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U.S. House's antitrust report hints at break-up of big tech firms: lawmaker

• lawrenceyan 6y ago
  Related discussion on reports of bribery fueling antitrust focus on tech companies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24694454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24694454
• api 6y ago
  I hope every VC is lobbying for this. What's the point in investing in tech if the market is full of big fat gorillas that will just copy everything you do and put 10X the capital behind it, not to mention hiring everyone at 10X the salary a startup can afford to pay.
  • diab0lic 6y ago
    > not to mention hiring everyone at 10X the salary a startup can afford to pay. This is how a functioning talent market works. It isn't unfair to the startup that big companies pay more, it's unfair to the startup employees that the startup isn't paying more. I'd argue that if a startup can't pay market rate for the employees it wants (be it cash or equity) then it wasn't properly funded in the first place.
    • Ericson2314 6y ago
      Yes, but if we equalize the tech industry on the company level, startups will be able to pay more, and a lack of monopsony around high-level programmer talent will further drive up wages. Unless FAANG is unionized or something, the trust-busted alternative of the status quo is definitely better for labor.
      • umeshunni 6y ago
        > startups will be able to pay more The OP's proposal is that startups should be able to pay less and hire talent, if it wasn't for those pesky FAANGs driving everyone's wages up. If only they were able to pay less would VCs have been able to keep even more for themselves, I mean, would the market have been more equitable (?@!@)
        • Ericson2314 6y ago
          Well if that's what OP is saying they are wrong. Don't look at the market from the perspective of the one of the participants, look at it as a whole. And don't try to evaluate something like anti-trust in a marginal way, when the effects are so numerous. Better to take a more stateless / path-independent approach and just find the new equilibrium, for the first rough-cut analysis. From those perspectives, higher Gini coefficient clearly means lower median, etc. From your other comment it looks like you agree with my conclusions, at least.
      • srtjstjsj 6y ago
        More competition would mean lower prices for consumers, paying more employees building redundant products, and less money per employee for salary.
        • Ericson2314 6y ago
          But we're talking about breaking up vertical monopolies. That doesn't necessarily create more redundancy.
    • peteradio 6y ago
      There is also the end-user to consider. Big fat salaries for engineers to create shitty/sheisty marketing/ads while squashing real innovation is not a net-benefit to society. There has to be some medium.
    • cblconfederate 6y ago
      By that standard, Putin's russia is a "functioning talent market" since it's a corrupt oligopoly. Or the CCP. "If they have not ties to the party, they shouldnt have tried to compete". It's functionally equivalent. If you want a functioning market, you don't want an oligopoly
      • diab0lic 6y ago
        That's a huge stretch so that you could pull two boogeymen into the conversation and stand them next to my argument. The big tech companies may have undesirable effects on the world but paying individuals too much isn't one of them. Literally the only complaint is that other owners can't hire for under market rate? Who cares?
        • cblconfederate 6y ago
          Thats not what i m objecting to, but the idea that having huge salaries is enough to call a market "good". It's not. Anyway, we all have our biases, and i do understand you work for a FAANG.
          • diab0lic 6y ago
            I do work for a FAANG company and bear that bias, yes. I haven't always worked at a FAANG company though -- before I did I appreciated the upward pressure FAANG companies were putting on salaries. I took another look at your comment I replied to, I must have glossed over the "If they have not ties to the party, they shouldnt have tried to compete" part. I apologize. I want to be clear that I'm not suggesting these companies shouldn't compete, I'm glad for all of the employers we have in tech. What I am suggesting is that they pay the price the market for that talent is currently willing to bear and if that results in less concentrated ownership for the ones that eventually do come to dominate the industry I won't be losing any sleep. For those that think current giants are "unbeatable" -- current FAANG companies were tiny and irrelevant 20 years ago and the industry was dominated by a different set of "unbeatable" giants.
            • 6y ago
    • rmrfstar 6y ago
      Look into the phrase "dumping". Uber and Lyft are allowed to run permanent losses because they have privileged access to cheap capital. If you have a better platform but you actually need to turn a profit, your ship is sunk before you leave the harbor. And a lot of the people earning "10x" at the RAMJAC companies would almost certainly earn more in equity appreciation in a competitive market. This era is bizarre. All the free market rhetoric from the 1980s is being recycled to defend central planning that is now totally cool because the central planner has a corporate charter.
      • dantheman 6y ago
        Central planning is about risk and force; if someone want to take a risk with their own money then it's not central planning. In fact that there are many different companies in the transportation market: byrd, lyft, uber, taxis, spacex, tesla, nikola, cruise, boring company, etc... Shows it's not centrally planned.
      • srtjstjsj 6y ago
        > If you have a better platform but you actually need to turn a profit, your ship is sunk before you leave the harbor. Why wouldn't a VC fund this amazing platform? > Uber and Lyft Wait, why does Lyft exist if Uber's funding prevents any competitor from existing?
        • rmrfstar 6y ago
          VC's won't fund anything in Big Tech's "kill zone", and bootstrapped projects need profits to sustain themselves. It is very difficult to turn a profit while facing a competitor that can run perpetual losses. I find the "kill zone" theory plausible and supported by available evidence [1,2,3]. Others (a large consulting firm) disagree [4]. [1] https://www.aei.org/economics/incumbents-vs-startups-the-case-that-big-tech-is-squashing-small-tech/ https://www.aei.org/economics/incumbents-vs-startups-the-cas... [2] https://www.dallasfed.org/-/media/Documents/research/events/2018/18ted-haltiwanger.pdf https://www.dallasfed.org/-/media/Documents/research/events/... [3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-destroy-modemyth-or-reality-11596068322 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-destroy-modemyth-or-r... [4] https://www.aei.org/economics/a-new-analysis-takes-a-shot-at-the-idea-big-tech-has-created-a-kill-zone-for-startups/ https://www.aei.org/economics/a-new-analysis-takes-a-shot-at...
  • Ericson2314 6y ago
    As an industry, going from vertical integration -> vertical modularity with interfaces that aren't just 80s microcomputers + layers of back-compat will also be revolutionary. (How will that happen? Well say Apple is forced to allow Samsung to install iOS on their phones. You can sure bet Apple will break a gazillion interfaces to make this as difficult as possible for Samsung. But Samsung will do it anyways, and now we'll get way less legacy-encumbered commoditized building blocks as a result!)
  • umeshunni 6y ago
    I think it's the other way around. One of the reasons tech companies got so big in the last 10 years is that there have been no startups emerging to compete with them because either (a) VCs have funded for the short term and encouraged exits to big companies over waiting it out for an IPO and (b) VCs have made mega funding rounds diluting out employee equity and making it a no-brainer to work for a FAANG
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • jonwachob91 6y ago
    But the tech conglomerates don't just copy and kill you, first they ask to acquire you and then when they get rejected they copy and kill you. It costs less to acquire a company with an existing project and team that is successful than it costs to stand up a new team on a new product that is unproven. VC's like having conglomerates that have lots of cash to throw around and can acquire their investments at nice multiples. Even if the startup sucks, they are almost guaranteed a decent exit as long as it doesn't suck TOO much.
    • cblconfederate 6y ago
      > first they ask to acquire you and then when they get rejected they copy and kill you Is that like a law or sth? And do they "ask nicely", or essentially blackmail?
    • tschwimmer 6y ago
      VCs don’t rely too heavily on this. In fact, taking a early buy out is one of the outcomes that can be very good for a founder but terrible for a VC. VCs need outsize returns to boost the market overall portfolio, which has many zero outcomes. Getting acquired for 110% of your series A valuation doesn’t do anything for them. That said, getting acquired as a strategic acquisition is a good outcome for VCs. However that’s much more rare and isn’t specific to big tech companies.
    • matthewdgreen 6y ago
      This is the 'outsource our R&D to venture-backed startups' model, rather than the 'have actual innovation and competition' model. Hey, it's still better than our defense contracting industry, which explicitly outsourced their R&D expenses to Congress.
    • srtjstjsj 6y ago
      Ah yes, I remember how Google copied and killed WhatsApp with GTalk, Facebook with Google+, and SnapChat with Photos.
• nabla9 6y ago
  Two-sided market and multi-sided platform create situations where old antitrust paradigms break down and regulators must step in hard. It seems still be uphill battle to explain this to the public, because at least social media comment sections are filled with 'what it is to me' anecdotal thinking in personal level that is "Not even wrong".
  • tomrod 6y ago
    Meh, it's straightforward. Platform should not compete on their platform. The incentives to muck around is too high. There is not a reasonable economies of scope argument here, in practice this self dealing tends to have lower quality products.
    • jstepka 6y ago
      Right, so Target, grocery stores, hardware stores, and everyone else, can't sell their own value products too then right? Seems like those shelves are platforms to me. I'm fine with 'big tech' not being able to sell products/services on their platform, but i want the same standard for other businesses as well.
      • naringas 6y ago
        a store (even a multi-location physical retailer) is not the same thing as a digital platform the crucial difference is due to the digial aspect. digital "material" does not have physical contraints. this simple fact changes everything.
        • andreilys 6y ago
          Sure they aren't the same thing, but doesn't mean you can't manipulate the physical layout among other variables in order to push your own products at the expense of your competitors. You also have access to sales trends for competitors, giving you a leg-up in market research (i.e. Target decides to enter Chips market because they see Lays data). I mean it's not that dissimilar to what Amazon does, it's just done in the physical world.
• wazoox 6y ago
  Big Tech is bringing us in an era of renewed feudalism. They can't be broken up too soon, or in too many pieces.
  • silexia 6y ago
    What about patent trolls? What about tobacco, pharmaceuticals, oil? What about airlines with hub monopolies keeping up prices?
    • paxys 6y ago
      > What about patent trolls What's the largest patent troll even worth? $10 million? > What about tobacco, pharmaceuticals, oil All of them are already intensely regulated, the exact opposite of big tech > What about airlines with hub monopolies keeping up prices What's an example of this? The biggest problem with airlines today is that there are too many of them, and so none of them are sustainable.
    • chrisdhoover 6y ago
      All bad things. You should add telecom and cable as well. But here is the thing, search, social media, video, and micro broadcast messaging companies have picked political sides and have become propaganda machines. Even if one agrees with the political side they align with, smart folks should realize the dangers to our liberal traditions. The very idea of inalienable rights, open debate of difficult problems, and protection of minority rights are at risk.
      • dantheman 6y ago
        What about newspapers and book publishers - they pick sides and hell even endorse candidates -- how can we allow them to exist?
    • zbrozek 6y ago
      "What about" arguments deflect attention without addressing any real issues. The closest you can get to justifying using one is to acknowledge that regulators have finite bandwidth to deal with issues and that some prioritization is needed. But the regulators' prioritization metrics may not match your own. I don't always work on the biggest or most difficult of my household chores. Sometimes I work on ones I can complete today or which mitigate my most severe annoyances or which have a deadline for some reason.
• bearjaws 6y ago
  I refuse to believe with this administration that any trust-busting will occur. The only company Donald Trump will break up is Amazon, out of a personal grudge against Jeff Bezos.
  • debacle 6y ago
    What is your basis on that opinion? Amazon seems like one of the least vertically integrated monopolies (though I agree they need to be curtailed).
    • jeffbee 6y ago
      I think what they are correctly pointing out is that this administration does not take a rational approach to, well, anything, so it doesn't matter what the facts are regarding Amazon's actual practices. It's just a grudge.
    • mywittyname 6y ago
      The current administration transparently considers "the stock market" to be their primary gauge of success. Going after any of the top 5 companies in the S&P500 is going to negatively impact the stock market. Ergo, I also doubt we will see any anti-trust activity originating from this administration. But this conversation is a bit irrelevant since the current administration probably has less than four months left in office, which is not enough time to put anything together. I don't expect a settlement from anyone either, so we are looking at several years worth of investigations and subsequent lawsuits, appeals, etc.
    • thethethethe 6y ago
      Least vertically integrated? They have their own ecomerse platform, running on their own compute, selling products they brand and manufacture, complete with warehouses and a delivery fleet
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  • 6y ago
• wmeredith 6y ago
  Great. Do the telcos next.
  • AlexandrB 6y ago
    They've already been broken up once - it's shocking that some of the recent mergers have been allowed to go forward. So, unironically, yes we should do the telcos next.
  • zip1234 6y ago
    Unless there is a monopoly (or agreements between telcos to raise prices without competing) then why? How will breaking up Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon do anything to help US consumers? It might help their competitors, many of whom are very large (Alibaba).
    • johnward 6y ago
      I do wonder what breaking up large US tech corporations does to the competitiveness of the US on the world scale.
    • arrosenberg 6y ago
      America is largely a nation of producers, and our current state of malaise (or whatever you want to call it) seems to be strongly correlated to being re-branded as consumers, and being forced into a system that treats us as such. There is a higher good than low prices for consumers. Consolidation destroys small business and the ability of the average American to support themselves through independent, private enterprise. All 5 of the FAANG companies have caused consolidation in tech, retail and other verticals, and they are acting as private regulators to manipulate the markets. I don't want 5 companies controlling my destiny, and I can't figure why any rational person would, even if you genuinely see yourself as a consumer.
      • Jach 6y ago
        Over the 16 years from 1998 to 2014 where FAANG is even relevant, small business share of GDP declined from 48% to 43.5%. (Their dollar amount has grown 1.4% annually vs. 2.5% for large businesses.) Is 43.5% too little? Or perhaps it's too high? Across the EU, the figure I found has 99% of all enterprises employing fewer than 250 people, whereas in the US it's 98%. For enterprises with 1-9 people employed, in the US it's 67%, vs 88% in France, 93% in Czech Republic, 78% in UK, 61% in Germany... I don't think this paints a dire picture for small(er) independent businesses. Why stop consolidation now? What numbers would we need to see to loosen up on consolidation restrictions again in the future? In other words, what is your model here? What values should trigger action? Given a value, what should we be able to predict? Then we can go look at random other countries and see if the model is any use. On a more general side of discussion, before breaking up big tech companies, I'd sooner break up big government. In a few months regardless of who wins the election, there will still be someone roughly 50% of the country despises who is going to claim to rule me and try to control my destiny from the other side of the continent. Why any rational person would want such a situation is beyond me, even if you genuinely see yourself as a Federalist.
• mrweasel 6y ago
  That would raise a ton of questions. Most of the deals Facebook did to buy WhatsApp, Instagram and others where approved by the US government. But if those approvals can be reversed, why bother requiring them to begin with? Google only develop Android and Chrome to fuel their ad business, those two product can’t turn a profit on their own, as proven by Mozilla. Would the lawmakers force a creation of companies who are doomed to fail? Lawmakers should have been more careful about which mergers and purchases they approved. Many of the issues we face with big tech is because lawmakers are to inept at seeing the long term consequences of the deals they themselfs approved.
  • sn41 6y ago
    I don't think this argument is entirely justified. There is a "sandpile" effect as more acquisitions come about, plus the merging of profiles in the context of social media platforms. The net effect is definitely more than the sum of the parts, so the monopoly effect is much more than the sum of the individual parts' market shares. Moreover, pointing out to earlier oversights cannot be a justification for an absence of oversight now.
    • tobr 6y ago
      > Moreover, pointing out to earlier oversights cannot be a justification for an absence of oversight now. Got confused trying to parse this, then realized you are probably using the word “oversight” in two diametrically different ways in this sentence.
      • jakelazaroff 6y ago
        "Oversight" is its own antonym! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym
  • wobblyasp 6y ago
    > Google only develop Android and Chrome to fuel their ad business Maybe, maybe not. Loss leaders are definitely a thing. Nothing forces them to be "doomed to fail" however. > those two product can’t turn a profit on their own, as proven by Mozilla Proven? Mozilla failed, sure. That does not mean its a foregone conclusion.
• thisiscorrect 6y ago
  How much of this is pre-election sabre rattling?
• myaltacct415 6y ago
  Lawmakers did not just wake up one morning and decide to push antitrust forward. I would love to see which companies or people are pushing for, or against, it. Yelp was singularly active in bringing scrutiny to Google years ago - https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/01/yelps-six-year-grudge-against-google.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/01/yelps-six-year-grudge-agains... "antitrust law is boring, complicated and political"
  • ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    I think antitrust has been asleep for decades but the shear scope of the damage of these monopolies is forcing congresspeople to finally ignore their special interests. Bear in mind, plenty of people ready to move forward on antitrust now are people literally receiving campaign money from Google. It's just not working anymore: Congresspeople aren't completely stupid (well, except Jim Jordan) and they can see their jobs are under threat due to Big Tech interference in the media and politics.
  • cblconfederate 6y ago
    So what? Considering how big these companies are, it's hard to claim that they can be bullied by lobbyists.
    • myaltacct415 6y ago
      I'm not claiming they are being bullied by lobbyists. I'm claiming that the antitrust arguments have a long history of political motivation, as opposed to broadly beneficial economic motivation.
  • kxrm 6y ago
    It would not surprise me to find out that telco lobbyists had a lot to do with this. It's not shocking that this whole movement to break up FAANG started after the Net Neutrality loss. Telcos have largely been able to avoid breakups and scrutiny for years because they invest very heavily in lobbying.
    • 6y ago
• mauvehaus 6y ago
  Situations can change, as can our understanding of the situation. What seems benign at one point in time can seem like a bad idea with more information. Revisiting decisions based on new information or a changed situation seems like a hallmark of good governing to me. Consider Freon. It was legal to use for a long time. With evidence that it's bad for the environment, it's no longer legal for most uses.
  • ehsankia 6y ago
    Then make very specific company-agnostic behaviors illegal, like with Freon. They didn't say "we ban company X from making any fridges", it was a general ban. If there's a certain behavior that's problematic (still not sure what specifically you would be referring to here), then ban that, not handpicked companies. This is the TikTok crap all over again. They want to help national security and user privacy, but instead of banning data collection, they target TikTok specifically, because they know other US owned apps do very similar data collection.
    • RestlessMind 6y ago
      > This is the TikTok crap all over again. They want to help national security and user privacy... Am I the only one who thinks that TikTok was more about geopolitics concerning US/China and much less about user privacy?
      • vorpalhex 6y ago
        Facebook selling your data to advertisers is annoying. TikTok et al vacuuming up data to be stored by the CCP for things like blackmail[0] is horrifying and basically geopolitical chess moving to give them leverage on things like putting Muslims in detention camps [1]. Treating the two as equivalent is somewhere between intentionally ignorant or acting in bad faith. [0] - https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-has-a-database-on-americans-built-from-stolen-data_2876161.html https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-has-a-database-on-americ... [1] - https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/china-confirms-death-of-uighur-man-whose-family-says-was-held-in-xinjiang-camps/ar-BB19D1G7 https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/china-confirms-death-of...
• seg_lol 6y ago
  I was at MS in the late 90s, left in 2000. It should have been broken up then. But to break up or be broken up is the wrong phrasing. It connotes a kind of destruction, to make something less than it was, but this is not the case at all. Any value that something this large has, is in its ability to exhaust resources from the ecosystem, control the market, the workers and the ability to resist changing its behavior when better things come along. Companies exist in a system that should serve everyone and when an imbalance occurs the whole system morphs around them. They are no longer players but dictators, willingly or not. Their sheer size forces rules of the game in ways even they do not control. Breaking up large companies isn't even about them. It is about us and the world we want to live in. Remember the wage fixing scandal between Pixar, Google, Apple and bunch of other companies in the bay? [1] They ultimately controlled where those people worked (and their horrible commutes), who they were friends with, what schools their kids went to and who they married. All because the execs at these companies wanted to maintain total control of the workforce and suppress wages. That is too much power for a company to have or wield. And these large companies due to their size alone are doing this on an unconscious level. On a conscious level they can do much worse. Microsoft stagnated for what 10-15 years? But it isn't just MS that is stagnating, it is all the people in those markets. There were a bunch of us WITHIN the company that wanted the divisions repotted so each could grow on its own. If value is being lost when an organization that large is distributed to a smaller number of units, then the value is selfish, it only serves the org and not the system it operates in. What is the end state if we let this continue? 20 large corporations in America and a field of small feeder gig economy vendors? We will all be serfs (NPCs) in a feudal corporate cosplay. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2012/01/20/doj_emails_anti_poaching_deals/ https://www.theregister.com/2012/01/20/doj_emails_anti_poach...
  • whimsicalism 6y ago
    > What is the end state if we let this continue? 20 large corporations in America and a field of small feeder gig economy vendors? We will all be serfs (NPCs) in a feudal corporate cosplay. The reality is that this is what we're moving to, break-up or not. The ownership of these publicly traded companies remains the same disparate set of high-capitalization funds.
• gambler 6y ago
  Should be a mandatory read for anyone who shills for big tech here: "Lack Of Anti-Trust Enforcement" https://blog.dshr.org/2020/08/lack-of-anti-trust-enforcement.html https://blog.dshr.org/2020/08/lack-of-anti-trust-enforcement...
  • fauigerzigerk 6y ago
    If someone is really shilling they won't be persuaded by any information you provide. If someone isn't shilling but may have doubts about the proposed regulation they won't be persuaded by you insulting them as a shill.
• dantheman 6y ago
  I really want to see the harm articulated. More and more we see vague 'problems' and 'harm' but it's never clearly stated. These companies provide damn good service and at a great cost. If we want to look at harm - why don't we look at the medical industry, drug industry, cable/internet -- these companies are outright abusive to their customers and extract massive amounts of money from them and are often granted monopolies by the government.
• offtop5 6y ago
  I would also love to see more regulation around the same company owning several brands which appear to compete with each other. For example their's only a handful of big tech recruiting firms, one of which has at least 4 brands which all report to the same home office. This in itself isn't wrong , but their needs to be much greater transparency. Like if you own 5 different hotdog chains nation wide , and your HotDog Inc , you should have to put 'Dave Dogs, by HotDog inc' In this manner if Dave Dogs get me sick I can avoid HotDog Inc in the future. Not likely to ever happen, but it would be nice.
• afrojack123 6y ago
  Not going to get broken up. Apple has Samsung. Amazon has to compete with Google and every other e-commerce store. Facebook is in a natural monopoly business and has taken steps to be politically involved. Google owns the web through search and other products. Google is the only risk and even then maybe.
  • whimsicalism 6y ago
    > Amazon has to compete with Google and every other e-commerce store. Amazon has majority market share in e-commerce. Google isn't even close. It's interesting - the comments section appears to be a litany of excuses for big tech just to see what sticks. I think focusing on a single, higher-quality argument against anti-trust might be better.
    • asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      > It's interesting - the comments section appears to be a litany of excuses for big tech just to see what sticks. Not sure what comments section you're reading. In the one I see, most of the top comments are celebrating the possibility of these companies getting broken up. There's only the niggling problem that the law probably doesn't provide a provable cause of action supporting said breaking up.
      • whimsicalism 6y ago
        > There's only the niggling problem that the law probably doesn't provide a provable cause of action supporting said breaking up. Well, I think we should change our anti-trust law to deal with platforms. I think it is pretty confident of you to say that a priori there is no legal reason you could break up these companies. The top comment when I commented was this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24698720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24698720. You're right that the tenor of the top comments now has already shifted.
        • asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
• holidayacct 6y ago
  This is the dumbest idea and it screams that the House just wants to appease their constituents. You can't break up tech companies; we've been through this before with Microsoft. What happens is, congress breaks up a big tech company then the people who started said big tech company invest large sums of money into the next generation of tech companies and effectively control them. The next set of boy geniuses get to be the face of these new companies for recreating ideas that the big monopolists weren't allowed to finish because they were broken up. See Microsoft and Facebook; Mark Zuckerberg is the "boy genius" who recreated an idea that wasn't allowed to be completed by Microsoft. See Bill Gates starting Microsoft recreating a bunch of ideas that weren't allowed to be completed by Xerox.
  • whimsicalism 6y ago
    > You can't break up tech companies; we've been through this before with Microsoft. All of your arguments appear to be reasons for continued anti-trust enforcement and all of the problems you identify seem to be caused by stringent, followed by lax, anti-trust enforcement.
• RestlessMind 6y ago
  And yet, we already have this story in WSJ today - "Partisan Divisions Hinder House Big Tech Report"[1]. Submitted as a separate article at [2]. I believe Big Tech and their lobbyists are already one step ahead of the game and current polarization plays very well to their advantage by averting a unified action by the US government. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/partisan-divisions-hinder-house-big-tech-report-11601991340 https://www.wsj.com/articles/partisan-divisions-hinder-house... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24699039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24699039
  • gogopuppygogo 6y ago
    Big tech today learned from Microsoft’s failures. They invest heavily in lobbying, government affairs, and other non profits setup to help their causes.
• hikerclimber1 6y ago
  this won't happen. lets be honest our politicans are bought.
• bladegash 6y ago
  Does anyone else feel like releasing this report prior this close to the elections is a miscalculation on the part of Democrats? Like it or not, these tech companies hold a lot of influence via lobbyists as well as their platforms themselves. I’m not saying they will actively try to get a candidate elected who is more friendly to their agendas. However, I don’t see them going out of their way to prevent others from doing it knowing what the future holds should there be an administration change. I’d also be surprised if moderate voters actually give a crap about anti-trust issues, at least not enough to sway their vote one way or the other. If anything, it could have the opposite effect of turning off voters that see this as government overreach, since many moderates are fiscally conservative. This post is out of curiosity and to hear the thoughts of others, so hopefully it isn’t taken the wrong way.
  • switch11 6y ago
    of course it is a mistake Look at what happened to Elizabeth Warren when she started talking a lot about breaking up large companies within TWO WEEKS her lead evaporated and she went to #4 * if someone has a rational explanation for Democratic frontrunner has 14% lead over #2 (Biden) Democratic frontrunner says she will break up tech companies SUDDENLY, within 2 weeks she is #4 in Democratic race would love to hear the rationale for this remarkable coincidence * * there is a lot of stuff behind the scenes If you want to keep going down the rabbithole, Biden's VP just happens to be the most Large Tech Friendly politician on the planet
    • sangnoir 6y ago
      The scientific way to look at that 2 week stretch is to try and find possible confounding factors, such as having Pete Butegieg - who was splitting the centrist vote - drop out and endorse Biden.
      • Mxs2000 6y ago
        No don’t ruin their warped worldview where politicians only drop in polls due to the secret tech masters.
• dexwiz 6y ago
  I'm confused as to why the US government would break up large tech now. Surely tech has reached the status of being a national interest, especially in relation to information and communication? What stops foreign firms from buying out large swaths of American tech after it has been broken up? TikTok shows how far foreign tech can penetrate the US market, and how nervous that makes the government. I feel that the only reason the current Trump administration would want to break up tech giants, is so the remnants can be auctioned to the highest bidder. Maybe they are feeling emboldened by this TikTok/Oracle deal, as botched as it is.
  • TMWNN 6y ago
    >I'm confused as to why the US government would break up large tech now. Surely tech has reached the status of being a national interest, especially in relation to information and communication? Harry Truman said in 1945 about the atomic bomb, "We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies". I feel the same way about FAANG and Silicon Valley as a whole (and Wall Street, and Hollywood, and SpaceX/Tesla, and the Ivy League), that they are in the United States. That doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That doesn't mean I can't or won't decry their putting thumbs on scales toward a certain type of bien-pensant ideology. That does mean that, overall, I am very, very glad that they are American instead of Russian, Chinese, or even British, French, or German. >I feel that the only reason the current Trump administration would want to break up tech giants This report is from the House of Representatives, which is Democratic-controlled.
  • cblconfederate 6y ago
    > What stops foreign firms from buying out large swaths of American tech after it has been broken up Why? They are way overpriced. If chinese or russians wanted to compete worldwide they could fund it much cheaper locally. Besides a lot of of their value is in the network effect / lock-in, not on the software itself. And why would they invest in a company that would be ultimately under control by the US administration.
• gerland 6y ago
  Breaking companies at a moment in history at which most of the worlds largest player are tightly coupled with their respective goverments agenda? It seems to me that someone here is still convinced that US can play by "free market" rules. Wrong. It could do it when it was effectively the only player in the world. I do not believe that innovation and flexibility can overcome sheer power in a world when everything can be freely emulated or bought out. Don't get me wrong - I would laugh to tears if Google would be broken up. Still I would wonder what will take this space.
• DevKoala 6y ago
  I believe it is fair to break up these companies. However, how do we expect them to compete internationally against state sponsored monopolies such as those coming from China a decade from now?
  • istjohn 6y ago
    On the contrary, breaking them up will only strengthen our technology ecosystem, allowing innovation to continue. If we don't break them up, the next disruptive tech giant will be founded overseas.
    • DevKoala 6y ago
      How do you imagine this playing out? For example if you were to break up Apple, Samsung/Huawei phones would probably dominate the landscape.
      • colinmhayes 6y ago
        The idea is that without the huge barriers to entry big tech creates smaller companies will be better able to innovate. I tend to agree with you though.
        • dodobirdlord 6y ago
          But what huge barrier to entry is Apple putting up to block a competitor in the smartphone industry? Just that Apple is better and nobody can realistically start from scratch and compete? No amount of selling a superior product constitutes anticompetitive behavior.
    • mFixman 6y ago
      Why doesn't the European Union have tech giants other than SAP?
• textman 6y ago
  Tim Bray had a recent blog article related to this: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/06/08/Anti-monopoly https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/06/08/Anti-mono... I love his quote from The Myth of Capitalism: “The tech giants love startups, but in the same way that lions love feasting on lifeless carcasses of gazelles.”
• supernova87a 6y ago
  I don't think it'll work anyway. Previous actions to disassemble companies worked because they were the only ones able to serve the customer. Phone companies, operating system installed on computer, airlines, railroads, etc. The behavior here is not related to the companies being big. Break up a tech company, and some other company will equally likely feed you the same info, find your personal data to sell, deliver you biased news, etc. You've solved nothing.
  • supernova87a 6y ago
    And I hate to be the bringer of discouraging news, but the reason tech companies are succeeding at selling us our own data is that we want it. In every click we make to like something, buy something targeted at us, listen to media we like, we teach companies or algorithms that we want what they have. And so yelling at the company for delivering what we have shown we want is a bit like yelling at yourself for eating so much ice cream. Until we put down our phones and stop reinforcing the outcome, we're a big source of our own problems. You might as well try to change human nature.
    • redisman 6y ago
      This is fairly disingenuous. Our online behaviour is driven largely by billion/trillion dollar companies microtargeting people like you and manipulating our emotions and our neolithic era brain parts.
    • rightbyte 6y ago
      Adspending is way overvalued. Ad-people are buying adwords for their own company brand and do Powerpoints of the impressive conversion rate. Furthermore, showing ads for something I am allready looking for is probably not as profitable as the adspacebuyer thinks. They underestimate the chance of me buying their stuff anyway.
    • nikitaga 6y ago
      And I hate to be the bringer of discouraging news, but the reason car manufacturers are succeeding at selling us polluting gas guzzlers is that we want it. Every time we buy an SUV and pay for gas, we teach companies and their executives that we want what they have. And so yelling at the company for delivering what we have shown we want is a bit like yelling at yourself for eating so much ice cream. Until we start using electric cars or transit, we're a big source of our own problems. You might as well try to change human nature. --- Yeah nope, this insight from the '80s didn't age well. Regulation has repeatedly fixed broken markets, and the whole ad tracking / data broker industry is beyond broken. The real "human nature" is responding to incentives. Applies to companies too. Adjusting those incentives with regulation has a long track record of being effective when done with even a modicum of goodwill and competence, which despite politicking is usually the case. Of course, breakups of individual companies won't achieve much as you said. But that doesn't justify jumping to "it's up to individuals to change their behaviour" mantra. That's exactly the bullshit that the plastics industry successfully used to pollute the whole planet with their garbage, blaming individuals for not recycling. You can debate the morals of that kind of blame, but you can't deny that it's completely ineffective at solving the problem.
• BearsAreCool 6y ago
  I highly doubt that this will ever succeed due to the S&P 500 and similar stock indexes. Over the past year (looking at September 6 2019 comparing that to today) there has been 15% growth in the S&P 500, which is insane considering the global pandemic and economic shutdowns. This means it is on track to double every 5 years. For a bit of context, if you were given 1,000 dollars on your 18th birthday and instead of buying a cruddy used car you invested it and made 15% interest every year, you're have over $700,000 dollars by the time you hit 65 and can retire on it. This 15% is including the massive dip that happened as the world came to a halt, without it who knows what insane growth there would have been reported. Now with that out of the way and established, this was literally all due to big tech. All the profit is from monopolies. Apple specifically experienced over 100% growth over the last year, taking into account its weight[1] of 7% in the S&P 500 that means if my math is correct that roughly half of the growth of the S&P 500 was entirely apple. When you calculate out the weights of AAPL (Apple), MSFT (Microsoft), AMZN (Amazon), FB (Facebook), GOOGL (Alphabet stock 1), and GOOG (Alphabet stock 2) you have 24% of the total S&P 500 index. Their total change in value over the past year averaged based on their weight in the S&P 500 shows that they had a growth of 69%, when multiplied by .24 you get a bit over 15%. Making the S&P 6 most of the S&P 500s profit. By this math, which may be incorrect, it appears the remaining S&P 494 unsurprisingly is slightly down about 1% over the last year, pretty good considering the pandemic and all but the people demand stonk. The % of S&P 500 profits attributable to each company (google stocks combined) according to my excel sheet: Apple - 48%, Amazon - 26%, Microsoft - 20%, Facebook - 7%, and Alphabet - 5% With this in perspective, it isn't that surprising that lawmakers will never bust these companies. The DOW is slightly more resilient to big tech (only a quarter of their total profits were microsoft and apple, they didn't have the other 3 big tech companies) and there are of course other stock indexes. However, politicians love to point to the stock market as proof of their economic successes and the S&P 500 is one of the common ones. If big tech is broken up, these companies will obviously make less profit once they're no longer a monopoly and with them the stonks go away. It also really isn't a surprise why Buck is focusing on "conservative allegations that some platforms have tried to stifle conservative voices". Of those companies, only 2 could really be considered as having social media platforms. Both of which are the small fries when it comes to weighted profit on the stock market. Sorry for going so long winded, but this article sparked over an hour of poking around and I wanted to share. tl;dr, big tech monopolies cause most stonking and politicians love that too much [1] - Apparent weightings for S&P 500 https://www.investopedia.com/top-10-s-and-p-500-stocks-by-index-weight-4843111 https://www.investopedia.com/top-10-s-and-p-500-stocks-by-in...
• kevindong 6y ago
  Realistically the upcoming testimonies are just grandstanding by lawmakers hoping for some brownie points in the upcoming election. There was a similar outcry over Facebook's testimony after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and nothing happened afterwards.
• ilaksh 6y ago
  I think things could work out if you replace those platforms with decentralized protocols.
• shadowgovt 6y ago
  I can't help but think that requiring tech firms to declare a "single line of business" just changes the ecosystem to a federation of "independent" companies under a holding company without really changing the market itself. If the law can't break up Alphabet it's toothless, and if it can break up Alphabet I don't see how it couldn't also break up any major consolidation firm that gets into the business of buying and flipping companies.
  • pyrale 6y ago
    The issue is not buying and selling companies, it's cross-domain consolidation. If Amazon can enter e.g. the diapers market not because they are good at making diapers but because they can leverage their other businesses to kill competition, you have a problem. If google can pour unaccounted billions in advertising for any new product they launch while killing competitors' visibility, there is aa problem. The solution is not to force e.g. alphabet to sell all of their companies, but to make these companies act independently.
    • shadowgovt 6y ago
      The question, to my mind, is how. So let's say Amazon declares their business is e-commerce, and they can't manufacture things they sell. And now there's ADiapers, that happens to make diapers. And Amazon Holdings, which owns ADiapers and Amazon. What stops ADiapers from optimizing their product to sell well on Amazon, Amazon building algorithms that preference ADiapers, and Amazon Holdings profiting off of this on both sides?
      • Jach 6y ago
        You don't even need Amazon Holdings to own them, the same results can happen from regular old business partnerships. Maybe the government can forbid new deals between the offshoots, but that just creates middlemen. Or maybe ADiapers isn't viable on its own, so Amazon forms a deal with BDiapers instead, but the same net result happens. (Product placement deals are commonplace.) In the worst case you get the same anti-competitive behavior, where Amazon and BDiapers form a partnership where Amazon subsidizes BDiapers to kill off the diaper competition and then gets paid back after BDiapers jacks up prices. The government could put a stop to that too (and does occasionally stop anti-competitive practices of various sorts) even though there's no single company to breakup. There are other methods than breakup to strongarm companies into doing things. So why not use them instead of all this mess that would result from breaking up Amazon? Especially if we can't even show their diaper venture was particularly effective in anti-competitive goals? We don't even need to invent a diaper business, we have the whole Amazon Basics line as well as their Amazon hardware to analyze. Those do get preferential treatment, yet other in-kind hardware and products still show up and sometimes do better anyway (Energizer is #1 in 9V batteries), plus the alternatives have the larger share (majority) of non-Amazon commerce locations where they don't compete with Amazon. They may compete with store-brands of those places of course. Meanwhile for customers, the top 3 most trusted brands in America are USPS, Amazon, and Google. This talk is not about what the public wants or what's good for the public at all.
• say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
  Break up companies while allowing insider trading by members of the House. Who do you think is going to know the outcomes of these decisions first and act upon them?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• 013a 6y ago
  Its going to be painful. They're going to split up the companies along the wrong lines. The products these companies produce are going to suffer tremendously. It still needs to be done.
• davidw 6y ago
  Hrm, I think there are probably a lot of details and nuance and good arguments both ways. But this is just not the right moment, politically speaking, to be taking that on. Maybe in a year or two?
• vitorbaptistaa 6y ago
  "He agreed with some of the report’s recommendations, such as (...) allowing consumers to take control of their data through data portability and interoperability between platforms." This is the key. If I'm able to talk with my WhatsApp friends from Signal, or migrate my whole Facebook account to another platform, it would make it much harder for the companies to create and keep their monopolies. If I were a lawmaker, I'd focus my time on how to do this properly.
  • Craighead 6y ago
    No thanks, Whatsapp can stay in Whatsapp
  • cblconfederate 6y ago
    this is user-generated content and it should belong to the user, i.e. they should be able to export it in an interchangeable format, like we had RSS a long time ago. But it would also mean the end of lock-in for many companies, so i don't think they 'll allow it
    • Someone 6y ago
      We already have export in interchangeable format, because of the GDPR, but it doesn’t make people move their data because it’s difficult, and often, there isn’t really anywhere to move it to. What would you import your Facebook data, your Strava tracks, etc. into? Even if there were a product with feature parity, your friends still would be on Facebook, and all your old URLs would die.
      • cblconfederate 6y ago
        Right now that data is not truly equivalent. E.g. twitter/fb have email addresses, and use them to notify friends, but they won't give you your followers' email list. There could be a way to ask your followers to give them for example, or at least a hash of it, so they can be discovered in another network. The issue here is that whatever value is in friend lists /subscribers is locked into these companies, but in reality it's the users who have earned it.
• Upvoter33 6y ago
  Trump is really hitting all the right notes on the economy. That said, smart breakups would make sense. FB/Insta would be a start.
  • filoeleven 6y ago
    What makes Facebook/Instagram a better target than, say, Amazon the virtual big box store and Amazon the cloud computing company?
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  Related recent discussion of mega corps eating the world: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24679514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24679514
• tw04 6y ago
  I presume the White House has backtracked on Oracle "acquiring" TikTok right? Because if this is truly about preventing monopolies and not a political witch hunt, allowing a company like Oracle to own a company like TikTok is the antithesis of their supposed goals.
• specialist 6y ago
  Whatever the evolving digital advertising ecosystem looks like, separate entities should control separate portions of the value chain.
• shmerl 6y ago
  How about breaking up ISP or media monopolies? They get free pass and only consolidate all the time.
• SkyMarshal 6y ago
  I wish they would break up the big ISPs too, for all their anti-competitive suppression of alternatives.
  • throwawaygh 6y ago
    Not only anti-competitive, but also far more privacy invading.
  • octoberfranklin 6y ago
    Never gonna happen, NSA needs fewer bigger ISPs. That's why they threw Qwest's CEO in prison and loaned CenturyLink the money to buy Qwest. Go ahead, check CL's SEC filings. They've had those mysterious NON-REGISTERED, NON-TRADEABLE Qwest acquisition bonds on their books for a decade now, all held by a single, non-disclosed entity. Gee I wonder who. Then they pulled the same stunt in order to buy Level3. https://ir.centurylink.com/news/news-details/2020/CenturyLink-Announces-Proposed-Private-Offering-of-Level-3-Financing-Senior-Notes/default.aspx https://ir.centurylink.com/news/news-details/2020/CenturyLin...
  • pottertheotter 6y ago
    Would breaking them up do that much? They already barely compete with each other. Seems like making them provide open access to any other ISP would be a better way to go about it. Separate the infrastructure from the service. It's just too bad we don't have more municipally owned infrastructure.
    • SkyMarshal 6y ago
      >It's just too bad we don't have more municipally owned infrastructure. Yeah that's what I really want, municipal fiber. The big ISPs are constantly suing municipalities that try to build that though.
• exclipy 6y ago
  Why is the corporate tax rate not progressive? If companies with higher earnings get charged a higher tax rate, they would naturally want to break themselves up.
  • smileysteve 6y ago
    This (it is, well, it was more progressive before 2018)! Except larger companies seem to net lower tax because they can afford to keep more money offshore and uses for that.
  • dodobirdlord 6y ago
    It doesn’t really make sense, for the same reason that corporate income tax in general doesn’t make much sense. A corporation is owned by people, when the corporation makes money, that money, one way or another, ends up in the hands of people who pay progressive tax on it. If you think that the government isn’t making enough money off of corporations, the answer is to raise capital gains taxes. Progressive income taxes on corporations are bad policy for many of the same reasons that corporate income taxes are bad policy in the first place. Corporations are artificial constructs and they have a really easy time reorganizing to behave in artificial ways to shed tax burden. Institute a progressive corporate income tax and watch as every major corporations spontaneously transforms into hundreds of micro-corporations that own each other’s stock, and “contract” all of their responsibilities to each other without changing anything except to increase inefficiency and make internal job transfers more complex. Just tax people and be done with it, taxing corporations is taxing people, just with an added incentive for wasteful tax-avoidance.
    • exclipy 6y ago
      Everything you said makes a lot of sense. But how do we stop monopolistic behaviour?
      • dodobirdlord 6y ago
        A corporation being very large doesn’t necessarily mean that it has a monopoly. I don’t find the argument that there are significant monopolies in the high-tech industry to be persuasive. Moreover, the competitive landscape among America’s high-tech industry is very active. Each of the major tech companies is regularly sniping at each other’s major markets. Microsoft introduced Bing to compete with Google Search and Azure to compete with AWS. Google introduced Google Cloud to compete with AWS, GSuite to compete with Microsoft’s productivity suite, and unsuccessfully introduced Google Plus to compete with Facebook. Amazon is ramping up an advertising wing to compete with Google Ads and investing in Twitch to compete with YouTube. And everybody these days seems to have a video streaming service of some sort competing with Netflix. This seems like a golden age of competition. Breaking up a high-tech monopoly would be tough because unlike historically successful breakups it would make no sense to do geographically. But for now it doesn’t seem like anything needs to change.
• cmurf 6y ago
  I see this as an attack on encryption. Break up all these companies and break up their ability to keep fighting governments' long-standing anti-encryption stance.
• snicker7 6y ago
  Why regulate size and not behaviour? The problem isn't that a company is too big, but that it engages in behaviour that makes it hard for competitors to thrive. And, yes, they may use size a leverage for this. But breaking up the company isn't the only (or best) solution for this.
  • octoberfranklin 6y ago
    Because size is easy to measure while behavior is highly subjective.
  • marricks 6y ago
    Well, when you're a big enough company that you can have extensive lobbying efforts and have connections to the congresspeople who would over see you (Schumer's daughter works at Facebook for example) it might get hard to do anything except break them up. A regulation can get watered down at the outset, eaten away by following legislation or legal challenges, but breakup could have a lot longer of an affect.
• tehjoker 6y ago
  We have all these problems with these companies because they are controlled by interests that help us only incidentally on their way to world domination. Why don't we put 1 and 1 together and just take control? It won't solve every problem, but a huge number of them will suddenly become pliable as the companies are run in the people's interest.
• Causality1 6y ago
  Good. At any other time in the last hundred years trust-busting regulators would've already smashed these companies into tiny pieces.
  • NE2z2T9qi 6y ago
    Can you list some ways Google has hurt you? You know, aside from all the harm they caused by giving you access to almost limitless knowledge, providing you tons of free storage, helping you navigate the world around you, providing an open source competitor to iOS, and providing countless hours of free entertainment and educational videos on YouTube?
    • Causality1 6y ago
      All of those activities make them money. None of them are charity. Hmm, some ways Google has hurt me. They bought Revolv and turned my expensive home automation into a paperweight to try and force me to buy into the Nest ecosystem. That's a good example.
      • NE2z2T9qi 6y ago
        Frustrating for sure, but you're comparing access to limitless knowledge and literally life transforming technologies that people even a few decades ago would have sold their soul for... to a home product that I think Google would refund you the price of. Keep things in perspective.
• sargun 6y ago
  I propose a “51% tax”. Once a given organization takes over 51% of a given market, their revenue begins to be taxed. This tax is then used to either fund public R&D or consider that to be a tax credit evenly distributed (somehow) to their competitors. Non voting control of the market doesn’t count (so for example, if intel bought a bunch of AMD shares and didn’t use them to vote, that would be okay)
• breck 6y ago
  Just more hacking at the branches of evil.
• credit_guy 6y ago
  Can someone help me understand what the problem is here? I, like billions of other people, am a heavy Google user: I use gmail, Google search, Google maps, Youtube, etc. I don't pay a cent and the quality of the service is impeccable. Competition is good to benefit the consumer at the cost of the producer. But in this case, I, as the consumer, pay nothing for my services and am happy with the quality of those free services. What is the antitrust trying to achieve? "When you don't pay, the product is you", they say. Ok, fine, so maybe the "true" consumer is the advertisers. Is the antitrust here designed to benefit the advertisers? Who is Congress trying to help here? Are they simply punishing success for the sake of punishing success?
  • postpawl 6y ago
    Those free users are the product. Just because you’re not paying money doesn’t mean there’s not value. “Are they simply punishing success” You could have said the same about Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel. The problem is when these companies get to a size and market position that enables extremely anticompetitive behavior like what we’re seeing with app stores and all the purchasing of other successful companies/engineers in the space.
  • monadic2 6y ago
    While it's nice that your needs are met, others do exist in this world. It's not terribly difficult to listen to them. Why do you feign ignorance?
  • dumbfoundded 6y ago
    Ultimately trust busting comes down to the impact on the consumer. A monopoly is defined as having market power, exclusionary conduct and business justification (1). In theory, if consumers are happy, nothing happens. As you state with Google, you're pretty happy with the services they provide. At some point, Google stops trying to compete with better products and simply uses its dominate position to takeover markets. For example, Google Flights. Is Google Flights a better product? Does it save me money or provide more options? I honestly have no clue but the fact that Google can just integrate with the top of search, pushing down the market tested existing companies is bad for consumers. Google can just singularly introduce worse products and instantly gain significant market share by putting them at the top of search. Similarly, they have an infinite adwords budget. As for punishing success, I wouldn't frame it that way. In general, if the companies split, it will make way more money for the existing equity holders. They get shares in all the new companies and they tend to do well. 1) https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
• joeseppy 6y ago
  After they just let 2 out of the only 4 National cell networks merge, this looks a bit like shutting the barn door after the horse has left
  • reducesuffering 6y ago
    Have you heard the argument that the cell network industry is so capital intensive, it's more competitive to have a combined Sprint & T-Mobile take on AT&T and Verizon, as opposed to AT&T and Verizon severely outcompeting Sprint and T-Mobile into bankruptcy, leaving a duopoly?
• NE2z2T9qi 6y ago
  In my entire life I've only ever felt screwed over by two--and only two--entities: Comcast and private universities. Not Apple, not Google, not Facebook, not Amazon, not banks, not credit card companies, not even my cell carrier. On the whole—as a customer at least—I feel like all my dealings with these "big tech firms" have been fair and mutually beneficial. I love Apple products, I think Google basically deserves a Nobel Prize for their democratization of knowledge and their creation of useful tools, and I can sing the praises of how much Amazon has simplified my life with easy ordering and reliable product reviews. Frankly, I even sorta like getting targeted ads! In contrast, Comcast keeps sneakily raising my bill, charging me BS fees they don't disclose ahead of time, locking me into punitive contracts, providing mediocre service—and I literally can't do a damn thing because they are the ONLY service provider in my area. As for universities, they demanded that I take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to pay their insane tuition bills. They would in fact prevent me from registering for classes and would even withhold my diploma if I was even a little late paying their bills!. They employed these draconian tactics despite having endowments in the billions and receiving many hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants each year. And, these universities received all their money up front and pawned off any repayment risk to the Government or private lenders... And despite asking me to mortgage my future to pay their bills, they now have the outrageous gall to send me letters almost weekly asking for more even donations. And, very conveniently for somebody, educational debt is non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. That's my longwinded way of asking: who the hell decided that regulating big tech is America's most pressing issue right now? I have nothing but goodwill toward big tech. Meanwhile, I don't hear any politicians saying a anything about Comcast (in fact, I see many Comcast execs throwing fundraisers for Joe Biden), and all hear about universities from many Congresspeople is how we need to increase their funding and make sure more students can pay their insane tuition bills—not actually reigning in those bills. Something seems... off.
• lemax 6y ago
  People love to throw around the big "Break up" but what they really want is probably much more nuanced. What do break ups achieve? To use an example from Benedict Evans, suppose Windows and Office were broken up... at the end of the day, you'd eliminate cross-leveraging of Windows and Office, but as far as crops of new PC operating systems licensors or productivity software companies popping up go, things would probably have remained more of the same. If the goal of a break up is to eliminate a complete market grip, we need to think a few steps more deeply. Google and Facebook both operate in two sided markets. If you break that up, you'll just end up creating more leverage for advertisers and less power to the successor companies. A better example is probably telecom in Europe, where regulators decided that instead of one big telecom provider, they would build the lines nationally and rent access to those lines to a slew of network operators. This created a rich and competitive market where consumers can get a data plan for a reasonable price and plenty of companies have made plenty of money. The crux of Evan's argument is that what makes FB/GOOG/AMZ/MS strong is the network effects they possess, not their sheer size. Google failed at creating a social network, Facebook wouldn't even try taking an aim at search. So, any reasonable unit these orgs can be "broken" into wouldn't achieve the intended effect. Regulators need to look at things like price capping, requiring big platforms to offer up certain data entities for use by third parties, requiring consumers to choose their default search provider instead of selling the position, et cetera. Get over the break up already
• freakynit 6y ago
  Breaking these big tech companies seems only fair. My question is why are big banks not being broken? Why are big oil companies not being broken?
• cryptica 6y ago
  I think this is great. The reality is that we live in the era of 'big government'. Until we have figured out a solution to make government smaller without causing poverty to skyrocket, then we have to assume that the government is going to be running the show; as such, it needs to ensure the well-being of all its stakeholders (citizens) and it needs to treat all of its citizens equally. The government should have full permission to break up companies that it sees as too big. It should also have the power to shut down corporations at will (in the same way that corporations can shut down internal projects that don't align with shareholder incentives). The government needs to rise up and take ownership of the economy. We live in crony-capitalism and in this system, it's better to put power in the hands of the government where the cronyism is more evenly distributed and is subjected to the necessary checks and balances.
• matthewfelgate 6y ago
  What about Microsoft?
• mrkramer 6y ago
  Yea reverse all acquisitions you guys approved cause you know at the time you were for the Big Tech and now you are against it.
• pers0n 6y ago
  These companies don't need to innovate, just buy up the competition or small companies and absorb them into their own. Or if they won't sell, just copy all the features or clone the app and use their big name to push it out there and crush them.