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Anti-trust isn’t equipped to deal with anything because it’s arbitrary and vague. “You’re too big because some bureaucrats said so” is not law. That’s not just

Anti-trust isn’t equipped to deal with anything because it’s arbitrary and vague. “You’re too big because some bureaucrats said so” is not law. That’s not justice. It’s totalitarian. How can a company avoid breaking the law if they don’t know they’re breaking it?

clavalle 8y ago
It's like a law against harrassment...it requires human judgment. Some harassment is obvious. Some depend on perspective. Enforcing harassment laws can still be justice even though it is arbitrary and vague. Hell, if laws weren't arbitrary and vague depending on circumstance, we wouldn't need lawyers and courts!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- posterboy 8y ago
  That's just saying it's the decisions that are arbitrary, not the rules. OP implies that judgement should be not just within the limits of the law, but dictated by it. Truly, the cut off where a law's guidance ends and judgement begins is rather arbitrary. Exegesis of law is difficult. OP takes the principled stance that law exists to conserve the power of governance (totalitarian). You take the stance that judges are arbiters (arbitrariness). That's no contradiction. In a perfect world, every body could excert their will arbitrarily. Practically though, individual wishes are mutually exclusive. Thus, totality is impossible, and harrasment prossecution e.g. only a retarded (too slow) meassure. Even totalitarianism has to make ammends (assuming e.g. it would want to abolish perversely incentivized harrasment for good) and it's therefore a misnomer. That the law has or tries to have in effect a monopoly on power (I'm translating loosely from German Gewaltmonopol, where Gewalt is power, violence, force ...) as the dominating institution in the market might be just a liberal thing. If the invisible hand of the market works, that's not a bad thing. If dismantling monopolies were a bad thing, OP's shallowly underhanded call for opposition to this monopoly woud be just too ironic. It's downright paradox, although I might be missing a few presupposed assumptions.
  - clavalle 8y ago
    Your analysis assumes that all monopolies are created equal -- that a monopoly on violence is the same as a monopoly on a commodity. Nothing could be further from the truth.
    - posterboy 8y ago
      Not if power is derived from goods. Goods of limited accessibility are by definition no commodity, though, so you would be right in that sense.
pseudolus 8y ago
>>Anti-trust isn’t equipped to deal with anything because it’s arbitrary and vague. That's something of a gross mischaracterization of antitrust law. The Sherman Act and other laws provide various guidelines as to what constitutes anticompetitive conduct. Through the succeeding decades since the introduction of antitrust legislation courts have also consistently built up case law that provides further guidance.
- posterboy 8y ago
  You are arguing in favour of the above argument. If case law has to be established on a case by case basis, then because the law is a priori insufficient.
  - pseudolus 8y ago
    No individual statute can encompass all possibilities hence the need for case law to clarify the law - it's a distinguishing characteristic of common law systems and, at least with respect to interpretation of statutes, also civil law systems.
    - posterboy 8y ago
      > No individual statute can encompass all possibilities In the same sense, a benevolent reading of OP's would find that it doesn't implicate all Anti Trust decisions, but just alleges that it's prone to, well, miscarriage of justice, I guess, having left specific examples to be specified by the factfinders, other commentators. I get that leaving arguments open like that is considered bad form. No need to tell me that Anti Trust is based on prior case law and thus based on Examples. I wouldn't know. I feel that they didn't feel the need to spell those cases out again is a general problem, and I see that as a problem more from a coding persöective. It's horrible spaghetti code and bound to be buggy. As debugging has it, inspections run very slow and for a really good development experience you have to pay suppliers for support and fixes. Vice versa, some vital functionality may be outsourced from the OS to third parties, or restricted by the OS. Complaints against such practice yield the typical recommendation to use free software or implement your own stack, instead.
thomasec 8y ago
I think the ambiguity is kind of the point. If things were written out ("doing X is monopolistic"), then it would be easy for companies to operate in an noncompetitive manner, so long as they don't violate specific laws. Plus, the definitions of things like monopolies vary so much across industries, that it would be impossible to come up with specifics that cover every instance of anti-trust violations. I don't think it's perfect, but I do think it's more effective than the alternatives.
- posterboy 8y ago
  OP alleges that the given rules are used for abusive judcement. You miss the point and opine that it works as intended. In sum, there's the funny argument that abuse is intended :D
hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
I saw this argument in another HN post that I found very convincing. The current antitrust standard of "consumer welfare" isn't necessarily wrong, but in the current world of tech it is wrongly applied because "the consumer" has been misidentified. As we like to say so often "if you're not the paying customer, you're the product." Then in the world of Facebook and Google, the customers are really the advertisers, who are forced to pay monopoly rates because there are no good alternatives. Even with Amazon the long term reduction in viable competitors is not a good thing for end consumers, and if you look at other areas (I'd consider an author a customer of a publishing house, and if Amazon rules all of book distribution it means authors are worse off).
- pseudolus 8y ago
  I think the earlier post you're referring to was a review of Tim Wu's "The Curse of Bigness" in the Los Angeles Review of Books [0][1]. It's a great overview of antitrust issues with respect to technology. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19079526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19079526 [1] https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/trust-busting-as-the-unsexy-answer-to-google-and-facebook/ https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/trust-busting-as-the...

clavalle 8y ago

It's like a law against harrassment...it requires human judgment. Some harassment is obvious. Some depend on perspective. Enforcing harassment laws can still be justice even though it is arbitrary and vague. Hell, if laws weren't arbitrary and vague depending on circumstance, we wouldn't need lawyers and courts!

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
posterboy 8y ago
That's just saying it's the decisions that are arbitrary, not the rules. OP implies that judgement should be not just within the limits of the law, but dictated by it. Truly, the cut off where a law's guidance ends and judgement begins is rather arbitrary. Exegesis of law is difficult. OP takes the principled stance that law exists to conserve the power of governance (totalitarian). You take the stance that judges are arbiters (arbitrariness). That's no contradiction. In a perfect world, every body could excert their will arbitrarily. Practically though, individual wishes are mutually exclusive. Thus, totality is impossible, and harrasment prossecution e.g. only a retarded (too slow) meassure. Even totalitarianism has to make ammends (assuming e.g. it would want to abolish perversely incentivized harrasment for good) and it's therefore a misnomer. That the law has or tries to have in effect a monopoly on power (I'm translating loosely from German Gewaltmonopol, where Gewalt is power, violence, force ...) as the dominating institution in the market might be just a liberal thing. If the invisible hand of the market works, that's not a bad thing. If dismantling monopolies were a bad thing, OP's shallowly underhanded call for opposition to this monopoly woud be just too ironic. It's downright paradox, although I might be missing a few presupposed assumptions.
- clavalle 8y ago
  Your analysis assumes that all monopolies are created equal -- that a monopoly on violence is the same as a monopoly on a commodity. Nothing could be further from the truth.
  - posterboy 8y ago
    Not if power is derived from goods. Goods of limited accessibility are by definition no commodity, though, so you would be right in that sense.

pseudolus 8y ago

>>Anti-trust isn’t equipped to deal with anything because it’s arbitrary and vague. That's something of a gross mischaracterization of antitrust law. The Sherman Act and other laws provide various guidelines as to what constitutes anticompetitive conduct. Through the succeeding decades since the introduction of antitrust legislation courts have also consistently built up case law that provides further guidance.

posterboy 8y ago
You are arguing in favour of the above argument. If case law has to be established on a case by case basis, then because the law is a priori insufficient.
- pseudolus 8y ago
  No individual statute can encompass all possibilities hence the need for case law to clarify the law - it's a distinguishing characteristic of common law systems and, at least with respect to interpretation of statutes, also civil law systems.
  - posterboy 8y ago
    > No individual statute can encompass all possibilities In the same sense, a benevolent reading of OP's would find that it doesn't implicate all Anti Trust decisions, but just alleges that it's prone to, well, miscarriage of justice, I guess, having left specific examples to be specified by the factfinders, other commentators. I get that leaving arguments open like that is considered bad form. No need to tell me that Anti Trust is based on prior case law and thus based on Examples. I wouldn't know. I feel that they didn't feel the need to spell those cases out again is a general problem, and I see that as a problem more from a coding persöective. It's horrible spaghetti code and bound to be buggy. As debugging has it, inspections run very slow and for a really good development experience you have to pay suppliers for support and fixes. Vice versa, some vital functionality may be outsourced from the OS to third parties, or restricted by the OS. Complaints against such practice yield the typical recommendation to use free software or implement your own stack, instead.

thomasec 8y ago

I think the ambiguity is kind of the point. If things were written out ("doing X is monopolistic"), then it would be easy for companies to operate in an noncompetitive manner, so long as they don't violate specific laws. Plus, the definitions of things like monopolies vary so much across industries, that it would be impossible to come up with specifics that cover every instance of anti-trust violations. I don't think it's perfect, but I do think it's more effective than the alternatives.

posterboy 8y ago
OP alleges that the given rules are used for abusive judcement. You miss the point and opine that it works as intended. In sum, there's the funny argument that abuse is intended :D

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago

I saw this argument in another HN post that I found very convincing. The current antitrust standard of "consumer welfare" isn't necessarily wrong, but in the current world of tech it is wrongly applied because "the consumer" has been misidentified. As we like to say so often "if you're not the paying customer, you're the product." Then in the world of Facebook and Google, the customers are really the advertisers, who are forced to pay monopoly rates because there are no good alternatives. Even with Amazon the long term reduction in viable competitors is not a good thing for end consumers, and if you look at other areas (I'd consider an author a customer of a publishing house, and if Amazon rules all of book distribution it means authors are worse off).

pseudolus 8y ago
I think the earlier post you're referring to was a review of Tim Wu's "The Curse of Bigness" in the Los Angeles Review of Books [0][1]. It's a great overview of antitrust issues with respect to technology. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19079526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19079526 [1] https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/trust-busting-as-the-unsexy-answer-to-google-and-facebook/ https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/trust-busting-as-the...