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I find Ben to be out of his depth when he discusses the role of a democratically elected body should be doing to represent its constituents. He still thinks th

I find Ben to be out of his depth when he discusses the role of a democratically elected body should be doing to represent its constituents. He still thinks the United States is a competitive market and that congress simply needs to open up competition. What a wonderful, fantastic world that must be to live in. Tech’s products are a series of unregulated skinner boxes vacuuming up data in order to segment each customer into Infinitely smaller market segments to charge them maximum prices they can afford while completely ignoring externalities. The average American is exhausted from playing this “free market virtual “game” in an ever increasing sociopathic world. The average consumer is simply ill-equipped to keep up and they aren’t earning enough to vote with their dollars. Tech and America business needs to shape up or welcome a bunch of bullshit laws because Americans are tired of this and will welcome “big government”. maybe ben living in Hong Kong can’t see what is happening “on the ground” so to speak. Read the room, Ben.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> The average American is exhausted from playing this “free market virtual “game” There is limited evidence for this. Polling certainly doesn’t show it. What the data do show is these companies’ app downloads are at record highs. To the degree polling shows broad concern, it’s around monopoly power, workers’ rights and speech suppression. > ben living in Hong Kong Believe he is in Taiwan.
- skummetmaelk 6y ago
  Whenever I want to show someone the valley mindset I will pull up this comment. The app download numbers are at an all time high! That must be good, right guys? Right? ... Guys?...
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
It seems like he is reading the room, and the room says Americans are not in fact tired of this. It's hard to reconcile your claim that "Americans are tired of this and will welcome big government" with polls showing 90% of Americans view Amazon and Google favorably.
- greesil 6y ago
  Citation needed
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    The original article is my implied citation.
  - spunker540 6y ago
    Those stats are in the article (cited, in fact)
  - ciarannolan 6y ago
    RTFA: https://stratechery.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/antitrust-1.png https://stratechery.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/antitrust...
- kulahan 6y ago
  I think this is a tough pill for some to swallow. With as much press as we've seen about Amazon abusing their workers, or Google infringing on privacy, or social media degrading our happiness levels, people keep going back. Most people just don't seem to care much (or at least, not enough to make any serious changes to their lives).
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    People are pretty tolerant of things they think they don't have any control over. We waste enough food to eradicate world hunger a few times. Same for unnecessary pollution, corruption, prison system and many others. > An estimated 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted globally each year, one third of all food produced for human consumption, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. > The amount of food lost or wasted costs 2.6 trillion USD annually and is more than enough to feed all the 815 million hungry people in the world - four times over. > According to the FAO, high- and low-income countries discard similar amounts of food — 670 and 630 million tonnes, respectively — but there is a major difference in where and how that loss occurs. > In low-income countries, loss occurs more often in the earlier stages. For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, 83 per cent of food is lost during production, handling/storage and processing, while just five per cent is wasted by consumers, according to the World Resources Institute. Conversely, in North America and Oceania, 32 per cent is lost in earlier stages, and 61 per cent is wasted by consumers. So yeah, food waste is still an issue although more restricted to developed countries. https://en.reset.org/knowledge/global-food-waste-and-its-environmental-impact-09122018 https://en.reset.org/knowledge/global-food-waste-and-its-env...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 6y ago
He’s reading the room correctly. At no point in the last 20 years have even 30% of people polled said that we need more regulation of business and industry: https://news.gallup.com/poll/243662/americans-worry-less-government-regulation.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/243662/americans-worry-less-gov.... Since 2006, a plurality, often an outright majority, have said we need less. And at every point since 2006, a majority of people have said the federal government is “too powerful.”
- free_rms 6y ago
  I hate to defend someone who unironically wrote "read the room", but breaking up the big tech firms is also hugely popular: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/18/20870938/break-up-big-tech-google-facebook-amazon-poll https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/18/20870938/b... Everybody hates congress and loves their congressman, everybody hates 'regulation' but strongly supports some forms of it.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    That’s a fair point.
  - aeternum 6y ago
    I don't think that breaking up big tech equates to regulation. I strongly oppose increased regulation because it prevents competition. It's very difficult for new companies to compete in many areas now without an army of lawyers. We already have laws on the books that should be preventing these anti-competitive mergers if properly enforced.
- smt88 6y ago
  I suspect that poll is skewed because of wording. If you ask people if they want more or less of something vague (govt, regulation, etc.) you're baking their preconceptions into the poll. Some people see "more regulation" as restrictions to abortion, while others see it as less. A better poll for this context would ask directly about breaking up or regulating Big Tech, which is very popular[1]. 1. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/456221-majority-supports-antitrust-review-of-tech-giants-poll https://thehill.com/policy/technology/456221-majority-suppor...
AM8iwYFJASLUdW9 6y ago
> vacuuming up data in order to segment each customer into Infinitely smaller market segments to charge them maximum prices they can afford Can you explain this mechanic? I see how segmentation can be related to filter bubbles, which cause externalities (political polarization, etc.). I also see how the Internet exposes "the long tail" that previously couldn't be marketed to. But I don't see how this inflates prices exactly. The classic example of market segmentation, AFAIK, is tomato sauce: They used to think people wanted one kind of tomato sauce; then they discovered they could sell (e.g.) "chunky", "spicy", and "classic", and that people would pay a little more for these. I guess, to use an analogy, you're saying that there used to be something like "American tomato sauce", which was mass-produced and sold for $5, whereas now there's "Blue state tomato sauce" and "Red state tomato sauce" (and more than these, but let's keep things simple), each selling for $7. And maybe even the old "American tomato sauce" is still on the market, but people are nevertheless willing to spend the extra $2 to get the "Red" and "Blue" varieties for some kind of emotional and/or signaling reasons ("I don't want communist tomato sauce in my pantry"). And that these companies are creating the red/blue fracture in order to capture the extra $2 on each jar. But, in this analogy, what exactly is the tomato sauce? I could see the answer being "news" in the feed. I could see the "dollars" being paid by consumers actually being "attention". So then the story becomes that FAAMG are selling eyeballs, which I think is uncontroversial. But to complete the story, you also need to include all the brands that they're selling the eyeballs to. So who are they? Starbucks vs. Chik-Fil-A? To connect to your earlier lines about "competitive markets" and the "free market virtual game", are you saying that new entrants are shut out by this advertising arms race? Is that how you complete the story? Your post is vague but gestures at important things. From it, I'm trying to draw the diagram of the complete "triangle trade" (and maybe it's more than three vertices) happening here. What are the pieces? - Social media (content discovery, filtering, curation). - Content (e.g. news) - Brands (ad buyers) - Consumers (eyeballs) Something like that? Can you spell out how this works with specific examples?

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> The average American is exhausted from playing this “free market virtual “game” There is limited evidence for this. Polling certainly doesn’t show it. What the data do show is these companies’ app downloads are at record highs. To the degree polling shows broad concern, it’s around monopoly power, workers’ rights and speech suppression. > ben living in Hong Kong Believe he is in Taiwan.

skummetmaelk 6y ago
Whenever I want to show someone the valley mindset I will pull up this comment. The app download numbers are at an all time high! That must be good, right guys? Right? ... Guys?...

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

It seems like he is reading the room, and the room says Americans are not in fact tired of this. It's hard to reconcile your claim that "Americans are tired of this and will welcome big government" with polls showing 90% of Americans view Amazon and Google favorably.

greesil 6y ago
Citation needed
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  The original article is my implied citation.
- spunker540 6y ago
  Those stats are in the article (cited, in fact)
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  RTFA: https://stratechery.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/antitrust-1.png https://stratechery.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/antitrust...
kulahan 6y ago
I think this is a tough pill for some to swallow. With as much press as we've seen about Amazon abusing their workers, or Google infringing on privacy, or social media degrading our happiness levels, people keep going back. Most people just don't seem to care much (or at least, not enough to make any serious changes to their lives).
- searchableguy 6y ago
  People are pretty tolerant of things they think they don't have any control over. We waste enough food to eradicate world hunger a few times. Same for unnecessary pollution, corruption, prison system and many others. > An estimated 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted globally each year, one third of all food produced for human consumption, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. > The amount of food lost or wasted costs 2.6 trillion USD annually and is more than enough to feed all the 815 million hungry people in the world - four times over. > According to the FAO, high- and low-income countries discard similar amounts of food — 670 and 630 million tonnes, respectively — but there is a major difference in where and how that loss occurs. > In low-income countries, loss occurs more often in the earlier stages. For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, 83 per cent of food is lost during production, handling/storage and processing, while just five per cent is wasted by consumers, according to the World Resources Institute. Conversely, in North America and Oceania, 32 per cent is lost in earlier stages, and 61 per cent is wasted by consumers. So yeah, food waste is still an issue although more restricted to developed countries. https://en.reset.org/knowledge/global-food-waste-and-its-environmental-impact-09122018 https://en.reset.org/knowledge/global-food-waste-and-its-env...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 6y ago

He’s reading the room correctly. At no point in the last 20 years have even 30% of people polled said that we need more regulation of business and industry: https://news.gallup.com/poll/243662/americans-worry-less-government-regulation.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/243662/americans-worry-less-gov.... Since 2006, a plurality, often an outright majority, have said we need less. And at every point since 2006, a majority of people have said the federal government is “too powerful.”

free_rms 6y ago
I hate to defend someone who unironically wrote "read the room", but breaking up the big tech firms is also hugely popular: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/18/20870938/break-up-big-tech-google-facebook-amazon-poll https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/18/20870938/b... Everybody hates congress and loves their congressman, everybody hates 'regulation' but strongly supports some forms of it.
- rayiner 6y ago
  That’s a fair point.
- aeternum 6y ago
  I don't think that breaking up big tech equates to regulation. I strongly oppose increased regulation because it prevents competition. It's very difficult for new companies to compete in many areas now without an army of lawyers. We already have laws on the books that should be preventing these anti-competitive mergers if properly enforced.
smt88 6y ago
I suspect that poll is skewed because of wording. If you ask people if they want more or less of something vague (govt, regulation, etc.) you're baking their preconceptions into the poll. Some people see "more regulation" as restrictions to abortion, while others see it as less. A better poll for this context would ask directly about breaking up or regulating Big Tech, which is very popular[1]. 1. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/456221-majority-supports-antitrust-review-of-tech-giants-poll https://thehill.com/policy/technology/456221-majority-suppor...

AM8iwYFJASLUdW9 6y ago

> vacuuming up data in order to segment each customer into Infinitely smaller market segments to charge them maximum prices they can afford Can you explain this mechanic? I see how segmentation can be related to filter bubbles, which cause externalities (political polarization, etc.). I also see how the Internet exposes "the long tail" that previously couldn't be marketed to. But I don't see how this inflates prices exactly. The classic example of market segmentation, AFAIK, is tomato sauce: They used to think people wanted one kind of tomato sauce; then they discovered they could sell (e.g.) "chunky", "spicy", and "classic", and that people would pay a little more for these. I guess, to use an analogy, you're saying that there used to be something like "American tomato sauce", which was mass-produced and sold for $5, whereas now there's "Blue state tomato sauce" and "Red state tomato sauce" (and more than these, but let's keep things simple), each selling for $7. And maybe even the old "American tomato sauce" is still on the market, but people are nevertheless willing to spend the extra $2 to get the "Red" and "Blue" varieties for some kind of emotional and/or signaling reasons ("I don't want communist tomato sauce in my pantry"). And that these companies are creating the red/blue fracture in order to capture the extra $2 on each jar. But, in this analogy, what exactly is the tomato sauce? I could see the answer being "news" in the feed. I could see the "dollars" being paid by consumers actually being "attention". So then the story becomes that FAAMG are selling eyeballs, which I think is uncontroversial. But to complete the story, you also need to include all the brands that they're selling the eyeballs to. So who are they? Starbucks vs. Chik-Fil-A? To connect to your earlier lines about "competitive markets" and the "free market virtual game", are you saying that new entrants are shut out by this advertising arms race? Is that how you complete the story? Your post is vague but gestures at important things. From it, I'm trying to draw the diagram of the complete "triangle trade" (and maybe it's more than three vertices) happening here. What are the pieces? - Social media (content discovery, filtering, curation). - Content (e.g. news) - Brands (ad buyers) - Consumers (eyeballs) Something like that? Can you spell out how this works with specific examples?