31 ms·

Justice Department to Open Broad, New Antitrust Review of Big Tech Companies

327 points by mudil 7y ago

omarhaneef 7y ago
Q: Does anyone know if it is typical for antitrust action to last into a new administration once it has started?
- CameronNemo 7y ago
  Q: Is antitrust action typical at all?
  - omarhaneef 7y ago
    Good point. I guess I was asking for p(drop action with new admin | antitrust started in last)
- tick_tock_tick 7y ago
  The DOJ normally acts with some degree of freedom with new administrations merely refocusing its most visible efforts. A large scale probe would be extremely unlikely to get dropped completely but could be marginalized.
  - omarhaneef 7y ago
    Thanks. For some reason I had the impression there was a large change, but I had no basis for that.
  - User23 7y ago
    The DOJ is not an independent agency, despite what the media attempts to lead people to believe. The Constitution clearly states that the executive power, which includes law enforcement, is vested in the President. The DOJ has no authority to enforce laws except that of the President. That said, political considerations do mean that Presidents are hesitant to overtly step in on specific cases and usually prefer to set general objectives. However the President can step in on a specific case if he wishes and that is actually explicitly part of our system. The President can set aside a conviction with a pardon or prevent it from being prosecuted in the first place.
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      Could it be the big 5 returned too little amount of jobs to USA and are getting a wrath? Or is it just standard SV bashing to please the conservative voters? I suppose (as European) USA is getting heated up for another presidential election.
    - bobsil1 7y ago
      >The President can… prevent it from being prosecuted in the first place No.
      - User23 7y ago
        You are completely incorrect. The President can pardon before a prosecution even begins so long as the pardon is after the act itself[1]. He can also direct his Attorney General or US attorneys to drop a case because he is their boss and they serve at his pleasure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_parte_Garland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_parte_Garland
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  In the past it was traditional that the justice department was somewhat separate from the administration - thus it would have been scandalous, in the past, if an administration had come in and cancelled investigations undertaken by an exiting administration - or at least scandalous if there could be any suspicion of corruption being the cause of the cancellation. So big companies have generally donated to political campaigns and as such they should not, traditionally, have their investigations quashed because this would raise suspicions that there had been a quid pro quo.
  - tssva 7y ago
    They may not have cancelled it but when the 2nd Bush administration came in the Justice department became much more lenient towards Microsoft than it was under the Clinton administration. The ultimate agreement was a sweetheart deal compared to what they were facing under the previous administration. It took the Europeans to impose anything with any kind of teeth.
    - omarhaneef 7y ago
      That was my understanding as well. Do you know/think/recall if that change a result of the Bush administration having a more lenient stance towards regulation, or was it a result of one administration almost always reacting to the prior one?
- debt 7y ago
  Unfortunately for the current administration, it would be cheaper to remove them from office that it would be to comply with their investigation. A future administration may be much friendlier towards tech. Big tech will likely drag this out as long as they can.
  - aaronbrethorst 7y ago
    A future administration may be much friendlier towards tech. Unlikely. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-03/the-next-democratic-president-is-coming-for-your-monopoly https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-03/the-next-...
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      I don't know about the USA but here in The Netherlands things being said during elections certainly aren't set in stone. To name two examples: empty promises get made, and rhetoric gets used. Now I know the latter is true in USA even far more but I am not sure on the former.
      - aaronbrethorst 7y ago
        Empty promises get made all the time. This isn't one of them. Facebook wouldn't survive a Warren administration, e.g.,—assuming that Margrethe Vestager leaves it intact.
      - CameronNemo 7y ago
        I really do not think Warren is messing around. Now her actually reaching the presidency is far off and certainly not guaranteed.
MichaelApproved 7y ago
> The Justice Department is opening a broad antitrust review into whether dominant technology firms are unlawfully stifling competition, according to department officials, adding a new Washington threat for companies such as Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc. ’s Google, Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. > The review is geared toward examining the practices of online platforms that dominate internet search, social media and retail services, the officials said. Interesting that Microsoft, the only company worth over $1 trillion, isn't mentioned. The focus is on online platforms and they don't have anything dominating in that field. I wonder if it'll stay isolated to those companies or if Microsoft will get looped into this because they're so large.
- lettergram 7y ago
  One thing Microsoft has going for it - they’ve been through this process in the 90s / early 2000s. Plus, their OS is clearly not a monopoly, their web browser is now based on Chrome, their a distant #2 in the cloud space, their a very distant #2 in search, etc Literally, I can’t think of one thing Microsoft is top dog in besides OS.
  - favorited 7y ago
    MS Office. They're 100% dominant in word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.
    - MBCook 7y ago
      Is that still true? I’m guessing Google Docs has a non-trivial marketshare. Probably not bigger than MS but real competition.
    - the1pato 7y ago
      Google Docs is pretty big, too.
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      ..but they don't leverage their MS Office dominance to harm the market. You can access MS Office with the open HTTP(S) standard. MS Office works on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and in WINE. It follows the OOXML standard which you can open in LibreOffice as well. Apple -> These $%^&ers don't allow anyone to repair their own devices, they don't allow a different distribution method on iOS/iPodOS devices hence quickly evolve to unfair market advantage. Amazon -> Undercut anyone at any cost while having the worst review system on our planet. Facebook -> RIP privacy, just see the recent scandals. Google -> Probably something involving Android... Microsoft? Oh I can write a book about my terrible experiences with that company. I hated this company and everything it stood for for about 15+ years or so (at least 1995-2010). Recently though? Not so much.
Railsify 7y ago
I don't understand how google could be split up, would they redirect traffic from google.com to another search engine?
- vkou 7y ago
  The ad business and the search business could theoretically exist as separate entities. The ad business would then buy page space from the search business.
  - katttrrr 7y ago
    That's an interesting point. Yet, I'm not sure I fully understand what you'd expect would change with this?
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    I imagine this would be the most effective split-up. If the ad business is required to let other search engines compete on the same terms as Google, it will remove the largest barrier to entry for small companies on search.
    - katttrrr 7y ago
      Theoretically, couldn't they still set different terms per search customer? Thus, still favoring themselves
      - elliekelly 7y ago
        The ad entity wouldn’t be “themselves” to the search entity anymore so there wouldn’t be any incentive to give one random customer a more favorable rate than the rest.
      - marcosdumay 7y ago
        Well, not if the courts say they can't. Splitting monopolies always come with extra strings attached, and this is a obvious one you can expect to be there.
ngngngng 7y ago
I'm happy that antitrust is being explored. I do think free markets need to be protected, and the last few decades attitude of "if it's good for consumers it's legal" is short sighted. Something can be good for consumers right now, but stifle competition and be bad for consumers eventually.
- writepub 7y ago
  We're IN the phase of big tech being bad for consumers right now.
  - User23 7y ago
    I feel like my relationship with Amazon is a pretty solid value proposition for me as a consumer of both retail and AWS. It helps that Amazon is less overtly political than the other tech giants. Obviously their employees lean left, but with a few notable exceptions like refusing to sell Confederate Battle Flags they have been quite good about allowing different views to be expressed by content creators. I'm starting to have my doubts about Google though. The quality of their search has been noticeably deteriorating, as has the gmail spam filter. The main reason I haven't switched to another service is that I didn't use a custom domain for my address. They are also overtly political with their YouTube demonitizing.
    - at-fates-hands 7y ago
      > they have been quite good about allowing different views to be expressed by content creators. Not really. They've been removing, censoring and burying conservative authors for a while now. If you do some googling, you'll find plenty of articles about it.
- ergothus 7y ago
  > "if it's good for consumers it's legal" is short sighted It's worse - the attitude has been "if it can theoretically lower prices in the short-term it must be good for consumers" - they've totally ignored all the perils involved in large scale mergers.
- 7y ago
thwythwy 7y ago
Broad, new headline same as every other headline for past years, new quotes from unattributed Justice Department official sources. Fear.
- katttrrr 7y ago
  It seems that a lot of this anti-trust content solely focuses on national competition, rather than then international playing field; even though the US is in onging direct competition with an extremely global and readily availble international tech market. I feel we need to start looking at things from a global perspective and what impact splitting up US companies would have on their growth relative to the internaional market competitors.
andrewstuart 7y ago
Tech companies have failed to buy enough politicians over the years. That message is clear. The need to employ the lobbyists who not only put big petroleum in a completely unassailable position, but got the government paying vast amounts of money to that industry.
- tlibert 7y ago
  According to OpenSecrets [0] the "Communications/Electronics" sector spends significantly more than "Energy/Natural Resources" on lobbying. SV has a big presence in DC. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=c&showYear=2019 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=c&showYe...
- GeekyBear 7y ago
  When the career antitrust officials at the FTC recommend antitrust action against Google back in 2012, it was the political appointees (from both parties) who shut that action down. >The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday faced renewed questions about its handling of its antitrust investigation into Google, after documents revealed that an internal report had recommended stronger action. The 2012 report, from the agency’s bureau of competition, said that the agency should sue the Internet search company for anticompetitive practices https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/technology/take-google-to-court-staff-report-urged-ftc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/technology/take-google-to... I'd say the bribes for both parties had been working as intended.
  - bduerst 7y ago
    It wasn't shut down, a deal was settled between the FTC and Google. You can mince words and call it a political conspiracy, but saying it was shut down is misleading when Google changed how it handles mobile patents to appease the FTC: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/01/google-agrees-change-its-business-practices-resolve-ftc https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/01/googl...
- cpp4life 7y ago
  Or perhaps they just bet it all on Hillary.
nodesocket 7y ago
Google and Facebook; sure makes sense and considering their track records I am for regulation. However Apple? They have the best record on privacy and clearly iPhone and Mac are not a monopoly. Thanks to Tim Cooks deplomacy they also happen to be in the good grace of Trump unlike the others.
- cbanek 7y ago
  Some consider the App Store to be monopolistic, as it is the only way to run on iOS devices, and they will charge you a 30% fee and make you go through their acceptance criteria. https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/13/supreme-court-rules-against-apple-allowing-an-app-store-antitrust-case-to-proceed/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/13/supreme-court-rules-agains...
- Fnoord 7y ago
  Apple -> Right to repair, and strict control over distribution of software allows them to easily compete on i(Pad)OS.
- visarga 7y ago
  > However Apple? They have the best record on privacy and clearly iPhone and Mac are not a monopoly. They have a monopoly on fruit named phones at the very least :-P
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Blackberry?
- Qwertystop 7y ago
  There is an argument to be made that, since Apple is fairly restrictive of what software can be made for their platforms, Apple has a monopoly on... software for Apple devices? App stores for Apple devices? Something of that sort. It is difficult-to-impossible to make, distribute, run, or sell iPhone software without giving Apple a cut of your earnings and a hook to force changes, and this has been claimed to lead to anti-competitive effects (see Spotify's recent complaints). I've seen the argument made here and there, but I am not a lawyer and I don't recall well enough who I saw it from, so I don't know whether this is a good argument. But it's an argument being made by at least one company that presumably does hire lawyers, so it's probably not a terrible one. Their record on privacy is unrelated as far as I can tell to antitrust, though; I'm not sure why you brought it up in this context.
thomasjudge 7y ago
Hasn't antitrust enforcement/actions been pretty toothless over the past, say, 15 years at least? Think of telco mergers, airline mergers, ...
JaimeThompson 7y ago
I somehow doubt that the review of the major telcos, which are tech companies, will be all that involved.
mjevans 7y ago
There are several places where I feel proper regulatory oversight would improve the situation, however they can all be reduced to a single phrase. Proprietary platforms that don't inter-operate are problematic. Email is OK because like phone service providers anyone is free to run their own, and choose to use the services of a competitor while still inter-operating on a shared communications structure; much like actual postal delivery. IRC is OK as a protocol (from the fair and inter-operable test), but was never designed to scale up to operate at this level. Proprietary platforms, like Facebook, Discord, etc flavor of the week which have strong market dominance but which are closed are actively problems. That's an area where monopoly is clearly being used to keep out competitors and restrict innovation. In Google's defense in this area they did try XMPP, and (as I recall) that experiment ended up as a failure since other platforms intentionally implemented a very poor baseline minimal interoperablity in ways that made communicating between platforms a very 'red headed step child' experience. That's why I believe whatever does come next has got to check all the boxes AND make them requirements of inter-operating, not 'extensions'.
- dboreham 7y ago
  Hmm...as I remember it xmpp federation with Google worked just fine for us until Google turned it off.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    The problem with XMPP is that it set Google's IM products back by a decade in terms of features. Google IMs still blow chunks. It may now be possible to make an okay XMPP experience, but proprietary/custom protocols continue to be simpler to implement, better-performing, and less hassle overall. We need something completely unlike XMPP if we want good federated IM to become a thing; something that isn't a bloated, exotic, "extensible", "well-formed", streaming XML protocol.
    - echelon 7y ago
      While I agree with your characterization of XMPP, it can still function as a gateway into richer platforms. There's no reason to turn off the lights. Chat hasn't changed that much in 40 years. That said, if Google wants to earn some much-needed goodwill, it could work on a new federated chat protocol. Something binary and concise that handles all of the modern emoji, stickers, outbound call initiation, bots, polls, etc. And if you could use it to build all of {Slack, Messenger, Telegram, IRC, Hangouts} on top of it, that would be amazing. Especially if it were federated and had a reference implementation. Commoditize your compliments, right? Anyone at Google looking for a project for promotion?
lanrh1836 7y ago
I just finished the Eric Weinstein/Peter Thiel podcast, and came away mostly agreeing with their assessment that we’ve really stagnated when it has come to progressing scientifically. I definitely feel like there’s this illusion of tech innovation coming from these big companies that suck up all the tech talent, but at end of day the best and brightest are working on optimizing ad clicks (FB, Goog) or getting people to buy crap (Amazon) or working on incremental hardware improvements (Apple). If anything, I would hope any outcome against big tech would level the playing field when it comes to attracting talent, and create an environment where working on true “moonshot” tech was not so risky.
- wpasc 7y ago
  I listened to that podcast as well and have listened to Thiel/Weinstein talk about tech and science stagnation in past podcasts. If you listen to Thiel, he'd say that going into any engineering field in the 80's-2000's was a bad idea EXCEPT for computer science. I'm more worried about ambitious and smart people putting their talents in investment banking and management consulting. Tech has been a great place to go for smart and scientific based people in part (at least) because it has been unregulated. I'm not saying I'm against regulating big tech. But if anything, we need more people in the sciences and the sciences to be a good career choice over banking/consulting rather than to make computer science a somewhat less attractive career goal through more regulation (potentially leading to lower salaries).
  - opportune 7y ago
    >ambitious and smart people putting their talents in investment banking and management consulting Honestly, I think that is a big factor (along with a reaction to perceived political biases) in why people think tech companies need to be broken up, beyond any real or imagined monopolistic practices. Silicon Valley really shook up the business world at an accelerating rate over the past 2-3 decades, and it's threatening to people accustomed to the status quo, especially those who invested decades of their lives into a career in [finance, management consulting, high-powered law/politics] because they thought it was the best way forward.
gerash 7y ago
It sounds like tech. hasn't bought enough Republicans yet. That's all these investigations are about apparently. Otherwise Sinclair media, for example, should be investigated for having an actual monopoly over US local news TV stations.
- djmips 7y ago
  I'd guess that Trump has an axe to grind with the 'liberal' tech industry. I'm sure Amazon is in the crosshairs.
tasty_freeze 7y ago
I believe the US could do more with antitrust oversight. The DOJ under Clinton was pursuing Microsoft up until 2001, when the new Bush administration carried through on a campaign promise and took the bite out of the investigation. This isn't to point the blame just at conservatives, who have historically been of the mindset that the government shouldn't interfere with business. Democrats haven't spent much political capital towards those ends either. For 2.5 years president Trump has been raging at Bezos because he owns the Washington Post, and that has extended to Trump raging that Amazon needs to be taxed heavily. Despite playing the social media angle for all it is worth, Trump has been claiming that Facebook/Twitter/Google have been filtering out conservative opinions. So pardon me for being suspicious that now the DOJ cares about looking into all of these companies. I'm for anti-trust regulation, but not when it is applied selectively for political gain.
- jdgoesmarching 7y ago
  Eh I mean, if Trump throwing a tantrum is how we stumble into anti-trust legislation I’m still for it.
  - tasty_freeze 7y ago
    No, that is a dangerous position. If the laws are applied only to political enemies, it is not justice. It also degrades the law, erodes public trust, and undermines democracy. Here is a counter example. 501(c)(4) organizations [1] are non-profits which have certain reporting requirements that are not allowed to do political work. Laws were changed, ostensibly to allow them to do some activities that were in the gray area -- the law said as long as they were mostly doing welfare/social work, then they could keep their status. PACs abused this by claiming they were 501(c)(4) organizations, which allowed them to shield who was bankrolling them. When this was noticed, the IRS started looking into them. The right screamed bloody murder, saying the IRS was being used as a political tool of the Obama administration. And if that had been true, they would have been right to complain, even those the vast majority of those PACs were not really 501(c)(4)s. To this day it is claimed that this is what actually went down, when in fact the IRS looked into PACs from both parties. [2] [1] https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-the-irs-classifies-nonprofit-organizations-2501798 https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-the-irs-classifies-nonprof... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
taurath 7y ago
Some mirrors/other posts (Paywall) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/technology/justice-department-tech-antitrust.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/technology/justice-depart... https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/23/doj-reportedly-to-open-broad-antitrust-review-of-big-tech-tech-stocks-dip.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/23/doj-reportedly-to-open-broad... https://apnews.com/e334256d27254a28a3b5d6db041ec5b1?utm_medium=AP&utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter https://apnews.com/e334256d27254a28a3b5d6db041ec5b1?utm_medi...
lifeisstillgood 7y ago
Matt Levine (Bloomberg news letter) was good in this today: roughly speaking, if "we" as a society want to regulate Tech companies we can just pass laws to do it - stop relying on handfuls of poachers-turned-gamekeepers to extend their remits and just legislate properly And if our legislators cannot do it, then that's is we the voters problem. It's all in our hands. Now - what is the vision? :-)
40acres 7y ago
The #1 issue with big tech is that the major players are under-utilizing their talent base. It's never been easier to start a software company (idea, laptop, Stripe Atlas, AWS/Azure/GCP.. GO!), and yet the over-all number of new business in America is declining. The threat of anti-trust, and perhaps trust busting, will spur competition and innovation. The US owes it to it's future citizens that STEM talent is not underutilized before it's too late, I support efforts to end this stagnation.
- opportune 7y ago
  It would be nice if the big high-paying tech companies instituted some kind of profit-sharing or internal VC kind of thing. The worst part of working at these places is when you feel like the work you do is kind of pointless and that you are constrained by what management wants you to work on. Or they could do part time. I'm sure there are a lot of people making $500k/year who would be perfectly fine working two days per week for $200k/year instead.
- TACIXAT 7y ago
  I don't feel underutilized. In my area of research I am working on what I know very well. I am getting paid far more than I could hope to make running my own business (if you account for the fact that many businesses fail and very few become unicorns). People say we are just optimizing ad sell, but I work in security and am getting to work on very cool problems in the space. I know what being underutilized feels like and I do not feel that here.
- TrackerFF 7y ago
  For many startups, the only goal is to get acquired by the big players. We know fully well that acquiring competition is a perfectly viable strategy to reduce competition. It's a win-win situation for founders, investors, and the big companies. The founders and investors get a huge payday, the big companies get useful IP and employees, and are free to bury the product (see google graveyard). It's sad. When startups release amazing stuff, they put pressure on the whole industry to up their game; consumers get better products, companies are forced to innovate, and good by-products come along. But in the end, money talks.
scarface74 7y ago
Anyone notice that the Justice Department under an administration who supposedly doesn’t believe in regulation all of the sudden is interested in regulating companies run by the “liberal elite”? Does it not worry anyone that an administration that’s not exactly friendly to the states where these companies are located are now all of the sudden cracking down on only certain big businesses? Every time I post about the government is rarely the answer I get push back. Be careful what you ask for...
- khazhou 7y ago
  This certainly looks like it's because they didn't bend the knee.
- malvosenior 7y ago
  Maybe so, but in this case the consumer will benefit. These large companies have been abusing their monopoly or near monopoly status to push their own politics aggressively. It's no surprise that the other side of the political spectrum would react negatively. That's why issues like free speech for all are so important. Someday, your enemies might be in charge and if you've been eroding human rights because you're powerful enough to do so, someone more powerful may show up and use the landscape you helped create against you. The winning move for tech was to not become politicized and just focus on being a neutral platform. Hopefully this threat of regulation will scare some of the overt politics out of our industry and everyone will benefit.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    You really think the government run by an administration hostile to tech companies is going to do anything that benefits the consumer? Do you trust any politician to have both the integrity and the knowledge to pass laws that benefit anyone except themselves and their donors? While tech companies aren’t “becoming politicized” you better believe that the people who don’t share your interest are.
    - malvosenior 7y ago
rrivers 7y ago
Warren and Sanders are proposing breaking up these organizations (Google, Amazon, and FB) - but I believe they are pulling out of the Gilded Age playbook that won't necessarily transfer to today's age. How do you break up virtual assets and realistically stifle their power? I don't believe the same old anti-trust is the most effective method for dealing with these and future monopolies. Instead, a more tiered social responsibility program may be the ideal solution to continue and incentivize innovation while allowing society to reap the benefits of organizations that reach network monopolies. If you're interested in exploring this line of thought I've published a brief article about it: https://bit.ly/2Yc57iS https://bit.ly/2Yc57iS
guelo 7y ago
This is so scary because of the highly politicized nature of Trump's DOJ. This feels like it's all about settling political scores that the right wing has against Google and Facebook's functions as gate keepers against fake news. In fact Steve Bannon announced this attack on tech shortly after the election. It is scary because they're now using the power of the federal government against their political enemies, where does that end? And they see an opening for their nakedly political attack because there is a lot of truth to the anticompetitive market, and liberals like Elizabeth Warren have floated similar ideas.
prepend 7y ago
I’m not sure what will come of the investigation, but I hope it clarifies the privately owned public space (POPS) aspect of these companies. Currently google, facebook, twitter and others alternate between being common carriers and private networks depending on what best suits them, and limits competition, I think. Regulation will be hard, but just clarifying the duty and liability to provide service and level of service. Currently, firms apply “terms of service” and don’t typically provide much insight into particular bans or limitations. If the phone company operated this way, it’s clear which regulator could intervene. Currently that’s not possible, but the platforms also aren’t liable for infringing content. It seems hard to practice selective enforcement, but not be liable when there is illegal material.
calimac 7y ago
MAGA
WalterBright 7y ago
The big tech companies are a major asset to the economy, driving growth and jobs. Breaking them up is a pretty risky proposition.
- eclipxe 7y ago
  Agreed. This is all very short sighted.
- vharuck 7y ago
  I think the economy is resilient enough to bounce back. And the point of antitrust prosecutions is to prevent long-term damage to the economy.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Any other country would dearly love to have even one of the FAANG companies. Big companies are what drive economies, prosperity, employment and tax revenue, not mom-and-pop companies. Small companies are the future, but big companies are the now. (That doesn't mean I propose government action to prop up big companies. Just that one needs to think twice about breaking them.)
happypeter 7y ago
Loved big these tech giants before, because I believed they were the only way to bring trust. Now I see them as bugs to fix, since trust can be done in a p2p way.
marmada 7y ago
I think there's too much backlash against big tech companies. Yes FAANG companies have occasionally done bad things, but they contribute immense value. Gmail, Google Maps, Android, Amazon, AWS, etc. have provided immense value to billions of people. I also think these companies are advancing state of the art software development, tons of open source software has been released Facebook, Google, etc. Google is doing cool things with AI, etc. I suspect a lot of this action against big tech companies is the result of a politicized justice department that wants to take down "liberal elites". Why haven't we seen more action against other arguably even more harmful companies? (Larger companies, companies that destroy the environment, etc.) I think people on HN are getting duped. In this case, their interests (enhanced consumer privacy) and Trump's interests (sticking it to the liberal elites), align on the surface, but the actual motivation of the Justice Department is much more insidious.
stock_toaster 7y ago
I wonder if the timing on this is just a level for trying to get backdoor encryption accepted by the major players.
ryeights 7y ago
Buy the fear on this news. Various governmental bodies (Congress, the FTC, etc.) have shown that they're more talk than walk on the issue of antitrust litigation
williesleg 7y ago
It's about fucking time.
ilaksh 7y ago
The way to replace their large networks is decentralized systems.
root_axis 7y ago
Why doesn't the topic of data privacy laws ever enter this discussion? Data privacy laws would apply to everyone instead of targeting whoever happens to be at the top of the alexa rankings. Most of the big tech companies are not in violation of anti-trust regulations, so why don't we actually pass new laws to tackle the actual problem (systematic abuse of user data for profit)?
shmerl 7y ago
I'm surprised Microsoft isn't mentioned. It can be a good initiative, if it will for example force breaking lock-in, free up standards and reduce the likes of MS monopoly of Windows on preinstalled computers.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Additional coverage: Justice Department Opens Antitrust Review of Big Tech Companies https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/technology/justice-department-tech-antitrust.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/technology/justice-depart... Matt Levine: Facebook Negotiated Its Rules https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-23/facebook-negotiated-its-rules https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-23/facebo... DoJ opens review into Big Tech’s market power https://www.ft.com/content/4f008ab0-ad8c-11e9-8030-530adfa879c2 https://www.ft.com/content/4f008ab0-ad8c-11e9-8030-530adfa87... (http://archive.is/ktmWP http://archive.is/ktmWP) Also/earlier: http://archive.is/xQ0hI http://archive.is/xQ0hI http://archive.is/Nt7kl http://archive.is/Nt7kl http://archive.is/TiDIB http://archive.is/TiDIB Big Tech Hit With Broad U.S. Antitrust Probe as Scrutiny Mounts https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-23/u-s-opens-probe-of-online-platforms-over-competition-harm?srnd=politics-vp https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-23/u-s-opens... Also worth revisiting: "Fred Turner: Silicon Valley Thinks Politics Doesn’t Exist" https://032c.com/fred-turner-silicon-valley-thinks-politics-doesnt-exist https://032c.com/fred-turner-silicon-valley-thinks-politics-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17669745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17669745)
awinder 7y ago
“I don’t think big is necessarily bad, but I think a lot of people wonder how such huge behemoths that now exist in Silicon Valley have taken shape under the nose of the antitrust enforcers,” Mr. Barr told senators What hasn’t been occurring in broad daylight? This excuse is purpose-made to escape blame but these issues have been discussed for years while SEC has allowed acquisitions and mergers through on the anti-competition side of this argument...
- scarface74 7y ago
  But not a peep about telecom, media, oil companies, Monsanto....
tuxxy 7y ago
Is there anything keeping this out of the anti-encryption debate? Is it possible that AG Barr could say, "We will go after you for anti-trust issues _unless_ you agree to weaken your privacy tooling", etc?
d1zzy 7y ago
I would imagine that each of the investigated companies cases is a multi-year effort with dozens/hundreds of specialists gathering evidence, processing it, etc. It seems rather weird to start such a gigantic effort against all companies at once because anti-trust law is very complex and for each of these companies there will be completely different criteria and circumstances to make the case against. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I suspect this to take decades to reach some conclusion. By then I'm not even sure how much of the original goal to the investigation will be reached.

327 points by mudil 7y ago

omarhaneef 7y ago

Q: Does anyone know if it is typical for antitrust action to last into a new administration once it has started?

CameronNemo 7y ago
Q: Is antitrust action typical at all?
- omarhaneef 7y ago
  Good point. I guess I was asking for p(drop action with new admin | antitrust started in last)
tick_tock_tick 7y ago
The DOJ normally acts with some degree of freedom with new administrations merely refocusing its most visible efforts. A large scale probe would be extremely unlikely to get dropped completely but could be marginalized.
- omarhaneef 7y ago
  Thanks. For some reason I had the impression there was a large change, but I had no basis for that.
- User23 7y ago
  The DOJ is not an independent agency, despite what the media attempts to lead people to believe. The Constitution clearly states that the executive power, which includes law enforcement, is vested in the President. The DOJ has no authority to enforce laws except that of the President. That said, political considerations do mean that Presidents are hesitant to overtly step in on specific cases and usually prefer to set general objectives. However the President can step in on a specific case if he wishes and that is actually explicitly part of our system. The President can set aside a conviction with a pardon or prevent it from being prosecuted in the first place.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    Could it be the big 5 returned too little amount of jobs to USA and are getting a wrath? Or is it just standard SV bashing to please the conservative voters? I suppose (as European) USA is getting heated up for another presidential election.
  - bobsil1 7y ago
    >The President can… prevent it from being prosecuted in the first place No.
    - User23 7y ago
      You are completely incorrect. The President can pardon before a prosecution even begins so long as the pardon is after the act itself[1]. He can also direct his Attorney General or US attorneys to drop a case because he is their boss and they serve at his pleasure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_parte_Garland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_parte_Garland
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
In the past it was traditional that the justice department was somewhat separate from the administration - thus it would have been scandalous, in the past, if an administration had come in and cancelled investigations undertaken by an exiting administration - or at least scandalous if there could be any suspicion of corruption being the cause of the cancellation. So big companies have generally donated to political campaigns and as such they should not, traditionally, have their investigations quashed because this would raise suspicions that there had been a quid pro quo.
- tssva 7y ago
  They may not have cancelled it but when the 2nd Bush administration came in the Justice department became much more lenient towards Microsoft than it was under the Clinton administration. The ultimate agreement was a sweetheart deal compared to what they were facing under the previous administration. It took the Europeans to impose anything with any kind of teeth.
  - omarhaneef 7y ago
    That was my understanding as well. Do you know/think/recall if that change a result of the Bush administration having a more lenient stance towards regulation, or was it a result of one administration almost always reacting to the prior one?
debt 7y ago
Unfortunately for the current administration, it would be cheaper to remove them from office that it would be to comply with their investigation. A future administration may be much friendlier towards tech. Big tech will likely drag this out as long as they can.
- aaronbrethorst 7y ago
  A future administration may be much friendlier towards tech. Unlikely. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-03/the-next-democratic-president-is-coming-for-your-monopoly https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-03/the-next-...
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    I don't know about the USA but here in The Netherlands things being said during elections certainly aren't set in stone. To name two examples: empty promises get made, and rhetoric gets used. Now I know the latter is true in USA even far more but I am not sure on the former.
    - aaronbrethorst 7y ago
      Empty promises get made all the time. This isn't one of them. Facebook wouldn't survive a Warren administration, e.g.,—assuming that Margrethe Vestager leaves it intact.
    - CameronNemo 7y ago
      I really do not think Warren is messing around. Now her actually reaching the presidency is far off and certainly not guaranteed.

MichaelApproved 7y ago

> The Justice Department is opening a broad antitrust review into whether dominant technology firms are unlawfully stifling competition, according to department officials, adding a new Washington threat for companies such as Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc. ’s Google, Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. > The review is geared toward examining the practices of online platforms that dominate internet search, social media and retail services, the officials said. Interesting that Microsoft, the only company worth over $1 trillion, isn't mentioned. The focus is on online platforms and they don't have anything dominating in that field. I wonder if it'll stay isolated to those companies or if Microsoft will get looped into this because they're so large.

lettergram 7y ago
One thing Microsoft has going for it - they’ve been through this process in the 90s / early 2000s. Plus, their OS is clearly not a monopoly, their web browser is now based on Chrome, their a distant #2 in the cloud space, their a very distant #2 in search, etc Literally, I can’t think of one thing Microsoft is top dog in besides OS.
- favorited 7y ago
  MS Office. They're 100% dominant in word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.
  - MBCook 7y ago
    Is that still true? I’m guessing Google Docs has a non-trivial marketshare. Probably not bigger than MS but real competition.
  - the1pato 7y ago
    Google Docs is pretty big, too.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    ..but they don't leverage their MS Office dominance to harm the market. You can access MS Office with the open HTTP(S) standard. MS Office works on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and in WINE. It follows the OOXML standard which you can open in LibreOffice as well. Apple -> These $%^&ers don't allow anyone to repair their own devices, they don't allow a different distribution method on iOS/iPodOS devices hence quickly evolve to unfair market advantage. Amazon -> Undercut anyone at any cost while having the worst review system on our planet. Facebook -> RIP privacy, just see the recent scandals. Google -> Probably something involving Android... Microsoft? Oh I can write a book about my terrible experiences with that company. I hated this company and everything it stood for for about 15+ years or so (at least 1995-2010). Recently though? Not so much.

Railsify 7y ago

I don't understand how google could be split up, would they redirect traffic from google.com to another search engine?

vkou 7y ago
The ad business and the search business could theoretically exist as separate entities. The ad business would then buy page space from the search business.
- katttrrr 7y ago
  That's an interesting point. Yet, I'm not sure I fully understand what you'd expect would change with this?
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  I imagine this would be the most effective split-up. If the ad business is required to let other search engines compete on the same terms as Google, it will remove the largest barrier to entry for small companies on search.
  - katttrrr 7y ago
    Theoretically, couldn't they still set different terms per search customer? Thus, still favoring themselves
    - elliekelly 7y ago
      The ad entity wouldn’t be “themselves” to the search entity anymore so there wouldn’t be any incentive to give one random customer a more favorable rate than the rest.
    - marcosdumay 7y ago
      Well, not if the courts say they can't. Splitting monopolies always come with extra strings attached, and this is a obvious one you can expect to be there.

ngngngng 7y ago

I'm happy that antitrust is being explored. I do think free markets need to be protected, and the last few decades attitude of "if it's good for consumers it's legal" is short sighted. Something can be good for consumers right now, but stifle competition and be bad for consumers eventually.

writepub 7y ago
We're IN the phase of big tech being bad for consumers right now.
- User23 7y ago
  I feel like my relationship with Amazon is a pretty solid value proposition for me as a consumer of both retail and AWS. It helps that Amazon is less overtly political than the other tech giants. Obviously their employees lean left, but with a few notable exceptions like refusing to sell Confederate Battle Flags they have been quite good about allowing different views to be expressed by content creators. I'm starting to have my doubts about Google though. The quality of their search has been noticeably deteriorating, as has the gmail spam filter. The main reason I haven't switched to another service is that I didn't use a custom domain for my address. They are also overtly political with their YouTube demonitizing.
  - at-fates-hands 7y ago
    > they have been quite good about allowing different views to be expressed by content creators. Not really. They've been removing, censoring and burying conservative authors for a while now. If you do some googling, you'll find plenty of articles about it.
ergothus 7y ago
> "if it's good for consumers it's legal" is short sighted It's worse - the attitude has been "if it can theoretically lower prices in the short-term it must be good for consumers" - they've totally ignored all the perils involved in large scale mergers.
7y ago

thwythwy 7y ago

Broad, new headline same as every other headline for past years, new quotes from unattributed Justice Department official sources. Fear.

katttrrr 7y ago
It seems that a lot of this anti-trust content solely focuses on national competition, rather than then international playing field; even though the US is in onging direct competition with an extremely global and readily availble international tech market. I feel we need to start looking at things from a global perspective and what impact splitting up US companies would have on their growth relative to the internaional market competitors.

andrewstuart 7y ago

Tech companies have failed to buy enough politicians over the years. That message is clear. The need to employ the lobbyists who not only put big petroleum in a completely unassailable position, but got the government paying vast amounts of money to that industry.

tlibert 7y ago
According to OpenSecrets [0] the "Communications/Electronics" sector spends significantly more than "Energy/Natural Resources" on lobbying. SV has a big presence in DC. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=c&showYear=2019 https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=c&showYe...
GeekyBear 7y ago
When the career antitrust officials at the FTC recommend antitrust action against Google back in 2012, it was the political appointees (from both parties) who shut that action down. >The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday faced renewed questions about its handling of its antitrust investigation into Google, after documents revealed that an internal report had recommended stronger action. The 2012 report, from the agency’s bureau of competition, said that the agency should sue the Internet search company for anticompetitive practices https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/technology/take-google-to-court-staff-report-urged-ftc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/technology/take-google-to... I'd say the bribes for both parties had been working as intended.
- bduerst 7y ago
  It wasn't shut down, a deal was settled between the FTC and Google. You can mince words and call it a political conspiracy, but saying it was shut down is misleading when Google changed how it handles mobile patents to appease the FTC: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/01/google-agrees-change-its-business-practices-resolve-ftc https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/01/googl...
cpp4life 7y ago
Or perhaps they just bet it all on Hillary.

nodesocket 7y ago

Google and Facebook; sure makes sense and considering their track records I am for regulation. However Apple? They have the best record on privacy and clearly iPhone and Mac are not a monopoly. Thanks to Tim Cooks deplomacy they also happen to be in the good grace of Trump unlike the others.

cbanek 7y ago
Some consider the App Store to be monopolistic, as it is the only way to run on iOS devices, and they will charge you a 30% fee and make you go through their acceptance criteria. https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/13/supreme-court-rules-against-apple-allowing-an-app-store-antitrust-case-to-proceed/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/13/supreme-court-rules-agains...
Fnoord 7y ago
Apple -> Right to repair, and strict control over distribution of software allows them to easily compete on i(Pad)OS.
visarga 7y ago
> However Apple? They have the best record on privacy and clearly iPhone and Mac are not a monopoly. They have a monopoly on fruit named phones at the very least :-P
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Blackberry?
Qwertystop 7y ago
There is an argument to be made that, since Apple is fairly restrictive of what software can be made for their platforms, Apple has a monopoly on... software for Apple devices? App stores for Apple devices? Something of that sort. It is difficult-to-impossible to make, distribute, run, or sell iPhone software without giving Apple a cut of your earnings and a hook to force changes, and this has been claimed to lead to anti-competitive effects (see Spotify's recent complaints). I've seen the argument made here and there, but I am not a lawyer and I don't recall well enough who I saw it from, so I don't know whether this is a good argument. But it's an argument being made by at least one company that presumably does hire lawyers, so it's probably not a terrible one. Their record on privacy is unrelated as far as I can tell to antitrust, though; I'm not sure why you brought it up in this context.

thomasjudge 7y ago

Hasn't antitrust enforcement/actions been pretty toothless over the past, say, 15 years at least? Think of telco mergers, airline mergers, ...

JaimeThompson 7y ago

I somehow doubt that the review of the major telcos, which are tech companies, will be all that involved.

mjevans 7y ago

There are several places where I feel proper regulatory oversight would improve the situation, however they can all be reduced to a single phrase. Proprietary platforms that don't inter-operate are problematic. Email is OK because like phone service providers anyone is free to run their own, and choose to use the services of a competitor while still inter-operating on a shared communications structure; much like actual postal delivery. IRC is OK as a protocol (from the fair and inter-operable test), but was never designed to scale up to operate at this level. Proprietary platforms, like Facebook, Discord, etc flavor of the week which have strong market dominance but which are closed are actively problems. That's an area where monopoly is clearly being used to keep out competitors and restrict innovation. In Google's defense in this area they did try XMPP, and (as I recall) that experiment ended up as a failure since other platforms intentionally implemented a very poor baseline minimal interoperablity in ways that made communicating between platforms a very 'red headed step child' experience. That's why I believe whatever does come next has got to check all the boxes AND make them requirements of inter-operating, not 'extensions'.

dboreham 7y ago
Hmm...as I remember it xmpp federation with Google worked just fine for us until Google turned it off.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  The problem with XMPP is that it set Google's IM products back by a decade in terms of features. Google IMs still blow chunks. It may now be possible to make an okay XMPP experience, but proprietary/custom protocols continue to be simpler to implement, better-performing, and less hassle overall. We need something completely unlike XMPP if we want good federated IM to become a thing; something that isn't a bloated, exotic, "extensible", "well-formed", streaming XML protocol.
  - echelon 7y ago
    While I agree with your characterization of XMPP, it can still function as a gateway into richer platforms. There's no reason to turn off the lights. Chat hasn't changed that much in 40 years. That said, if Google wants to earn some much-needed goodwill, it could work on a new federated chat protocol. Something binary and concise that handles all of the modern emoji, stickers, outbound call initiation, bots, polls, etc. And if you could use it to build all of {Slack, Messenger, Telegram, IRC, Hangouts} on top of it, that would be amazing. Especially if it were federated and had a reference implementation. Commoditize your compliments, right? Anyone at Google looking for a project for promotion?

lanrh1836 7y ago

I just finished the Eric Weinstein/Peter Thiel podcast, and came away mostly agreeing with their assessment that we’ve really stagnated when it has come to progressing scientifically. I definitely feel like there’s this illusion of tech innovation coming from these big companies that suck up all the tech talent, but at end of day the best and brightest are working on optimizing ad clicks (FB, Goog) or getting people to buy crap (Amazon) or working on incremental hardware improvements (Apple). If anything, I would hope any outcome against big tech would level the playing field when it comes to attracting talent, and create an environment where working on true “moonshot” tech was not so risky.

wpasc 7y ago
I listened to that podcast as well and have listened to Thiel/Weinstein talk about tech and science stagnation in past podcasts. If you listen to Thiel, he'd say that going into any engineering field in the 80's-2000's was a bad idea EXCEPT for computer science. I'm more worried about ambitious and smart people putting their talents in investment banking and management consulting. Tech has been a great place to go for smart and scientific based people in part (at least) because it has been unregulated. I'm not saying I'm against regulating big tech. But if anything, we need more people in the sciences and the sciences to be a good career choice over banking/consulting rather than to make computer science a somewhat less attractive career goal through more regulation (potentially leading to lower salaries).
- opportune 7y ago
  >ambitious and smart people putting their talents in investment banking and management consulting Honestly, I think that is a big factor (along with a reaction to perceived political biases) in why people think tech companies need to be broken up, beyond any real or imagined monopolistic practices. Silicon Valley really shook up the business world at an accelerating rate over the past 2-3 decades, and it's threatening to people accustomed to the status quo, especially those who invested decades of their lives into a career in [finance, management consulting, high-powered law/politics] because they thought it was the best way forward.

gerash 7y ago

It sounds like tech. hasn't bought enough Republicans yet. That's all these investigations are about apparently. Otherwise Sinclair media, for example, should be investigated for having an actual monopoly over US local news TV stations.

djmips 7y ago
I'd guess that Trump has an axe to grind with the 'liberal' tech industry. I'm sure Amazon is in the crosshairs.

tasty_freeze 7y ago

I believe the US could do more with antitrust oversight. The DOJ under Clinton was pursuing Microsoft up until 2001, when the new Bush administration carried through on a campaign promise and took the bite out of the investigation. This isn't to point the blame just at conservatives, who have historically been of the mindset that the government shouldn't interfere with business. Democrats haven't spent much political capital towards those ends either. For 2.5 years president Trump has been raging at Bezos because he owns the Washington Post, and that has extended to Trump raging that Amazon needs to be taxed heavily. Despite playing the social media angle for all it is worth, Trump has been claiming that Facebook/Twitter/Google have been filtering out conservative opinions. So pardon me for being suspicious that now the DOJ cares about looking into all of these companies. I'm for anti-trust regulation, but not when it is applied selectively for political gain.

jdgoesmarching 7y ago
Eh I mean, if Trump throwing a tantrum is how we stumble into anti-trust legislation I’m still for it.
- tasty_freeze 7y ago
  No, that is a dangerous position. If the laws are applied only to political enemies, it is not justice. It also degrades the law, erodes public trust, and undermines democracy. Here is a counter example. 501(c)(4) organizations [1] are non-profits which have certain reporting requirements that are not allowed to do political work. Laws were changed, ostensibly to allow them to do some activities that were in the gray area -- the law said as long as they were mostly doing welfare/social work, then they could keep their status. PACs abused this by claiming they were 501(c)(4) organizations, which allowed them to shield who was bankrolling them. When this was noticed, the IRS started looking into them. The right screamed bloody murder, saying the IRS was being used as a political tool of the Obama administration. And if that had been true, they would have been right to complain, even those the vast majority of those PACs were not really 501(c)(4)s. To this day it is claimed that this is what actually went down, when in fact the IRS looked into PACs from both parties. [2] [1] https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-the-irs-classifies-nonprofit-organizations-2501798 https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-the-irs-classifies-nonprof... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy

taurath 7y ago

Some mirrors/other posts (Paywall) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/technology/justice-department-tech-antitrust.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/technology/justice-depart... https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/23/doj-reportedly-to-open-broad-antitrust-review-of-big-tech-tech-stocks-dip.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/23/doj-reportedly-to-open-broad... https://apnews.com/e334256d27254a28a3b5d6db041ec5b1?utm_medium=AP&utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter https://apnews.com/e334256d27254a28a3b5d6db041ec5b1?utm_medi...

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

Matt Levine (Bloomberg news letter) was good in this today: roughly speaking, if "we" as a society want to regulate Tech companies we can just pass laws to do it - stop relying on handfuls of poachers-turned-gamekeepers to extend their remits and just legislate properly And if our legislators cannot do it, then that's is we the voters problem. It's all in our hands. Now - what is the vision? :-)

40acres 7y ago

The #1 issue with big tech is that the major players are under-utilizing their talent base. It's never been easier to start a software company (idea, laptop, Stripe Atlas, AWS/Azure/GCP.. GO!), and yet the over-all number of new business in America is declining. The threat of anti-trust, and perhaps trust busting, will spur competition and innovation. The US owes it to it's future citizens that STEM talent is not underutilized before it's too late, I support efforts to end this stagnation.

opportune 7y ago
It would be nice if the big high-paying tech companies instituted some kind of profit-sharing or internal VC kind of thing. The worst part of working at these places is when you feel like the work you do is kind of pointless and that you are constrained by what management wants you to work on. Or they could do part time. I'm sure there are a lot of people making $500k/year who would be perfectly fine working two days per week for $200k/year instead.
TACIXAT 7y ago
I don't feel underutilized. In my area of research I am working on what I know very well. I am getting paid far more than I could hope to make running my own business (if you account for the fact that many businesses fail and very few become unicorns). People say we are just optimizing ad sell, but I work in security and am getting to work on very cool problems in the space. I know what being underutilized feels like and I do not feel that here.
TrackerFF 7y ago
For many startups, the only goal is to get acquired by the big players. We know fully well that acquiring competition is a perfectly viable strategy to reduce competition. It's a win-win situation for founders, investors, and the big companies. The founders and investors get a huge payday, the big companies get useful IP and employees, and are free to bury the product (see google graveyard). It's sad. When startups release amazing stuff, they put pressure on the whole industry to up their game; consumers get better products, companies are forced to innovate, and good by-products come along. But in the end, money talks.

scarface74 7y ago

Anyone notice that the Justice Department under an administration who supposedly doesn’t believe in regulation all of the sudden is interested in regulating companies run by the “liberal elite”? Does it not worry anyone that an administration that’s not exactly friendly to the states where these companies are located are now all of the sudden cracking down on only certain big businesses? Every time I post about the government is rarely the answer I get push back. Be careful what you ask for...

khazhou 7y ago
This certainly looks like it's because they didn't bend the knee.
malvosenior 7y ago
Maybe so, but in this case the consumer will benefit. These large companies have been abusing their monopoly or near monopoly status to push their own politics aggressively. It's no surprise that the other side of the political spectrum would react negatively. That's why issues like free speech for all are so important. Someday, your enemies might be in charge and if you've been eroding human rights because you're powerful enough to do so, someone more powerful may show up and use the landscape you helped create against you. The winning move for tech was to not become politicized and just focus on being a neutral platform. Hopefully this threat of regulation will scare some of the overt politics out of our industry and everyone will benefit.
- scarface74 7y ago
  You really think the government run by an administration hostile to tech companies is going to do anything that benefits the consumer? Do you trust any politician to have both the integrity and the knowledge to pass laws that benefit anyone except themselves and their donors? While tech companies aren’t “becoming politicized” you better believe that the people who don’t share your interest are.
  - malvosenior 7y ago

rrivers 7y ago

Warren and Sanders are proposing breaking up these organizations (Google, Amazon, and FB) - but I believe they are pulling out of the Gilded Age playbook that won't necessarily transfer to today's age. How do you break up virtual assets and realistically stifle their power? I don't believe the same old anti-trust is the most effective method for dealing with these and future monopolies. Instead, a more tiered social responsibility program may be the ideal solution to continue and incentivize innovation while allowing society to reap the benefits of organizations that reach network monopolies. If you're interested in exploring this line of thought I've published a brief article about it: https://bit.ly/2Yc57iS https://bit.ly/2Yc57iS

guelo 7y ago

This is so scary because of the highly politicized nature of Trump's DOJ. This feels like it's all about settling political scores that the right wing has against Google and Facebook's functions as gate keepers against fake news. In fact Steve Bannon announced this attack on tech shortly after the election. It is scary because they're now using the power of the federal government against their political enemies, where does that end? And they see an opening for their nakedly political attack because there is a lot of truth to the anticompetitive market, and liberals like Elizabeth Warren have floated similar ideas.

prepend 7y ago

I’m not sure what will come of the investigation, but I hope it clarifies the privately owned public space (POPS) aspect of these companies. Currently google, facebook, twitter and others alternate between being common carriers and private networks depending on what best suits them, and limits competition, I think. Regulation will be hard, but just clarifying the duty and liability to provide service and level of service. Currently, firms apply “terms of service” and don’t typically provide much insight into particular bans or limitations. If the phone company operated this way, it’s clear which regulator could intervene. Currently that’s not possible, but the platforms also aren’t liable for infringing content. It seems hard to practice selective enforcement, but not be liable when there is illegal material.

calimac 7y ago

MAGA

WalterBright 7y ago

The big tech companies are a major asset to the economy, driving growth and jobs. Breaking them up is a pretty risky proposition.

eclipxe 7y ago
Agreed. This is all very short sighted.
vharuck 7y ago
I think the economy is resilient enough to bounce back. And the point of antitrust prosecutions is to prevent long-term damage to the economy.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Any other country would dearly love to have even one of the FAANG companies. Big companies are what drive economies, prosperity, employment and tax revenue, not mom-and-pop companies. Small companies are the future, but big companies are the now. (That doesn't mean I propose government action to prop up big companies. Just that one needs to think twice about breaking them.)

happypeter 7y ago

Loved big these tech giants before, because I believed they were the only way to bring trust. Now I see them as bugs to fix, since trust can be done in a p2p way.

marmada 7y ago

I think there's too much backlash against big tech companies. Yes FAANG companies have occasionally done bad things, but they contribute immense value. Gmail, Google Maps, Android, Amazon, AWS, etc. have provided immense value to billions of people. I also think these companies are advancing state of the art software development, tons of open source software has been released Facebook, Google, etc. Google is doing cool things with AI, etc. I suspect a lot of this action against big tech companies is the result of a politicized justice department that wants to take down "liberal elites". Why haven't we seen more action against other arguably even more harmful companies? (Larger companies, companies that destroy the environment, etc.) I think people on HN are getting duped. In this case, their interests (enhanced consumer privacy) and Trump's interests (sticking it to the liberal elites), align on the surface, but the actual motivation of the Justice Department is much more insidious.

stock_toaster 7y ago

I wonder if the timing on this is just a level for trying to get backdoor encryption accepted by the major players.

ryeights 7y ago

Buy the fear on this news. Various governmental bodies (Congress, the FTC, etc.) have shown that they're more talk than walk on the issue of antitrust litigation

williesleg 7y ago

It's about fucking time.

ilaksh 7y ago

The way to replace their large networks is decentralized systems.

root_axis 7y ago

Why doesn't the topic of data privacy laws ever enter this discussion? Data privacy laws would apply to everyone instead of targeting whoever happens to be at the top of the alexa rankings. Most of the big tech companies are not in violation of anti-trust regulations, so why don't we actually pass new laws to tackle the actual problem (systematic abuse of user data for profit)?

shmerl 7y ago

I'm surprised Microsoft isn't mentioned. It can be a good initiative, if it will for example force breaking lock-in, free up standards and reduce the likes of MS monopoly of Windows on preinstalled computers.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Additional coverage: Justice Department Opens Antitrust Review of Big Tech Companies https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/technology/justice-department-tech-antitrust.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/technology/justice-depart... Matt Levine: Facebook Negotiated Its Rules https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-23/facebook-negotiated-its-rules https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-23/facebo... DoJ opens review into Big Tech’s market power https://www.ft.com/content/4f008ab0-ad8c-11e9-8030-530adfa879c2 https://www.ft.com/content/4f008ab0-ad8c-11e9-8030-530adfa87... (http://archive.is/ktmWP http://archive.is/ktmWP) Also/earlier: http://archive.is/xQ0hI http://archive.is/xQ0hI http://archive.is/Nt7kl http://archive.is/Nt7kl http://archive.is/TiDIB http://archive.is/TiDIB Big Tech Hit With Broad U.S. Antitrust Probe as Scrutiny Mounts https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-23/u-s-opens-probe-of-online-platforms-over-competition-harm?srnd=politics-vp https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-23/u-s-opens... Also worth revisiting: "Fred Turner: Silicon Valley Thinks Politics Doesn’t Exist" https://032c.com/fred-turner-silicon-valley-thinks-politics-doesnt-exist https://032c.com/fred-turner-silicon-valley-thinks-politics-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17669745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17669745)

awinder 7y ago

“I don’t think big is necessarily bad, but I think a lot of people wonder how such huge behemoths that now exist in Silicon Valley have taken shape under the nose of the antitrust enforcers,” Mr. Barr told senators What hasn’t been occurring in broad daylight? This excuse is purpose-made to escape blame but these issues have been discussed for years while SEC has allowed acquisitions and mergers through on the anti-competition side of this argument...

scarface74 7y ago
But not a peep about telecom, media, oil companies, Monsanto....

tuxxy 7y ago

Is there anything keeping this out of the anti-encryption debate? Is it possible that AG Barr could say, "We will go after you for anti-trust issues _unless_ you agree to weaken your privacy tooling", etc?

d1zzy 7y ago

I would imagine that each of the investigated companies cases is a multi-year effort with dozens/hundreds of specialists gathering evidence, processing it, etc. It seems rather weird to start such a gigantic effort against all companies at once because anti-trust law is very complex and for each of these companies there will be completely different criteria and circumstances to make the case against. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I suspect this to take decades to reach some conclusion. By then I'm not even sure how much of the original goal to the investigation will be reached.