13 ms·
Why Did Congress Just Vote to Break Up Big Tech?
- psychlops 5y agoThey weren't tithing enough money to the right people?
- aurizon 5y agoPerhaps they saw how the big national monopolies, like Siemens and BASF and Samsung, and Sanyo and . became stultifying nepotistic monopolies in various fields, and when faster and quicker more innovative US companies came along that ran past them - and seeing this, decided to have a way to limit these monopolies. Look up Standard oil monopoly for some aspects, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil That is the wiki and here.... https://www.investopedia.com/insights/history-of-us-monopolies/ https://www.investopedia.com/insights/history-of-us-monopoli...
- tomc1985 5y agoThis all sounds nice, but it still has to make it through the rest of congress
- thih9 5y agoI wonder how the "break-up bill" would be applied in practice for specific companies. Does that mean that e.g. Apple Music would now have to become a separate entity?
- snicker7 5y agoIt means that "Apple Music" cannot rely on an "online platform" (large online service) owned by Apple. A more practical example is that Google can't run its ad-tech services in GCP. And Amazon cannot run its online store in AWS. They could, however, use each other's cloud. But not their own.
- Mirioron 5y agoSo Google has to run a second cloud service that's only used internally?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ehnto 5y agoThat's interesting. I would say we wouldn't have AWS if Amazon couldn't have built it by scratching it's own itch. But also, couldn't Amazon just spin up an "internal" AWS style system, instead of using a competitors cloud service?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ignoramous 5y ago> The ACCESS Act mandates that big tech firms have to make their systems open to competitors and business rivals, in the same way that AT&T customers can talk to T-Mobile customers, or users of different email systems can communicate with one another. Okay, this is plausible, but it can turn into all kinds of mess as federated systems aren't simpler to design, build, or operate. For example, how would Signal inter-communicate with e2ee intact with say, Facebook Messenger? They'd have to do a matrix.org style bridges, which is going to be super tricky to maintain, at their scale. Hardware is doomed: USB-C for all inter-connects... > The merger bill makes it harder for big tech firms to buy rivals. Well, the race to $2T market cap just got harder. Can get behind this. I can do without Zuck in my WhatsApp, or Satya in my GitHub. Such a restriction may, instead, result in a marked increase in venture investments from BigTech, which may not be as bad a thing, after all? > The nondiscrimination bill is intended to ban the ability to big tech firms to preference their own products, the way Google substitutes its own reviews for Yelp reviews, even if Yelp’s reviews are better. Much needed. Looking at you "Amazon's choice". > The break-up bill is supposed to split apart big tech firms by prohibiting platforms from owning any line of business that uses that platform. Affects tech companies ranging from AWS and Stripe to platforms like Android and iOS? This bill can be the straw that breaks the camel's back, imo, if they get the details right. Either the incumbents remain entrenched because of the loopholes, or they no longer wield undue advantage, leaving some breathing room for upstarts. Unsure if this is good or bad for software engineers. They've enjoyed higher salaries for a while on the back of some of the most ridiculous growth ever seen, driven in no part by unabated monopolistic practices. > And that is truly stunning. Indeed.
- ehnto 5y ago> Hardware is doomed: USB-C for all inter-connects... I am down for a standard, it doesn't matter which one it is, so long as it's consistent. Mostly it's for power distribution, I want every single one of my devices to be able to draw from a USB battery bank.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago> Either the incumbents remain entrenched because of the loopholes, or they would no longer wield undue advantage, leaving some breathing room for upstarts. Unsure if this is good or bad for software engineers. There are always unintended consequences, but it seems like it would be good in that if there are more upstarts there should also be more jobs for software engineers. The pay may (probably) won't be like what it is in FAANG companies, but not everyone can work for a FAANG company.
- bigcorp-slave 5y agoDemocrats don’t like big tech because it’s composed of big companies, and big companies are bad. The bigger a company gets, the more bad stuff it can do by sheer accident, that all gets attributed to malice. Republicans don’t like big tech because the employees are overwhelmingly liberal, and they have idiotic notion that these companies are suppressing their views - when in reality, companies (looking at you, Facebook) have bent over backwards to allow conservatives to spread lies and hate on their platform. Seems like a no-win scenario. The second these representatives do anything at all about the telecoms I’ll believe this is anything other than politically motivated. Hope you are all ready for us to cut off our nose to spite our face, and cripple the global competitiveness of the only American industry we lead the world in.
- veerabadhra 5y agoThe anti trust break up of AT&T led to disruptive innovation, like mass produced cell phones. I personally can't wait for the AI revolution that will occur when Google is broken up. The Big Tech incumbents need to die out, because innovation stagnates in these monopolies.
- snicker7 5y agoWe also lost Bell labs.
- kgwgk 5y ago> innovation stagnates in these monopolies Bell Labs managed to come up with a couple of interesting things, though.
- wittycardio 5y agoGoogle and Facebook are amongst the most important sponsors of scientific research in the world. Why would you want to destroy that. The internet is a winner take all industry , all things considered the current winners are pretty good. Why ruin that for narrow political goals
- 5y ago
- stephc_int13 5y agoThis is clearly needed, even if late, considering that antitrust laws are not a new thing. There is hope, we tend to forget after only a few generations, but if politicians are moving now this is because the collective opinions about big tech progressively shifted during the last decade. I might be naïve, but I think that HN played a role. And of course this is not over yet.
- dantheman 5y agoThis is clearly not needed. The citizens of the US are being harmed in education both primary and secondary, medicine, and in housing. These are heavily regulated industries that recieve large amounts of tax dollars - why are they not being addressed?
- mrDmrTmrJ 5y agoStrongly agree. We're seeing legislation target the sector of the economy with some of the highest productivity ever seen in human history. Congress needs to look at the sectors with the lowest productivity growth! Home construction, infrastructure, health care, and eduction. Here's a great place for congressional investigators to start: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-costs-are-so-high-work-in-progress/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c... Though, in reality, many those industries are high cost because of congress
- fmajid 5y agoThe Tech monopolists are not the entire Tech sector, in fact they are a very small portion of tech employment (and thus productivity). Their rent-seeking behavior stifles innovation and competition, and they coast on the hard work of non-monopolists, e.g. Apple's outrageous 30% cut on app developer revenues.
- LarryEt 5y agoIMO "monopoly" is possibly an outdated idea. The real problem here is the natural preferential attachment that emerges with tech companies at this scale. "A preferential attachment process is any of a class of processes in which some quantity, typically some form of wealth or credit, is distributed among a number of individuals or objects according to how much they already have, so that those who are already wealthy receive more than those who are not." I don't know how we deal with this in the modern world. IMO we need to at least start with network science on the table and realize we do not have the answers if using outdated ideas.
- 88840-8855 5y agoOne of the things that I would love to see would be the ban of all those acquisitions that those large firms do. Yet alone the 9bn USD MGM takeover by Amazon was not understandable. Amazon is already too huge. Why are those aqcuisitions allowed?
- wonderwonder 5y agoI hear what you are saying and agree but wonder if this would have the effect of stifling the creation of new companies as so many people start a company with the hope of being acquired.
- viraptor 5y agoOh no, what will we do without the companies running on funding, without a viable business model, trying to get more monthly active users by any means. /s I don't think this approach has been healthy for quite a while. It may be an actual good thing that companies think more about long-term independent survival.
- alexanderdmitri 5y agoI think this exact thinking has perverted the idea of business and has steadily been eroding consumer trust in small business and their offerings.
- wvenable 5y agoMGM is dying so they really needed to be acquired or otherwise invested in.
- WalterBright 5y agoNotably absent of is any recognition that we live today in a very global marketplace. FAANG companies are all American. If they are broken into pieces by the US government, what if that just provides opportunity for non-US companies to now fill those ecological niches? The end result will be the US anti-trust action accomplished nothing but enabling foreign replacements.
- reidjs 5y agoDon't you think monopolies are bad, though? Maybe they're convenient, but it's better to spread wealth around, right?
- WalterBright 5y agoWhat if the result of breaking up US monopolies is their replacement by non-US monopolies? How is that better? I'd think very, very hard about crippling US companies in a global marketplace. So far, I don't even see any discussion about it.
- ALittleLight 5y agoIf foreign monopolies take over then the US government should ban or regulate them in the same way that domestic companies are regulated. Foreign monopolies may (or may not) dominate global markets, but I think that concern should be lower priority than the health of our own markets and the well-being of our citizens.
- azinman2 5y agoSo are we going on to put up a great firewall preventing you from using Tencent? Seems very unlikely.
- BeFlatXIII 5y agoConsidering how many of those big tech companies rely on pushing ads, does it really matter whether they’re based in the US or not? Either way, they’re revenue is from selling out their users.
- fmajid 5y agoStoller makes the excellent point that Congress will also need to rein in the judiciary and notably the Chicago School "interpretation" (neutering, really) of antitrust law perpetrated by Judge Robert Bork (he of Nixon's infamous Saturday Night Massacre) in a stunning act of judicial activism and caprice: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/robert-borks-america/ https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/robert-bork... (this is a conservative publication, by the way, hardly one you'd expect to be unfavorably biased against Bork).
- estaseuropano 5y agoClearly needed and a positive, but I see zero impact on stock prices of those companies. Does that mean the expert consensus is that this will simply not pass the next levels, or that it is all ineffective?
- SkyMarshal 5y agoTargeting the FANGs and not the banking system and telecoms is super annoying. The amount of damage the banking system can do to the economy is orders of magnitude greater than FANGs can, as we recently witnessed. And the telecom regional monopolies that suppress competition and block municipal broadband have much stronger competitive moats than the FANGs do. The government needs to address those first, but they seem better at lobbying than the FANGs are.
- jvanderbot 5y agoThis is a distraction / what-about. The focus is not on damage to economy from FAANGs.
- LatteLazy 5y agoBanking and Telecoms pay their lobbying tax and their old-media advertising tax. Its a pretty simple protection racket they grew up with. FAANG thought they'd be allowed to operate without it. They're not. As soon as they pump some money into both parties and buy some ads they'll be fine.
- musicale 5y agoJust imagine what the internet would be like if we hadn't broken up the AOL/CompuServe monopoly on online services! As they said in 1997, “The reality is that AOL is cyberspace."[1] This is an interesting perspective btw on how the Microsoft settlement set the stage for the rise of Google, etc.: [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/6/17827042/antitrust-1990s-microsoft-google-aol-monopoly-lawsuits-history https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/6/17827042/antitrust-1990s-m...
- zsz 5y agoHow will breaking up the biggest U.S. tech firms not make them more vulnerable to Chinese influence -- where, notably, the biggest firms like ZTE and Huawei have already since at least 2012 (i.e. based on E.U. agencies reports at the time) been receiving tens of billions (in USD) of funding, specifically for the purpose of outcompeting foreign (i.e. primarily western) contenders? Notably, at the time (I believe around 2012) it was found that Huawei and ZTE were backed by $30 billion and $15 billion in government financing (via central bank), respectively.
- novok 5y agoWish these bills would kill clauses like "most favored nation" as far as pricing goes, anti-steering laws and forcing side loading. Making the pricing premium for using a platform naked would give a direct financial & choice to consumers to go towards the most price efficient venue.
- im_down_w_otp 5y agoI don't understand this movement at all. It seems very, very short sighted and also misdirected. The most toxic marketplace and social elements of some of these companies is their business model, not their scale/size. Breaking them up into pieces doesn't fix their deleterious business models and only opens the door for non-US entities who remain scaled/vertically-integrated to become the dominant forces in the market. Either that or this will necessitate passing future protectionist legislation to keep out foreign competition, which I'm both skeptical is actually a good idea in general or that the US has the actual resolve to do so. What problem is supposed to be solved by breaking these companies up? It doesn't make any sense to me, and I say this as someone who is generally deeply disturbed by much of what is enabled by some of these firms, so this isn't an endorsement of these companies. It's an indictment of the approach.
- bronzeage 5y agoYou must be incredibly naive if you think any anti trust regulation hurting Facebook or Google is going to pass. Biden literally owes his presidency to unprecedented censorship and propaganda by Facebook and Google. Censorship that included censoring the virus lab leak theory, included incredibly laughable propaganda about the safety of mail in ballots (which was proven wrong by orders of magnitude of evidence of fraud), by incredible levels of censorship and anti Trump propaganda across the board, by shady donations on the orders of billions of dollars by Facebook which completely owned voting infrastructure in Wisconsin. Facebook and Google literally own Biden. They elected Biden - not you the people. Don't be surprised when all these bills weakening Facebook and Google are thrown in the garbage.
- randyrand 5y agoIf FAANG is required to allow more competition, it will inherently also allow more international competition as well. It’s going to be a lot of lost tax dollars, and USA incomes. But I hope it’s for the best.