is a red herring distraction du jour. every company over $100MM should be scrutinized for breakup into smaller entities. m&a should be default deny, with extraordinary evidence required for approval, with penalties that pierce the corporate veil for not meeting stated fair market objectives.
that would actually encourage competition and functional markets without harming substantive efficiency/productivity gains from economies of scale, which, despite the popular conception, tend to be sublinear rather than superlinear. that's because coordination problems scale superlinearly with size (a la mythical man month), which in turn is why there is a optimum firm size both for the firms themselves as well as for the markets they compete in. markets (independent actors loosely coordinating via price signals) actually specifically arose to solve these very coordination problems.
i'm absolutely in favor of progressive tax functions (minus the numerous loopholes, e.g., tax shields) for corporations. in fact, there's no reason to have differing corporate and individual tax functions (smoothly varying, as opposed to discontinuous, stepped rates), especially when corporations have gained favored personhood status, and are treated better and more deferentially relative to actual people. note that the biden global tax is a tax floor, and discontinuities just beg to be gamed.
moreover there's no reason to preclude one for the other. let's do both, and more, to make markets competitive and work for the common welfare, rather than decidedly favoring consolidation and capital-holders.
>Historically, breaking up monopolies has been very good for the end consumer.
Historically the US was the largest economy with the largest monopolies, so yes that was true then. It's not necessarily true now or going forward since the US govt can only break up US monopolies but not their foreign competitors.
That said, it sounds like this bill 1) does not break up US big tech, and 2) is applicable to any enterprise operating in the US, similar to how GDPR applies to all companies operating in EU.
> Bell Labs and Standard Oil both ended up being good things.
These are nothing like the current tech companies. Their monopolies were based on commodities. Oil hasn’t changed since standard oil was broken up. AT&T’s monopoly was based on access to real estate to build a network.
I wish basic IRS functions could be get the same level of attention as these efforts. What would be particularly good for consumers would be bringing some level of fairness to the tax system.
Why hurt the middle class to help "consumers"? Nah.
If you wanted to make the tax system "more fair" it would mean lowering the outrageously high taxes on the middle class, but that's not within the Overton window and not what you're talking about.
Do you have a particular example in mind or is it a theoretical concern?
I can definitely see how it could benefit foreign competitors, but at the same time the American tech giants are so largely ahead of the competition that it's hard for me to imagine a foreign competitor managing to overtake them. It might level the playing field a little bit, but it's not necessarily a bad thing, even from a US-centric point of view.
You should take a look at Tik Tok. Companies with large marketing budgets and focused on digital channels spend the majority of it on Facebook and Google. Traditionally, the rest went to Pinterest and Snapchat, but Tik Tok has 1) built a huge audience and 2) built a good enough ad platform (which only continues to improve) that they went from nowhere to choice #3 in a shockingly short amount of time. Sound familiar? Yes, that's exactly how to Facebook surprised Google as well, only much slower.
If we were to break up Facebook or Google, it would be of the granularity of YouTube or Instagram, which is actually what TikTok competes with. I cannot see how YouTube or Instagram could suffer or lose market share.
I am not exactly sure what you are trying to prove here. As far as I am concerned, Google and Facebook have not been broken up into pieces of YouTube and Instagram yet. How does this in any way demonstrate what would happen if we broke up big tech? Sounds like further evidence they need to be released from their mismanagement.
Antitrust enforcement on large platforms should be done by enforcing vertical separation and interoperability, not by simple breakup. Even the AT&T breakup didn't create a plurality of incompatible landline networks; the resulting companies were all connected in a single phone network, and could seamlessly interoperate. A large interoperable platform can easily preserve its total market share over any foreign competitor aspiring to a monopoly of their own, since it derives greater benefits from network effects.
> the problem with “breaking up big tech” is it only breaks up american companies.
I understood it as targeting companies whose products are used by Americans.
Historical parallel: a movement to abolish patents in England in 1850-1880 foundered because it would enable cheap imports, threatening local manufacturing jobs.
But big tech employs proportionately few, and pays no tax.
From where? Not Europe, where they don't have any of these companies, and have even more stringent regulations.
China or Russia then? Easy, just ban their services like they do for ours.
Everything you touch or use has a component going through china
I used to think the American leverage over China was not that great (I'm not American).
Then Huawei was put on that Entity List (or whatever it's called) and prohibited from doing business with US companies.
Huawei was the world's #2 phone producer after Samsung and rising rapidly, I think the forecast was that within 2 quarters it would be #1, overtaking Samsung.
One year later, with the ban still ongoing, Huawei fell out of the top 5, its sales having shrunk 60% or more (https://www.gsmarena.com/sa_smartphone_market_surges_24_in_q...).
I would buy a Huawei phone running a Huawei operating system that operates as wifi/data only, purely for the meme factor.
We are a market for them. If you're suggesting they would stop selling us anything in response to us blocking a few of their services online, I think you're overestimating their likely response.
Bullshit. We have the same anti-trust power over foreign companies operating in America. We've never used it because we've never needed to. For the companies that don't operate in America, but import into America, we can and regularly do impose import restrictions and quotas.
I can't think of any foreign companies in a monopoly/monopolistic position in the US that don't have a US counterpart in a similar position.
T-Mobile is/was German and is in a monopolistic position, but it doesn't have any specific advantage over AT&T or Verizon, and is subject to the same type of regulatory scrutiny over aquisitions, etc.
There's a lot of foreign pharma corps, but afaik, they don't do anything more monopolistic than US pharma corps. Same with oil and chemical companies.
Would be happy to consider something I missed, however.
In practice, large countries can regulate companies which operate within their borders. It’s normal for mergers of multinationals to seek approval from US authorities, the EC, and sometimes Chinese authorities today, over competition issues. Today, the EC is typically the fussiest, but it doesn’t seem that out there to imagine a world where the US gets stricter.
> operate within their borders
That can be a problematic concept for online businesses with no local presence.
You can try and apply tariffs on imports, but policing imports, especially of services, is hard.
Do you think American internet companies are following the GDPR in their European operations just for fun? Or Chinese rules in their Chinese operations?
In practice, most multinationals are not too comfortable blatantly violating the law in large markets.
Those are organisations that have a local presence, over which some leverage can be exerted. Many US companies with no EU operations are simply ignoring the GDPR.
The US could almost certainly make it a condition of future trade deals. We are absolute masterclasses in short-circuiting democracy by way of international relations.
See also: the policy laundering that got us DMCA 1201 and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
If the premise is it makes the companies stronger through competition, this isn't a concern, right?
That isn’t the premise at all. It makes the market stronger through competition. Typically it makes the company itself weaker since it no longer can leverage power in one market to corner another.
We agree. I said companies, plural, as a whole as in the whole economy.
Oh missed that. My bad.
i don't see why this would be the case or why it would be bad. maybe consumers would benefit from foreign competition rather than US tech giants having so much control and power.
Regulate ISPs because they have an actual monopoly? Nope, that's socialism
Regulate "Big Tech" because they banned inciting violence on their platforms? Absolutely, that's freedom.
Strawman arguments like this are entirely pointless, especially on HN. Please refrain from making them because it's obvious you aren't interested in real conversation.
Oh I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were the official HN arbitrator on what is pointless or not.
Regardless, you're being needlessly antagonistic.
How so? Ken Buck is against regulating ISPs. My comment wasn't a strawman, its literally his position.
> When asked about Pai’s work to unravel net neutrality rules, Buck said: “I support Chairman Pai’s efforts to free internet providers from burdensome regulations that stifle innovation and increase costs for Coloradans.” [1]
> The Far Left is attempting to enact their socialist agenda by tearing down statues and rewriting America’s history. > The United States of America will never be a socialist country—and we need to celebrate the Founders who made our nation so great. [2]
[1] https://www.denverpost.com/2017/12/14/colorado-congress-net-...
[2] https://twitter.com/RepKenBuck/status/1301540179208007681
We are talking about the big tech companies...
Name one that is an ACTUAL monopoly? Facebook? Apple? Google? Amazon? Vertical integration is NOT monopoly, and thats what many of them are doing.
I see a lot of arguments about these companies that are tantamount to "I didn't know how the world worked till I saw them do it and now I'm unhappy".
After starting to dig a bit further than this article into what some of these would contain, someone with some tech savvy needs to get themselves to the capital and educate our legislators.
> I see a lot of arguments about these companies that are tantamount to "I didn't know how the world worked till I saw them do it and now I'm unhappy".
Just out of curiosity: which aspect of those arguments do you object to, if any? I'm not trying to be confrontational, just trying to understand your point of view.
There was a time where monopolies were "how the world worked", until the society collectively decided that it's not how the world should work. If Google and Amazon aren't actual monopolies, then maybe we need a new name and a new set of rules.
Instagram was a probable competitor for Facebook. Facebook bought it. Facebook was feeling threatened by the success of WhatsApp on instant messaging? bought. if it doesn't look to you like a monopoly, or at least something seriously and credibly moving to become a monopoly, by the time they meet your criteria, it would be too late to do anything about it.
When Instagram was purchased by Facebook it was not viewed as a competitor at all, it was widely viewed as a terrible decision with FB massively overpaying.
The only people who thought FB overpaid for Instagram were the same people who complained that FB wasn't a real business and was going to collapse at any moment. Ironically many of these people were HN commentators.
Anyone who worked in the space thought it was the most desirable property available, and wasn't surprised at the price given that Google was looking at social properties at the time too.
And no matter what people on HN thought, FB did buy Insta because it was a competitor:
The exchange was one of several potentially damning pieces of evidence in documents obtained by the U.S. House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, showing that Zuckerberg leveraged Facebook’s market power over competitors and bought Instagram because he was concerned about the fast growing company’s potential to turn users away from Facebook.
https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/facebook-bought-inst...
I'm not sure how this cuts against the claim. In this case, wide views at the time were wrong, and Facebook knew lighting money on fire was worth it... if it kept the spigot flowing.
When Standard Oil was broken up, it wasn't a 100% monopoly. Nor was AT&T. I'm not sure what your criteria are, but if you're just being pedantic, it doesn't seem to have any historical bearing. The great monopolies of US history that prompted legal change never had complete control. They just had de facto control due to outsized influence and predatory (or at least anticompetitive) behavior.
Standard Oil once had 90% market share, but by the time they were broken up, they had only ~60% market share.
You don't need to have a full monopoly to be considered a monopoly under the law in the United States. You can be considered a legal monopoly if you have significant market power and can charge overly high prices for things.
Hard to charge overly high price for something that is free.
Free service -> non-free infrastructure / development -> corporate revenue -> who's really paying
In this case, it's advertisers.
Which is why all the antitrust suits are brought "for" the ad industry.
> But aren't the ad prices derived by live auction? It's not as if Facebook is pricing above market equilibrium to extract monopoly rents.
There is a peculiar dynamic as the market centralizes toward fewer marketplaces (for example two-sided ones like AdWords) such that buyers have to go there to find sellers and vice-versa, that results in sellers getting stuck in a race to the bottom, while buyers are stuck in a race to the top. It's like the dark mirror of the network effect. The market maker gets to siphon off the growing gap as fees of various sorts. Voila, monopoly rents.
FB isn't a two sided marketplace, but buyers are definitely stuck bidding against each other which causes the market equilibrium to rise. And even if you broaden the definition of the market fairly generously such that FB doesn't have a monopoly per-se, you've still got an oligopoly at best.
That Facebook, or Google, sells ad pricing via a live auction doesn't opine on whether that results in overcharging.
The mere fact that participation is effectively mandatory itself skews the market.
> Name one that is an ACTUAL monopoly? Facebook? Apple? Google? Amazon? Vertical integration is NOT monopoly, and thats what many of them are doing.
I think we should be less interested in whether these companies are literal monopolies and more interested in whether these companies represent a net harm to society (or even more narrowly, to their respective competitive landscapes). I don’t posit an answer, but I think this criteria will lead to more fruitful discussion than the fixation on monopoly.
For any of those companies besides apple, imagine setting the goal of never using one of the company’s services and of “escaping their grasp”. Aws runs most of the cloud and your local bookstores closed years ago so where do you get books? Everyone you email uses google. Facebook tracks everything you do even if you’re not a user. You can’t get away unless your life depended on it
It doesn’t really matter whether any of these companies are monopolies in the Sherman Act sense. That act was passed about 130 years ago and could never have possibly envisioned the challenges presented by tech companies today.
What does matter is that these companies are very much engaged in the behaviors these bills would regulate. The point of the legislature is not to sit around and observe why a century-old law doesn’t technically apply to a modern problem, it’s to make a new law that does apply.
I don’t have an opinion on whether these bills are a good idea or not (although I definitely think big tech need some reining in). But whether or not these companies are technically monopolies has nothing to do with it beyond a bit of political rhetoric.
Better phrasing now a days is the elimination of middle man industries in favor of public infrastructure projects.
As ultimately what these companies represent is toll road to the content others create.
As what these companies do is common sense. My own father created what became the modern search paradigm and was subsequently kicked off the project that later became yahoo.
So from my perspective what these companies do is not innovative.
Ah yes, Amazon isn't a monopoly. That's why I often use the alternative online shopping site that has nearly every mass-produced item imaginable at low prices and low or free shipping. Same with Facebook: it's good thing there's that competitor of theirs that nearly everyone is on, catching up, organizing local events, buying and selling stuff. And man, I don't know where I would be without that other Internet search engine that rapidly and intelligently indexes almost everything online as soon as it's up and has been so fine-tuned over more than a decade that it has an almost psychic ability to correctly interpret even the most vague, misspelled and deranged search queries. It's truly amazing that humanity managed to make such a wonder of technology not just once, but twice!
Really, I don't know what the lawmakers are thinking. Competition is alive and well on the Internet! Innovation has never been higher! Absolutely nothing has gotten worse since 2008! Boy I can't wait for the next version of Firefox. It totally won't be even more like Chrome this time.
> That's why I often use the alternative online shopping site that has nearly every mass-produced item imaginable at low prices and low or free shipping.
If you put enough qualifiers on something you can make anything one-of-a-kind.
Today the patterns that big tech companies are following is the same as the so called train robber barons in the past. Use your monopoly or control in 1 thing to horn in on other businesses by subsidising .
Google has some where around 80% of the search market in the US which is possibly enough to qualify as a monopoly.
Is this because they're a monopoly or because they're better than the competition?
I'm not sure what you mean? It is completely possible for a company with a superior product to be a monopoly. Google has a large market share because their products are generally better than their competitors.
It's possible for a company with a superior product to be a monopoly, and it's also possible for a company with a majority share in the market to not be a monopoly.
Harry Truman said in 1945 about the atomic bomb, "We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies". I feel the same way about FAANG and Silicon Valley as a whole (and Wall Street, and Hollywood, and SpaceX/Tesla, and the Ivy League), that they are in the United States.
That doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That doesn't mean I can't or won't decry their putting thumbs on scales toward a certain type of bien-pensant ideology. That does mean that, overall, I am very, very glad that they are American instead of Russian, Chinese, or even British, French, or German.
I wonder if this an inadvertent dark pattern used by Congress. Doesn’t this fundamentally set up lobbying infrastructure? You set up a racket where you start regulating a business, then said business reacts by funding massive lobbying toolkits to buy the crooks in Congress off to curtail regulation.
The general problem is called "regulatory capture", though that's a specific case of the principle-agent problem, which also affects private organisations / businesses.
Generally the solution is checks & balances, oversight, you cut / I choose, and similar mechanisms. (Off the top of my head, there may be others.)
“This is a nice little multi-trillion dollar industry you got here… it’d be a shame if anything happened to it.”
You think David Cicilline knows a thing or two about shaking down businesses? Why, that's a repugnant attack against Italian-Americans!
The anti-monopoly movement has been a struggle for the past 70 years, but has managed to notch some wins. However, the digital economy has only recently come into focus that aligns with past understand of monopoly (legal). As a result, the anti-monopoly movement floundered in the start of the 21st century. Here is a great overview from the Harvard Business Review:
https://hbr.org/2017/12/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-u-s...
The reason why this committee is bipartisan, I believe, is because social progressives on one side and free-market conservatives on the other are finally seeing the problem with today's monopolies. (Unfortunately this is just one giant problem out of many giant problems facing modern government, so maybe let's not position it as, "well if they can't fix X they shouldn't bother to fix Y and Z.")
I'm most interested in the platform monopoly legislation. There's an entire new legal vocabulary required to even talk about this. Or so I think.
Looking at the first page of one (https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/... ), it will make it illegal to:
"restrict or impede businesses users from communicating information or providing hyperlinks on the covered platform to covered platform users to facilitate business transactions;"
Does this make it illegal to ban spammers? (I havent actually read these. They are long).
This is covered under the proceeding affirmative defense and the phrase 'legitimate activity'. I imagine it's pretty easy to make the case that spammers are not engaging in legitimate activity, but that's up for interpretation I guess
---
Subsection (a) and (b) shall not apply if the defendant establishes by clear and convincing evidence that the conduct described in subsections (a) or (b) would not result in harm to the competitive process by restricting or impeding legitimate activity by business users.
Odds any of it gets out of committee?
It seems a greater priority of this Congress is social reforms and the President and VP also have other priorities that are keeping Congress’ attention
Now the negotiations start -- which means FAANG paying off, and playing one off the other, each party to water down the actual legislation. If they manage to get this passed and signed, politicians get to claim "bipartisanship" (or not), FAANG will get the regulatory capture they're seeking, and the media will convince the public that everything has been done in the public's best interests.
The EU has a very similar outlook on antitrust and competition policy. Some U.S. states are also pushing for enforcement of antitrust policies wrt. large Internet platforms.
Pretty good, actually. It's a rare area of agreement between the parties that Big Tech has too much power.
I think that’s the problem though. The parties agree that tech has too much power, but they disagree about the how and the why, and as a result they’re seeking different solutions.
I suspect this will end up like Florida’s embarrassing law to reduce deplatforming of candidates with weird exemptions carved out for favored businesses.
Interestingly enough the main sponsor for one of the bills (Jayapal) represents pretty much all the tech workers that work at Amazon in Seattle.
Wonder how they will feel knowing their representative is proposing legislation will likely hurt their financial well-being.
Edit: Why the downvotes? I think it’s an interesting dynamic between constituents and their representative.
> Wonder how they will feel knowing their representative is proposing legislation will likely hurt their financial well-being.
If you're a rank-and-file employee in those companies and legitimately think these bills will significantly affect your financial well-being, you've successfully been brainwashed to believe that your stake in the company actually matters.
How would it do that? It’s not like Amazon is going to go “oh, well, if we can’t be an abusive monopoly we’ll just close down”. They (or their fragments) will presumably still need employees, who they’ll have to pay market rates to.
The workers don't own the company.
Seems a remarkable number of people don't grasp the difference (in context of US Constitution) between a press and a postal road - as in they think Facebook et al _is_ the internet, not comprehending they have any number of options to choose from. Hence the non-sequitur accusations of "monopoly!"
Don't like congress critters sticking their nose so deeply in business. All of this was probably preventable if the SEC and other agencies had done their jobs. Don't change the rules for the future to address the current bad apples; just enforce the current rules.
Who was consulted when drafting these bills and why are they “good”?
“Online platforms” == operating systems according to the first linked.
If that’s the quality of legislation… I’m unsure how to proceed.
No one seems to agree on what they want or how to get there with big tech. Until their is some consensus laws will be at best very disappointing.
Good thing they’re focusing on this instead of global warming or voter disenfranchisement.
/s
> Big tech has routinely suppressed conservative voices and violated consumers’ privacy,” said Rep. Gooden. “We must rein in their destructive behavior and preserve the constitutional rights of all Americans.”
First, this whole suppressing conservatives voices thing is just totally unhinged from reality. The few tiny examples of this violate clearly defined platform rules (which pale in comparison to the giant gain of misinformation aimed at the right that’s free flowed). These companies and their products aren’t the same as a phone call, and you absolutely don’t have any constitutional rights if speech to it! They’re private platforms and anyone (eg Gab) can go and create their own.
If any company violated consumer’s privacy in accordance with constitutional rights, then current day lawsuits would win without any additional amendments.
This is both sides looking for a new boogie man, and will ultimately make America less competitive globally compared to a place like China where not only do their tech companies have massive integration across so many products (hello WeChat), but they have actual state support.
This is just populism aimed at all of those who didn’t make money in tech over the past 20 years, many of whom are jealous their industries got outsourced and therefore mad.
I won't comment on your first point but I will say it's weird you argue for private companies' rights and then use a country where most of our tech companies are de facto banned(Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Reddit, Snapchat, Pinterest, Youtube, Twitch, etc), where anonymous internet usage isn't possible(must show ID for even an internet cafe), and where mass topical censorship is legally required. What we had in the US/Europe is debate over what extreme edge cases and fringe ideologies meet the minimal threshold to be considered dangerous enough to society to stamp out, and even then every instance is met with great debate and pushback. Some people make "careers" out of making hateful replies to politicians we're objectively much freer here and better off for it.
Not to mention a country where tech moguls are under far more heat than they ever could be in this one.
> where not only do their tech companies have massive integration across so many products
Why can't tech products have integration across each other, without tech giants buying up every small startup that comes across their way?
Because integration is very difficult to achieve in one company (just look at Google vs Apple products), let alone across multiple. I don’t see how that has anything to do with buying small startups.
However since you mentioned that, preventing M&A will not only prevent our bigger tech companies from being globally competitive by restricting their access to talent, it’ll shut off one of the main exit routes that’s made doing a startup far safer. It’ll mean failures will end up in $0 for everyone, less money in returns to a VC, which will mean less money in returns to the retirement funds and whatnot that invest in VCs (which is bad for all of our 401ks), so VCs will be even more careful about who they invest in, which means less capital going around for startups generally. That will reduce American competitiveness.
> Because integration is very difficult to achieve in one company (just look at Google vs Apple products), let alone across multiple.
This is clearly false. All sorts of industry defined standards work quite well. When companies don't create interoperability it isn't because it is too hard...
You seem to suggest that few giant companies are optimal. If so, why not take that to the full extend - have just one player in the market by the government nationalizing all tech companies and merging into one?
(I am not suggesting that as a credible alternative).
Because competition is good, and monopolies are bad. It’s just that we don’t actually have any monopolies in the tech industry, and people who say we do are wrong and/or pursuing an agenda that has nothing to do with market competition.
Because economies of scale, automation due to use of software, and near zero marginal costs mean the bigger you are, the more you can offer customers at a lower price.
I thought you meant banning speech of your political enemies is unhinged from reality until I realised you meant the opposite
https://cyber.harvard.edu/node/99982
Just one of many analyses that have showed how the right in the US has majorly gained from being able to share misinformation and live in filter bubbles by platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The idea that Twitter/FB have political enemies is not supported by how they’ve been used, and is inviting an over-politicization of American life. They’re private businesses… not political affiliates.
It is though. Imagine if every online forum was forced to promote government propaganda. That's not free speech. So to some degree, forum discretion is speech.
Just imagine if every telephone companies was prevented from discriminating on the basis of the speech....
Oh wait, that is literally how common carrier laws work. They are basically, forced to sell to everyone, and have to allow anyone to make speech over their network.
I didn't say that everything is a common carrier.
Instead, I am pointing out the ridiculousness of saying that every single instance of the governement "enforcing" speech, in the context of powerful platforms, is somehow some huge infringement on free speech.
Because clearly, we are OK with the government requiring phone companies, which are platforms, into allow most people to make phone calls.
Therefore, you cannot come out, swinging very hard, with this free speech stuff, when, if I were to guess, you are totally OK with phone companies being covered under common carrier laws.
So you need to either chill with this whole "free speech" argument, or you need to instead come out and say that common carriers are some horrible, really evil thing. Pick one.
Do you hear yourself? You are full of yourself. An economy that doesn't work for everyone won't work for anyone.
I'm a liberal and it's clear that big tech is suppressing dissenting voices. It's not targeted at conservatives specifically, but it captures them in larger number because tech and corporate media is mostly liberal and progressive. As such, conservative is by default a dissenting voice.
Edit: See the lab leak hypothesis where big tech was suppressing and even banning people last year for questioning the approved narrative. And here's an example just yesterday with old school progressives being silenced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27493994
> Managing director of Thiel Capital
> posted a paper describing Geometric Unity online and went on Joe Rogan’s immensely popular podcast to discuss it
What makes someone an old school progressive, in your opinion?
I'm having trouble finding anything progressive about this person. His crackpot "theory of everything" has apparently been around since about 2013.
What's wrong with having a theory? When did science start to mean scientism?
The guy is clearly very bright. Perhaps you missed where he talked about the same theory with nobel laureate Roger Penrose.
Just because he might not be right about an extremely complex and hard to follow idea doesn't mean he shouldn't be studying it, discussing it, and engaging about it.
> What makes someone an old school progressive, in your opinion?
Those who were known as progressives prior to about 5 years ago. Eric and his brother Bret were self described progressives for decades.
> I'm having trouble finding anything progressive about this person.
Listen to his podcast The Portal to see. That he works with Thiel simply means that he is able to work with people who have different opinions. Guilt by association is lazy, as is dismissing a theory as crackpot, especially from a serious intellectual with the credentials (eg Harvard) to back it up.
https://medium.com/cybersecurity-for-democracy/far-right-new...
Where is the evidence? Because by in large, the use and effectiveness of these platforms in study after study goes the other way.
Well denying science isn't really a selling point to have the same platform as those who don't deny science. Conservatives don't offer anything of substance to the conversation.
Please give us a specific example of "big tech suppressing dissenting voices". I can certainly see how you could lay that charge on the Hearst Corporation, for example, but I have a hard time seeing how it applies to companies who will record and disseminate your writings, photos, and videos worldwide without charge and almost without regard to the content thereof.
Google Admits to Censoring the World Socialist Web Site
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/04/goog-n04.html
Facebook Purges Left-Wing Pages and Individuals
Google returns that site as the #1 result for "world socialist", and "world socialist web site" and the Facebook accounts that were supposedly "purged" are all online, for example https://www.facebook.com/iyssesdsu. So, again, please provide specific examples of accounts that were suppressed for dissension, and apparently also I need to ask you to think critically about whether and how such suppression was achieved.
This will serve them well.
Ever since the GFC big tech has not produced anything which actually improved the quality of life of the avg. citizen.
And the last huge leap was Windows 95, the rate of innovation slowed down since then, we just barely managed to collect Google and Facebook along the way.
It was Windows 95 which should have shown big tech companies the way. If you stop innovating, then people begin to look at the marketcap of the company and the net worth of the founders as well as the pay of CEOs and sure enough hatred among the public opinion starts mounting pretty fast. People get accostumed to the quality of life provided by big tech in a very fast manner, if the rate of innovation slows down then people will turn on innovators because of the wealth inequality that they see between themselves and big tech companies' insiders.
Microsoft was fighting for its survival a mere 5 years after the release of Windows 95, not because of competitors, but because of the public hatred against them had mounted and that emboldened the DOJ to sue them. It wouldn't have happened if the next iteration would have been as transformative as the jump from Ms-Dos to Win95.
Big tech has to understand that as complex as they are as companies, they are not much different than a bike, you can only slow down so much before you tip over and disaster happens.
They have their 300B cash warchest, they have their AAA+ credit rating, they have interest rates at an historic minimum. They have no excuse for the technological stasis
This seems more and more like the end of an era. This used to be a place where if you didn't like the rules you could just move over to the next lot and it would be the frontier again.
With these bills it seems like we are getting closer and closer to closing that frontier, and closing it for good.
Usenet is deader than dead (I have subscribed to some groups in thunderbird, but some of these haven't seen a post in several years), reddit is useful only in some small subreddits.
It seems like the end of an era. Maybe I should just, I don't know, log of?
Anybody else feels the same? Or better yet, know where the magic can be found these days?
And nothing to abolish one of the biggest tools used by monopolists or oligarchies to steal from others: software patents.