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Lina Khan, Big Tech Critic, Will Lead the FTC
- oh_sigh 5y agoBased on the complete lack of movement from AMZN and related stocks, I have to guess no one is particularly shaking in their boots (or, it was known that this was going to happen).
- bradj 5y agoHas a single law review article done more to propel anyone’s career or drive policy than the Amazon Antitrust Paradox?
- elefanten 5y agoIt's quite silly and not the greatest look for the country. I mean, to some people it is the greatest look -- the DEI story and the heroic "brilliant youth" narrative. But appointing someone so inexperienced to such a high office is not something you do you if you are serious about governing.
- an_opabinia 5y agoHow do you personally benefit from an Amazon with fewer competitors? I’m not sure if even ordinary people who work for Amazon benefit. You’re complaining about someone who represents your interests, as opposed to representing the interests of someone you’ll never be, a billionaire.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoAmazon has many retail competitors. Maybe they have pricing power in AWS, but otherwise, I do not see evidence of them having control of the retail goods market. Even for AWS, they have Microsoft and Google as competitors and a few other companies too.
- ravel-bar-foo 5y agoAmazon is in such a monopoly position that it is able to force sellers to cover the price of prime shipping (incorporating the shipping price into the display price) and then penalizes their display rank when they list lower prices on websites where shipping is separate from product price. Forcing suppliers to raise prices on unrelated sales is a classic monopoly move, like when MSFT forced OEMs to pay for Windows licenses on computers sold without operating systems.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoAnd those sellers cannot go to Target or Walmart or Home Depot or advertise their own website? We have Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal making it very simple to pay for things with a simple click, just like Amazon. Amazon has inertia, but it’s not exactly in a high barrier business. Walmart supplanted Kmart, and Amazon was able to gain share from Walmart. The switching cost is visiting a different website. If you have a good product at a price people we willing to pay, the internet makes it very possible to survive without any big retailer’s help. The bigger problem is probably someone cloning it but with 50% cheaper materials and selling it for 70% of your price, one that I’m sure many sellers on Amazon’s flea market are aware of.
- ravel-bar-foo 5y agoThey can advertise and sell on other websites, but if they advertise below the prices they advertise for on Amazon, then Amazon pushes them out of the search results box. Something like 90% of Amazon sales happen due to products being put in that box.
- fortenforge 5y agoWhat? The whole point of "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" is that we should abandon the "consumer welfare" standard. Meaning that we should gut Amazon even though it provides enormous benefits to consumers in the form of low prices. Lina Khan may represent the interests of Amazon's competitors, but she certainly doesn't represent the interests of consumers.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoThe problem with the "consumer welfare" standard is that it traditionally only considers a single variable: Cost. But consumer welfare can and should extend beyond that. But if you try to get customer service from many of these monopolies, you'll see plenty of consumers falling through the cracks. Google abuses people's privacy, eliminates competitors, kills off services people rely on, provides literally no customer service... but because their core services are "free", the consumer welfare standard is often considered inadequate to deal with an absolutely reprehensible and societally harmful company. And what's really crazy is: Competition tends to force companies to compete on treating consumers well. Protecting competing businesses protects consumer welfare pretty darn well, and it provides room for innovation which stagnates when a single company dominates a field.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago> get customer service from many of these monopolies, you'll see plenty of consumers falling through the cracks That's true of many non-monopolies too. And Amazon is widely known to have pretty good service. Conversely, no cellular company has ever had a monopoly in the US but a number of them are famed for poor customer service.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoI can call Verizon or Comcast right now and get someone on the line in minutes. Usually they can solve my problem too. Get Google on the phone though. (Amazon actually does deserve credit here, their customer service isn't the worst, by any means. But they have a litany of other issues, like a work environment where people have to pee in bottles to make quotas...)
- Apocryphon 5y agoWho are some alternatives in the antitrust space, then? Elizabeth Warren?
- arcticfox 5y agoSince when are 32-year-olds "so inexperienced"? Maybe she's got different experience from prior appointees but 10+ years of high quality experience is IMO, more than enough. Most people are at the top of their game at that age.
- bgorman 5y agoShe has been out of law school for 4 years.
- akomtu 5y agoTo play the DEI's advocate I'll call this sexism.
- vitus 5y agoAdditionally: while 32 might set a new record, it's not by _that_ much -- Collier became chairman at 34 in 1976.
- lupire 5y agoFor better or for worse, the law is much more complicated now than in 1976.
- rpdillon 5y agoI get where you're coming from, "so inexperienced" is probably overstating it. But she's been out of law school for four years, and I feel like saying most folks are at their best then discounts all the experience and learning that come from working another 30 years in the field (for, say, a 62-year old).
- elefanten 5y ago4 years out of law school is what I was referencing. I stand by my phrasing. She had (presuming usual timelines) 3 years of work between undergrad and law school. She went from law school student to law school associate professor (on the strength of her viral rewview article). She has 0 non-academic work experience and will now be regulating entire industries. In context, that's "so inexperienced".
- kemitchell 5y agoI've met Lina Khan. Silly doesn't come to mind.
- bobsil1 5y agoOne of SpaceX’s rocket leads was 27 at their first successful launch.
- ROARosen 5y agoAnd how is that comparable with an appointment to the number one top position in the authority over thousands of regulations governing thousands of companies etc. Also I think i's safe to assume you don't just "get appointed" to the lead team in SpaceX you need to actually "show" that you have what it takes. I'm not saying she won't be good, I'm just asking how can we trust?
- ldbooth 5y agoAt least she's not on the backend of her mental stamina. +1 for being hungry. Unlike congress, who today ignored the homeless ( or pick your) crises to make Juneteenth an official holiday. I'd like to see a lot of under 40 year olds governing if that is the result of "experience".
- selimthegrim 5y agoI suppose they’d rather have Feinstein in charge
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- JoeJonathan 5y agoIt's not like she was dragged in off the street. She's an associate professor at Columbia Law.
- shbooms 5y agomore than that, she has direct experience within the FTC and related government bodies [1]: - 2018, worked as a Legal Fellow at the FTC in the office of Commissioner Rohit Chopra - 2019, began serving as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law - Lead the Democrat's congressional investigation into digital markets and lead the investigation into digital markets. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Khan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Khan
- GoodJokes 5y agoPlease be more dismissive and patronizing of a person you know very little about. A DEI story? You are showing your insecurity.
- elefanten 5y agoIt has been explicitly trumpeted widely. The admin itself has highlighted it. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm saying it seems like there are narratives motivating this orthogonal to good governance. Are you saying she, with zero industry experience, is the most capable person for the job?
- GoodJokes 5y agoAll I am saying is I would have no grounds to make a decision on her hire, because like you I know very little about her. I can name many jobs where industry experience is not important. I can do this because I can critically think and am not biased.
- nvr219 5y agoWhy, was Joseph Simons was so amazing?
- timy2shoes 5y agoAlthough it's not a review article, but maybe Bork's The Antitrust Paradox, which the Amazon Antitrust Paradox works hard to refute.
- CalChris 5y agoRobert Bork had already been Nixon's acting-Attorney General at that point. He became acting AG when AG Elliot Richardson refused Nixon's order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and instead resigned. Deputy AG William Ruckelshaus also then refused to fire Cox and resigned. Bork then became acting AG but he did not refuse to fire Cox. Bork's legal career was not propelled by any singular brilliance.
- dvtrn 5y agoBork's legal career was not propelled by any singular brilliance. Well there was the whole Blockbuster rental history thing during his confirmation but that’s more like fun/interesting pub-trivia than anything necessarily “brilliant”.
- an_opabinia 5y agoI agree, there ought to be more original ideas in law, besides “Whatever earns me a plum clerkship.”
- musicale 5y ago"Whatever helps me pay off my student loans."
- mattmcknight 5y ago"policymakers' hearty appetite to rein in Big Tech". Rein them in from doing what exactly? Buying companies and making people rich?
- xxpor 5y agoThey're making the wrong people rich: Not the good ol boys who support conservative christian causes. They're eating old businesses. This is a threat to the existing donor class in Washington, which has embarked on a project since 1968 to build power through political donations, the courts, and crushing labor.
- bgorman 5y agoThis is exactly right. Big tech doesn’t have a unionized workforce, and thus do not create solid blue votes- so they will never be favored. Big Tech has been playing with fire warning up to democratic politicians.
- ru552 5y agoWhy would a Dem controlled President, House, and Senate care to preserve your so called “conservative christian causes”?
- ncfausti 5y agoIt requires bipartisanship in the Senate. Why is this the only thing Dems and Republicans can agree on? It's hard for me to not see it as a power play on both sides.
- kmeisthax 5y agoThis is an extremely cynical take on antitrust law. Unjustifiably cynical, at least for now. Granted, America has done such a piss-poor job of actually enforcing antitrust laws already on the books that it's hard not to read into this enforcement now as the end result of someone refusing to play ball.
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- nabla9 5y agoA review article from Lina Khan that explains the new New Brandeis Movement, a move back to Brandeis type antitrust from Borkian antitrust that started in Reagan era. The New Brandeis Movement: America’s Antimonopoly Debate by Lina Khan https://academic.oup.com/jeclap/article/9/3/131/4915966 https://academic.oup.com/jeclap/article/9/3/131/4915966 "We learned long ago that liberty could be preserved only by limiting in some way the freedom of action of individuals; that otherwise liberty would necessarily yield to absolutism; and in the same way we have learned that unless there be regulation of competition, its excesses will lead to the destruction of competition, and monopoly will take its place." – Louis Brandeis
- ilaksh 5y agoI believe technology has a key part to play in a more fair, yet still highly efficient, marketplace. The government should think about supporting or even mandating technical frameworks or protocols for information exchange and commerce. For example, much (although by no means all) of what Amazon does with it's product sales that provides a lot of the value is provide an information service that collects and queries a wide range of product data. Cryptocurrencies are the starting point for this. Along with other types of decentralized systems which provide, despite the name, the best ways we have to operate large scale systems holistically (as well as democratically). But to take a step back, rather than mandating protocols that could easily become dated and detrimental, prescribe or at least very strongly encourage systems for sharing, subscribing to and consuming those protocols. Maybe things like package registries, or perhaps package registries for smart contract programming libraries. But overall, I do not think that we can have effective government that is not integrated into society in a high tech way. And despite the track record of governments being horrible, I doubt we can function without them.
- ilaksh 5y agoWow! A lot of downvotes this time with no comment! That's how I know it was a good idea! And I should keep making the comment over and over regardless of how unpopular it is. Because the unpopularity of my comment is a hint that I know something that other people do not.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago> Because the unpopularity of my comment is a hint that I know something that other people do not. It may be. Or it may be that you're saying something that's obviously bogus to everyone else. Downvotes only give you one bit of information, and it's orthogonal to the "right/wrong" axis.
- ilaksh 5y agoBogus in what way I wonder? Historically, ideas that were "obviously bogus" were often unpopular.
- freyr 5y agoThe party is over for the computer nerds. Back to the bottom of the social pecking order.
- musicale 5y agoWell, they broke up IBM and Microsoft, didn't they?
- Apocryphon 5y agoThe people running the monopolies are nothing like the vast majority of "computer nerds" in the industry working under them.
- jonas21 5y agoSundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Satya Nadella all have some solid "computer nerd" background. Tim Cook, maybe not so much, but if I had to guess, Apple is the one who is going to make it out of this in the best shape, if only because congresspeople love their iPhones. And regardless of leadership, there are hundreds of thousands of computer nerds who are doing quite well at these companies.
- Apocryphon 5y agoI don't doubt the engineering chops of any of these people. You can say the same of Gates, Page and Brin, and so forth. But it's an extraordinary claim to say that in their present forms they are in any way in the same "social pecking order" as computer nerds.
- emodendroket 5y agoAnd yet their fates are intertwined.
- Apocryphon 5y agoThe employees can always go work for tech companies that aren't big monopolies. For example, startups.
- gok 5y agoI suspect the outcome of Trump's social media ban review will depend a lot on how Big Tech feels it's being treated by the FTC in 2023.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y agoText-only version https://text.npr.org/2021/06/15/1006807299/lina-khan-prominent-big-tech-critic-will-lead-the-ftc https://text.npr.org/2021/06/15/1006807299/lina-khan-promine... (Was having problems retrieving the full blown version.)
- rdxm 5y agoyawn......
- echelon 5y agoThis is fantastic news! Tech monopolies need much more scrutiny, and honestly, they need to have parts of the business model excised. Apple's control of mobile computing and commerce, Google's takeover of the web, Amazon reaching into every business: Apple should be mandated to allow web downloads of apps, Google can't ethically be in charge of Chrome as a product, and Amazon can't operate so many business units to siphon off and destroy smaller businesses. It's really nice to see Lina Khan was supported as a bipartisan appointment. It's good that she's young too -- she understands the technology, unlike a lot of our policymakers that struggle to comprehend the systems at play. The government moves slowly, but they're clearly starting to dip their toes in. Change is coming. If you're a capitalist, you want lean, fierce competition. What we have now is not that. If you're a small business, startup, or free software proponent, this is a score for the home team. Let's keep it up! Keep calling and writing your legislators.
- AceJohnny2 5y agoI see a conspicuous lack of ISPs in your list.
- echelon 5y agoWell, the solution to that is municipal fiber and a return to net neutrality. edit: while we're on that topic, I'm actually a little less concerned about that. Where I live I can get Comcast, Google Fiber, AT&T, Verizon, T Mobile, etc. Data caps are an issue, but they're nowhere near as bad as Apple telling me what I can and cannot run on their devices. Or Google swallowing the web with Chrome, Amp, ads, and the rest.
- minikites 5y agoISPs should be run by governments, just like other utilities are or should be. Market forces don't make better infrastructure.
- vmception 5y agoThe lack of market forces make no infrastructure “So lets improve municipal transportation options by putting a multipurpose device in everyone’s pockets that connects to this completely parallel wireless network, which is yet to be built, connected with high bandwidth cables underground - no it wont use the telephone poles why do you ask - and itll will have a random pricing scheme, so …. what does the county board think of how this fits in the budget?”
- andyxor 5y agowell congrats to all the progressives who work for big tech and voted Biden, here is karma completing the woke circle. "As a man himself sows, so he himself reaps" — Mahabharata
- akomtu 5y agoI smell some hope in this "completing". Let me dispell it: the cycle has just begun. Biden said that in the next 10 years things will change more than in the past 50. P.S. and yeah, I was one of those voters.
- joejerryronnie 5y agoMeh, nothing of substance will change through government action. We’ll all clutch our pearls and hope big daddy gov will come to the rescue, but just like Microsoft in the 90’s, a technology paradigm shift will level the playing field and bring a new crop of tech giants to the forefront. Ironically, our kids will be crying “monopoly” with this new batch of companies.
- hourislate 5y agoLets not forget who the Gov is. These same companies they talk of going after are the same companies that run the Gov/Country. 4 years from now nothing will have changed. Theater for the masses...
- fnord77 5y agoI do not believe this is quite right. Government will protect its own power. If big tech is getting too powerful, the government chop it up into little pieces. I think it is a forgone conclusion that google will be split up, apple will lose their app-store monopoly, etc.
- hourislate 5y agoBig tech has bought the government a long time ago. Corporations run America. I am willing to make a friendly bet with anyone that nothing serious happens. No one is getting broken up. There might be some hand slapping but that is all.
- RickJWagner 5y agoConservative voter here. I like Khan for the position. Let's see if she's able to make some progress.