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The article calls for the splitting up of Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon. If the companies are not being anti competitive is it fair for a Government to b

The article calls for the splitting up of Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon. If the companies are not being anti competitive is it fair for a Government to break up private enterprise that is not breaking the law? I feel that it's going too far allowing Government to split apart corporations acting legally just for being successful. What are your thoughts?

mieseratte 9y ago
> that is not breaking the law? Illegal anti-competitive practices? Have we forgotten about Microsoft already?
- Gigablah 9y ago
  Which law are they breaking at this moment?
  - mieseratte 9y ago
    > Which law are they breaking at this moment? Fuck if I know, I'm not a Federal prosecutor. Point is, it's not hard to draw a line between legal history (United States vs. Microsoft) and various software giants and their practices. We've got a collective short-memory.
    - the-dude 9y ago
      What is exactly the legal history of the US vs MS ?
      - jimnotgym 9y ago
        Microsoft were accused of being a monopoly and abusing it in the US. The case was settled[0] with Microsoft retreating in the browser wars and other things. There were further cases brought by the EU over media players. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
        the-dude 9y ago
        We were talking about the US : the settlement did basically nothing which could be said to be detrimental to MS. Heck, they are opening up for years by themselves now.
        jimnotgym 9y ago
        OK keeping to the US case > The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel of three people who will have full access to Microsoft's systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure compliance Are you arguing that this had no effect? What about the effect it had on having to tread more carefully in the future?
        the-dude 9y ago
        Yes I am arguing it was merely a flick on the wrist(?). Threading more carefully : you may have a point there. Please explain how those measures have cost them money or market share.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
fulafel 9y ago
The mechanism for breaking up the companies would be new laws. Yes, it's generally considered fair for democratically elected governments to draft legislation regulating companies.
adventured 9y ago
The argument is certainly not attempting to be rational. If you want to break up Apple due to its economic power, then you have dozens of other corporations to slice into pieces. How? Who knows, some bureacrat with likely zero relevant qualifications will get to decide. If you take apart Apple, then you have to rip apart: Berkshire Hathaway, 3M, Johnson & Johnson, Caterpillar, Intel, Oracle, Cisco, nVidia, Netflix, Adobe, Activision Blizzard, Priceline, Exxon, Chevron, Pfizer, Merck, Amgen, AbbVie, Abbott Labs, Gilead, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Lockheed Martin, Visa, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Procter & Gamble, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Kraft Heinz, Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, Lowes, McDonald's, Starbucks, Nike, DowDupont, Disney, Boeing, CVS, Walgreens. I'd add GE to that list, but they've decided to take care of it themselves. You also reasonably have to start dealing harshly with similarly massive corporations HQ'd outside your jurisdiction, when they attempt to operate within your borders. Whether that's SAP, Toyota, Alibaba, AmBev, etc. Now, on some of those, without question, a large audience is shaking their head yes. For example, the big banks. There is a large segment that overwhelmingly thinks they need broken up. How do you forcibly break up 3M, Boeing and Home Depot? That's just begging for disaster. Then after you're done screwing with the economy, you have to pass a law that prevents nearly any acquisitions, so the giants outside your borders don't just scoop up the now weaker smaller entities and so that new giants never get constructed again. Good luck.
- yladiz 9y ago
  Nitpick: don't conflate conglomerates and other corporations, like BH and Apple. BH owns a lot of smaller companies but themselves don't do much as a holding company, whereas Apple is one big company that does a lot directly.
  - adventured 9y ago
    I'm intentionally including Berkshire, with full awareness of the difference between a conglomerate and eg Apple. This is about economic power, reach, influence over daily life. Berkshire reaches into daily American life every bit as much as Amazon does. The difference is you don't see a lot of what Berkshire does. Berkshire's energy position is massive. They operate one of the largest railroads. They operate one of the world's largest insurance businesses (or several of them if you view them seperately). They have huge influential stakes in everything from the largest banks to Coca Cola to Kraft Heinz. They're one of the largest owners of Apple. I'd argue their influence on daily American life exceeds that of Amazon.
jimnotgym 9y ago
My thoughts are that this is a moot point. They are being anti-competitive and are beginning to be shown to be in courts of law, at least in the <snark> free world </snark>[0][1]. In all seriousness the USA seems to have lost all appetite to pursue anti-trust cases, whereas it seemed rather keen on it in the early-mid 20th century. Regarding the tax avoidance, I notice Suckerberg and Thiel and their sub-Randian tax free fruitopian ideas. Perhaps we should let them avoid tax, and at the same time deny them the capital and property protecting powers that the state was designed for. No more copyright, patents, no access to courts at all. No criminal protection either, from hackers/DDOSers et al. At the same time if they want to use our state educated employees they can pay a special transfer fee to buy them of the state school system. There has developed a cult of 'I did this whole thing myself', which massively downplays the role society has in allowing the formation of a corporation and providing the protection of property and capital. None of which is free, and why should the regular Joe payroll tax payer pick up the tab? [0]https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/27/google-braces-for-record-breaking-1bn-fine-from-eu https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/27/google-brac... [1]http://www.techradar.com/news/new-standards-for-the-indian-online-market-as-google-gets-sued http://www.techradar.com/news/new-standards-for-the-indian-o... edit: I feel like I should have expressly mentioned limited-liability. Imagine if the investors in a private equity outfit hat to pick up the tab of all of the start-ups that go bankrupt? That is libertarian
- jstanley 9y ago
  Just because tax-funded services play a role in somebody's success doesn't mean that person morally owes arbitrary amounts of money to the government. Taxes are proportional to earnings, but the amount of money you cost the government is not. Why should you start paying more just because you were successful? If you actually wanted to implement "Suckerburg" and Thiel's "fruitopian" ideas, you should charge them a reasonable price based on the services they use, rather than based on how much money they earn. I suspect they pay substantially more taxes than most of us do.
  - jimnotgym 9y ago
    >arbitrary amounts of money... No proportional amounts of money >Taxes are proportional to earnings, but the amount of money you cost the government is not You don't think Google places rather more demand on the government than me? For instance I go to court occasionally to collect debts from customers. These are single 10 minute sessions before a judge. Compare this to Oracle Vs Google. Or we have a fleet of 11 delivery vehicles using the highways that society created, Amazon has hundreds. We have 100 employees that the state brought up, kept healthy (Yeah I know this is different in the US), educated and delivered to us at 16 ready to work. Google has 74k employees, Amazon has 566k. Then there is regulation, I am not in a position to abuse the market, these guys are and should pay for the arbitration and oversight that this needs. > charge them a reasonable price based on the services they use Yes, a reasonable price, hundreds of millions of dollars every year in every territory where they operate.
gaius 9y ago
Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon. Apple and Amazon are fundamentally different from Google and Facebook and shouldn’t even be mentioned together. The former want to sell you real products and services, the latter just want to trick you out of your personal data so they can sell it on.
- jimnotgym 9y ago
  Except Google also sell products that compete with Amazon and are seeking to restrict access to certain mainstream services from Amazon products! It's worse than you thought! https://mashable.com/2017/09/27/amazon-echo-show-youtube-access/ https://mashable.com/2017/09/27/amazon-echo-show-youtube-acc...
loup-vaillant 9y ago
"Fair" should not even be on the vocabulary when talking about what we should do to companies. Companies aren't people. What we do to them is secondary to whatever we do to actual people. Now, how a split would affect the people involved, that's another story. But if you weight the number of people in those companies, versus the number of people they affect worldwide, well… the moral weight of the company is a rounding error. The only thing that really counts is how stuff like a split would affect the rest of the world. And if it means putting those four companies out of business, well, tough luck. The greater good must prevail. And even then, there are ways to compensate for the subsequent spike in unemployment.
- thomasrognon 9y ago
  A company is a group of people. Why should a group of people be treated differently than an individual?
  - jimnotgym 9y ago
    A corporation is not a group of people, it is a body in itself. This is fundamental to the concept of a corporation. We can consider the rights of the various stakeholders of the company, consumers, shareholders, employees, neighbours and suppliers. But the idea that the corporation itself has anything equivalent to human rights is very distasteful. The idea of corporate personhood is a thing in US law at least, but it is the idea that the corporation is a person, not that it is a group of people.
    - thomasrognon 9y ago
      I don't agree with the idea that any type of company is a body in itself, or that it should be considered a person under law. It's a group of people who work together to achieve common goals. The concept of rights doesn't even apply, in the same way that "society" doesn't have rights. Individuals have rights. Taking money from a company means taking money from the people who own it. It doesn't exist apart from them. Making it seem so just makes it easier to violate the rights of the individuals involved. To me, it's as ridiculous as things like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U.S._Currency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U...
kzrdude 9y ago
Yes it is fair. The greatest power inside a country should be the democratic representatives of the people, which is the government.
- isoskeles 9y ago
  The government, in the US at least, is more powerful in matters of life and death, i.e. militarily. That doesn't make it right or fair to use that power. Not even the democratic will of the people makes it fair to simply break up a company. Why is it fair or unfair to break up these companies? The government should be powerful isn't a reason. I'll start: it's not protecting the consumer from monopoly prices. Google and Facebook don't charge the primary "consumer" anything, and ads are cheap. Amazon has competition (Walmart, Target). Apple has competition. What might be fair is using the democratic will of the people (although this is really just something done by representatives who can be influenced and don't always act on our will) to pass laws specifying behavior of these companies as illegal. Actual behavior, things like collecting gigabytes of personal data per individual to target ads, not things like "having too much money." The companies are not outright destroyed if they can find a way to make money without leaning on that behavior.
- gwright 9y ago
  Except for the notion of inalienable individual rights. One of the hallmarks of the US form of democracy is that government is NOT the greatest power. Its power is limited and must protect the individual rights of its constituents (people and states in some contexts).
dghughes 9y ago
I wonder if that's why Alphabet was created. Did Google see this coming and broke up itself and its other companies into smaller pieces to be ruled by Alphabet. I'm not sure what US law considers when breaking up companies. I recall AT&T being broken up but did it have any control over the new companies? If the four companies get too big and cause problems (tax avoidance) yes break them up. But if not I'd say leave them as is.

mieseratte 9y ago

> that is not breaking the law? Illegal anti-competitive practices? Have we forgotten about Microsoft already?

Gigablah 9y ago
Which law are they breaking at this moment?
- mieseratte 9y ago
  > Which law are they breaking at this moment? Fuck if I know, I'm not a Federal prosecutor. Point is, it's not hard to draw a line between legal history (United States vs. Microsoft) and various software giants and their practices. We've got a collective short-memory.
  - the-dude 9y ago
    What is exactly the legal history of the US vs MS ?
    - jimnotgym 9y ago
      Microsoft were accused of being a monopoly and abusing it in the US. The case was settled[0] with Microsoft retreating in the browser wars and other things. There were further cases brought by the EU over media players. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
      - the-dude 9y ago
        We were talking about the US : the settlement did basically nothing which could be said to be detrimental to MS. Heck, they are opening up for years by themselves now.
        jimnotgym 9y ago
        OK keeping to the US case > The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel of three people who will have full access to Microsoft's systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure compliance Are you arguing that this had no effect? What about the effect it had on having to tread more carefully in the future?
        the-dude 9y ago
        Yes I am arguing it was merely a flick on the wrist(?). Threading more carefully : you may have a point there. Please explain how those measures have cost them money or market share.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

fulafel 9y ago

The mechanism for breaking up the companies would be new laws. Yes, it's generally considered fair for democratically elected governments to draft legislation regulating companies.

adventured 9y ago

The argument is certainly not attempting to be rational. If you want to break up Apple due to its economic power, then you have dozens of other corporations to slice into pieces. How? Who knows, some bureacrat with likely zero relevant qualifications will get to decide. If you take apart Apple, then you have to rip apart: Berkshire Hathaway, 3M, Johnson & Johnson, Caterpillar, Intel, Oracle, Cisco, nVidia, Netflix, Adobe, Activision Blizzard, Priceline, Exxon, Chevron, Pfizer, Merck, Amgen, AbbVie, Abbott Labs, Gilead, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Lockheed Martin, Visa, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Procter & Gamble, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Kraft Heinz, Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, Lowes, McDonald's, Starbucks, Nike, DowDupont, Disney, Boeing, CVS, Walgreens. I'd add GE to that list, but they've decided to take care of it themselves. You also reasonably have to start dealing harshly with similarly massive corporations HQ'd outside your jurisdiction, when they attempt to operate within your borders. Whether that's SAP, Toyota, Alibaba, AmBev, etc. Now, on some of those, without question, a large audience is shaking their head yes. For example, the big banks. There is a large segment that overwhelmingly thinks they need broken up. How do you forcibly break up 3M, Boeing and Home Depot? That's just begging for disaster. Then after you're done screwing with the economy, you have to pass a law that prevents nearly any acquisitions, so the giants outside your borders don't just scoop up the now weaker smaller entities and so that new giants never get constructed again. Good luck.

yladiz 9y ago
Nitpick: don't conflate conglomerates and other corporations, like BH and Apple. BH owns a lot of smaller companies but themselves don't do much as a holding company, whereas Apple is one big company that does a lot directly.
- adventured 9y ago
  I'm intentionally including Berkshire, with full awareness of the difference between a conglomerate and eg Apple. This is about economic power, reach, influence over daily life. Berkshire reaches into daily American life every bit as much as Amazon does. The difference is you don't see a lot of what Berkshire does. Berkshire's energy position is massive. They operate one of the largest railroads. They operate one of the world's largest insurance businesses (or several of them if you view them seperately). They have huge influential stakes in everything from the largest banks to Coca Cola to Kraft Heinz. They're one of the largest owners of Apple. I'd argue their influence on daily American life exceeds that of Amazon.

jimnotgym 9y ago

My thoughts are that this is a moot point. They are being anti-competitive and are beginning to be shown to be in courts of law, at least in the <snark> free world </snark>[0][1]. In all seriousness the USA seems to have lost all appetite to pursue anti-trust cases, whereas it seemed rather keen on it in the early-mid 20th century. Regarding the tax avoidance, I notice Suckerberg and Thiel and their sub-Randian tax free fruitopian ideas. Perhaps we should let them avoid tax, and at the same time deny them the capital and property protecting powers that the state was designed for. No more copyright, patents, no access to courts at all. No criminal protection either, from hackers/DDOSers et al. At the same time if they want to use our state educated employees they can pay a special transfer fee to buy them of the state school system. There has developed a cult of 'I did this whole thing myself', which massively downplays the role society has in allowing the formation of a corporation and providing the protection of property and capital. None of which is free, and why should the regular Joe payroll tax payer pick up the tab? [0]https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/27/google-braces-for-record-breaking-1bn-fine-from-eu https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/27/google-brac... [1]http://www.techradar.com/news/new-standards-for-the-indian-online-market-as-google-gets-sued http://www.techradar.com/news/new-standards-for-the-indian-o... edit: I feel like I should have expressly mentioned limited-liability. Imagine if the investors in a private equity outfit hat to pick up the tab of all of the start-ups that go bankrupt? That is libertarian

jstanley 9y ago
Just because tax-funded services play a role in somebody's success doesn't mean that person morally owes arbitrary amounts of money to the government. Taxes are proportional to earnings, but the amount of money you cost the government is not. Why should you start paying more just because you were successful? If you actually wanted to implement "Suckerburg" and Thiel's "fruitopian" ideas, you should charge them a reasonable price based on the services they use, rather than based on how much money they earn. I suspect they pay substantially more taxes than most of us do.
- jimnotgym 9y ago
  >arbitrary amounts of money... No proportional amounts of money >Taxes are proportional to earnings, but the amount of money you cost the government is not You don't think Google places rather more demand on the government than me? For instance I go to court occasionally to collect debts from customers. These are single 10 minute sessions before a judge. Compare this to Oracle Vs Google. Or we have a fleet of 11 delivery vehicles using the highways that society created, Amazon has hundreds. We have 100 employees that the state brought up, kept healthy (Yeah I know this is different in the US), educated and delivered to us at 16 ready to work. Google has 74k employees, Amazon has 566k. Then there is regulation, I am not in a position to abuse the market, these guys are and should pay for the arbitration and oversight that this needs. > charge them a reasonable price based on the services they use Yes, a reasonable price, hundreds of millions of dollars every year in every territory where they operate.

gaius 9y ago

Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon. Apple and Amazon are fundamentally different from Google and Facebook and shouldn’t even be mentioned together. The former want to sell you real products and services, the latter just want to trick you out of your personal data so they can sell it on.

jimnotgym 9y ago
Except Google also sell products that compete with Amazon and are seeking to restrict access to certain mainstream services from Amazon products! It's worse than you thought! https://mashable.com/2017/09/27/amazon-echo-show-youtube-access/ https://mashable.com/2017/09/27/amazon-echo-show-youtube-acc...

loup-vaillant 9y ago

"Fair" should not even be on the vocabulary when talking about what we should do to companies. Companies aren't people. What we do to them is secondary to whatever we do to actual people. Now, how a split would affect the people involved, that's another story. But if you weight the number of people in those companies, versus the number of people they affect worldwide, well… the moral weight of the company is a rounding error. The only thing that really counts is how stuff like a split would affect the rest of the world. And if it means putting those four companies out of business, well, tough luck. The greater good must prevail. And even then, there are ways to compensate for the subsequent spike in unemployment.

thomasrognon 9y ago
A company is a group of people. Why should a group of people be treated differently than an individual?
- jimnotgym 9y ago
  A corporation is not a group of people, it is a body in itself. This is fundamental to the concept of a corporation. We can consider the rights of the various stakeholders of the company, consumers, shareholders, employees, neighbours and suppliers. But the idea that the corporation itself has anything equivalent to human rights is very distasteful. The idea of corporate personhood is a thing in US law at least, but it is the idea that the corporation is a person, not that it is a group of people.
  - thomasrognon 9y ago
    I don't agree with the idea that any type of company is a body in itself, or that it should be considered a person under law. It's a group of people who work together to achieve common goals. The concept of rights doesn't even apply, in the same way that "society" doesn't have rights. Individuals have rights. Taking money from a company means taking money from the people who own it. It doesn't exist apart from them. Making it seem so just makes it easier to violate the rights of the individuals involved. To me, it's as ridiculous as things like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U.S._Currency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U...

kzrdude 9y ago

Yes it is fair. The greatest power inside a country should be the democratic representatives of the people, which is the government.

isoskeles 9y ago
The government, in the US at least, is more powerful in matters of life and death, i.e. militarily. That doesn't make it right or fair to use that power. Not even the democratic will of the people makes it fair to simply break up a company. Why is it fair or unfair to break up these companies? The government should be powerful isn't a reason. I'll start: it's not protecting the consumer from monopoly prices. Google and Facebook don't charge the primary "consumer" anything, and ads are cheap. Amazon has competition (Walmart, Target). Apple has competition. What might be fair is using the democratic will of the people (although this is really just something done by representatives who can be influenced and don't always act on our will) to pass laws specifying behavior of these companies as illegal. Actual behavior, things like collecting gigabytes of personal data per individual to target ads, not things like "having too much money." The companies are not outright destroyed if they can find a way to make money without leaning on that behavior.
gwright 9y ago
Except for the notion of inalienable individual rights. One of the hallmarks of the US form of democracy is that government is NOT the greatest power. Its power is limited and must protect the individual rights of its constituents (people and states in some contexts).

dghughes 9y ago

I wonder if that's why Alphabet was created. Did Google see this coming and broke up itself and its other companies into smaller pieces to be ruled by Alphabet. I'm not sure what US law considers when breaking up companies. I recall AT&T being broken up but did it have any control over the new companies? If the four companies get too big and cause problems (tax avoidance) yes break them up. But if not I'd say leave them as is.