17 ms·

Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful?

229 points by clumsysmurf 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ronnier 8y ago
I'm OK with giant tech companies. America isn't the only place in the world and doesn't hold a monopoly on tech. If it's not American tech giants, it'll be Chinese or some other countries tech giants.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- peterlk 8y ago
  But these aren't American companies any more. They were founded in America, and there are lots of jobs created by them in America, and there's something to be said for both those things. But I think there's a larger issue here which is that sovereignty is being eroded by the consolidation of wealth and power. Companies move to Ireland to avoid taxes, set up warehousing shell companies in Nevada to avoid taxes, set up legal holding companies in Delaware so they can do whatever they want, file patents in Jamaica to claim precedence on things that others may have thought of, and I'm sure tons of other things that I'm not aware of.
  - acchow 8y ago
    > file patents in Jamaica to claim precedence on things that others may have thought of Can you explain how this works? Why would anyone care about Jamaican patents if they apparently don't play properly?
    - wjnqx 8y ago
      > "The tech giants are exploiting a US trademark-law provision that lets them effectively claim a trademark in secret." Jamaica and some other countries don't maintain searchable databases, allowing companies to register trademarks abroad in secret and then point to those registrations when claiming the mark in the US. Source: https://qz.com/808846/why-jamaica-knows-about-apples-new-products-before-the-rest-of-the-world/ https://qz.com/808846/why-jamaica-knows-about-apples-new-pro...
      - matt4077 8y ago
        Patents != trademarks
        musage 8y ago
        The actual point still stands though (though it is in response to something that doesn't even stand on it's own, but hey). Replace "patents" with "trademarks", which is not necessary for the structural integrity of the argument either way -- and follow the HN guidelines about the strongest interpretation of a comment.
    - sharemywin 8y ago
      Here's a few techniques: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/multinationals-turn-from-double-irish-to-single-malt-to-avoid-tax-in-ireland-1.3290649 https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/multinationals-t... https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2010/02/19/submarine-patents-alive-and-well-tivo-patents-dvr-scheduling/id=9168/ https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2010/02/19/submarine-patents-aliv...
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  > America ... doesn't hold a monopoly on tech Certainly seems that way.
  - notamicroshill 8y ago
    Proprietary anyway, free software seems much more international.
  - mattlondon 8y ago
    Perhaps it only seems that way for household names like apple, Facebook and google. There are a lot of less well known technology giants elsewhere in the world. E.g. ARM from the UK (now owned by Japanese giant SoftBank) has pretty much total domination on the smartphone CPU market (licensing anyway - lots of manufacturing is done by e.g. Samsung of Korea) My mum will have heard of Facebook and Google, but I guarantee that she and probably most other people's mother's have never ever heard of ARM. Just one example - countless others.
    - wilsonnb2 8y ago
      What's another example? This one strikes me as unique because ARM just sells their IP. Sure, our mothers probably haven't heard of ARM but that's more like saying they haven't heard of x86. Our mothers have almost definitely heard of Samsung and Apple, both of whom manufacture a large number of ARM chips. There's even a decent chance they've heard of a company like Qualcomm that's not as well known as Apple or Samsung.
      - andy_boot 8y ago
        Foxconn, SAP ? These are good examples aren't they. Edit: Not nvidia. Realised OP was asking for None-US companies
        eeZah7Ux 8y ago
        No.
    - 8y ago
- fjojab 8y ago
  But for much of the western world it's these American household names which have direct influence on people's livelihoods more than any other on a social/cultural level. When companies like Apple, Facebook and Google reach the 'giant' status that they have, the average person will have a choice made for them, becuase of what the status quo is, despite there being alternatives out there. The larger they get, the less choice the world has, meaning less indpendence.
HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
Looks like old media is feeling threatened.
- Kurtz79 8y ago
  You are being downvoted but, regardless of whether the argument has merit (it does IMHO), it is a fact that traditional media companies have been negatively affected by the rise of the new tech giants, and can be scarcely objective in the matter. Some of the biggest support to the recent copyright law rejected by the EU, came from traditional news outlets.
  - HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
    I'll charitably assume I'm being down-voted more because of how short and dismissive my remark was than anything else. Truth be told that's all I think the likes of the NYT deserves. Even the POTUS calls it "Failing New York Times".
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Gigablah 8y ago
Have the news media giants grown too powerful?
- slipkorts 8y ago
  Oh yeah, sure. Most of them are owned by the same people.
eulers__number 8y ago
heres a better rephrased question; Have the Governments Grown Too Powerful? let us abolish the enslavement by government, and let us abolish the state, and let anarcho-capitalism take its place.
confounded 8y ago
Unless you work for one, or have founded a company purpose-built for acquisition, I don’t see how the answer can be ‘No’. For entrepreneurs, the monopolistic stranglehold these companies have, make them impossible to beat with a better product. The best possible outcome is acquisition. You may join, but never beat them. For Free Software hackers, the giants turning away from open standards, and towards DRM and abuse of the CFAA, is chilling. For a free society, surveillance capitalism needs to die. If you have ambitions in life beyond RSUs and a regular massage, yes they are too powerful.
- neospice 8y ago
  As an entrepreneur, I feel that its not always the problem that they can't be beat at the product game- but that the product doesn't really matter. Often people don't look at the product, but the marketing. E.G. It's not a problem that SquareSpaces has an awesome site-builder, but it is a problem that they can afford to use [Keanu Reaves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqnhN2Rzaqc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqnhN2Rzaqc) as their mascot.
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > For Free Software hackers, the giants turning away from open standards, and towards DRM and abuse of the CFAA, is chilling. Every DRM needs two sides: A company implementing it and a mass of customers willing to tolerate it. The serious problem that I see is not the DRM itself, but the laws that prohibit people to develop and distribute cracks for the DRM.
- wilsonnb2 8y ago
  > For entrepreneurs, the monopolistic stranglehold these companies have, make them impossible to beat with a better product. The best possible outcome is acquisition. You may join, but never beat them. Isn't this exactly what everyone said about IBM until Microsoft came along, and then what everyone said about Microsoft until Google/Apple/Facebook/Amazon came along? Why is this time different?
  - dralley 8y ago
    Microsoft only stopped being a destructive force of nature after the Department of Justice gave them a kick to the face.
aalleavitch 8y ago
The problem isn’t that they’ve grown too powerful, it’s that they either haven’t recognized their own power or have willfully rejected the responsibility attached to it.
- pimmen 8y ago
  Basically this post. The whole debacle around Cambridge Analytica and political ads on Facebook is basically the consumers saying; "Congratulations Facebook, you conquered news publishers by piggy backing my cousin's puppy pictures! Did you know I expect responsibility from publisher's? As in, when I see slanderous information slung around at near the speed of light, someone better take responsibility for it."
  - tomjen3 8y ago
    Fine, Facebook would say, we don't care.
    - pimmen 8y ago
      Their response was not ”we don’t care” to the Cambridge Analytica and political ads scandal because when they didn’t respond at all at first the public became angry and politicians threatened with regulation. That’s why Zuckerberg eventually did appear before Congress and the EU parliament. To do otherwise is to guarantee regulation, and then Facebook would really care.
- flukus 8y ago
  > or have willfully rejected the responsibility attached to it. There is no responsibility attached to it, at least not legal responsibility. Even that isn't enough for anyone that gets to powerful and beyond enforcement. The truly sad thing is that you expect them to act responsibly. Companies will (and have) work children to death if it helps maximize output, if you expect them to act benevolently then prepare for disappointment.
  - Y_Y 8y ago
hexadecimal7e 8y ago
The problems with tech companies are not that they are big, but people follow them blindly. These companies only work for making money and are not around to help people. This other day a journalist asked a big computer game producing company why they are selling in-game stuff to kids (like Overwatch). They refused to answer. They are not around to help people. A hospital in Tanzania was in dire need for an upgrade of there IT-system connecting a X-ray machine to doctors for image analysis. They had no budget. 2 helpful guys from Europe searched the Webb for free software. On there free time they built a system which they installed themselves. The big companies are not around to help people.
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > These companies only work for making money and are not around to help people. This has nothing to do with tech companies.
- nojvek 8y ago
  Big companies are on the stock market with CEO’s who want to turn in a profit so market share goes higher. If they don’t do that, they get replaced. Tech is especially dangerous since it can automate vast amounts of things with very few people if capital is there. It just makes me really sad how non-existent Seattle startup industry is compared to the valley. Almost everyone here works at the Big Cos Microsoft and Amazon.
- wilsonnb2 8y ago
  In 2016, Google donated $167 million in cash and $1 billion in their own products to charitable causes. Microsoft - $135 million in cash, $922 million in product Cisco - $41 million in cash, $245 million in product AT&T - $112 million in cash, $7 million in product Verizon - $56 million in cash, $32 million in product While these companies are around primarily to make a profit, I'm sure that their $460 million dollars in cash donations sure helped a lot of people. Not to mention all the jobs they create (also helping people), the wealth they generate for their shareholders (also helping people), and the individual charitable donations of those shareholders. http://www.businessinsider.com/most-generous-companies-in-america-2015-2016-6#23-verizon-communications-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/most-generous-companies-in-am...
fipple 8y ago
LOL. What's next. "Have opioids been overprescribed?"
paxys 8y ago
Corporations have been "too powerful" in this country since its inception. Public policy, culture, politics, style and all other aspects of daily life have all been constantly influenced or outright driven by conglomerates in media, banking, big oil, defense etc. The only difference is that now tech, which had till recently been on the very fringe of this, is starting to upset the established order.
- mercer 8y ago
  Upset or supplant?
- viridian 8y ago
  American corporations have only been powerhouses capable of dominating the policy aspect of public life for 95-110 years. I know it seems pedantic, but it's annoying to watch people rewrite history. The industrial revolution weakened the power base of a strong American aristocracy, the majority of which had already been crippled after a brutal civil war. These were the ashes upon which corporate America was built.
  - astazangasta 8y ago
    The industrial revolution began before the civil war; export-driven growth began taking off in the 1840s. More broadly, industrialization weakened an artisan middle class - wages fell during early industrialization. This power was always concentrated in the hands of a bourgeois owning class; the limited liability corporation was one of the key early innovations of American government in promoting this economic form. The modern corporate form did not develop until later - a managerial class emerged starting around World War II (see: James Burnham) and is, I think, a big explanation for why the previous Gilded Age saw massive labor organizing that eventually drove American policy change, but this era has not - the ruling class bought their own organizers this time.
  - ameister14 8y ago
    America didn't really have an aristocracy. It had something that if left unchecked would probably become an aristocracy, but it didn't exist in that form yet.
s2g 8y ago
Yes, far too powerful. Both in society and within the tech sector. Break 'em up!
white-flame 8y ago
The "tech giants" are creating and controlling core forms of communication, both interpersonal and broadcast/public. That's too important and fundamental to the health of society to allow it to be arbitrarily engineered, filtered, and slanted for maximizing profit. If they were acting like common carriers, it would be a completely different issue. But they're not; they have business models that necessitate the manipulation of communication.
- snarf21 8y ago
  I agree that they are getting too powerful but the main issue is that the FTC keeps allowing all these mega mergers and consolidations. I also find it ironic that this is from the NYTimes when one could argue that 60 years ago that they were the too powerful one. The easiest source of information is always going to have an unfair advantage and drive the narrative. The only thing that has changed is that this is cheaper to do and scale now then in the old days. You can't stop people from being lazy.
  - extralego 8y ago
    >but the main issue is that the FTC keeps allowing all these mega mergers and consolidations. Such a short-sighted effort to identify a singular bad apple seems disingenuous. Hardly anyone on this site is blind to the FTC’s corrupt motivations for cooperating with the tech corporations. Is this an effort to soothing some personal guilt? I can’t make sense of it. >The only thing that has changed is that this is cheaper to so and scale now then in the old days. Not true or helpful. Why even try to make such a comparison? What about the FTC allowing mergers? You said it yourself! And nobody here will have trouble finding examples of businesses not participating in these dystopian and authoritarian practices. Very odd minimalization of these issues as laziness. I can’t imagine who you think you’re fooling.
  - CPLX 8y ago
    > I also find it ironic that this is from the NYTimes when one could argue that 60 years ago that they were the too powerful one. That's really a stretch. In 1968 there's no question the NYT was among the top 3-4 national newspapers, but it's not even a remotely close comparison. First of all you're still talking about a rather bulky collection of papers that had to be distributed daily in order to have any persuasive ability. The NYT never had daily sway over the residents of Colorado Springs or Salt Lake City, and as a practical matter pretty much every American had never picked up an issue. Their reach internationally was minimal at best, and even within NYC they had half a dozen very serious competitors. And of course the three major broadcast networks (both radio and TV) were of equal or higher reach as well. Comparing their reach 60 years ago to Facebook today is actually incredibly instructive, but not at all in the way you're implying.
ionised 8y ago
That's a question we should have been asking a few years ago.
darepublic 8y ago
OP should include the full NYT title that answers it's own question
kodablah 8y ago
Yet more pointless anti-tech drivel. I wish HN had a downvote option for articles (though I know some use the flagging feature for that). The cycle: news domain hosts newsless anti-tech article, people here and elsewhere say "yeah!", site gets clicks, narrative steered as intended, repeat tomorrow. We get it, many here and mass media are against big tech, can we just wait for news or at least unique perspectives before upvoting?
- sctb 8y ago
  > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. ... If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - kodablah 8y ago
    To clarify my point, I don't believe it is spam, off-topic, or flaggable. I just disagree with the frequency across the spectrum. Not specific to HN so, granted, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned HN in my comment.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
Yes. But we have to be careful here. Investors want every quarter of every company they invest in to be better than the previous quarter. They don't care about your 5 year goals or your 10 year goals. They want returns now. Companies do what they can to make that happen. If we say this is just a Tech problem, we're wrong. Tech is just where most of the money has flown because, dare I say, it's relatively easy money.
paidleaf 8y ago
They are powerful for sure, but I wouldn't say they are too powerful. When the media or politicians can brow-beat tech giants into submitting to their demands, you really can't say tech giants are too powerful. I'd say "too big to [f|j]ail" banks or "too big to [f|j]ail" oil companies are too powerful right now. But tech giants have the potential of becoming too powerful as they "collude/merge" with media and government. It's worrisome that giant techs are now moving into news media and working so much government.
wpdev_63 8y ago
It's interesting google maps came out with a new pricing model as mapbox gained popularity. It became more expensive and made the market easier for mapbox. Usually google would offer a cheaper, more competitive product but this wasn't the case.
sqdbps 8y ago
I really don't understand the self destructive desire to domestically pile on our tech firms while they are being shutout of the Chinese market by the government there which apparently appreciates the importance of these firms so much as to support their local companies financially, politically, and intellectually and on the other front the EU is using every tool at its disposal to hamstring US tech firms. Some comments here and elsewhere indicate that some pitchforks wielding folks are conflating this issue with the outcomes of recent political contests, the source of this confusion is poor-old media companies that keep feigning powerlessness while conveniently pointing the finger at business rivals.
- factorialboy 8y ago
  It's deliberate. Opinions are manipulated for power by countries and companies. Our minds are the biggest targets.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  I don't believe it's self-destructive to hold our companies accountable for what they do. Many of us also agree with what the EU is doing, and wish our government would get up off it's ass and do the same thing.
  - sqdbps 8y ago
    The EU is targeting US firms as a protectionist measure, you can read transcripts of their politicians' grandstanding and parroting local lobbyist to get the picture, they're not shy about it.
    - s73v3r_ 8y ago
      They're targeting those firms because they're the ones running roughshod over users.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Special interests and their existence inherently transgressing the "high school social order". Jobs were outsourced overseas decades ago and few blamed the business owners because that is what they do and the foreigners were too far away to be a punching bag. Just pretend it is a force of nature. Not to mention the desire to be one of the "rich kids". To be one they don't need to change anything about themselves - just have more money (so they think). Gentrification by hipsters? They are either producing a good restuarant restuarant in this dump for a change and neat or there to be laughed at as fools dressing up like their grandparents. Automation? They are ruining everything and it is all their fault! High prices due to companies moving in? It is the fault of those damn techies! Let's ignore all of the lawyers, marketers and managers though it is all the needs' fault! Those nerds aren't there to be mocked or out of sight and mind. It is their fault! Unlike the other "problem causers" the blamers don't want to be like them and they threaten their inherent sense of superiority. Not to mention how people blindly go along with norms like holding the rich and powerful less responsible. A rich kid crashing his car into someone drunk made a mistake. A poor kid doing so is inherently worthless trash.
keevie 8y ago
Fun exception to Betteridge's law of headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
jeffreyrogers 8y ago
I'm probably in the minority, but the negatives don't seem that bad when compared to the benefits we get from the tech companies: free email, free or cheap access to information on almost anything you could be interested in, junk entertainment that people seem to enjoy. The negatives are less tangible: giving up your personal data (this is complicated by the fact that the data didn't exist until you used their services), targeted advertising, I'm not sure what else there is. It's easy to criticize things, but it's harder to come up with an alternative system that would provide many of the same benefits. I'm not defending the current legal and regulatory system that large corporations operate in. I think they receive large amounts of corporate welfare from the government that are harmful overall, but that's an economy wide problem, not one confined to the tech industry. It also has more straightforward solutions: begin eliminating some of the subsidies these businesses receive.
- nkozyra 8y ago
  > free email, free or cheap access to information on almost anything you could be interested in, junk entertainment that people seem to enjoy. > giving up your personal data You just described precisely why it's not free.
- bobbygoodlatte 8y ago
  I agree, except for one potentially huge negative: they might be eroding our ability to have functional democracies. The tech giants' business models strongly incentivize maximizing the time a user spends within their app. To do that, their algorithms try to find the most engaging content to show you. The most engaging political content is often hyper-partisan, outrage-driven, and unconcerned with truth. These algorithms encourage bad faith participation by all players: media outlets, individuals, and politicians. Political ideas are often shared not out of deep seated belief, but in hopes of distribution. Democracy seems predicated on the idea that most participants will engage in good faith. Whether we like it or not, our civic discourse has moved over to platforms that seem to incentivize bad faith participation. I think that's cause for alarm.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
segmondy 8y ago
There's always someone that's powerful. If it's not tech, it's media or finance or someone else.
ascendantlogic 8y ago
As someone old enough to remember when IBM seemed too huge to ever lose in the market, along came Microsoft. Then when Microsoft felt like it was unstoppable, along came Google and Amazon. Now those companies are reaching the same terminal velocity and a new breed of companies will rise up and dethrone them.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  AT&T still dominates telephone service. Most phone companies are renamed Baby Bells. Facebook has the analytics information and wealth to buy any competitor. IBM gave itself away to Microsoft when an exec handed Bill Gates a sweetheart deal for DOS. Microsoft is still the dominant force in its original industry (desktop computing) which is still significant. The Internet disrupted companies that weren't ready for it. Do you think something new is coming alomg to replace the Internet? Even so, when one giant replaces another, so what? What problem does that solve? "When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers."
  - ascendantlogic 8y ago
    > The Internet disrupted companies that weren't ready for it. Do you think something new is coming alomg to replace the Internet? Yes, this is the way of technology and it's happening faster and faster. One of the biggest reasons Microsoft ended up on its back foot in the 2000's was because it disregarded the threat of Linux, and woke up too late to the mobile revolution. In all these cases there's hubris mixed with inertia and when the landscape shifts these giants aren't paying attention.
- kilotaras 8y ago
  Both IBM and Microsoft got hit with anittrust lawsuits, which curbed their monopolistic behavior.
benologist 8y ago
The tech giants have grown too profitable, at the expense of stuff they should be doing like paying taxes, or hiring enough people to oversee click fraud, or hire enough people to oversee counterfeit fraud, or hire enough people to oversee how companies use highly personal data. They hire just enough people to dodge taxes and somehow not be complicit in anything they directly profit from.
dalbasal 8y ago
This article is a bit meandering. Most of these are not really scale-specific issues, or are but in a roundabout way. Here's (imo) the most obvious reasons. Political Power- We used to complain about Rupert Murdoch's power. Media and journalism are a leg of democracy, so having a corporate oligopoly controlling it was worrying. Zuck's influence is way bigger. There have already been a handful of revolutions that started on FB, a dozen attempts at revolutions, full scale coups and thousands of elections where fb played a bigger role than any past media company. They didn't even notice this until it was Trump and/or stuff FB-ers cared about personally. (1) This is too much power. (2) FB are pretending this has nothing to do with them. They don't care about journalistic integrity, or feel it applies to them. They let anyone with a credit card sign up and run political ads. extremely irresponsible, at best. Monopoly - Thiel put it best, startups are about monopoly-or-bust. Uber wants to be the only ride app. YouTube the only free video site. FB the only networking app. The pattern is often: Innovate. Win. Then milk it with ads and spying and/or stop innovating. YouTube for example, it's nowhere near as good as it could be, but why bother. Data - data gets different qualities as it grows. A lot of the creepiness of targeted ads have more to do with how many people's data they have, not how much data they have about you. It locks in monopolies. It's also the newest category of "IP," which is (imo, but not gonna support it here) a current and future driver of wealth disparity. We're now (definitely in Europe) in a period where the public/legislators are very keen on regulating. This will likely lock these monopolies further into place. 4 out of 5 times, regulation is incumbent friendly.
super-serial 8y ago
The ISPs and mobile carriers are too powerful. At least Google/Facebook have to innovate, or buy companies like Instagram or Whatsapp that innovate. ISPs get their billions in revenue from monopoly. All they have to do is buy off politicans and put people like Ajit Pai in power. Now that they've started to acquire tech companies like Yahoo, no one can stop them from giving preferential treatment to their content and streaming services eventually threatening the ability for tech startups to compete through innovation.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  I'm still baffled by the focus on FANG as too powerful and inescapable, especially from generally left/liberal writers. They're not always friendly or easy to avoid, certainly, but they're far more escapable and far less legislatively malicious than Comcast, AT&T, and their ilk. Obviously lots of people are mad at those companies too, but it's frustrating to see "hit Google with antitrust suits!" getting high-profile NYT billing while "hit Comcast with antitrust suits!" doesn't.
  - lainga 8y ago
    >writers I think there's your problem. The FANG companies have such a higher profile than ISPs, and universal exposure among readers (vs. anyone who might live outside the US, or where Comcast doesn't have a monopoly), so articles on them will attract more attention. See $argument-about-the-decline-of-journalism and so on.
  - tivert 8y ago
    > I'm still baffled by the focus on FANG as too powerful and inescapable, especially from generally left/liberal writers. They're not always friendly or easy to avoid, certainly, but they're far more escapable and far less legislatively malicious than Comcast, AT&T, and their ilk. Facebook and Google have are far more powerful and inescapable for writers than for the general public, as those companies are the primary way the public discovers and consumes news media online. A regular person can easily delete their Facebook profile and switch to Duckduckgo, but the same would be suicide for a newspaper: they have to go where the eyeballs are.
bla2 8y ago
The nytimes publishes an article like this every few months. It's not like they're impartial in this area -- tech took news's audience. Don't give this attention it doesn't deserve.
RestlessMind 8y ago
It is a particularly dangerous moment for American Tech giants. In the US, liberals / Democrats hate them because: Tech is the biggest reason behind the decline of existing publishing business model and people in those industries lean liberal, Tech's contribution to rising inequality (due to automation etc), very apparent gentrification by Tech workers in places like SF / NYC. Conservatives / Republicans hate Tech because of its perceived liberal bias - see Facebook controversy in 2016 about suppression of Conservative topics, or Eric Schmidt campaigning for Hillary, or overwhelming majority of left-leaning people in these companies. Apart from US, other countries (eg. EU) hates Tech because they are foreign companies who are blind to local cultural sensitivities (eg. privacy, right to be forgotten, free speech to a near-absolute degree), and also the reasons why US left hates Tech (see above). Countries like China hate US Tech co's maybe because geopolitical reasons and CCP wants to nurture local Tech giants instead of rolling out a red carpet to American Tech. American Tech giants should really be nervous.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
Am I surprised that the New York times doesn't ask "Have the banking giants grown too powerful?" No I am not. I am also not sure why the NYT feels compelled to bash the Bay Area from time to time but whatever. Do I think there should be more privacy reform? Yes. Do I think there should be more banking reform? Yes. Do I think for a minute that the current state of the world will persist for a decade? Not really.
- neuromantik8086 8y ago
  > "Have the banking giants grown too powerful?" The New York Times never asks this question because it doesn't make for news and the answer has basically been the same since the emergence of banking giants. Asking if banking is too powerful will always yield an affirmative, and the discerning NYTimes reader will react with a justified, "No shit Sherlock". > I am also not sure why the NYT feels compelled to bash the Bay Area The issue is cultural. Folks from the Bay Area tend to couch their money-making schemes with nonsense about making the world a better place. Finance workers in NYC have no need to sugarcoat what they do and are unabashedly trying to make ludicrous amounts of money. In New York, calling people out on their bullshit is deeply culturally ingrained, and the Bay Area is clearly full of it. :. The NY Times gives its primary demographic what it wants.
  - ChuckMcM 8y ago
    Fair enough.
- brennanc 8y ago
  I don't know if it's necessarily a NY vs. SF thing. I see it as the NYT trying to push a conversation. Everyone knows that the financial sector is too powerful, and attempts have been made to take action on it (i.e. regulation, albeit relatively unsuccessful). I think this is the first time we're really seeing a public conversation about the power of software fueled by advertising and its implications on privacy and speech - discussion about regulation and policies is coming around for the first time, making it pretty important news to cover.
CM30 8y ago
They certainly have from the perspective of a website creator or business owner. If you're running a business (or hell, any service in general), then you have to either play by Google and Facebook's rules or risk being rendered totally irrelevant and inaccessible to large portions of the population. If your company's website is banned from Google, that can effectively be game over for the company, especially if you can't get reconsidered. Same if they move into your industry in many cases.
olliej 8y ago
Collectively all large corps in America have too much power, so i’ll assume we mean “more power than the other corporations” I’m that case I’ll believe that they’re “too powerful” when a tech company mismanages itself to bankruptcy and gets a bail out from tax payer funds. Or when other companies are forced by the government to use (and pay more for) software and tech from a specific company or group of companies (maybe software from “defense” contractors counts?). Until then i’ll continue to believe that banks, coal, and oil companies have too much power.

229 points by clumsysmurf 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

I'm OK with giant tech companies. America isn't the only place in the world and doesn't hold a monopoly on tech. If it's not American tech giants, it'll be Chinese or some other countries tech giants.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
peterlk 8y ago
But these aren't American companies any more. They were founded in America, and there are lots of jobs created by them in America, and there's something to be said for both those things. But I think there's a larger issue here which is that sovereignty is being eroded by the consolidation of wealth and power. Companies move to Ireland to avoid taxes, set up warehousing shell companies in Nevada to avoid taxes, set up legal holding companies in Delaware so they can do whatever they want, file patents in Jamaica to claim precedence on things that others may have thought of, and I'm sure tons of other things that I'm not aware of.
- acchow 8y ago
  > file patents in Jamaica to claim precedence on things that others may have thought of Can you explain how this works? Why would anyone care about Jamaican patents if they apparently don't play properly?
  - wjnqx 8y ago
    > "The tech giants are exploiting a US trademark-law provision that lets them effectively claim a trademark in secret." Jamaica and some other countries don't maintain searchable databases, allowing companies to register trademarks abroad in secret and then point to those registrations when claiming the mark in the US. Source: https://qz.com/808846/why-jamaica-knows-about-apples-new-products-before-the-rest-of-the-world/ https://qz.com/808846/why-jamaica-knows-about-apples-new-pro...
    - matt4077 8y ago
      Patents != trademarks
      - musage 8y ago
        The actual point still stands though (though it is in response to something that doesn't even stand on it's own, but hey). Replace "patents" with "trademarks", which is not necessary for the structural integrity of the argument either way -- and follow the HN guidelines about the strongest interpretation of a comment.
  - sharemywin 8y ago
    Here's a few techniques: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/multinationals-turn-from-double-irish-to-single-malt-to-avoid-tax-in-ireland-1.3290649 https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/multinationals-t... https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2010/02/19/submarine-patents-alive-and-well-tivo-patents-dvr-scheduling/id=9168/ https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2010/02/19/submarine-patents-aliv...
dingo_bat 8y ago
> America ... doesn't hold a monopoly on tech Certainly seems that way.
- notamicroshill 8y ago
  Proprietary anyway, free software seems much more international.
- mattlondon 8y ago
  Perhaps it only seems that way for household names like apple, Facebook and google. There are a lot of less well known technology giants elsewhere in the world. E.g. ARM from the UK (now owned by Japanese giant SoftBank) has pretty much total domination on the smartphone CPU market (licensing anyway - lots of manufacturing is done by e.g. Samsung of Korea) My mum will have heard of Facebook and Google, but I guarantee that she and probably most other people's mother's have never ever heard of ARM. Just one example - countless others.
  - wilsonnb2 8y ago
    What's another example? This one strikes me as unique because ARM just sells their IP. Sure, our mothers probably haven't heard of ARM but that's more like saying they haven't heard of x86. Our mothers have almost definitely heard of Samsung and Apple, both of whom manufacture a large number of ARM chips. There's even a decent chance they've heard of a company like Qualcomm that's not as well known as Apple or Samsung.
    - andy_boot 8y ago
      Foxconn, SAP ? These are good examples aren't they. Edit: Not nvidia. Realised OP was asking for None-US companies
      - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
        No.
  - 8y ago
fjojab 8y ago
But for much of the western world it's these American household names which have direct influence on people's livelihoods more than any other on a social/cultural level. When companies like Apple, Facebook and Google reach the 'giant' status that they have, the average person will have a choice made for them, becuase of what the status quo is, despite there being alternatives out there. The larger they get, the less choice the world has, meaning less indpendence.

HumanDrivenDev 8y ago

Looks like old media is feeling threatened.

Kurtz79 8y ago
You are being downvoted but, regardless of whether the argument has merit (it does IMHO), it is a fact that traditional media companies have been negatively affected by the rise of the new tech giants, and can be scarcely objective in the matter. Some of the biggest support to the recent copyright law rejected by the EU, came from traditional news outlets.
- HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
  I'll charitably assume I'm being down-voted more because of how short and dismissive my remark was than anything else. Truth be told that's all I think the likes of the NYT deserves. Even the POTUS calls it "Failing New York Times".

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Gigablah 8y ago

Have the news media giants grown too powerful?

slipkorts 8y ago
Oh yeah, sure. Most of them are owned by the same people.

eulers__number 8y ago

heres a better rephrased question; Have the Governments Grown Too Powerful? let us abolish the enslavement by government, and let us abolish the state, and let anarcho-capitalism take its place.

confounded 8y ago

Unless you work for one, or have founded a company purpose-built for acquisition, I don’t see how the answer can be ‘No’. For entrepreneurs, the monopolistic stranglehold these companies have, make them impossible to beat with a better product. The best possible outcome is acquisition. You may join, but never beat them. For Free Software hackers, the giants turning away from open standards, and towards DRM and abuse of the CFAA, is chilling. For a free society, surveillance capitalism needs to die. If you have ambitions in life beyond RSUs and a regular massage, yes they are too powerful.

neospice 8y ago
As an entrepreneur, I feel that its not always the problem that they can't be beat at the product game- but that the product doesn't really matter. Often people don't look at the product, but the marketing. E.G. It's not a problem that SquareSpaces has an awesome site-builder, but it is a problem that they can afford to use [Keanu Reaves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqnhN2Rzaqc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqnhN2Rzaqc) as their mascot.
wolfgke 8y ago
> For Free Software hackers, the giants turning away from open standards, and towards DRM and abuse of the CFAA, is chilling. Every DRM needs two sides: A company implementing it and a mass of customers willing to tolerate it. The serious problem that I see is not the DRM itself, but the laws that prohibit people to develop and distribute cracks for the DRM.
wilsonnb2 8y ago
> For entrepreneurs, the monopolistic stranglehold these companies have, make them impossible to beat with a better product. The best possible outcome is acquisition. You may join, but never beat them. Isn't this exactly what everyone said about IBM until Microsoft came along, and then what everyone said about Microsoft until Google/Apple/Facebook/Amazon came along? Why is this time different?
- dralley 8y ago
  Microsoft only stopped being a destructive force of nature after the Department of Justice gave them a kick to the face.

aalleavitch 8y ago

The problem isn’t that they’ve grown too powerful, it’s that they either haven’t recognized their own power or have willfully rejected the responsibility attached to it.

pimmen 8y ago
Basically this post. The whole debacle around Cambridge Analytica and political ads on Facebook is basically the consumers saying; "Congratulations Facebook, you conquered news publishers by piggy backing my cousin's puppy pictures! Did you know I expect responsibility from publisher's? As in, when I see slanderous information slung around at near the speed of light, someone better take responsibility for it."
- tomjen3 8y ago
  Fine, Facebook would say, we don't care.
  - pimmen 8y ago
    Their response was not ”we don’t care” to the Cambridge Analytica and political ads scandal because when they didn’t respond at all at first the public became angry and politicians threatened with regulation. That’s why Zuckerberg eventually did appear before Congress and the EU parliament. To do otherwise is to guarantee regulation, and then Facebook would really care.
flukus 8y ago
> or have willfully rejected the responsibility attached to it. There is no responsibility attached to it, at least not legal responsibility. Even that isn't enough for anyone that gets to powerful and beyond enforcement. The truly sad thing is that you expect them to act responsibly. Companies will (and have) work children to death if it helps maximize output, if you expect them to act benevolently then prepare for disappointment.
- Y_Y 8y ago

hexadecimal7e 8y ago

The problems with tech companies are not that they are big, but people follow them blindly. These companies only work for making money and are not around to help people. This other day a journalist asked a big computer game producing company why they are selling in-game stuff to kids (like Overwatch). They refused to answer. They are not around to help people. A hospital in Tanzania was in dire need for an upgrade of there IT-system connecting a X-ray machine to doctors for image analysis. They had no budget. 2 helpful guys from Europe searched the Webb for free software. On there free time they built a system which they installed themselves. The big companies are not around to help people.

wolfgke 8y ago
> These companies only work for making money and are not around to help people. This has nothing to do with tech companies.
nojvek 8y ago
Big companies are on the stock market with CEO’s who want to turn in a profit so market share goes higher. If they don’t do that, they get replaced. Tech is especially dangerous since it can automate vast amounts of things with very few people if capital is there. It just makes me really sad how non-existent Seattle startup industry is compared to the valley. Almost everyone here works at the Big Cos Microsoft and Amazon.
wilsonnb2 8y ago
In 2016, Google donated $167 million in cash and $1 billion in their own products to charitable causes. Microsoft - $135 million in cash, $922 million in product Cisco - $41 million in cash, $245 million in product AT&T - $112 million in cash, $7 million in product Verizon - $56 million in cash, $32 million in product While these companies are around primarily to make a profit, I'm sure that their $460 million dollars in cash donations sure helped a lot of people. Not to mention all the jobs they create (also helping people), the wealth they generate for their shareholders (also helping people), and the individual charitable donations of those shareholders. http://www.businessinsider.com/most-generous-companies-in-america-2015-2016-6#23-verizon-communications-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/most-generous-companies-in-am...

fipple 8y ago

LOL. What's next. "Have opioids been overprescribed?"

paxys 8y ago

Corporations have been "too powerful" in this country since its inception. Public policy, culture, politics, style and all other aspects of daily life have all been constantly influenced or outright driven by conglomerates in media, banking, big oil, defense etc. The only difference is that now tech, which had till recently been on the very fringe of this, is starting to upset the established order.

mercer 8y ago
Upset or supplant?
viridian 8y ago
American corporations have only been powerhouses capable of dominating the policy aspect of public life for 95-110 years. I know it seems pedantic, but it's annoying to watch people rewrite history. The industrial revolution weakened the power base of a strong American aristocracy, the majority of which had already been crippled after a brutal civil war. These were the ashes upon which corporate America was built.
- astazangasta 8y ago
  The industrial revolution began before the civil war; export-driven growth began taking off in the 1840s. More broadly, industrialization weakened an artisan middle class - wages fell during early industrialization. This power was always concentrated in the hands of a bourgeois owning class; the limited liability corporation was one of the key early innovations of American government in promoting this economic form. The modern corporate form did not develop until later - a managerial class emerged starting around World War II (see: James Burnham) and is, I think, a big explanation for why the previous Gilded Age saw massive labor organizing that eventually drove American policy change, but this era has not - the ruling class bought their own organizers this time.
- ameister14 8y ago
  America didn't really have an aristocracy. It had something that if left unchecked would probably become an aristocracy, but it didn't exist in that form yet.

s2g 8y ago

Yes, far too powerful. Both in society and within the tech sector. Break 'em up!

white-flame 8y ago

The "tech giants" are creating and controlling core forms of communication, both interpersonal and broadcast/public. That's too important and fundamental to the health of society to allow it to be arbitrarily engineered, filtered, and slanted for maximizing profit. If they were acting like common carriers, it would be a completely different issue. But they're not; they have business models that necessitate the manipulation of communication.

snarf21 8y ago
I agree that they are getting too powerful but the main issue is that the FTC keeps allowing all these mega mergers and consolidations. I also find it ironic that this is from the NYTimes when one could argue that 60 years ago that they were the too powerful one. The easiest source of information is always going to have an unfair advantage and drive the narrative. The only thing that has changed is that this is cheaper to do and scale now then in the old days. You can't stop people from being lazy.
- extralego 8y ago
  >but the main issue is that the FTC keeps allowing all these mega mergers and consolidations. Such a short-sighted effort to identify a singular bad apple seems disingenuous. Hardly anyone on this site is blind to the FTC’s corrupt motivations for cooperating with the tech corporations. Is this an effort to soothing some personal guilt? I can’t make sense of it. >The only thing that has changed is that this is cheaper to so and scale now then in the old days. Not true or helpful. Why even try to make such a comparison? What about the FTC allowing mergers? You said it yourself! And nobody here will have trouble finding examples of businesses not participating in these dystopian and authoritarian practices. Very odd minimalization of these issues as laziness. I can’t imagine who you think you’re fooling.
- CPLX 8y ago
  > I also find it ironic that this is from the NYTimes when one could argue that 60 years ago that they were the too powerful one. That's really a stretch. In 1968 there's no question the NYT was among the top 3-4 national newspapers, but it's not even a remotely close comparison. First of all you're still talking about a rather bulky collection of papers that had to be distributed daily in order to have any persuasive ability. The NYT never had daily sway over the residents of Colorado Springs or Salt Lake City, and as a practical matter pretty much every American had never picked up an issue. Their reach internationally was minimal at best, and even within NYC they had half a dozen very serious competitors. And of course the three major broadcast networks (both radio and TV) were of equal or higher reach as well. Comparing their reach 60 years ago to Facebook today is actually incredibly instructive, but not at all in the way you're implying.

ionised 8y ago

That's a question we should have been asking a few years ago.

darepublic 8y ago

OP should include the full NYT title that answers it's own question

kodablah 8y ago

Yet more pointless anti-tech drivel. I wish HN had a downvote option for articles (though I know some use the flagging feature for that). The cycle: news domain hosts newsless anti-tech article, people here and elsewhere say "yeah!", site gets clicks, narrative steered as intended, repeat tomorrow. We get it, many here and mass media are against big tech, can we just wait for news or at least unique perspectives before upvoting?

sctb 8y ago
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. ... If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- kodablah 8y ago
  To clarify my point, I don't believe it is spam, off-topic, or flaggable. I just disagree with the frequency across the spectrum. Not specific to HN so, granted, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned HN in my comment.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

Yes. But we have to be careful here. Investors want every quarter of every company they invest in to be better than the previous quarter. They don't care about your 5 year goals or your 10 year goals. They want returns now. Companies do what they can to make that happen. If we say this is just a Tech problem, we're wrong. Tech is just where most of the money has flown because, dare I say, it's relatively easy money.

paidleaf 8y ago

They are powerful for sure, but I wouldn't say they are too powerful. When the media or politicians can brow-beat tech giants into submitting to their demands, you really can't say tech giants are too powerful. I'd say "too big to [f|j]ail" banks or "too big to [f|j]ail" oil companies are too powerful right now. But tech giants have the potential of becoming too powerful as they "collude/merge" with media and government. It's worrisome that giant techs are now moving into news media and working so much government.

wpdev_63 8y ago

It's interesting google maps came out with a new pricing model as mapbox gained popularity. It became more expensive and made the market easier for mapbox. Usually google would offer a cheaper, more competitive product but this wasn't the case.

sqdbps 8y ago

I really don't understand the self destructive desire to domestically pile on our tech firms while they are being shutout of the Chinese market by the government there which apparently appreciates the importance of these firms so much as to support their local companies financially, politically, and intellectually and on the other front the EU is using every tool at its disposal to hamstring US tech firms. Some comments here and elsewhere indicate that some pitchforks wielding folks are conflating this issue with the outcomes of recent political contests, the source of this confusion is poor-old media companies that keep feigning powerlessness while conveniently pointing the finger at business rivals.

factorialboy 8y ago
It's deliberate. Opinions are manipulated for power by countries and companies. Our minds are the biggest targets.
s73v3r_ 8y ago
I don't believe it's self-destructive to hold our companies accountable for what they do. Many of us also agree with what the EU is doing, and wish our government would get up off it's ass and do the same thing.
- sqdbps 8y ago
  The EU is targeting US firms as a protectionist measure, you can read transcripts of their politicians' grandstanding and parroting local lobbyist to get the picture, they're not shy about it.
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    They're targeting those firms because they're the ones running roughshod over users.
Nasrudith 8y ago
Special interests and their existence inherently transgressing the "high school social order". Jobs were outsourced overseas decades ago and few blamed the business owners because that is what they do and the foreigners were too far away to be a punching bag. Just pretend it is a force of nature. Not to mention the desire to be one of the "rich kids". To be one they don't need to change anything about themselves - just have more money (so they think). Gentrification by hipsters? They are either producing a good restuarant restuarant in this dump for a change and neat or there to be laughed at as fools dressing up like their grandparents. Automation? They are ruining everything and it is all their fault! High prices due to companies moving in? It is the fault of those damn techies! Let's ignore all of the lawyers, marketers and managers though it is all the needs' fault! Those nerds aren't there to be mocked or out of sight and mind. It is their fault! Unlike the other "problem causers" the blamers don't want to be like them and they threaten their inherent sense of superiority. Not to mention how people blindly go along with norms like holding the rich and powerful less responsible. A rich kid crashing his car into someone drunk made a mistake. A poor kid doing so is inherently worthless trash.

keevie 8y ago

Fun exception to Betteridge's law of headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

jeffreyrogers 8y ago

I'm probably in the minority, but the negatives don't seem that bad when compared to the benefits we get from the tech companies: free email, free or cheap access to information on almost anything you could be interested in, junk entertainment that people seem to enjoy. The negatives are less tangible: giving up your personal data (this is complicated by the fact that the data didn't exist until you used their services), targeted advertising, I'm not sure what else there is. It's easy to criticize things, but it's harder to come up with an alternative system that would provide many of the same benefits. I'm not defending the current legal and regulatory system that large corporations operate in. I think they receive large amounts of corporate welfare from the government that are harmful overall, but that's an economy wide problem, not one confined to the tech industry. It also has more straightforward solutions: begin eliminating some of the subsidies these businesses receive.

nkozyra 8y ago
> free email, free or cheap access to information on almost anything you could be interested in, junk entertainment that people seem to enjoy. > giving up your personal data You just described precisely why it's not free.
bobbygoodlatte 8y ago
I agree, except for one potentially huge negative: they might be eroding our ability to have functional democracies. The tech giants' business models strongly incentivize maximizing the time a user spends within their app. To do that, their algorithms try to find the most engaging content to show you. The most engaging political content is often hyper-partisan, outrage-driven, and unconcerned with truth. These algorithms encourage bad faith participation by all players: media outlets, individuals, and politicians. Political ideas are often shared not out of deep seated belief, but in hopes of distribution. Democracy seems predicated on the idea that most participants will engage in good faith. Whether we like it or not, our civic discourse has moved over to platforms that seem to incentivize bad faith participation. I think that's cause for alarm.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago

segmondy 8y ago

There's always someone that's powerful. If it's not tech, it's media or finance or someone else.

ascendantlogic 8y ago

As someone old enough to remember when IBM seemed too huge to ever lose in the market, along came Microsoft. Then when Microsoft felt like it was unstoppable, along came Google and Amazon. Now those companies are reaching the same terminal velocity and a new breed of companies will rise up and dethrone them.

fjsolwmv 8y ago
AT&T still dominates telephone service. Most phone companies are renamed Baby Bells. Facebook has the analytics information and wealth to buy any competitor. IBM gave itself away to Microsoft when an exec handed Bill Gates a sweetheart deal for DOS. Microsoft is still the dominant force in its original industry (desktop computing) which is still significant. The Internet disrupted companies that weren't ready for it. Do you think something new is coming alomg to replace the Internet? Even so, when one giant replaces another, so what? What problem does that solve? "When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers."
- ascendantlogic 8y ago
  > The Internet disrupted companies that weren't ready for it. Do you think something new is coming alomg to replace the Internet? Yes, this is the way of technology and it's happening faster and faster. One of the biggest reasons Microsoft ended up on its back foot in the 2000's was because it disregarded the threat of Linux, and woke up too late to the mobile revolution. In all these cases there's hubris mixed with inertia and when the landscape shifts these giants aren't paying attention.
kilotaras 8y ago
Both IBM and Microsoft got hit with anittrust lawsuits, which curbed their monopolistic behavior.

benologist 8y ago

The tech giants have grown too profitable, at the expense of stuff they should be doing like paying taxes, or hiring enough people to oversee click fraud, or hire enough people to oversee counterfeit fraud, or hire enough people to oversee how companies use highly personal data. They hire just enough people to dodge taxes and somehow not be complicit in anything they directly profit from.

dalbasal 8y ago

This article is a bit meandering. Most of these are not really scale-specific issues, or are but in a roundabout way. Here's (imo) the most obvious reasons. Political Power- We used to complain about Rupert Murdoch's power. Media and journalism are a leg of democracy, so having a corporate oligopoly controlling it was worrying. Zuck's influence is way bigger. There have already been a handful of revolutions that started on FB, a dozen attempts at revolutions, full scale coups and thousands of elections where fb played a bigger role than any past media company. They didn't even notice this until it was Trump and/or stuff FB-ers cared about personally. (1) This is too much power. (2) FB are pretending this has nothing to do with them. They don't care about journalistic integrity, or feel it applies to them. They let anyone with a credit card sign up and run political ads. extremely irresponsible, at best. Monopoly - Thiel put it best, startups are about monopoly-or-bust. Uber wants to be the only ride app. YouTube the only free video site. FB the only networking app. The pattern is often: Innovate. Win. Then milk it with ads and spying and/or stop innovating. YouTube for example, it's nowhere near as good as it could be, but why bother. Data - data gets different qualities as it grows. A lot of the creepiness of targeted ads have more to do with how many people's data they have, not how much data they have about you. It locks in monopolies. It's also the newest category of "IP," which is (imo, but not gonna support it here) a current and future driver of wealth disparity. We're now (definitely in Europe) in a period where the public/legislators are very keen on regulating. This will likely lock these monopolies further into place. 4 out of 5 times, regulation is incumbent friendly.

super-serial 8y ago

The ISPs and mobile carriers are too powerful. At least Google/Facebook have to innovate, or buy companies like Instagram or Whatsapp that innovate. ISPs get their billions in revenue from monopoly. All they have to do is buy off politicans and put people like Ajit Pai in power. Now that they've started to acquire tech companies like Yahoo, no one can stop them from giving preferential treatment to their content and streaming services eventually threatening the ability for tech startups to compete through innovation.

Bartweiss 8y ago
I'm still baffled by the focus on FANG as too powerful and inescapable, especially from generally left/liberal writers. They're not always friendly or easy to avoid, certainly, but they're far more escapable and far less legislatively malicious than Comcast, AT&T, and their ilk. Obviously lots of people are mad at those companies too, but it's frustrating to see "hit Google with antitrust suits!" getting high-profile NYT billing while "hit Comcast with antitrust suits!" doesn't.
- lainga 8y ago
  >writers I think there's your problem. The FANG companies have such a higher profile than ISPs, and universal exposure among readers (vs. anyone who might live outside the US, or where Comcast doesn't have a monopoly), so articles on them will attract more attention. See $argument-about-the-decline-of-journalism and so on.
- tivert 8y ago
  > I'm still baffled by the focus on FANG as too powerful and inescapable, especially from generally left/liberal writers. They're not always friendly or easy to avoid, certainly, but they're far more escapable and far less legislatively malicious than Comcast, AT&T, and their ilk. Facebook and Google have are far more powerful and inescapable for writers than for the general public, as those companies are the primary way the public discovers and consumes news media online. A regular person can easily delete their Facebook profile and switch to Duckduckgo, but the same would be suicide for a newspaper: they have to go where the eyeballs are.

bla2 8y ago

The nytimes publishes an article like this every few months. It's not like they're impartial in this area -- tech took news's audience. Don't give this attention it doesn't deserve.

RestlessMind 8y ago

It is a particularly dangerous moment for American Tech giants. In the US, liberals / Democrats hate them because: Tech is the biggest reason behind the decline of existing publishing business model and people in those industries lean liberal, Tech's contribution to rising inequality (due to automation etc), very apparent gentrification by Tech workers in places like SF / NYC. Conservatives / Republicans hate Tech because of its perceived liberal bias - see Facebook controversy in 2016 about suppression of Conservative topics, or Eric Schmidt campaigning for Hillary, or overwhelming majority of left-leaning people in these companies. Apart from US, other countries (eg. EU) hates Tech because they are foreign companies who are blind to local cultural sensitivities (eg. privacy, right to be forgotten, free speech to a near-absolute degree), and also the reasons why US left hates Tech (see above). Countries like China hate US Tech co's maybe because geopolitical reasons and CCP wants to nurture local Tech giants instead of rolling out a red carpet to American Tech. American Tech giants should really be nervous.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

Am I surprised that the New York times doesn't ask "Have the banking giants grown too powerful?" No I am not. I am also not sure why the NYT feels compelled to bash the Bay Area from time to time but whatever. Do I think there should be more privacy reform? Yes. Do I think there should be more banking reform? Yes. Do I think for a minute that the current state of the world will persist for a decade? Not really.

neuromantik8086 8y ago
> "Have the banking giants grown too powerful?" The New York Times never asks this question because it doesn't make for news and the answer has basically been the same since the emergence of banking giants. Asking if banking is too powerful will always yield an affirmative, and the discerning NYTimes reader will react with a justified, "No shit Sherlock". > I am also not sure why the NYT feels compelled to bash the Bay Area The issue is cultural. Folks from the Bay Area tend to couch their money-making schemes with nonsense about making the world a better place. Finance workers in NYC have no need to sugarcoat what they do and are unabashedly trying to make ludicrous amounts of money. In New York, calling people out on their bullshit is deeply culturally ingrained, and the Bay Area is clearly full of it. :. The NY Times gives its primary demographic what it wants.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  Fair enough.
brennanc 8y ago
I don't know if it's necessarily a NY vs. SF thing. I see it as the NYT trying to push a conversation. Everyone knows that the financial sector is too powerful, and attempts have been made to take action on it (i.e. regulation, albeit relatively unsuccessful). I think this is the first time we're really seeing a public conversation about the power of software fueled by advertising and its implications on privacy and speech - discussion about regulation and policies is coming around for the first time, making it pretty important news to cover.

CM30 8y ago

They certainly have from the perspective of a website creator or business owner. If you're running a business (or hell, any service in general), then you have to either play by Google and Facebook's rules or risk being rendered totally irrelevant and inaccessible to large portions of the population. If your company's website is banned from Google, that can effectively be game over for the company, especially if you can't get reconsidered. Same if they move into your industry in many cases.

olliej 8y ago

Collectively all large corps in America have too much power, so i’ll assume we mean “more power than the other corporations” I’m that case I’ll believe that they’re “too powerful” when a tech company mismanages itself to bankruptcy and gets a bail out from tax payer funds. Or when other companies are forced by the government to use (and pay more for) software and tech from a specific company or group of companies (maybe software from “defense” contractors counts?). Until then i’ll continue to believe that banks, coal, and oil companies have too much power.