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Allow me to temper some of the glee exhibited in the comments and even in some of the reports but a key line here is: "The divvying of antitrust enforcement do

Allow me to temper some of the glee exhibited in the comments and even in some of the reports but a key line here is: "The divvying of antitrust enforcement does not mean that the agencies have opened official investigations" It is worth keeping in mind that antitrust enforcement in the US doesn't care about whiny competitors but if the enduser and customer is harmed and it doesn't appear to be the case when it comes to any of these corporations. This whole thing is terribly misguided, there is a long list of companies and markets worthy of antitrust scrutiny and these tech companies if they are on that list then they are at the very bottom of it. The real drag on the economy are the high prices of healthcare and housing, there is also the case that ISPs have obvious monopolies and are providing inferior products and services and the list goes on. The role of the media here shouldn't be ignored, they coined the term "big tech" to conjure negative associations and they continuously publish alarmist coverage about any combination of these firms, they also stand to benefit if any enforcement action were to occur.

Meekro 7y ago
Visa and Mastercard have a pretty effective duopoly, too! Their fees and chargeback procedures are a drag on the entire economy. Getting banned by them effectively kills your ability to accept payments, and many legal but politically unpopular businesses find themselves in the crosshairs.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tomrod 7y ago
  Is that right? I thought there were several payment service providers and interchange networks.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Visa/MC/Amex/Discover for Americans, with Visa being far in the lead.
- mailslot 7y ago
  Can we include Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion to the list of monopolistic anti-competitive financial companies?
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    Not to put too fine a point on it, but we've almost immediately started down the road that HN user fyoving is cautioning us against. The idea that our government is going to go after financial firms is a bit fanciful. (In all honesty, legally speaking, fyoving is even correct in asserting that they aren't even going after tech firms.) When you're getting people's hopes up by making them think that something is going to happen, and then nothing happens. People immediately blame big banking, big finance, big tech, corrupt politicians, corruption in general, etc etc. Which is entirely understandable. People get upset at dashed hopes. They look for something or someone to blame. And to be fair, sometimes it's even true that corruption is part of the reason. But this time I have a strong suspicion fyoving is likely correct for a more systemic reason. Any sort of action against a lot of these companies, tech or finance, won't pass muster with the courts. It's not corruption, it's just the law. Which we can change, but it's really hard to do so because there are good reasons for some of these laws. (One way to address that problem though is to add new laws instead of changing the current ones, but there is going to be natural resistance against that too.) I suspect that's the entire reason a certain segment of politicians are trying to bring action against the tech giants within the parameters of current law. Because they know it won't work already. They know how the supremes will rule on any such actions. (Rulings the supremes won't even have to hand down because the agencies in question will probably decide against wasting the time taking any actions in the first place.) It's terrible. A likely diversion of 10 years minimum, during which no one will actually be able to gain any traction towards changing the laws because these elites will be wagging the dog making people think something is going to happen under current law. We should have pushed for changes in the law first. Then gone after the big businesses. But that was probably just a pipe dream of mine anyway. It was never gonna happen.
    - refurb 7y ago
      Are you arguing that politicians would spend ten years investigating companies with the full knowledge they won’t get anywhere with it beyond political brownie points? If so, I agree 100%.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  Chargebacks are overwhelmingly positive. It allows you to use your credit card fearlessly knowing the card companies have your back. Truthfully, if they decreased payment volume or "dragged the economy" card companies wouldn't offer them.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    The problem with chargebacks is that they're mandatory, even in cases where the seller is more trustworthy than the buyer. Then you end up with all the losses associated with buyer fraud even if the overwhelming majority of legitimate buyers would have enough faith in the seller to waive the ability to conduct a chargeback in exchange for a discount in the amount of the fee that has to be charged to cover them. The fee should be on the customer side and they should have a choice whether to pay it per transaction. Paying for insurance is fine, being forced to pay for it when you don't need it is not.
    - arcticbull 7y ago
      > The problem with chargebacks is that they're mandatory, even in cases where the seller is more trustworthy than the buyer. Then you end up with all the losses associated with buyer fraud even if the overwhelming majority of legitimate buyers would have enough faith in the seller to waive the ability to conduct a chargeback in exchange for a discount in the amount of the fee that has to be charged to cover them. This is actually accounted for in the merchant interchange rate. It varies by MCC (merchant category code) [and potentially merchant to merchant] and the frequency of chargebacks is built into how much the merchant pays for processing. Further, that bubbles up to the customer in terms of the pricing. Merchants may offer cash or other payment method discounts, so in a sense, what you're asking for already exists. Merchants do not opt into it because it's not in their interests. That said, that's not how the math works out. If a buyer has a number of chargebacks, the buyer may be investigated and has their account suspended or is charged with fraud. This works both ways. Again, merchants and payment networks are aligned in this case, both make money on greater transaction volume, this feature increases transaction volume, that's why it's there, otherwise it wouldn't be there. Also, paying per-transaction isn't really insurance as it leads to massive adverse selection risk. The most helpful chargeback for me personally was a two thousand dollar chargeback against Expedia where they refused to refund a refundable ticket. I filed a chargeback and I got the money back within a few days. It's a good thing, unless you've got data to back your case.
- tracker1 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure that they should be included as well here... the bigger issue is at what point, and to what extent should civil rights protections extend to publicly available platforms. ie Public Spaces in Private Ownership.
Johnny555 7y ago
there is a long list of companies and markets worthy of antitrust scrutiny... The real drag on the economy are the high prices of healthcare and housing I'm curious what you see as the antitrust violations that lead to high housing prices?
- isoskeles 7y ago
  I agree with the sentiment of the comment you're responding to, but I also think this is a valid question and don't understand why your comment appears to be downvoted.
  - Johnny555 7y ago
    I agree with his overall sentiment too, there are lots of cases of monopolistic practices harming consumers, but I just don't see the same thing with housing prices. Low interest rate loans and restrictive zoning seems to be more of a problem than a few companies colluding together to drive up housing prices.
- dahfizz 7y ago
  I don't understand why you're being down voted... It's a valid question. Nothing pops into my head when I imagine a corporation that owns a majority of real estate. It's a conversation worth having.
  - greeneggs 7y ago
    The closest I can think of is mobile home manufacturing. Berkshire Hathaway has 52% of the market (up from 17% in 2007). https://concentrationcrisis.openmarketsinstitute.org/industry/mobile-home-manufacturing/ https://concentrationcrisis.openmarketsinstitute.org/industr...
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  The housing case is non-traditional because the entity the cartel organizes through is the local government rather than a corporation. You have to live somewhere to get a vote there, so the people (sellers) who already own property in a location get a vote while the people (buyers) who are about to move there don't until after they have and have switched from customer to owner. The result is that the existing property owners have a lock on the local government and pass anti-competitive rules that constrain the housing supply and raise prices. You might think renters would help there, but there are areas where the majority are not renters, and the areas with majority renters often end up with abominations like rent control which cause market rents to go even higher while neutralizing the threat to the anti-competitive rules by paying off just enough of the tenants to retain local majority support.
not2b 7y ago
The difficulty is that antitrust law as originally written did care about "whiny competitors", not just harm to the consumer, but the Justice Department in the Reagan era changed their standards (without changing the law) and both Democratic and Republican administrations went along with it.
onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
It's interesting how the media is owned by the ISPs. They couldn't possibly be trying to redirect our attention after the Net Neutrality uproar and insane disapproval ratings for Ajit Pai -- could they?
dv_dt 7y ago
My cynical suspicion is that the tech giant's platforms allow for citizen organization in a way that the other ignored monopolies do not.
shmerl 7y ago
> Antitrust enforcement in the US doesn't care about whiny competitors but if the enduser and customer is harmed So why does it allow harmful mega-mergers of ISPs and corrupt buying of laws that forbid building municipal networks, which is just a tactic to cement local monopolies? The whole net neutrality topic is primarily about competition law. And lawmakers still (supposedly) can't wrap their heads around such basic thing, dancing to the tune of said monopolists, who pull their strings with legalized corruption.
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> antitrust enforcement in the US doesn't care about whiny competitors but if the enduser and customer is harmed and it doesn't appear to be the case when it comes to any of these corporations One, the House Judiciary Committee is also investigating. That not only makes the investigations bipartisan (though the DoJ is technically nonpartisan). It also introduces the potential for new legislation. Two, there has been consumer harm. It's just not dollar-denominated harm. From a recent New York Times article: "In 2007, for example, Facebook introduced a program that recorded users’ activity on third-party sites and inserted it into the News Feed. Following public outrage and a class-action lawsuit, Facebook ended the program. 'We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them,' Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote in a public apology. This sort of thing happened regularly for years. Facebook would try something sneaky, users would object and Facebook would back off. But then Facebook’s competition began to disappear. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Later in 2014, Google announced that it would fold its social network Orkut. Emboldened by the decline of market threats, Facebook revoked its users’ ability to vote on changes to its privacy policies and then (almost simultaneously with Google’s exit from the social media market) changed its privacy pact with users. This is how Facebook usurped our privacy: with the help of its market dominance. The price of using Facebook has stayed the same over the years (it’s free to join and use), but the cost of using it, calculated in terms of the amount of data that users now must provide, is an order of magnitude above what it was when Facebook faced real competition" [1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/opinion/privacy-antitrust-facebook.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/opinion/privacy-antitrust...
chiefalchemist 7y ago
> "...he US doesn't care about whiny competitors but if the enduser and customer is harmed..." It's difficult for me to imagine the Justice Dept being able to argue that "customers" were harmed...using services that were free.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  > It's difficult for me to imagine the Justice Dept being able to argue that "customers" were harmed...using services that were free. C'mon, not offering any choice in how you pay for the service is inherently anti-consumer behavior. It's certainly not free, and they certainly never offer the consumer any insight into exactly how they are paying for it.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    > C'mon, not offering any choice in how you pay for the service is inherently anti-consumer behavior. This might be the best take I've heard yet. What constitutes choice in method of payment. Since it appears you consider "forcing users to pay with data" to be anti-consumer, is "forcing users to pay with dollars" equally anti-consumer? Does that make, like, restaurants that don't let you pay with personal info anti-consumer? What about companies that take data and don't offer anything in return (Equifax et. al, ISPs, etc.)
    - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
      I'm not against paying with currency, except insofar as this inherently benefits a subset of humanity. But the issue is not that ads are inherently bad, it's that the interaction is inherently dishonest. A more honest way would allow you, the end-user, to bid for the same ad spots to allow a proper valuation of the ad to the perspective of the consumer. My impression is that Google goes to large efforts to obscure the 'value' of a web page from consumers. If there were proper exchanges between ads and money this might make sense, though I can only imagine the number of ads you might watch to pay for a meal would drive anyone insane. Plus, ads try to target users with money, so presumably their value is proportional to your value. That's probably also a key reason why you don't see this anywhere: it's a blatantly classist practice.
noelsusman 7y ago
Replace "big tech" with "big banks" and this is almost word for word what I hear from my friends on Wall Street. The fact is that these are some of the most powerful companies in the world. Tech has skated by with a tiny fraction of the scrutiny that similarly powerful industries get. You say that it doesn't appear customers have been harmed by these companies, but maybe it doesn't appear that way because nobody with any power has bothered to look.
- awinder 7y ago
  This is actually a decent point, and tech has only recently realized that they need lobbyists in order to smooth the legislative runways (this is the most charitable description I could imagine for what is being done here). Congress & the executive may want to look into this with cool heads rather than doing the lambasting song and dance. There’s a lot of s&p 500 money in the companies they are going after, and I’m getting the feeling that the “enormous tax cut” is really just gonna end up as cushion for trillions in dumbass value destruction.
  - kortilla 7y ago
    Google has been lobbying for at least a decade. These big companies didn’t “recently realize” anything. It’s just come to light now because there isn’t an administration in control now that is politically aligned with them.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
The fact that I can't purchase any software for my iPhone without Apple taking a 30% cut absolutely harms me as a consumer. It naturally leads to higher prices.
- cpuguy83 7y ago
  I think you would have a hard time proving this, because software prices are much (much) cheaper than they were pre-app store.
  - wavefunction 7y ago
    That assertion seems harder to prove than the assertion that a 30% built-in cost leads to higher prices.
    - cpuguy83 7y ago
      How is it harder to prove? It's completely provable and even a huge complaint of developers of the platform. Everyone expects free/0.99 apps and it costs way more to produce and support them. Apps, before we had an app store, were absolutely more expensive than this. Which apps are expensive? Not to defend Apple here, but when the store was introduced people didn't mind the 30% hit because: 1. Credit card processing wasn't as easy as it is today, and the store takes care of all that 2. Store hands distribution and listing Before the app store we actually had to go to a physical store to buy software. Sure some you could buy online but really not all that much (comparatively) and discoverability was basically "hope someone with a big blog or CNET review it". Of course now it is difficult to be discovered because there's tons and tons of other things out there. CC processing is not difficult and there are companies like Stripe that you can go through... etc.
- pmart123 7y ago
  15% when the subscription is over a year and the 30% cut only applies to digital goods so Uber, Lyft and food delivery, for instance, are exempt. My guess is these fees will continue to drop naturally over time, but they probably haven't dropped fast enough.
feynmanistheman 7y ago
As the article goes into, the consumer welfare standard that you mention is an interpretation of the Sherman Act, not a cut-and-dry statutory phrasing. Changes in either judicial thought or legislation could still put "big tech" in danger, even if they don't run afoul of the consumer welfare standard. I would hope that questions of competition and influence would be asked in the digital age, hopefully without the malign influence of the media and "whiny competitors."
soup10 7y ago
Big tech does many scummy things in the name of corporate greed, far from misguided, this is overdue.

Meekro 7y ago

Visa and Mastercard have a pretty effective duopoly, too! Their fees and chargeback procedures are a drag on the entire economy. Getting banned by them effectively kills your ability to accept payments, and many legal but politically unpopular businesses find themselves in the crosshairs.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tomrod 7y ago
Is that right? I thought there were several payment service providers and interchange networks.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Visa/MC/Amex/Discover for Americans, with Visa being far in the lead.
mailslot 7y ago
Can we include Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion to the list of monopolistic anti-competitive financial companies?
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  Not to put too fine a point on it, but we've almost immediately started down the road that HN user fyoving is cautioning us against. The idea that our government is going to go after financial firms is a bit fanciful. (In all honesty, legally speaking, fyoving is even correct in asserting that they aren't even going after tech firms.) When you're getting people's hopes up by making them think that something is going to happen, and then nothing happens. People immediately blame big banking, big finance, big tech, corrupt politicians, corruption in general, etc etc. Which is entirely understandable. People get upset at dashed hopes. They look for something or someone to blame. And to be fair, sometimes it's even true that corruption is part of the reason. But this time I have a strong suspicion fyoving is likely correct for a more systemic reason. Any sort of action against a lot of these companies, tech or finance, won't pass muster with the courts. It's not corruption, it's just the law. Which we can change, but it's really hard to do so because there are good reasons for some of these laws. (One way to address that problem though is to add new laws instead of changing the current ones, but there is going to be natural resistance against that too.) I suspect that's the entire reason a certain segment of politicians are trying to bring action against the tech giants within the parameters of current law. Because they know it won't work already. They know how the supremes will rule on any such actions. (Rulings the supremes won't even have to hand down because the agencies in question will probably decide against wasting the time taking any actions in the first place.) It's terrible. A likely diversion of 10 years minimum, during which no one will actually be able to gain any traction towards changing the laws because these elites will be wagging the dog making people think something is going to happen under current law. We should have pushed for changes in the law first. Then gone after the big businesses. But that was probably just a pipe dream of mine anyway. It was never gonna happen.
  - refurb 7y ago
    Are you arguing that politicians would spend ten years investigating companies with the full knowledge they won’t get anywhere with it beyond political brownie points? If so, I agree 100%.
arcticbull 7y ago
Chargebacks are overwhelmingly positive. It allows you to use your credit card fearlessly knowing the card companies have your back. Truthfully, if they decreased payment volume or "dragged the economy" card companies wouldn't offer them.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  The problem with chargebacks is that they're mandatory, even in cases where the seller is more trustworthy than the buyer. Then you end up with all the losses associated with buyer fraud even if the overwhelming majority of legitimate buyers would have enough faith in the seller to waive the ability to conduct a chargeback in exchange for a discount in the amount of the fee that has to be charged to cover them. The fee should be on the customer side and they should have a choice whether to pay it per transaction. Paying for insurance is fine, being forced to pay for it when you don't need it is not.
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    > The problem with chargebacks is that they're mandatory, even in cases where the seller is more trustworthy than the buyer. Then you end up with all the losses associated with buyer fraud even if the overwhelming majority of legitimate buyers would have enough faith in the seller to waive the ability to conduct a chargeback in exchange for a discount in the amount of the fee that has to be charged to cover them. This is actually accounted for in the merchant interchange rate. It varies by MCC (merchant category code) [and potentially merchant to merchant] and the frequency of chargebacks is built into how much the merchant pays for processing. Further, that bubbles up to the customer in terms of the pricing. Merchants may offer cash or other payment method discounts, so in a sense, what you're asking for already exists. Merchants do not opt into it because it's not in their interests. That said, that's not how the math works out. If a buyer has a number of chargebacks, the buyer may be investigated and has their account suspended or is charged with fraud. This works both ways. Again, merchants and payment networks are aligned in this case, both make money on greater transaction volume, this feature increases transaction volume, that's why it's there, otherwise it wouldn't be there. Also, paying per-transaction isn't really insurance as it leads to massive adverse selection risk. The most helpful chargeback for me personally was a two thousand dollar chargeback against Expedia where they refused to refund a refundable ticket. I filed a chargeback and I got the money back within a few days. It's a good thing, unless you've got data to back your case.
tracker1 7y ago
I'm pretty sure that they should be included as well here... the bigger issue is at what point, and to what extent should civil rights protections extend to publicly available platforms. ie Public Spaces in Private Ownership.

Johnny555 7y ago

there is a long list of companies and markets worthy of antitrust scrutiny... The real drag on the economy are the high prices of healthcare and housing I'm curious what you see as the antitrust violations that lead to high housing prices?

isoskeles 7y ago
I agree with the sentiment of the comment you're responding to, but I also think this is a valid question and don't understand why your comment appears to be downvoted.
- Johnny555 7y ago
  I agree with his overall sentiment too, there are lots of cases of monopolistic practices harming consumers, but I just don't see the same thing with housing prices. Low interest rate loans and restrictive zoning seems to be more of a problem than a few companies colluding together to drive up housing prices.
dahfizz 7y ago
I don't understand why you're being down voted... It's a valid question. Nothing pops into my head when I imagine a corporation that owns a majority of real estate. It's a conversation worth having.
- greeneggs 7y ago
  The closest I can think of is mobile home manufacturing. Berkshire Hathaway has 52% of the market (up from 17% in 2007). https://concentrationcrisis.openmarketsinstitute.org/industry/mobile-home-manufacturing/ https://concentrationcrisis.openmarketsinstitute.org/industr...
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
The housing case is non-traditional because the entity the cartel organizes through is the local government rather than a corporation. You have to live somewhere to get a vote there, so the people (sellers) who already own property in a location get a vote while the people (buyers) who are about to move there don't until after they have and have switched from customer to owner. The result is that the existing property owners have a lock on the local government and pass anti-competitive rules that constrain the housing supply and raise prices. You might think renters would help there, but there are areas where the majority are not renters, and the areas with majority renters often end up with abominations like rent control which cause market rents to go even higher while neutralizing the threat to the anti-competitive rules by paying off just enough of the tenants to retain local majority support.

not2b 7y ago

The difficulty is that antitrust law as originally written did care about "whiny competitors", not just harm to the consumer, but the Justice Department in the Reagan era changed their standards (without changing the law) and both Democratic and Republican administrations went along with it.

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago

It's interesting how the media is owned by the ISPs. They couldn't possibly be trying to redirect our attention after the Net Neutrality uproar and insane disapproval ratings for Ajit Pai -- could they?

dv_dt 7y ago

My cynical suspicion is that the tech giant's platforms allow for citizen organization in a way that the other ignored monopolies do not.

shmerl 7y ago

> Antitrust enforcement in the US doesn't care about whiny competitors but if the enduser and customer is harmed So why does it allow harmful mega-mergers of ISPs and corrupt buying of laws that forbid building municipal networks, which is just a tactic to cement local monopolies? The whole net neutrality topic is primarily about competition law. And lawmakers still (supposedly) can't wrap their heads around such basic thing, dancing to the tune of said monopolists, who pull their strings with legalized corruption.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> antitrust enforcement in the US doesn't care about whiny competitors but if the enduser and customer is harmed and it doesn't appear to be the case when it comes to any of these corporations One, the House Judiciary Committee is also investigating. That not only makes the investigations bipartisan (though the DoJ is technically nonpartisan). It also introduces the potential for new legislation. Two, there has been consumer harm. It's just not dollar-denominated harm. From a recent New York Times article: "In 2007, for example, Facebook introduced a program that recorded users’ activity on third-party sites and inserted it into the News Feed. Following public outrage and a class-action lawsuit, Facebook ended the program. 'We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them,' Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote in a public apology. This sort of thing happened regularly for years. Facebook would try something sneaky, users would object and Facebook would back off. But then Facebook’s competition began to disappear. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Later in 2014, Google announced that it would fold its social network Orkut. Emboldened by the decline of market threats, Facebook revoked its users’ ability to vote on changes to its privacy policies and then (almost simultaneously with Google’s exit from the social media market) changed its privacy pact with users. This is how Facebook usurped our privacy: with the help of its market dominance. The price of using Facebook has stayed the same over the years (it’s free to join and use), but the cost of using it, calculated in terms of the amount of data that users now must provide, is an order of magnitude above what it was when Facebook faced real competition" [1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/opinion/privacy-antitrust-facebook.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/opinion/privacy-antitrust...

chiefalchemist 7y ago

> "...he US doesn't care about whiny competitors but if the enduser and customer is harmed..." It's difficult for me to imagine the Justice Dept being able to argue that "customers" were harmed...using services that were free.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago
> It's difficult for me to imagine the Justice Dept being able to argue that "customers" were harmed...using services that were free. C'mon, not offering any choice in how you pay for the service is inherently anti-consumer behavior. It's certainly not free, and they certainly never offer the consumer any insight into exactly how they are paying for it.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  > C'mon, not offering any choice in how you pay for the service is inherently anti-consumer behavior. This might be the best take I've heard yet. What constitutes choice in method of payment. Since it appears you consider "forcing users to pay with data" to be anti-consumer, is "forcing users to pay with dollars" equally anti-consumer? Does that make, like, restaurants that don't let you pay with personal info anti-consumer? What about companies that take data and don't offer anything in return (Equifax et. al, ISPs, etc.)
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    I'm not against paying with currency, except insofar as this inherently benefits a subset of humanity. But the issue is not that ads are inherently bad, it's that the interaction is inherently dishonest. A more honest way would allow you, the end-user, to bid for the same ad spots to allow a proper valuation of the ad to the perspective of the consumer. My impression is that Google goes to large efforts to obscure the 'value' of a web page from consumers. If there were proper exchanges between ads and money this might make sense, though I can only imagine the number of ads you might watch to pay for a meal would drive anyone insane. Plus, ads try to target users with money, so presumably their value is proportional to your value. That's probably also a key reason why you don't see this anywhere: it's a blatantly classist practice.

noelsusman 7y ago

Replace "big tech" with "big banks" and this is almost word for word what I hear from my friends on Wall Street. The fact is that these are some of the most powerful companies in the world. Tech has skated by with a tiny fraction of the scrutiny that similarly powerful industries get. You say that it doesn't appear customers have been harmed by these companies, but maybe it doesn't appear that way because nobody with any power has bothered to look.

awinder 7y ago
This is actually a decent point, and tech has only recently realized that they need lobbyists in order to smooth the legislative runways (this is the most charitable description I could imagine for what is being done here). Congress & the executive may want to look into this with cool heads rather than doing the lambasting song and dance. There’s a lot of s&p 500 money in the companies they are going after, and I’m getting the feeling that the “enormous tax cut” is really just gonna end up as cushion for trillions in dumbass value destruction.
- kortilla 7y ago
  Google has been lobbying for at least a decade. These big companies didn’t “recently realize” anything. It’s just come to light now because there isn’t an administration in control now that is politically aligned with them.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

The fact that I can't purchase any software for my iPhone without Apple taking a 30% cut absolutely harms me as a consumer. It naturally leads to higher prices.

cpuguy83 7y ago
I think you would have a hard time proving this, because software prices are much (much) cheaper than they were pre-app store.
- wavefunction 7y ago
  That assertion seems harder to prove than the assertion that a 30% built-in cost leads to higher prices.
  - cpuguy83 7y ago
    How is it harder to prove? It's completely provable and even a huge complaint of developers of the platform. Everyone expects free/0.99 apps and it costs way more to produce and support them. Apps, before we had an app store, were absolutely more expensive than this. Which apps are expensive? Not to defend Apple here, but when the store was introduced people didn't mind the 30% hit because: 1. Credit card processing wasn't as easy as it is today, and the store takes care of all that 2. Store hands distribution and listing Before the app store we actually had to go to a physical store to buy software. Sure some you could buy online but really not all that much (comparatively) and discoverability was basically "hope someone with a big blog or CNET review it". Of course now it is difficult to be discovered because there's tons and tons of other things out there. CC processing is not difficult and there are companies like Stripe that you can go through... etc.
pmart123 7y ago
15% when the subscription is over a year and the 30% cut only applies to digital goods so Uber, Lyft and food delivery, for instance, are exempt. My guess is these fees will continue to drop naturally over time, but they probably haven't dropped fast enough.

feynmanistheman 7y ago

As the article goes into, the consumer welfare standard that you mention is an interpretation of the Sherman Act, not a cut-and-dry statutory phrasing. Changes in either judicial thought or legislation could still put "big tech" in danger, even if they don't run afoul of the consumer welfare standard. I would hope that questions of competition and influence would be asked in the digital age, hopefully without the malign influence of the media and "whiny competitors."

soup10 7y ago

Big tech does many scummy things in the name of corporate greed, far from misguided, this is overdue.