36 ms·

Where Warren’s Wrong

222 points by nikbackm 8y ago

thebooktocome 8y ago
It's really hard to read an article that conflates moral or ethical concepts (should FAANG exist?) with legal ones (are FAANG vulnerable to existing antitrust laws?), particularly in the context of comparative international law.
resalisbury 8y ago
A lot is wrong, but I appreciate than Ben gives credit where due. ”Let me reiterate a point I have made twice now: I appreciate Senator Warren raising these issues; they are indeed critical not only for the world today, but also the world we wish to create in the future." And "This is why I have called Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram The Greatest Regulatory Failure of the Past Decade, and called for an end to social networks being allowed to buy other social networks."
monster2control 8y ago
While I agree to some extend with the author, he too is making large leaps without truly backing them up. He's fighting over semantics. While Warren may be wrong in her history, she's not truly wrong in the results. Amazon does exactly what she says, Amazon sees a Marketplace item is selling really well, so they start to sell it too at or slightly cheaper. The reason people tend to use Google over Yelp as in his example isn't really choice, but a lot of times because people don't know. My mother as an example has no idea of the difference between Google and the internet, they are the same thing to her if Google promoted Yelp and other restaurant review sites over their own, she might use them, but she only knows what google shows her. This is a lot more common than people with an understanding of tech realize for the average consumer. Google's business should be that, advertising and showing accurate search results. But they need people to stay on their pages longer, so that they get more ad dollars, so they start duplicating other popular sites to maintain the user's attention. They are in a position of power that no other company has, and when they decide they are going to compete with your idea, they have a completely unfair advantage, strictly because they have become, to many, the Gatekeepers of the Web. They also provide the most popular Web Browser, which defaults to Google. Think that's fair? Think the average consumer knows any better. His discussion of the Microsoft Antitrust is also a little dumb, while a computer coming bundled with a Web browser does make it more useful, it was the way that Microsoft did it, to ensure their only competition had no real way of competing by using their dominance to make the web a IE only land. Proprietary Web API that only worked in IE that didn't follow the standard meant a lot of early developers only targeted IE because it was too hard or expensive to target Netscape too. This was the heart of the antitrust, and while Google may have emerged non-the-less, we would not have Firefox or probably even chrome and they Web would definitely not be what it is today, because Microsoft didn't foster innovation on the Web, that was thanks to Mozilla and other open-source browsers. The web might have eventually become what it is today, but most experts agree Microsoft is a large part of the reason we aren't farther ahead because they killed competition at the drop of a hat. The author seems to forget how bleak and shitty the web was when IE was the only choice and Microsoft didn't update IE from version 6 for almost 5 years, when they finally released the garbage that was IE 7. Tech is a much different beast and while Warren could certainly use some help to clarify her reasons for wanting to break up these tech giants, she's not completely wrong either. However, big tech isn't where her focus should be completely. Comcast, ATT, Version. These companies essentially control the internet backbone and are monopolies in many areas. Consumers have little to no competition for how they get internet access and that's one of the biggest issues.
- dnautics 8y ago
  It wasn't Microsoft's meddling with the browser that was it's major anticompetitive sin; it was it's control over the bootloader. https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ Yet here we are, and windows is not at all the dominant consumer os, and is not the dominant general purpose os any longer.
  - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
    >Yet here we are, and windows is not at all the dominant consumer os, and is not the dominant general purpose os any longer. Are you sure about that?
    - oflannabhra 8y ago
      iOS and Android have far more active devices that Windows 10. As pointed out in the article, Microsoft missed the mobile revolution, and computing has shifted to mobile devices.
      - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
        And when those users need to sit down at a computer to do actual work... It's by far dominantly a Windows PC. You can't just take mobile and give it equal representation to PC, servers, workstations, etc. It's it's own thing. Did Windows lose mobile, of course. Do mobile users exclusively use Android or IOS and not use Windows - no.
        dnautics 8y ago
        > those users need to sit down at a computer to do actual work Not all people sit down to do work, and even those that do have more devices than they do desktops.
  - re-actor 8y ago
    Windows still hovers around 90% market share, how is that not dominant?
balthasar 8y ago
If it makes more sense to keep these tech giants as conglomerates then there exists other methods of using the resources more economically. For instance lowering their transfer payments(raising taxes on their activities in classical economics.)
mcguire 8y ago
"What is more striking is that, in retrospect, the core piece of the government’s case doesn’t make any sense: of course a browser should be bundled with an operating system; a new computer without a browser would be practically useless (for one, how do you install a browser?). Moreover, Apple, not without merit, argues that restricting rendering engines to the one that ships with the OS (all browsers on iOS have no choice but to use the built-in rendering engine) has significant security benefits; this is debatable, but ultimately, most don’t care, simply because browsers are means to information, not ends." Someone may want to revisit this argument. 1. The same way Netscape achieved its original dominance? 2. Integrating a browser engine with the core operating system increases security...how?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jlv2 8y ago
  "a new computer without a browser would be practically useless (for one, how do you install a browser?)" When I read this, I realized that no computers can have browsers!
- cromwellian 8y ago
  > Integrating a browser engine with the core operating system increases security...how? In particular, how process isolation and Just-In-Time compilers work. Since mobile phones are extremely resource constrained, there's a tradeoff between security and performance that is more difficult on mobile than on the desktop. That means the way things were sandboxed on mobile was different on the desktop. For example, the ability to allocate memory that is both writable and executable, one of the features used by Javascript JITs, opens up a huge attack surface area. Apple basically solved this problem by making JavaScriptCore the only blessed Javascript engine able to do this, and for a long time, only Mobile Safari itself could leverage the JIT. Granted, modern phones can relax this, but there's definitely benefits to controlling the entire stack. For example, some functions of the browser could leverage enclaves or enclave-like containers for privacy oriented calculations.
- akkartik 8y ago
philipodonnell 8y ago
I have to admit I'm a little taken aback by the focus on how the stated rationale is weak or doesn't fit every company equally while agreeing that there are real problems that would be addressed. Is there a word for this? Its almost nit-picking? Pedantry? Like dismissing someone who is fighting against anti-vaxxers because they didn't quote the most definitive study as rationale. Explanations of policy ideas aren't targeted at experts but at laypeople so I don't see the problem with using terms or rationale they understand even if its not perfect. I mean the core of the whole idea is that no one should both control the platform and simultaneously participate in it. Is the author against that? The pushback seems to be that it would lead to lawsuits which is almost a cliche from anyone trying to dismiss an idea.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I had the same impression. But this is how political discourse seems to work this day. Instead of making suggestions for improvement an idea gets dismissed completely and nothing happens as a result. Happened with Obamacare and also with the discussion about regulations. Instead of suggesting specific improvements it turns into a black and white debate without results.
  - monkbent 8y ago
    This is why the entire second half of the article was detailing where I think focus should be.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      Maybe the title was already too confrontational. How about "How I would improve Warren's plan" or something like that?
      - your-nanny 8y ago
        yes that would have been better. didn't finish article, but headline would have kept me reading to the end because I would have expected critique to be followed with constructive suggestions
beager 8y ago
I wish the author and anyone writing about this would disclose their positions in these companies or that they have none. The merits of any argument on this topic are only worth considering if we know that they're being presented in good faith. And to be clear, this applies to people who are pro-dismantling and anti-dismantling.
- monkbent 8y ago
  https://stratechery.com/about/#ethics https://stratechery.com/about/#ethics
anon0000 8y ago
Noticeably absent from Warren's target list is Comcast. IMHO, they are more anti-trust than any of the tech companies she is targeting. Comcast also happens to be the 15th biggest donor to her campaign. https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/contributors?cid=N00033492&cycle=2018 https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/contributors...
- jessedhillon 8y ago
  Wait until you see who #9 is! (It's Alphabet, parent of Google) The list you linked shows the common employers of the individual contributors to her 2018 campaign.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  That’s a great point. I hope someone asks her about that. The fact that Comcast can institute data caps on broadband while offering a similar service, on-demand video over cable, without caps is absolutely insane.
  - azeotropic 8y ago
    Especially since it has a bunch of (local) government-granted monopolies. Let's eliminate those.
- apcragg 8y ago
  Wow. Your post is so misleading it borders on outright lying. Those $31k contributions come entirely from individuals. Comcast the company did not donate any money to her. Conflating individual contributions with Corporate contributions is massively misleading. Comcast has 164k employees. Do you honestly expect that most employees of Corporations agree with the political goals and objectives of their parent companies?
  - Rooster61 8y ago
    Your argument is equally misleading. Does the fact that those contributions come from individuals somehow make them less profound? It's exceedingly important to point out who these individuals are associated with employment-wise.
comnetxr 8y ago
Agree 95%, but one point he uses to crticize Warren seems wrong: Where Warren says "America’s big tech companies have achieved their level of dominance in part based on two strategies: using Mergers to Limit Competition,..." he argues that they achieved dominance by making good products and were already dominant when they started making major mergers, and that Warren doesn't understand this. It sounds like he's missing the whole point here: google, amazon, and apple of course did achieve dominance by making a good product, but then they leveraged that dominance over one product to dominance over the whole tech sector with a combination of more good products and anticompetitive moves. Warren does not argue that companies that make good products shouldn't be allowed to get big - just that they should be scrutinized and not allowed to make anticompetitive moves. Indeed, all of the tech companies she has proposed breaking up would still be huge companies with "dominating" products (including control over their respective platforms - search, app store, amazon store); but hopefully the ecosystem on those platforms can flourish without competition from the platform companies.
- mtgx 8y ago
  Yeah, it seems almost like a naive/purposeful misunderstanding of what Warren means. Of course that's what Warren meant - the whole point of even talking about antitrust is that you believe a company used its dominant position to destroy the competition in a way that's less than fair/legal.
- Shivetya 8y ago
  Sorry, but the idea that Apple needs to be separated from the App store is ludicrous. If you don't like the App store don't buy Apple products. There are hundreds of other phones to choose from and some get equal or better reviews. It would be one thing if Apple was the only cell phone maker in existence but that is so far from the truth. Amazon and online purchases, again, there are so many choices that you never ever have to visit Amazon to buy anything. If they were preventing resellers from selling elsewhere then we would have an issue. Like when Intel was trying to force Dell not to sell AMD. Amazon is in truth their own worst enemy now with so many bad products that venturing off known brands is a risk. She is doing what politicians do best, using resentment, jealousy, and more, to gain more power and money. Not just at the voting booth but by intimidating companies into contributing more the PACs and political campaigns. We see this all the time and sadly people buy into it because using market tested phrases has become standard operating procedure for politicians. They pay to find out how to divide people. An example of why PACs are truly bad is a recent political office run revealed that one candidate, who could not see fit to pay their taxes on time, nor their school loans, had been on the part time pay roll of a PAC for nearly 200k a year. Seriously, you want to see how politicians roll in the money look how the shake down really pays them.
wslh 8y ago
It is interesting that this discussion is happening but we need to apply rational thinking in both ways (in favor and against). For example, this paragraph: > There is certainly an argument to be made that Google, not only in Shopping but also in verticals like local search, is choking off the websites on which Search relies by increasingly offering its own results. At the same time, there is absolutely nothing stopping customers from visiting those websites directly, or downloading their apps, bypassing Google completely. That consumers choose not to is not because Google is somehow restricting them — that is impossible! — but because they don’t want to. Is it really the purview of regulators to correct consumer choices willingly made? The truth is that most consumers will not find alternatives because that involves much work and the platform putting the offerings just in front consumer eyes wins. Stratechery writes about this which is basically about UX, attention and search economy. Google, for example, is making users believe that they are showing the best results based on "an alhorithm" and not hardcoding parts if the results to benefit them. This is a kind of dark pattern that cannot be tolerated.
chj 8y ago
The author is nitpicking. Warren may be wrong about the history of bing and google, but that's not really important. She's 100% right about Amazon, and the author conveniently forgot to mention. Most people in tech industry always strive to build monopoly and dominance. In their eyes, Warren's idea is of course insane. But viewing from another point, in order to protect competition and small businesses, her proposal is mostly sound. The concept of "Platform Utility" may seem arbitrary, but actually a very helpful check and balance. The perfect solution is that the platform should be run like an open blockchain, trouble is no one has a clue how to build it yet.
- elicash 8y ago
  Also, some would argue it's also good to protect democracy from any entity getting too powerful and having too much influence. None of this of course only applies to tech companies.
- cm2187 8y ago
  Actually amazon is the one that I would say doesn't have a monopoly. It doesn't have a monopoly in the retail space (far from it), nor in the cloud hosting (let alone server hosting) business, nor in online streaming (music/tv). Google on the other hand has close to a monopoly on search (and browsers). Facebook on social medias.
  - mschuster91 8y ago
    > It doesn't have a monopoly in the retail space For vendors, the situation looks different - and Amazon certainly does abuse their position towards vendors often enough, e.g. with the AmazonBasics program where they take bestselling stuff, produce it at Amazon scales and then outprice the "competition".
    - replicatorblog 8y ago
      That seems like the weakest part of the argument — Walmart, Kroger, Walgreens, Costco, and every other major retailer has a similar program. All use sales data to determine what sells best and copy it. I did this for a decade, designing store brand medical devices for all the major retailers. There are plenty of legitimate critiques of Amazon. The "private label" one is by far the weakest.
jmrobertson 8y ago
Reading her stuff, it seems like proposals to separate Apple from the App store indicate a total lack of awareness about InfoSec, and at best a poorly researched policy proposal from a technical standpoint. The only reason the App Store isn't a simmering cesspool of malware is that Apple heavily moderates what gets on there, and Google does somewhat the same. That doesn't mean that there perhaps isn't a less MSFT + IE type of solution, and I don't necessarily disagree with her, but her not mentioning that sort of nuance at all makes it rather clear the policy doesn't extend too far into anything more than populism.
- chj 8y ago
  There are quite some shady stuff going on in the App Store. People have to live with that, because there is no alternative. https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/sneaky-subscriptions-are-plaguing-the-app-store/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/sneaky-subscriptions-are-p...
  - jmrobertson 8y ago
    Right, so imagine separating Apple/Google totally from its current oversight position, and having a totally open app store. Like the world _just_ got past learning not to click 'download here!' on a browser, and that was after 20 years of the internet. I'd be open to alternative proposals, but separating the App Store with no replacement is not a secure solution by any means and causes more problems than it solves, assuming a secure app store is the most important trait of an app store.
    - phillmv 8y ago
      I don't understand why people should not be permitted to go to netflix.com to install the netflix app, or to twitter.com etc etc
      - hopler 8y ago
        Because then they'd install a fake Netflix malware from getnetflix.com
gilbetron 8y ago
> This is a restriction on competition produced not by market dominance, at least not directly, but rather contracts that OEMs could not afford to say ‘No’ to. I'm not seeing a significant difference here. They couldn't afford to say "no" because MS was so dominant.
- hopler 8y ago
  He's trying to draw a meaningless boundary between competitors being unable to access the market, and competitors being blocked by collusion.
objektif 8y ago
I would take anything the tech industry and even tech focused journalists say about this topic with a grain of salt. It is very likely that they have a conflict of interest. Either they have shares or their jobs require not alienating big tech.
- monkbent 8y ago
  https://stratechery.com/about/#ethics https://stratechery.com/about/#ethics
gimmeThaBeet 8y ago
> the next generation of great American tech companies can flourish. To do that, we need to stop this generation of big tech companies from throwing around their political power to shape the rules in their favor and throwing around their economic power to snuff out or buy up every potential competitor. This is part I find interesting. If there is a difference between the titans of now vs old, its that they behave like Kronos, swallowing any potential threat for fear someone may disrupt them as they themselves had done to the original mammoths, not brushing off the threat they know is there, no matter how small. But, on a separate note, I think that the current anti-trust philosophy isn't equipped to deal with companies whose business isn't driven by physical products, or behaves a certain way in highly competitive markets (i.e. Apple). Matt Levine often talks about how practically, modern anti-trust in the US isn't there to regulate bigness, but protect consumers via promoting price competition. I can see that they have a lot of power, and some of the effects that power can have, I just struggle to see how potentially impacting the way these businesses operate leads to better outcomes for consumers and citizens as customers.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  Its even uglier when the price these companies charge is "free"... But in actuality you pay with your data. And I know of no human who would be able to accurately price access to parts or all of their data. "Its just data. How much am I really worth?", is a common refrain. And then, well, its freeeeee....
  - sdenton4 8y ago
    Nah, you pay with your eyeballs on the ads. The data just helps choose the ad, and doesn't need to be terribly accurate. So no, your data isn't really worth much: it's the aggregates that you've done a tiny tiny part in building that's worth a lot.
- sdenton4 8y ago
  The arguments are about stifled competition, rather than direct consumer impact. There's less funding for early startups because it's hard to compete with the Giants, and the Giants walk where they want to. As a result, no one gets a chance to do better than the Giants are currently doing... Even if consumers are kinda ok with how things currently are. (Now, it's also pretty easy to imagine breakups going horribly horribly wrong for consumers, precisely because consumers are pretty happy with the state of play. I would hate paying for a calendar app at this point in history, and I would also hate having to comparison shop for one that didn't suck...)
abalone 8y ago
I’m worried about breaking up Apple. Control of the App Store is how they keep the iPhone secure and malware free. They make money on things sold through the store, yes, but they make most of their money in the phone itself. Break that up and now whoever runs the store has a lot more pressure to make money by exploiting your data, cutting back on curation, etc.
- yeldarb 8y ago
  I don't think that's what's being proposed. It's that if they are going to control the App Store they can't also participate with their own apps. For instance, Apple Music, which has gotten over 50 million paying users not by being the best music app but by being pushed heavily by Apple as the platform owner. In Warren's plan, Apple Music could not be controlled by Apple. It would have to compete in the App Store on its own merits.
  - abalone 8y ago
    > For instance, Apple Music, which has gotten over 50 million paying users not by being the best music app but by being pushed heavily by Apple as the platform owner. Apple Music has more music, a longer free trial and integration with iTunes which lets you upload your own music and sync it to all your devices among other features. By one estimate it converts free users into subscribers at 3X the rate of Spotify.[1] That’s a sign of happier customers, not just being pushed by the platform. Worth mentioning they pay artists more too. And what are you saying, Warren would let Apple run the store but would have to break off Music into a separate entity? All their other bundled apps too like Maps? I didn’t get that from the proposal.. and it doesn’t strike me as consumer friendly. [1] https://bgr.com/2018/09/25/apple-music-vs-spotify-paid-subscribers/ https://bgr.com/2018/09/25/apple-music-vs-spotify-paid-subsc...
steve76 8y ago
The best thing we can do? Lower the barrier to get rich. Think of a reverse Amazon store. You go there, you do what your phone tells you, money is added to it. Guaranteed job public utility vs. I need to apply for a building permit to launch my app public utility.
nabla9 8y ago
Stratechery is weirdly insular site. I don't know the background but it looks like the writer/writers just read business news and create their own ideas and don't like to study or read economics. The "Aggregation Theory" is perfect example of this. It's like the author is not aware that the idea he came up has not been under study for decades and has well developed concepts, terminology and research subject.
- hopler 8y ago
  Aggregation Theory is brand name he made up to market his consulting services. He's not ignorant, he's selling. The business consulting and person health/self-help industries are full of this sort of thing.
  - nabla9 8y ago
    Ah. That makes sense.
- zanybear 8y ago
  Re: Area of economics talking about aggregators/corner market . I'm interested in researching more this topic. Do you have any links to point me to ?
bhauer 8y ago
> Moreover, Apple, not without merit, argues that restricting rendering engines to the one that ships with the OS (all browsers on iOS have no choice but to use the built-in rendering engine) has significant security benefits; this is debatable, but ultimately, most don’t care, simply because browsers are means to information, not ends. I care about being able to install an alternative browser engine on my devices. I think the reason we're today debating the risks of large social networks and the tech titans in general is that there were finally enough voices of concern that we could no longer be ignored. That had to start somewhere, and it did. It started with a smaller group who have been raising concerns about these companies centralizing user data and surveilling on their users for years. So dismissing a potential future battlefield (browser consolidation versus browser engine choice) seems an echo of those who dismissed concerns about social network overreach five years ago. That said, I personally favor promoting alternatives and educating people about those alternatives. I don't use Facebook and yet I am able to easily communicate with friends and family. Do I want to destroy or break-up Facebook? Meh, not really. I'm fine with Facebook simply not being a part of my life. That includes blocking its domains via DNS. Improving the ability for laypeople to fully block the various surveillance tools of these firms is where I'd like to see more effort spent, not in application of government power. Looping back to the point above, the tough one right now is mobile: You either choose the surveillance apparatus called Android or the walled garden called iOS. There are some fringe options, among which Purism 5 looks particularly promising.
martythemaniak 8y ago
There's a lot of common sentiment around politicians that goes something like "It doesn't matter if they got the details wrong, what matters is that they're essentially correct because they see the Big Picture" We see this here, with fans of Warren saying getting things wrong is irrelevant, because we all know FANG is too powerful and she says it. Thus, quibbling over details is nitpicky pedantry. This tactic is also used by Trump fans, who keep telling us we must "take him seriously, but not literally", where any random nonsense he says is re-interpreted to hint at a larger truth. In this world, Birtherism for example, has absolutely nothing to do with racism and we shouldn't be so nitpicky, because it hints at the larger truth that Obama's life-arch is very different from that of the average American, and they are thus correct to feel that he is more "foreign". Whoever you support, you should not let your guy/gal off the hook like this. Once you start, there's no feedback mechanism to hold you back, you can justify any nonsense using only bits of clever rhethric.
- jtr1 8y ago
  This smacks a little too much of "both-sidesism." The substantive difference between the two is that Warren will hire a cabinet of seasoned policy specialists who have the bandwidth to write accurate distinctions into law, while there was never any corollary action for Trump because birtherism was never going to be translated into policy; it was a play to prejudice.
  - martythemaniak 8y ago
    It is actually the exact opposite of both-siderism, because I'd like people to hold Democrats to a far higher and tougher standard than Republicans. But also, it applies to politics in other countries, it is not strictly an American R/D thing. Also, you should go back to 2015/2016 and read the things said about Trump at the time. The idea that he'd hire a cabinet full of super competent people to run everything while he connects with people and sees the larger truth was very popular. Scott Adams is one of the people who took this line very seriously that I specifically remember.
  - zaphar 8y ago
    Yes she will undoubtedly hire seasoned specialists to write her policy into law for her. But will she be looking for people who are on board with her framework or will she be looking for people who will challenge her framework and change her mind on some things. It's worth asking which of those it will be because that is what determines how effective her efforts will be. It's not certain in my mind which one she'll do and as written her proposal does fail to account for some of the causes of the current crop of large scale goliaths in tech.
scarface74 8y ago
After reading through all of the comments, I don’t see how many of the same people who worry about the power of private companies are okay with giving the government more power - the only entity with the legal right to take your property, life, and liberty. I’m much more afraid of government power than private corporations.
- shadowtree 8y ago
  Try not paying a mortgage and see what happens. Banks can take away a lot, starting with your credit score. And without government, you'd not even have any recourse.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    If I don’t pay my mortgage - a contract that I freely entered into knowing the consequences - why shouldn’t the bank take away my house? If the credit score accurately reflected that I didn’t pay the mortgage, why shouldn’t that be recorded?
- whytaka 8y ago
  The government always had this power. One member of congress is simply making an argument about exercising said power.
Cyclone_ 8y ago
If she's complaining about those companies using private information for profit she'll be quite surprised once she learns what happens on the internet. Many political campaigns use some sort of data mining operations.
tabtab 8y ago
Re: "Bing was not even launched until 2009, eight years after the Microsoft case was settled. MSN Search, its predecessor, did launch in 1998, but with licensed search results from Inktomi and AltaVista; Microsoft didn’t launch its own web crawler until 2005" Had MS not been pressured by anti-trust scrutiny, they may have bought out early search startups. Therefore, MS may have been "late" to search due to anti-trust pressure, and not because they fumbled, as the author suggests. (We may never really know because this would have happened inside of Bill Gates' head.) Ironically, MS may have gotten its start by the fact that IBM felt pressured to make an open-architecture PC due to anti-trust scrutiny. Otherwise, they would have prefered to hard-wire their system for their own PC operating system (created or purchased). Re: "of course a browser should be bundled with an operating system; a new computer without a browser would be practically useless" Including and bundling are not necessarily the same thing. An OS can include multiple browser brands and/or make it easy for new buyers to install another brand. Re: "but rather the entire web; what ties things together are not APIs, but links." But standards are needed for links & browsers to work right across brands, and standards and API's are pretty much the same thing. Re: "Google would have emerged with or without antitrust action against Microsoft" We don't know that. See above. Re: "Facebook was dominant before it bought Instagram and WhatsApp, Google before it bought DoubleClick or YouTube, and Amazon before it bought..." True, but they were even more dominant after. It's a winner-take-all economy these days, reducing competition. They may have got big being good, but that alone is no guarantee they'll stay good. It's human nature to slack when competition fades. It's why the Gov't is not efficient. (Google Maps has been slipping in quality of late I've noticed.) Re: "the app market on PCs died in large part due to security concerns" Come again? Re: "Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple dominate because consumers like them. Each of them leveraged technology to solve a unique user needs" True, but once big they start using other tricks besides being good. Oligopolies and monopolies almost always jack up prices and limit choice once competition goes away. MS left blatant bugs in MS-Access for several years once they flattened the other desktop databases. Good capitalism is based on competition. Competition shrinks, and corporate jerkification and slacking goes up. They shift focus from making a better mouse-trap to keeping others out of the mouse-trap business. Warren's argument may not be perfect, but lack of competition clearly stifles the market in my observation of several decades dealing with the likes of Microsoft and the big telecoms, let alone the history of airlines, IBM, AT&T, eyeglasses, etc.
shadowtree 8y ago
Classic framing problem: Immediately assume it is wrong, then work backwards proving it, using minute details. Would be more interesting to assume we're doing it, then think through the consequences. Or, define the stated end goal (fairer marketplace) and then see if the break up helps. Super irony: In the NGINX gets bought by F5 thread, people complain about AWS being killer competition, ruining the market for open source. The emotions here are also nationalistic, as it hits US companies. Breaking up Ali or TenCent would get a different reaction.
specialist 8y ago
Winner takes all (preferential attachment) is just math. This new trouble is because the internet has resulted in fewer, larger markets. Markets would need to become more fragmented or more fluid to mitigate winner takes all. I don't have any notions on what to do about that.
oflannabhra 8y ago
It seems like the overwhelming response to this article is that the author is nit-picking. I'd argue that the main point of the article is to drive to first-principles: How did these giants get so big? What is fundamentally different about tech companies that makes current antitrust legislation ineffective? Antitrust legislation and enforcement has had several "generations" of philosophy in the United States: - 1890s-1970s Sherman Antitrust Act targeting American Standard Oil. In this era enforcement focused on how a company practiced its business, with a chief goal being maximal competition. - 1970s-now After The Antitrust Paradox [1] was published by Robert Bork, enforcement shifted to "consumer welfare," with the chief goal being maximal welfare. (Planet Money is currently doing a series [2] that covers this) I believe Ben Thompson is advocating that a new generation of philosophy needs to begin, because "consumer welfare" cannot be directly applied to these companies, their unfair advantages, or how to prevent the next "wave." Indeed, their size is a direct result of their serving "consumer welfare" (ie, consumers choose them because their offerings are best). Nitpicking or not, I'd prefer the result of the current discussion to result in actionable change, and I believe the points in this article (ie, the "nitpicks" it makes) are required for such a result. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Th... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox [2] - https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/15/695131832/antitrust-1-standard-oil https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/15/695131832/anti...
georgeecollins 8y ago
In the article: "Worst, it would do so by running roughshod over the idea of judicial independence, invite endless lawsuits and bureaucratic meddling around subjective definitions, and effectively punish consumers for choosing the best option for them." This seems like a FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) argument. How is breaking up a tech giant going to create more of these problems than breaking up AT&T did? We lived through that.
jondubois 8y ago
>> and effectively punish consumers for choosing the best option for them Consumers today are fat and lazy. Whatever small part of me is a consumer, I don't care about that part. We should care about producers and their right to participate in a fair and open marketplace. The biggest problem in people's lives today is not related to a lack of options in terms of what to consume, it is related to a lack of options in terms of what they can produce and how they can produce it. >> Start with the most obvious error: Bing was not even launched until 2009 Actually, her statement makes perfect logical sense. OP is the one who doesn't understand history. If the antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft did not succeed, Internet Explorer would have been the only internet browser which could run on Windows (which itself was a near total monopoly in the personal computing space) and therefore, through their control of IE, they could have created Bing and made it the only search engine in the IE address bar. Maybe they could even have blocked google.com completely if it started to become a threat or maybe they could have added an overlay on top of google.com so that they could replace Google ads with their own ads... The possibilities of what Microsoft could have done to stop Google would have been endless if it wasn't for the antitrust cases brought against Microsoft. If anything, her point is too clever and too insightful for some people to comprehend. Basically Elizabeth Warren seems to actually understand how the world works and she understands the huge impact of goverment policy on the economy instead of pretending that there is no impact.
jondubois 8y ago
>> This is decidedly not the case when it comes to enterprise-focused startups: that sector is thriving with all kinds of new businesses being created, acquired, and going public. Bullshit. If you don't have VC investment under your belt, no corporation would use your services. I have seen this first hand. They refuse to deal with small bootstrapped players. It doesn't matter how great your tech is.
scottlegrand2 8y ago
Amazon's cloud service has plenty of competition. No need to antitrust that part in my opinion. What's hard to disrupt is their amazing logistics network for delivering impulse purchases on the cheap and fast. But while I have nothing but contempt for sponsored products, enabling Amazon arbitrage like it's eBay, and for deleting keywords to increase the size of search results because that defeats my spearfishing for specific products, it doesn't seem like something someone else couldn't build. Start by addressing all of the bad customer experiences with counterfeit products, badly shipped items, and lousy customer support. What makes this difficult is that (beyond the challenge of execution itself) I don't think traditional venture-capital would invest in this so you have a chicken and the egg problem that I suspect will never be solved until someone manages to come up with a business model better than Amazon's at a time when Amazon is too large and inefficient to respond properly. And I think they're getting there. I worked there for six years and left recently. I'm never going back. The culture in my opinion is horrible. And that's a second area where you could do better than Amazon and brain drain them. I'm sure there's more.
JackFr 8y ago
When Disney creates a streaming service, are they using their market power to crush Netflix? Or when Netflix promotes their own original content are they using their platform to unfairly compete. When I buy store brand cough syrup, rather than the name brand, am I being harmed? Is the cough syrup manufacturer?
known 8y ago
I've a simple/enforceable solution; Tax their revenues;

222 points by nikbackm 8y ago

It's really hard to read an article that conflates moral or ethical concepts (should FAANG exist?) with legal ones (are FAANG vulnerable to existing antitrust laws?), particularly in the context of comparative international law.

resalisbury 8y ago

A lot is wrong, but I appreciate than Ben gives credit where due. ”Let me reiterate a point I have made twice now: I appreciate Senator Warren raising these issues; they are indeed critical not only for the world today, but also the world we wish to create in the future." And "This is why I have called Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram The Greatest Regulatory Failure of the Past Decade, and called for an end to social networks being allowed to buy other social networks."

monster2control 8y ago

While I agree to some extend with the author, he too is making large leaps without truly backing them up. He's fighting over semantics. While Warren may be wrong in her history, she's not truly wrong in the results. Amazon does exactly what she says, Amazon sees a Marketplace item is selling really well, so they start to sell it too at or slightly cheaper. The reason people tend to use Google over Yelp as in his example isn't really choice, but a lot of times because people don't know. My mother as an example has no idea of the difference between Google and the internet, they are the same thing to her if Google promoted Yelp and other restaurant review sites over their own, she might use them, but she only knows what google shows her. This is a lot more common than people with an understanding of tech realize for the average consumer. Google's business should be that, advertising and showing accurate search results. But they need people to stay on their pages longer, so that they get more ad dollars, so they start duplicating other popular sites to maintain the user's attention. They are in a position of power that no other company has, and when they decide they are going to compete with your idea, they have a completely unfair advantage, strictly because they have become, to many, the Gatekeepers of the Web. They also provide the most popular Web Browser, which defaults to Google. Think that's fair? Think the average consumer knows any better. His discussion of the Microsoft Antitrust is also a little dumb, while a computer coming bundled with a Web browser does make it more useful, it was the way that Microsoft did it, to ensure their only competition had no real way of competing by using their dominance to make the web a IE only land. Proprietary Web API that only worked in IE that didn't follow the standard meant a lot of early developers only targeted IE because it was too hard or expensive to target Netscape too. This was the heart of the antitrust, and while Google may have emerged non-the-less, we would not have Firefox or probably even chrome and they Web would definitely not be what it is today, because Microsoft didn't foster innovation on the Web, that was thanks to Mozilla and other open-source browsers. The web might have eventually become what it is today, but most experts agree Microsoft is a large part of the reason we aren't farther ahead because they killed competition at the drop of a hat. The author seems to forget how bleak and shitty the web was when IE was the only choice and Microsoft didn't update IE from version 6 for almost 5 years, when they finally released the garbage that was IE 7. Tech is a much different beast and while Warren could certainly use some help to clarify her reasons for wanting to break up these tech giants, she's not completely wrong either. However, big tech isn't where her focus should be completely. Comcast, ATT, Version. These companies essentially control the internet backbone and are monopolies in many areas. Consumers have little to no competition for how they get internet access and that's one of the biggest issues.

dnautics 8y ago
It wasn't Microsoft's meddling with the browser that was it's major anticompetitive sin; it was it's control over the bootloader. https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ Yet here we are, and windows is not at all the dominant consumer os, and is not the dominant general purpose os any longer.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  >Yet here we are, and windows is not at all the dominant consumer os, and is not the dominant general purpose os any longer. Are you sure about that?
  - oflannabhra 8y ago
    iOS and Android have far more active devices that Windows 10. As pointed out in the article, Microsoft missed the mobile revolution, and computing has shifted to mobile devices.
    - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
      And when those users need to sit down at a computer to do actual work... It's by far dominantly a Windows PC. You can't just take mobile and give it equal representation to PC, servers, workstations, etc. It's it's own thing. Did Windows lose mobile, of course. Do mobile users exclusively use Android or IOS and not use Windows - no.
      - dnautics 8y ago
        > those users need to sit down at a computer to do actual work Not all people sit down to do work, and even those that do have more devices than they do desktops.
- re-actor 8y ago
  Windows still hovers around 90% market share, how is that not dominant?

balthasar 8y ago

If it makes more sense to keep these tech giants as conglomerates then there exists other methods of using the resources more economically. For instance lowering their transfer payments(raising taxes on their activities in classical economics.)

mcguire 8y ago

"What is more striking is that, in retrospect, the core piece of the government’s case doesn’t make any sense: of course a browser should be bundled with an operating system; a new computer without a browser would be practically useless (for one, how do you install a browser?). Moreover, Apple, not without merit, argues that restricting rendering engines to the one that ships with the OS (all browsers on iOS have no choice but to use the built-in rendering engine) has significant security benefits; this is debatable, but ultimately, most don’t care, simply because browsers are means to information, not ends." Someone may want to revisit this argument. 1. The same way Netscape achieved its original dominance? 2. Integrating a browser engine with the core operating system increases security...how?

deleted 8y ago
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jlv2 8y ago
"a new computer without a browser would be practically useless (for one, how do you install a browser?)" When I read this, I realized that no computers can have browsers!
cromwellian 8y ago
> Integrating a browser engine with the core operating system increases security...how? In particular, how process isolation and Just-In-Time compilers work. Since mobile phones are extremely resource constrained, there's a tradeoff between security and performance that is more difficult on mobile than on the desktop. That means the way things were sandboxed on mobile was different on the desktop. For example, the ability to allocate memory that is both writable and executable, one of the features used by Javascript JITs, opens up a huge attack surface area. Apple basically solved this problem by making JavaScriptCore the only blessed Javascript engine able to do this, and for a long time, only Mobile Safari itself could leverage the JIT. Granted, modern phones can relax this, but there's definitely benefits to controlling the entire stack. For example, some functions of the browser could leverage enclaves or enclave-like containers for privacy oriented calculations.
akkartik 8y ago

philipodonnell 8y ago

I have to admit I'm a little taken aback by the focus on how the stated rationale is weak or doesn't fit every company equally while agreeing that there are real problems that would be addressed. Is there a word for this? Its almost nit-picking? Pedantry? Like dismissing someone who is fighting against anti-vaxxers because they didn't quote the most definitive study as rationale. Explanations of policy ideas aren't targeted at experts but at laypeople so I don't see the problem with using terms or rationale they understand even if its not perfect. I mean the core of the whole idea is that no one should both control the platform and simultaneously participate in it. Is the author against that? The pushback seems to be that it would lead to lawsuits which is almost a cliche from anyone trying to dismiss an idea.

maxxxxx 8y ago
I had the same impression. But this is how political discourse seems to work this day. Instead of making suggestions for improvement an idea gets dismissed completely and nothing happens as a result. Happened with Obamacare and also with the discussion about regulations. Instead of suggesting specific improvements it turns into a black and white debate without results.
- monkbent 8y ago
  This is why the entire second half of the article was detailing where I think focus should be.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Maybe the title was already too confrontational. How about "How I would improve Warren's plan" or something like that?
    - your-nanny 8y ago
      yes that would have been better. didn't finish article, but headline would have kept me reading to the end because I would have expected critique to be followed with constructive suggestions

beager 8y ago

I wish the author and anyone writing about this would disclose their positions in these companies or that they have none. The merits of any argument on this topic are only worth considering if we know that they're being presented in good faith. And to be clear, this applies to people who are pro-dismantling and anti-dismantling.

monkbent 8y ago
https://stratechery.com/about/#ethics https://stratechery.com/about/#ethics

anon0000 8y ago

Noticeably absent from Warren's target list is Comcast. IMHO, they are more anti-trust than any of the tech companies she is targeting. Comcast also happens to be the 15th biggest donor to her campaign. https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/contributors?cid=N00033492&cycle=2018 https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/contributors...

jessedhillon 8y ago
Wait until you see who #9 is! (It's Alphabet, parent of Google) The list you linked shows the common employers of the individual contributors to her 2018 campaign.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
That’s a great point. I hope someone asks her about that. The fact that Comcast can institute data caps on broadband while offering a similar service, on-demand video over cable, without caps is absolutely insane.
- azeotropic 8y ago
  Especially since it has a bunch of (local) government-granted monopolies. Let's eliminate those.
apcragg 8y ago
Wow. Your post is so misleading it borders on outright lying. Those $31k contributions come entirely from individuals. Comcast the company did not donate any money to her. Conflating individual contributions with Corporate contributions is massively misleading. Comcast has 164k employees. Do you honestly expect that most employees of Corporations agree with the political goals and objectives of their parent companies?
- Rooster61 8y ago
  Your argument is equally misleading. Does the fact that those contributions come from individuals somehow make them less profound? It's exceedingly important to point out who these individuals are associated with employment-wise.

comnetxr 8y ago

Agree 95%, but one point he uses to crticize Warren seems wrong: Where Warren says "America’s big tech companies have achieved their level of dominance in part based on two strategies: using Mergers to Limit Competition,..." he argues that they achieved dominance by making good products and were already dominant when they started making major mergers, and that Warren doesn't understand this. It sounds like he's missing the whole point here: google, amazon, and apple of course did achieve dominance by making a good product, but then they leveraged that dominance over one product to dominance over the whole tech sector with a combination of more good products and anticompetitive moves. Warren does not argue that companies that make good products shouldn't be allowed to get big - just that they should be scrutinized and not allowed to make anticompetitive moves. Indeed, all of the tech companies she has proposed breaking up would still be huge companies with "dominating" products (including control over their respective platforms - search, app store, amazon store); but hopefully the ecosystem on those platforms can flourish without competition from the platform companies.

mtgx 8y ago
Yeah, it seems almost like a naive/purposeful misunderstanding of what Warren means. Of course that's what Warren meant - the whole point of even talking about antitrust is that you believe a company used its dominant position to destroy the competition in a way that's less than fair/legal.
Shivetya 8y ago
Sorry, but the idea that Apple needs to be separated from the App store is ludicrous. If you don't like the App store don't buy Apple products. There are hundreds of other phones to choose from and some get equal or better reviews. It would be one thing if Apple was the only cell phone maker in existence but that is so far from the truth. Amazon and online purchases, again, there are so many choices that you never ever have to visit Amazon to buy anything. If they were preventing resellers from selling elsewhere then we would have an issue. Like when Intel was trying to force Dell not to sell AMD. Amazon is in truth their own worst enemy now with so many bad products that venturing off known brands is a risk. She is doing what politicians do best, using resentment, jealousy, and more, to gain more power and money. Not just at the voting booth but by intimidating companies into contributing more the PACs and political campaigns. We see this all the time and sadly people buy into it because using market tested phrases has become standard operating procedure for politicians. They pay to find out how to divide people. An example of why PACs are truly bad is a recent political office run revealed that one candidate, who could not see fit to pay their taxes on time, nor their school loans, had been on the part time pay roll of a PAC for nearly 200k a year. Seriously, you want to see how politicians roll in the money look how the shake down really pays them.

wslh 8y ago

It is interesting that this discussion is happening but we need to apply rational thinking in both ways (in favor and against). For example, this paragraph: > There is certainly an argument to be made that Google, not only in Shopping but also in verticals like local search, is choking off the websites on which Search relies by increasingly offering its own results. At the same time, there is absolutely nothing stopping customers from visiting those websites directly, or downloading their apps, bypassing Google completely. That consumers choose not to is not because Google is somehow restricting them — that is impossible! — but because they don’t want to. Is it really the purview of regulators to correct consumer choices willingly made? The truth is that most consumers will not find alternatives because that involves much work and the platform putting the offerings just in front consumer eyes wins. Stratechery writes about this which is basically about UX, attention and search economy. Google, for example, is making users believe that they are showing the best results based on "an alhorithm" and not hardcoding parts if the results to benefit them. This is a kind of dark pattern that cannot be tolerated.

chj 8y ago

The author is nitpicking. Warren may be wrong about the history of bing and google, but that's not really important. She's 100% right about Amazon, and the author conveniently forgot to mention. Most people in tech industry always strive to build monopoly and dominance. In their eyes, Warren's idea is of course insane. But viewing from another point, in order to protect competition and small businesses, her proposal is mostly sound. The concept of "Platform Utility" may seem arbitrary, but actually a very helpful check and balance. The perfect solution is that the platform should be run like an open blockchain, trouble is no one has a clue how to build it yet.

elicash 8y ago
Also, some would argue it's also good to protect democracy from any entity getting too powerful and having too much influence. None of this of course only applies to tech companies.
cm2187 8y ago
Actually amazon is the one that I would say doesn't have a monopoly. It doesn't have a monopoly in the retail space (far from it), nor in the cloud hosting (let alone server hosting) business, nor in online streaming (music/tv). Google on the other hand has close to a monopoly on search (and browsers). Facebook on social medias.
- mschuster91 8y ago
  > It doesn't have a monopoly in the retail space For vendors, the situation looks different - and Amazon certainly does abuse their position towards vendors often enough, e.g. with the AmazonBasics program where they take bestselling stuff, produce it at Amazon scales and then outprice the "competition".
  - replicatorblog 8y ago
    That seems like the weakest part of the argument — Walmart, Kroger, Walgreens, Costco, and every other major retailer has a similar program. All use sales data to determine what sells best and copy it. I did this for a decade, designing store brand medical devices for all the major retailers. There are plenty of legitimate critiques of Amazon. The "private label" one is by far the weakest.

jmrobertson 8y ago

Reading her stuff, it seems like proposals to separate Apple from the App store indicate a total lack of awareness about InfoSec, and at best a poorly researched policy proposal from a technical standpoint. The only reason the App Store isn't a simmering cesspool of malware is that Apple heavily moderates what gets on there, and Google does somewhat the same. That doesn't mean that there perhaps isn't a less MSFT + IE type of solution, and I don't necessarily disagree with her, but her not mentioning that sort of nuance at all makes it rather clear the policy doesn't extend too far into anything more than populism.

chj 8y ago
There are quite some shady stuff going on in the App Store. People have to live with that, because there is no alternative. https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/sneaky-subscriptions-are-plaguing-the-app-store/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/sneaky-subscriptions-are-p...
- jmrobertson 8y ago
  Right, so imagine separating Apple/Google totally from its current oversight position, and having a totally open app store. Like the world _just_ got past learning not to click 'download here!' on a browser, and that was after 20 years of the internet. I'd be open to alternative proposals, but separating the App Store with no replacement is not a secure solution by any means and causes more problems than it solves, assuming a secure app store is the most important trait of an app store.
  - phillmv 8y ago
    I don't understand why people should not be permitted to go to netflix.com to install the netflix app, or to twitter.com etc etc
    - hopler 8y ago
      Because then they'd install a fake Netflix malware from getnetflix.com

gilbetron 8y ago

> This is a restriction on competition produced not by market dominance, at least not directly, but rather contracts that OEMs could not afford to say ‘No’ to. I'm not seeing a significant difference here. They couldn't afford to say "no" because MS was so dominant.

hopler 8y ago
He's trying to draw a meaningless boundary between competitors being unable to access the market, and competitors being blocked by collusion.

objektif 8y ago

I would take anything the tech industry and even tech focused journalists say about this topic with a grain of salt. It is very likely that they have a conflict of interest. Either they have shares or their jobs require not alienating big tech.

monkbent 8y ago
https://stratechery.com/about/#ethics https://stratechery.com/about/#ethics

gimmeThaBeet 8y ago

> the next generation of great American tech companies can flourish. To do that, we need to stop this generation of big tech companies from throwing around their political power to shape the rules in their favor and throwing around their economic power to snuff out or buy up every potential competitor. This is part I find interesting. If there is a difference between the titans of now vs old, its that they behave like Kronos, swallowing any potential threat for fear someone may disrupt them as they themselves had done to the original mammoths, not brushing off the threat they know is there, no matter how small. But, on a separate note, I think that the current anti-trust philosophy isn't equipped to deal with companies whose business isn't driven by physical products, or behaves a certain way in highly competitive markets (i.e. Apple). Matt Levine often talks about how practically, modern anti-trust in the US isn't there to regulate bigness, but protect consumers via promoting price competition. I can see that they have a lot of power, and some of the effects that power can have, I just struggle to see how potentially impacting the way these businesses operate leads to better outcomes for consumers and citizens as customers.

crankylinuxuser 8y ago
Its even uglier when the price these companies charge is "free"... But in actuality you pay with your data. And I know of no human who would be able to accurately price access to parts or all of their data. "Its just data. How much am I really worth?", is a common refrain. And then, well, its freeeeee....
- sdenton4 8y ago
  Nah, you pay with your eyeballs on the ads. The data just helps choose the ad, and doesn't need to be terribly accurate. So no, your data isn't really worth much: it's the aggregates that you've done a tiny tiny part in building that's worth a lot.
sdenton4 8y ago
The arguments are about stifled competition, rather than direct consumer impact. There's less funding for early startups because it's hard to compete with the Giants, and the Giants walk where they want to. As a result, no one gets a chance to do better than the Giants are currently doing... Even if consumers are kinda ok with how things currently are. (Now, it's also pretty easy to imagine breakups going horribly horribly wrong for consumers, precisely because consumers are pretty happy with the state of play. I would hate paying for a calendar app at this point in history, and I would also hate having to comparison shop for one that didn't suck...)

abalone 8y ago

I’m worried about breaking up Apple. Control of the App Store is how they keep the iPhone secure and malware free. They make money on things sold through the store, yes, but they make most of their money in the phone itself. Break that up and now whoever runs the store has a lot more pressure to make money by exploiting your data, cutting back on curation, etc.

yeldarb 8y ago
I don't think that's what's being proposed. It's that if they are going to control the App Store they can't also participate with their own apps. For instance, Apple Music, which has gotten over 50 million paying users not by being the best music app but by being pushed heavily by Apple as the platform owner. In Warren's plan, Apple Music could not be controlled by Apple. It would have to compete in the App Store on its own merits.
- abalone 8y ago
  > For instance, Apple Music, which has gotten over 50 million paying users not by being the best music app but by being pushed heavily by Apple as the platform owner. Apple Music has more music, a longer free trial and integration with iTunes which lets you upload your own music and sync it to all your devices among other features. By one estimate it converts free users into subscribers at 3X the rate of Spotify.[1] That’s a sign of happier customers, not just being pushed by the platform. Worth mentioning they pay artists more too. And what are you saying, Warren would let Apple run the store but would have to break off Music into a separate entity? All their other bundled apps too like Maps? I didn’t get that from the proposal.. and it doesn’t strike me as consumer friendly. [1] https://bgr.com/2018/09/25/apple-music-vs-spotify-paid-subscribers/ https://bgr.com/2018/09/25/apple-music-vs-spotify-paid-subsc...

steve76 8y ago

The best thing we can do? Lower the barrier to get rich. Think of a reverse Amazon store. You go there, you do what your phone tells you, money is added to it. Guaranteed job public utility vs. I need to apply for a building permit to launch my app public utility.

nabla9 8y ago

Stratechery is weirdly insular site. I don't know the background but it looks like the writer/writers just read business news and create their own ideas and don't like to study or read economics. The "Aggregation Theory" is perfect example of this. It's like the author is not aware that the idea he came up has not been under study for decades and has well developed concepts, terminology and research subject.

hopler 8y ago
Aggregation Theory is brand name he made up to market his consulting services. He's not ignorant, he's selling. The business consulting and person health/self-help industries are full of this sort of thing.
- nabla9 8y ago
  Ah. That makes sense.
zanybear 8y ago
Re: Area of economics talking about aggregators/corner market . I'm interested in researching more this topic. Do you have any links to point me to ?

bhauer 8y ago

> Moreover, Apple, not without merit, argues that restricting rendering engines to the one that ships with the OS (all browsers on iOS have no choice but to use the built-in rendering engine) has significant security benefits; this is debatable, but ultimately, most don’t care, simply because browsers are means to information, not ends. I care about being able to install an alternative browser engine on my devices. I think the reason we're today debating the risks of large social networks and the tech titans in general is that there were finally enough voices of concern that we could no longer be ignored. That had to start somewhere, and it did. It started with a smaller group who have been raising concerns about these companies centralizing user data and surveilling on their users for years. So dismissing a potential future battlefield (browser consolidation versus browser engine choice) seems an echo of those who dismissed concerns about social network overreach five years ago. That said, I personally favor promoting alternatives and educating people about those alternatives. I don't use Facebook and yet I am able to easily communicate with friends and family. Do I want to destroy or break-up Facebook? Meh, not really. I'm fine with Facebook simply not being a part of my life. That includes blocking its domains via DNS. Improving the ability for laypeople to fully block the various surveillance tools of these firms is where I'd like to see more effort spent, not in application of government power. Looping back to the point above, the tough one right now is mobile: You either choose the surveillance apparatus called Android or the walled garden called iOS. There are some fringe options, among which Purism 5 looks particularly promising.

martythemaniak 8y ago

There's a lot of common sentiment around politicians that goes something like "It doesn't matter if they got the details wrong, what matters is that they're essentially correct because they see the Big Picture" We see this here, with fans of Warren saying getting things wrong is irrelevant, because we all know FANG is too powerful and she says it. Thus, quibbling over details is nitpicky pedantry. This tactic is also used by Trump fans, who keep telling us we must "take him seriously, but not literally", where any random nonsense he says is re-interpreted to hint at a larger truth. In this world, Birtherism for example, has absolutely nothing to do with racism and we shouldn't be so nitpicky, because it hints at the larger truth that Obama's life-arch is very different from that of the average American, and they are thus correct to feel that he is more "foreign". Whoever you support, you should not let your guy/gal off the hook like this. Once you start, there's no feedback mechanism to hold you back, you can justify any nonsense using only bits of clever rhethric.

jtr1 8y ago
This smacks a little too much of "both-sidesism." The substantive difference between the two is that Warren will hire a cabinet of seasoned policy specialists who have the bandwidth to write accurate distinctions into law, while there was never any corollary action for Trump because birtherism was never going to be translated into policy; it was a play to prejudice.
- martythemaniak 8y ago
  It is actually the exact opposite of both-siderism, because I'd like people to hold Democrats to a far higher and tougher standard than Republicans. But also, it applies to politics in other countries, it is not strictly an American R/D thing. Also, you should go back to 2015/2016 and read the things said about Trump at the time. The idea that he'd hire a cabinet full of super competent people to run everything while he connects with people and sees the larger truth was very popular. Scott Adams is one of the people who took this line very seriously that I specifically remember.
- zaphar 8y ago
  Yes she will undoubtedly hire seasoned specialists to write her policy into law for her. But will she be looking for people who are on board with her framework or will she be looking for people who will challenge her framework and change her mind on some things. It's worth asking which of those it will be because that is what determines how effective her efforts will be. It's not certain in my mind which one she'll do and as written her proposal does fail to account for some of the causes of the current crop of large scale goliaths in tech.

scarface74 8y ago

After reading through all of the comments, I don’t see how many of the same people who worry about the power of private companies are okay with giving the government more power - the only entity with the legal right to take your property, life, and liberty. I’m much more afraid of government power than private corporations.

shadowtree 8y ago
Try not paying a mortgage and see what happens. Banks can take away a lot, starting with your credit score. And without government, you'd not even have any recourse.
- scarface74 8y ago
  If I don’t pay my mortgage - a contract that I freely entered into knowing the consequences - why shouldn’t the bank take away my house? If the credit score accurately reflected that I didn’t pay the mortgage, why shouldn’t that be recorded?
whytaka 8y ago
The government always had this power. One member of congress is simply making an argument about exercising said power.

Cyclone_ 8y ago

If she's complaining about those companies using private information for profit she'll be quite surprised once she learns what happens on the internet. Many political campaigns use some sort of data mining operations.

tabtab 8y ago

Re: "Bing was not even launched until 2009, eight years after the Microsoft case was settled. MSN Search, its predecessor, did launch in 1998, but with licensed search results from Inktomi and AltaVista; Microsoft didn’t launch its own web crawler until 2005" Had MS not been pressured by anti-trust scrutiny, they may have bought out early search startups. Therefore, MS may have been "late" to search due to anti-trust pressure, and not because they fumbled, as the author suggests. (We may never really know because this would have happened inside of Bill Gates' head.) Ironically, MS may have gotten its start by the fact that IBM felt pressured to make an open-architecture PC due to anti-trust scrutiny. Otherwise, they would have prefered to hard-wire their system for their own PC operating system (created or purchased). Re: "of course a browser should be bundled with an operating system; a new computer without a browser would be practically useless" Including and bundling are not necessarily the same thing. An OS can include multiple browser brands and/or make it easy for new buyers to install another brand. Re: "but rather the entire web; what ties things together are not APIs, but links." But standards are needed for links & browsers to work right across brands, and standards and API's are pretty much the same thing. Re: "Google would have emerged with or without antitrust action against Microsoft" We don't know that. See above. Re: "Facebook was dominant before it bought Instagram and WhatsApp, Google before it bought DoubleClick or YouTube, and Amazon before it bought..." True, but they were even more dominant after. It's a winner-take-all economy these days, reducing competition. They may have got big being good, but that alone is no guarantee they'll stay good. It's human nature to slack when competition fades. It's why the Gov't is not efficient. (Google Maps has been slipping in quality of late I've noticed.) Re: "the app market on PCs died in large part due to security concerns" Come again? Re: "Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple dominate because consumers like them. Each of them leveraged technology to solve a unique user needs" True, but once big they start using other tricks besides being good. Oligopolies and monopolies almost always jack up prices and limit choice once competition goes away. MS left blatant bugs in MS-Access for several years once they flattened the other desktop databases. Good capitalism is based on competition. Competition shrinks, and corporate jerkification and slacking goes up. They shift focus from making a better mouse-trap to keeping others out of the mouse-trap business. Warren's argument may not be perfect, but lack of competition clearly stifles the market in my observation of several decades dealing with the likes of Microsoft and the big telecoms, let alone the history of airlines, IBM, AT&T, eyeglasses, etc.

shadowtree 8y ago

Classic framing problem: Immediately assume it is wrong, then work backwards proving it, using minute details. Would be more interesting to assume we're doing it, then think through the consequences. Or, define the stated end goal (fairer marketplace) and then see if the break up helps. Super irony: In the NGINX gets bought by F5 thread, people complain about AWS being killer competition, ruining the market for open source. The emotions here are also nationalistic, as it hits US companies. Breaking up Ali or TenCent would get a different reaction.

specialist 8y ago

Winner takes all (preferential attachment) is just math. This new trouble is because the internet has resulted in fewer, larger markets. Markets would need to become more fragmented or more fluid to mitigate winner takes all. I don't have any notions on what to do about that.

oflannabhra 8y ago

It seems like the overwhelming response to this article is that the author is nit-picking. I'd argue that the main point of the article is to drive to first-principles: How did these giants get so big? What is fundamentally different about tech companies that makes current antitrust legislation ineffective? Antitrust legislation and enforcement has had several "generations" of philosophy in the United States: - 1890s-1970s Sherman Antitrust Act targeting American Standard Oil. In this era enforcement focused on how a company practiced its business, with a chief goal being maximal competition. - 1970s-now After The Antitrust Paradox [1] was published by Robert Bork, enforcement shifted to "consumer welfare," with the chief goal being maximal welfare. (Planet Money is currently doing a series [2] that covers this) I believe Ben Thompson is advocating that a new generation of philosophy needs to begin, because "consumer welfare" cannot be directly applied to these companies, their unfair advantages, or how to prevent the next "wave." Indeed, their size is a direct result of their serving "consumer welfare" (ie, consumers choose them because their offerings are best). Nitpicking or not, I'd prefer the result of the current discussion to result in actionable change, and I believe the points in this article (ie, the "nitpicks" it makes) are required for such a result. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Th... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox [2] - https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/15/695131832/antitrust-1-standard-oil https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/15/695131832/anti...

georgeecollins 8y ago

In the article: "Worst, it would do so by running roughshod over the idea of judicial independence, invite endless lawsuits and bureaucratic meddling around subjective definitions, and effectively punish consumers for choosing the best option for them." This seems like a FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) argument. How is breaking up a tech giant going to create more of these problems than breaking up AT&T did? We lived through that.

jondubois 8y ago

>> and effectively punish consumers for choosing the best option for them Consumers today are fat and lazy. Whatever small part of me is a consumer, I don't care about that part. We should care about producers and their right to participate in a fair and open marketplace. The biggest problem in people's lives today is not related to a lack of options in terms of what to consume, it is related to a lack of options in terms of what they can produce and how they can produce it. >> Start with the most obvious error: Bing was not even launched until 2009 Actually, her statement makes perfect logical sense. OP is the one who doesn't understand history. If the antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft did not succeed, Internet Explorer would have been the only internet browser which could run on Windows (which itself was a near total monopoly in the personal computing space) and therefore, through their control of IE, they could have created Bing and made it the only search engine in the IE address bar. Maybe they could even have blocked google.com completely if it started to become a threat or maybe they could have added an overlay on top of google.com so that they could replace Google ads with their own ads... The possibilities of what Microsoft could have done to stop Google would have been endless if it wasn't for the antitrust cases brought against Microsoft. If anything, her point is too clever and too insightful for some people to comprehend. Basically Elizabeth Warren seems to actually understand how the world works and she understands the huge impact of goverment policy on the economy instead of pretending that there is no impact.

jondubois 8y ago

>> This is decidedly not the case when it comes to enterprise-focused startups: that sector is thriving with all kinds of new businesses being created, acquired, and going public. Bullshit. If you don't have VC investment under your belt, no corporation would use your services. I have seen this first hand. They refuse to deal with small bootstrapped players. It doesn't matter how great your tech is.

scottlegrand2 8y ago

Amazon's cloud service has plenty of competition. No need to antitrust that part in my opinion. What's hard to disrupt is their amazing logistics network for delivering impulse purchases on the cheap and fast. But while I have nothing but contempt for sponsored products, enabling Amazon arbitrage like it's eBay, and for deleting keywords to increase the size of search results because that defeats my spearfishing for specific products, it doesn't seem like something someone else couldn't build. Start by addressing all of the bad customer experiences with counterfeit products, badly shipped items, and lousy customer support. What makes this difficult is that (beyond the challenge of execution itself) I don't think traditional venture-capital would invest in this so you have a chicken and the egg problem that I suspect will never be solved until someone manages to come up with a business model better than Amazon's at a time when Amazon is too large and inefficient to respond properly. And I think they're getting there. I worked there for six years and left recently. I'm never going back. The culture in my opinion is horrible. And that's a second area where you could do better than Amazon and brain drain them. I'm sure there's more.

JackFr 8y ago

When Disney creates a streaming service, are they using their market power to crush Netflix? Or when Netflix promotes their own original content are they using their platform to unfairly compete. When I buy store brand cough syrup, rather than the name brand, am I being harmed? Is the cough syrup manufacturer?

known 8y ago

I've a simple/enforceable solution; Tax their revenues;