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The fact that the the thing allegedly being monopolized, and the monopolization mechanism are "data" makes this interesting, and potentially informative. On an

The fact that the the thing allegedly being monopolized, and the monopolization mechanism are "data" makes this interesting, and potentially informative. On another thread about Google's search monopoly, the consensus (or whatever the nearest HN-equivalent is) opinion that data (past searches and user behaviour) is a major moat for Google. In a lot of senses, data is a new type of capital, a new type of IP. It's ownership is still in debate. Some recent legislation attempts to give us a certain level of theoretical "ownership" of "our personal data," but ultimately... data isn't really data unless it's aggregated. What it is, and how useful it is depends on having lots of it. Being "intellectual" property essentially means that it's ethereal property. It isn't exclusive by nature, only by law. If a court finds that Amazon using its extensive market data to monopolistic advantage... What's the fix? Could it be make data public? That's an interesting discussion to start having in the context of a competition investigation. Say we put privacy questions aside for a start... what's the public downside to making such data public by default... over a certain magnitude.

CodiePetersen 7y ago
Well I imagine the immediate downside is having companies that you dont care for trying to influence you with data you never gave them possibly quite on purpose. In the end that's just a privacy concern again. I think the problem is always the scale. Knowing one persons data isn't to harmful to society. But knowing so many and having real incentive to use and abuse it has always been the problem. That type of data lead to Trumps election and Brexit both from the same person. So data can definitely move nations. I think the best option is to break the big tech companies up. On smaller scales they are less harmful.
- dalbasal 7y ago
  I think maybe we're speaking past eachother. When we say "break up" in the context of Google... what do we mean? Geographically? By "vertical" like Gmail & stuff, YouTube and search, advertising & making money, waymo and other loss making operations..? I'm not sure what the solutions to all the issues are. But, apart from the issues around privacy (and I'm not sure the conventions we're aiming for are great on privacy anyway), we just can't "physically" own our data individually. That's not how data works. The data from lots of cars driving around can become a self driving car program. The data from you driving around cannot (never say never though). It's data's qualities at scale that are being discussed here. Amazon knows what and how and how much who buys, at scale. If an allegation/indictment is made, it will/may allege that at Amazon scale, this is monopolistic.
  - CodiePetersen 7y ago
    I'm suggesting that the bad effects are usually from scale. So the only real effective way imo is to reduce the scale by breaking the companies both horizontally and vertically. Maybe each vertical has two or more companies created from it idk. But if there are more actors smaller populations can have a larger effect on policy because now the companies don't have many revenue streams to hold out until people forget. They would be subject to immediate public demands and people would have competitors they could flock to. Additionally many actors competing with data at smaller scales I think reduces the harmful effects of singular bad influence pointing society in the wrong direction. But I agree I don't think there is much we can do about data ownership. The most we can do is make laws saying you have to inform them when you collect their data and that's already being done. Users just need to be conscious about their activity and sites they go to. But there needs to be real competitive alternatives to switch to if that is going to be effective.
- repolfx 7y ago
  You don't have any evidence that "data" is the reason why Trump or Brexit won. Recall: - Trump was not an experienced campaigner, had no real campaign database and spent half as much as Clinton. - Leaving the EU was represented by two different campaigns which hated each other, none of which had any meaningful amounts of data, and were up against a vastly well funded and organised campaign by the government, literally, the organisation that has the most data on everyone. Trump won because Clinton was a terrible candidate who had a policy of starting a war with Russia (her no-fly zone over Syria) and Leave won because Remain ran a terrible campaign that boiled down to "we can't leave because the EU will punish us severely if we do and we are weak". You don't have to be a campaigning genius to understand that people don't like these things - vague allusions to 'data' aren't necessary.
  - CodiePetersen 7y ago
    Actually you have plenty of evidence. AggregateIQ through data was able to automatically fashion ads tailored at capturing audience members susceptible to certain messages. Leave used that data to campaign and attract voters who otherwise would have not voted. Cambridge Analytica employed similar methods with similar data to help secure president Trumps election. Both companies belonged to Robert Mercer who worked on AI and data analytics in its earlier years. You can read plenty on how both those companies were used to secure those votes. It's all in the public domain. Sure it wasn't all data but data was a pivotal weapon in winning their respective battles.
    - CodiePetersen 7y ago
      I might also add that Robert Mercer donated to both Trumps campaign and to prominent Brexit proponents. I forget exactly who but like I said it's all public knowledge.
    - repolfx 7y ago
      Sure it wasn't all data but data was a pivotal weapon in winning their respective battles. You actually don't know that. In fact nobody, including those making the claims, can prove it made any difference. Both AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica could well have had no impact whatsoever: this stuff is pure faith based spending. It's like spending on campaign advertising. Some people take it as an article of faith that whoever spends more wins, but that has been repeatedly proven false in the real world. Apparently political ad spending isn't such a big deal after all. And again, you must remember that in both those cases their opponents spent far more, on all kinds of things including data based voter targeting. If generic "data" were so valuable they'd surely have achieved massive victories, but they lost
r00fus 7y ago
I think Data is too vague of a term. It's probably more a combination of proprietary metadata + personal/targeted demographic data. Does a store (online or B&M) have exclusive license of your aggregate heatmap while you walk/browse through the store? - I think many would argue that's probably valid. Does it have the right to link that to your demographics/psychology to optimize the store? They probably do ... but for your benefit? Sounds like "personalization" - a bit murky. How about if it's for their benefit (personal price segmentation)? That sounds bad/unethical. How about if it's to only serve the "right people"? That's clearly on the edge of legality. The remedy is to have cyberethics on how personal/private data is controlled and aggregated. It's not about "opening things up" but using Amazon as a case study as to how to draw borders/distinctions on proprietary vs. personal data. GDPR++
- dalbasal 7y ago
  I suppose we'll see. I think it's more likely that we see some limitations on us of your aggregate data, if it's decided on privacy. To me, this sounds unattractive. This doesn't make it "our data" in a meaningful way. We can't get the value from it. Monopoly, oth, is all about aggregation and that's what's being discussed here.

CodiePetersen 7y ago

Well I imagine the immediate downside is having companies that you dont care for trying to influence you with data you never gave them possibly quite on purpose. In the end that's just a privacy concern again. I think the problem is always the scale. Knowing one persons data isn't to harmful to society. But knowing so many and having real incentive to use and abuse it has always been the problem. That type of data lead to Trumps election and Brexit both from the same person. So data can definitely move nations. I think the best option is to break the big tech companies up. On smaller scales they are less harmful.

dalbasal 7y ago
I think maybe we're speaking past eachother. When we say "break up" in the context of Google... what do we mean? Geographically? By "vertical" like Gmail & stuff, YouTube and search, advertising & making money, waymo and other loss making operations..? I'm not sure what the solutions to all the issues are. But, apart from the issues around privacy (and I'm not sure the conventions we're aiming for are great on privacy anyway), we just can't "physically" own our data individually. That's not how data works. The data from lots of cars driving around can become a self driving car program. The data from you driving around cannot (never say never though). It's data's qualities at scale that are being discussed here. Amazon knows what and how and how much who buys, at scale. If an allegation/indictment is made, it will/may allege that at Amazon scale, this is monopolistic.
- CodiePetersen 7y ago
  I'm suggesting that the bad effects are usually from scale. So the only real effective way imo is to reduce the scale by breaking the companies both horizontally and vertically. Maybe each vertical has two or more companies created from it idk. But if there are more actors smaller populations can have a larger effect on policy because now the companies don't have many revenue streams to hold out until people forget. They would be subject to immediate public demands and people would have competitors they could flock to. Additionally many actors competing with data at smaller scales I think reduces the harmful effects of singular bad influence pointing society in the wrong direction. But I agree I don't think there is much we can do about data ownership. The most we can do is make laws saying you have to inform them when you collect their data and that's already being done. Users just need to be conscious about their activity and sites they go to. But there needs to be real competitive alternatives to switch to if that is going to be effective.
repolfx 7y ago
You don't have any evidence that "data" is the reason why Trump or Brexit won. Recall: - Trump was not an experienced campaigner, had no real campaign database and spent half as much as Clinton. - Leaving the EU was represented by two different campaigns which hated each other, none of which had any meaningful amounts of data, and were up against a vastly well funded and organised campaign by the government, literally, the organisation that has the most data on everyone. Trump won because Clinton was a terrible candidate who had a policy of starting a war with Russia (her no-fly zone over Syria) and Leave won because Remain ran a terrible campaign that boiled down to "we can't leave because the EU will punish us severely if we do and we are weak". You don't have to be a campaigning genius to understand that people don't like these things - vague allusions to 'data' aren't necessary.
- CodiePetersen 7y ago
  Actually you have plenty of evidence. AggregateIQ through data was able to automatically fashion ads tailored at capturing audience members susceptible to certain messages. Leave used that data to campaign and attract voters who otherwise would have not voted. Cambridge Analytica employed similar methods with similar data to help secure president Trumps election. Both companies belonged to Robert Mercer who worked on AI and data analytics in its earlier years. You can read plenty on how both those companies were used to secure those votes. It's all in the public domain. Sure it wasn't all data but data was a pivotal weapon in winning their respective battles.
  - CodiePetersen 7y ago
    I might also add that Robert Mercer donated to both Trumps campaign and to prominent Brexit proponents. I forget exactly who but like I said it's all public knowledge.
  - repolfx 7y ago
    Sure it wasn't all data but data was a pivotal weapon in winning their respective battles. You actually don't know that. In fact nobody, including those making the claims, can prove it made any difference. Both AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica could well have had no impact whatsoever: this stuff is pure faith based spending. It's like spending on campaign advertising. Some people take it as an article of faith that whoever spends more wins, but that has been repeatedly proven false in the real world. Apparently political ad spending isn't such a big deal after all. And again, you must remember that in both those cases their opponents spent far more, on all kinds of things including data based voter targeting. If generic "data" were so valuable they'd surely have achieved massive victories, but they lost

r00fus 7y ago

I think Data is too vague of a term. It's probably more a combination of proprietary metadata + personal/targeted demographic data. Does a store (online or B&M) have exclusive license of your aggregate heatmap while you walk/browse through the store? - I think many would argue that's probably valid. Does it have the right to link that to your demographics/psychology to optimize the store? They probably do ... but for your benefit? Sounds like "personalization" - a bit murky. How about if it's for their benefit (personal price segmentation)? That sounds bad/unethical. How about if it's to only serve the "right people"? That's clearly on the edge of legality. The remedy is to have cyberethics on how personal/private data is controlled and aggregated. It's not about "opening things up" but using Amazon as a case study as to how to draw borders/distinctions on proprietary vs. personal data. GDPR++

dalbasal 7y ago
I suppose we'll see. I think it's more likely that we see some limitations on us of your aggregate data, if it's decided on privacy. To me, this sounds unattractive. This doesn't make it "our data" in a meaningful way. We can't get the value from it. Monopoly, oth, is all about aggregation and that's what's being discussed here.