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It's not just Amazon. Facebook and Google also want to avoid any criticism that suggests they should be regulated as utilities. The #1 marketplace, #1 social n

• x0x0 9y ago
  It will be kind of amazing to watch the complaining as people who, by consensus, refuse to pay for news and discuss news on a site that helps them evade paying for news, then complain about what the news organizations they don't pay for do or don't do. Because apparently America is owed robust news organizations that act in the public interest and survive off bread and water. The parallels to open source software and maintainers will be ignored.
  • RodericDay 9y ago
    > America is owed robust news organizations Americans would and should pay for this, collectively and without recourse, via a strong social safety net and possibly taxes. Your shelter, your food, a high quality of life for your kids, etc. should all basically be provided for, so that people can take risks and be daring journalists without being guilt-tripped into feeling like they sacrificed their offspring to their ego. However, levying taxes to pay for things has been systematically demonized as just not an option at all, and by-and-large people have been hoodwinked into believing that more and more facets of society need to be mediated via "the free market", and if they fail that test, they are not deserving of existence. It'll take a while until people realize that the market is just a tool, not a be-all-and-end-all.
    • WalterBright 9y ago
      There are countries that have taxation funded news organizations. They are hardly bastions of objective news. Like any organization, they serve whoever funds them - in this case, they serve the interests of the people that run the government.
      • halter73 9y ago
        I think you're misreading the parent comment. They're not advocating for tax funded news organizations, but instead for a stronger social safety net. They're theorizing that this would enable people to pursue journalism without fear of losing their livelihoods because of struggles in that market sector. I'm not saying that I agree with this position. I think that without capital, the news industry would shrink and struggle even with a strong social safety net to support its journalists. Personal blogs cannot fully replace well funded news organizations.
        • RodericDay 9y ago
          I don't know why you're downvoted. This is a correct reading of my post. I'm more concerned with the family of a daring journalist being safe regardless of their investigations, than with the actual remuneration of the journalist.
      • __s 9y ago
        CBC was pretty critical of the Conservatives while they ruled Granted it's a debated topic: http://cbcexposed.blogspot.ca/2017/07/is-cbc-news-biased.html http://cbcexposed.blogspot.ca/2017/07/is-cbc-news-biased.htm...
        • bch 9y ago
          > CBC was pretty critical of the Conservatives while they ruled That relationship was pretty combative from both sides, though, no? http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cbc-budget-cut-by-115m-over-3-years-1.1147096 http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cbc-budget-cut-by-115m-over-... http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/cbc-funding-heritage-minister-1.3470198 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/cbc-funding-h...
          • nl 9y ago
            That's the point. It undermines the idea that publicly funded news organisation follow the government line.
  • costcopizza 9y ago
    This was probably (wrongly) downvoted because it's hitting too close to home. Nearly every HN post with a paywall has comments boycotting or denouncing said paywall, how else do you expect them to survive?
    • x0x0 9y ago
      I expect people who want robust investigations of what half trillion dollar companies are doing to pay for news, not expect reporters to devote say 1/4 of a year to an investigation at a cost of probably $100k+ (their salary, expenses, editors, travel, etc) in exchange for a couple hundred thousand pageviews with $0.1cpm ads. Though spending $100k to make $50 is actually supported by the valley =P ... but it doesn't lead to a robust public press.
      • danielam 9y ago
        It's not that simple. The amount of money it takes to run a newspaper exceeds the amount it could easily charge readers, at least in the conventional way in which newspapers have done. This has always been the case (a good read is Hillaire Belloc's "The Free Press").
• adventured 9y ago
  There is in fact a highly functional, proven alternative to what you're proposing. It's the Intel approach. The US Government allowed Intel to keep its monopoly, while simultaneously restraining it enough that Intel wasn't able to truly lock out various competitors from rising up over time. ARM, Samsung, nVidia, AMD, Taiwan Semi, etc. It's also what ended up happening with Microsoft & Windows. Had the US Government not been involved at all, Microsoft could have trivially barred all competing search engines (bye Google) from their desktop platform, and all other browsers (bye Netscape, Chrome, Firefox), and all competing media software (bye iTunes), and so on. Intel didn't have to be regulated as a fake natural monopoly that it in fact obviously wasn't (nor are Facebook or Google), in order to keep the lanes open to competition.
• am1988 9y ago
  and so Bezos buys the post while the control FB and Google have on advertising (and increasingly the internet in general) just makes Journalism ever more reliant on them.
• jpttsn 9y ago
  The term natural monopoly keeps cropping up, seemingly with a definition other than the one I'm familiar with. What does the natural adjective mean, the way you use it here?
  • _mhr_ 9y ago
    A natural monopoly is where a company operates in an industry in which either network effects or vertical integration make a big difference for the competitiveness of the company, so it's naturally incentivised within the market for one player to gradually become dominant. I don't buy that Google is a natural monopoly for search, but it makes sense for Amazon and Facebook, since network effects are huge. That's how I interpret it.
    • jpttsn 9y ago
      Assuming that's true for Facebook, how could they be so threatened by Instagram? Snapchat? And how could Facebook even make a dent in MySpace, who fit the natural monopoly definition above just as well? If social networking were a natural monopoly, could a startup really stand a chance? I feel the fast pace of innovation and customer behavior shifts makes these products very different from oil and railroads.
      • edaemon 9y ago
        Facebook isn't really threatened by either of those companies. They own Instagram. They also own WhatsApp, which is overtaking Snapchat in users[1]. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/3/15537000/whatsapp-stories-status-users-175-million https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/3/15537000/whatsapp-stories-...
        • mattnewton 9y ago
          They were threatened enough to buy them at large valuations is gp's point.
          • 9y ago
• Aloha 9y ago
  I personally don't see a good rationale for needing to recognize any of them as utilities. There are alternatives to Amazon, Facebook and Google - good ones at that - while it /could/ be argued that a search engine is an essential product, I would argue the opposite - and even more so for social networking and online shopping - if I saw conclusive proof that any go them were using their market power to force competitors out of the market, I might be more agreeable to the concept.
  • nikofeyn 9y ago
    what are the alternatives?
    • nl 9y ago
      eBay, Snap/Twitter, Bing.
      • hooluupig 9y ago
        Twitter is different from facebook.Snap is not and will never be a facebook alternative(vice versa).Because social network is not just client software but relationships.You can easily replace facebook/whatsapp with snapchat or whatever you like,but how do you persuade your friends and relatives to do that?If none of your friends use the alternatives,you have to reuse facebook.
  • crdoconnor 9y ago
    They've all used their market power to quash competitors.
    • elefanten 9y ago
      Your language is debatable, on a case by case basis. But even assuming it true, even that is not the standard by which anti-trust is judged. It's judged based on consumer welfare. That's where the debate should lie. And no doubt it is a debate still. And the debate alone could shape actions and outcomes.
• hnuser350 9y ago
  Google and Facebook's interest in suppressing "fake news" is especially worrisome given the lack of transparency in how they are run. Left leaning websites are already seeing drop in traffic from search referrals because of changes in Google's ranking[1][2] [1] https://mronline.org/2017/07/28/new-google-algorithm-restricts-access-to-left-wing-progressive-web-sites/ https://mronline.org/2017/07/28/new-google-algorithm-restric... [2] http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/07/28/pers-j28.html http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/07/28/pers-j28.html
• tootie 9y ago
  Aamzon isn't the #1 marketplace. They're the 9th largest retailer in a still very competitive space. Social media isn't important enough to regulate. Google Search is the only thing that could conceivably need regulation and really no one is demanding it right now.
• dredmorbius 9y ago
  NB: it was oil transport and most especially refining which seemed to capture true monopoly rents, most especially where oilfield control was not unitised. In the case of unitised oilfield control (that is: a single company or other entity controlled all extraction from a single resource), other monopoly powers might exist, most especially if the field exhibited lower-than-average costs (as in Saudi Arabia).