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Facebook and Google have a long history of illegal activities. If they colluded like a "cartel", they should be treated like a cartel. The problem is both side

Facebook and Google have a long history of illegal activities. If they colluded like a "cartel", they should be treated like a cartel. The problem is both sides of the aisle have are irreparably entangled with big tech and cannot be trusted to prosecute not just fine them a paltry some that is insufficient to correct their behavior. People have gone to jail for weed longer than anyone in power at big tech has paid for their gross violations of trust and privacy of the entire world. Edit: Someone believes cartels are just for drugs here is a link about some of our remedies: https://www.globallegalinsights.com/practice-areas/cartels-laws-and-regulations/usa https://www.globallegalinsights.com/practice-areas/cartels-l... The DOJ can raid them, and states attorney's can file separate suits. Perhaps there is one state government that hasn't succumbed to the corruption.

m0zg 5y ago
Here's why FB is in no danger until at least 2024: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gop-furious-zuckerberg-piled-400m-into-dem-groups-to-sway-election/ar-AAPx46T?li=BB141NW3 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gop-furious-zuckerbe.... Don't hold your breath on this, at all. It's all for sale, and Zuck is buying.
swarnie 5y ago
> If they colluded like a "cartel", they should be treated like a cartel Are you suggesting we use their distribution networks to move crack in to the cities, then use the money made to fund illegal interventions in South America? Seems a bit extreme, i'd say just break them up.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Cartels aren't just for drugs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel) but I agree, break them up.
  - beckman466 5y ago
    it was meant in jest because the CIA directly participated in the drug trade as uncovered by investigative journalist Gary Webb (who died from two gunshot wounds to the head...). "Michael Cuesta’s movie 'Kill the Messenger' tells the story of Gary Webb, whose August 1996 investigative series “Dark Alliance,” published in the San Jose Mercury News, uncovered ties between the Central Intelligence Agency and massive drug peddling by the right-wing, mercenary Nicaraguan Contras. Webb’s three-part series established that in the 1980s the CIA-backed Contras smuggled cocaine into the US that was widely distributed as crack. The drug profits were then funneled by the CIA to the Contras in their war against the left-nationalist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/10/17/kill-o17.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/10/17/kill-o17.html
    - 28969968 5y ago
      Who wants to bet that the CIA has been politely sitting on their hands when it comes to the ad network cartels? Not me.
    - swarnie 5y ago
      Jest might be too trivial but yes... The CIA meet all of their own criteria to be a terrorist organisation.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> both sides of the aisle have are irreparably entangled with big tech and cannot be trusted to prosecute not just fine them a paltry some that is insufficient to correct their behavior When did so many on Hacker News become so pathetically fatalistic? I expect this from spoiled teenagers, not hackers of all people.
- zrm 5y ago
  That position isn't fatalistic. The barriers to a political solution leave open the potential for a technical one, which is just what you would expect from a hacker. Alright, lads, we can't rely on the government for this one, how are we going to do it?
- Craighead 5y ago
  Because HN is reddit now
- birdyrooster 5y ago
  Because the majority of people here are not hackers. They are corporate drones.
  - poetaster 5y ago
    System administrative deus ex machina, please. Oh, [BOFH] to you.
  - boston_clone 5y ago
    hackers can have white-collar jobs, too. maybe that even provides a different perspective for the hackers who aren't employed professionally
sgregnt 5y ago
> has paid for their gross violations of trust and privacy of the entire world. Sorry, but who are you to speak for the entire world? You may not like facebook and google personally, but it is far streach to think you know to represent one country let alone the whole world. For one thing, your are not speaking for myself: both google and facebook are some of the best tech I enjoy using every day, and they have and are improving mylife daily. They did not violate my trust in any way. And for your allegations, can you provide any proof for it? Even out of respect for the community, so here supporting material not just words, in the air is what appreciated the most. What I don't understand, is how a tendentious hateful post is not downvotes here on HN?
- radley 5y ago
  > And for your allegations, can you provide any proof for it? Actually, yes. The reason this is news is because it was recently unredacted from internal Google documents submited to the court: https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1451579045246820355?s=21 https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1451579045246820355?s=...
  - sgregnt 5y ago
    So the court is not over yet? The allegation might not be proven true?
    - sofixa 5y ago
      It's not an allegation, it was in Google's internal documents discovered during a trial. The facts they represent aren't conditional on the outcome of said trial.
- kerng 5y ago
  This sounds like what a client of a drug dealer would say. There has been plenty of proof of illegal (downright malicious) behavior in multiple dimension by big tech (anti competitive, anti privacy, bad security practices, keeping wages low, lying in front of congress, inciting (or at least turning a blind eye on) war, genocide and riots, the list goes on...) and new revelations like these here are showing up nearly daily. Especially in the ad industry incentives are not aligned. The problem is that fines (which is proof of their illegal actions, since you asked for proof) are always very low - so companies design their actions with that in mind.
throwawaysea 5y ago
We already know big technology companies behave like cartels in other ways. For example there was the famous case of agreements not to poach from each other. In the end all they got for that was a slap on the wrist. All the workers were never properly compensated for it.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  When your best example is over a decade old, it's hard to see it as evidence of rampant cartel behaviour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
> The DOJ can raid them, and states attorney's can file separate suits. Are you talking about the DOJ and many state governments run by people that received donations and support from Google and Facebook? Let me know when a politician bites the hand that fed them.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  The only get donations for their campaigns. If tech companies give evenly to both parties, it wouldn't matter to politicians if those donations stopped. If one party gets more than the other, one party would gain, relatively, if donations became illegal. So the story isn't quite complete without mentioning: It's mostly the Republican party that has stopped acting in ways that could be considered good for the country. It's gotten so bad they are actively trying to undermine democracy in every imaginable way, including opposing any constraints on campaign donations and even the regular application of the few safeguards left after Citizen United.
la6471 5y ago
The politicians and policy makers have failed in their job to come up with a well developed policy addressing various impact of new technology , partly because they do not understand it and do not have the expertise to solve it. They however have been successful in covering their ineptitude by diverting the general public’s attention and putting the tech companies in the defendants chair in the public court and this shifting the blame from the government to the tech companies. And then they of course get profited from lobbyist efforts and the huge spend behind them. It all works to the politicians benefits and they can shrink from their responsibility of coming up with same legislation and finish the endless debate , which frankly is getting tiring.
- acdha 5y ago
  This take isn’t uncommon but I think it’s far too simple. We do have members of Congress with CS degrees but they all have advisors and groups like the Congressional Research Service because nobody is an expert on everything. The problem isn’t lack of knowledge but the fact that this isn’t happening in a vacuum. The lobbyists you mentioned, for example, aren’t like mosquitoes which just show up in DC — companies and industry groups hire them to make sure members of Congress hear their preferences. Some are hired by tech companies, others by their opponents or special interest groups. The tech companies have a ton of money and an enviable reputation as one of the best growth industries for the future so they’ve been very successful at preventing or defanging regulation. That doesn’t mean that people don’t know what’s going on – more commonly, they don’t think it’s a problem, know they don’t have the votes, or have other priorities.
- hilbert42 5y ago
  "The politicians and policy makers have failed in their job to come up with a well developed policy addressing various impact of new technology , partly because they do not understand it and do not have the expertise to solve it." Agreed, and one of the reasons for the failure of policy is the millions of dollars spent by companies like Google and Facebook in lobbying and spreading FUD among politicians and the GP alike. That said, eventually some remedial laws will have to filter through, as you cannot keep sweeping shit under the carpet and ignoring it forever. However, that's when the real problems of policing new laws begin, as the long and tortured history of trying to get corporations to comply with laws repeatedly attests. Cigarette companies deliberately lying and obfuscating the truth about the dangers of cigarettes for decades is a quintessential example. The only surefire way of resolving this is to simultaneously legislate that company employees are equally liable under the law for a company's violations of the law. This would mean that employees would be in violation of the law if they engaged in or formulated company policies that violated the law or if they learned about such violations and did nothing about them. In essence, as employees could no longer hide behind corporate structures, self preservation would kick in and to save themselves from possible prosecution they would make the company's wrongdoing public. (There is little doubt that this would be very effective law if penalties were high enough.) The fact that laws aren't already properly framed in this way shows how successful corporate influence has been on government policy up until now. If citizens feel sufficiently strongly about this then they'll be politically motivated to do something about it. Personally, I find it very odd that there hasn't been a general call from the citizenry along these lines long ago. The fact that all past blustering about corporate misbehavior has amounted to essentially nothing and that there has been no change of any significe along these lines to remedy matters tells me that either the general public doesn't really care sufficiently about the issue and or that too many people own shares in corpations and thus have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
gary_0 5y ago
Political entanglements aren't the half of it. Facebook and Google (Alphabet) make up about 6% of the S&P500 by market cap, and that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how much of the global economy depends on the online advertising market. Nobody wants to risk popping that bubble.
- fourtrees 5y ago
  Something like that concurrent with the Evergrande bs in China, the pandemic, ect. seems like a recipe for a financial disaster. I agree Facebook should be dealt with, but let's have a few quarters of normalcy beforehand.
ootsootsoots 5y ago
To what end though? Ownership aside isn’t big tech something of an expert workers council? If there’s literal logistics value to these systems we’ll build them anyway. Political labels like cartel help politicians sell us on big ownership. Let’s do novel things literally and ditch figurative political tradition. No more political tradition, no more big corp. Obviously it can’t happen over night. We could invoke old politics or let big tech takeover the world and let workers takeover big tech as they forget about politics

m0zg 5y ago

Here's why FB is in no danger until at least 2024: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gop-furious-zuckerberg-piled-400m-into-dem-groups-to-sway-election/ar-AAPx46T?li=BB141NW3 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gop-furious-zuckerbe.... Don't hold your breath on this, at all. It's all for sale, and Zuck is buying.

swarnie 5y ago

> If they colluded like a "cartel", they should be treated like a cartel Are you suggesting we use their distribution networks to move crack in to the cities, then use the money made to fund illegal interventions in South America? Seems a bit extreme, i'd say just break them up.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
Cartels aren't just for drugs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel) but I agree, break them up.
- beckman466 5y ago
  it was meant in jest because the CIA directly participated in the drug trade as uncovered by investigative journalist Gary Webb (who died from two gunshot wounds to the head...). "Michael Cuesta’s movie 'Kill the Messenger' tells the story of Gary Webb, whose August 1996 investigative series “Dark Alliance,” published in the San Jose Mercury News, uncovered ties between the Central Intelligence Agency and massive drug peddling by the right-wing, mercenary Nicaraguan Contras. Webb’s three-part series established that in the 1980s the CIA-backed Contras smuggled cocaine into the US that was widely distributed as crack. The drug profits were then funneled by the CIA to the Contras in their war against the left-nationalist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/10/17/kill-o17.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/10/17/kill-o17.html
  - 28969968 5y ago
    Who wants to bet that the CIA has been politely sitting on their hands when it comes to the ad network cartels? Not me.
  - swarnie 5y ago
    Jest might be too trivial but yes... The CIA meet all of their own criteria to be a terrorist organisation.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> both sides of the aisle have are irreparably entangled with big tech and cannot be trusted to prosecute not just fine them a paltry some that is insufficient to correct their behavior When did so many on Hacker News become so pathetically fatalistic? I expect this from spoiled teenagers, not hackers of all people.

zrm 5y ago
That position isn't fatalistic. The barriers to a political solution leave open the potential for a technical one, which is just what you would expect from a hacker. Alright, lads, we can't rely on the government for this one, how are we going to do it?
Craighead 5y ago
Because HN is reddit now
birdyrooster 5y ago
Because the majority of people here are not hackers. They are corporate drones.
- poetaster 5y ago
  System administrative deus ex machina, please. Oh, [BOFH] to you.
- boston_clone 5y ago
  hackers can have white-collar jobs, too. maybe that even provides a different perspective for the hackers who aren't employed professionally

sgregnt 5y ago

> has paid for their gross violations of trust and privacy of the entire world. Sorry, but who are you to speak for the entire world? You may not like facebook and google personally, but it is far streach to think you know to represent one country let alone the whole world. For one thing, your are not speaking for myself: both google and facebook are some of the best tech I enjoy using every day, and they have and are improving mylife daily. They did not violate my trust in any way. And for your allegations, can you provide any proof for it? Even out of respect for the community, so here supporting material not just words, in the air is what appreciated the most. What I don't understand, is how a tendentious hateful post is not downvotes here on HN?

radley 5y ago
> And for your allegations, can you provide any proof for it? Actually, yes. The reason this is news is because it was recently unredacted from internal Google documents submited to the court: https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1451579045246820355?s=21 https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1451579045246820355?s=...
- sgregnt 5y ago
  So the court is not over yet? The allegation might not be proven true?
  - sofixa 5y ago
    It's not an allegation, it was in Google's internal documents discovered during a trial. The facts they represent aren't conditional on the outcome of said trial.
kerng 5y ago
This sounds like what a client of a drug dealer would say. There has been plenty of proof of illegal (downright malicious) behavior in multiple dimension by big tech (anti competitive, anti privacy, bad security practices, keeping wages low, lying in front of congress, inciting (or at least turning a blind eye on) war, genocide and riots, the list goes on...) and new revelations like these here are showing up nearly daily. Especially in the ad industry incentives are not aligned. The problem is that fines (which is proof of their illegal actions, since you asked for proof) are always very low - so companies design their actions with that in mind.

throwawaysea 5y ago

We already know big technology companies behave like cartels in other ways. For example there was the famous case of agreements not to poach from each other. In the end all they got for that was a slap on the wrist. All the workers were never properly compensated for it.

BurningFrog 5y ago
When your best example is over a decade old, it's hard to see it as evidence of rampant cartel behaviour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago

> The DOJ can raid them, and states attorney's can file separate suits. Are you talking about the DOJ and many state governments run by people that received donations and support from Google and Facebook? Let me know when a politician bites the hand that fed them.

KarlKemp 5y ago
The only get donations for their campaigns. If tech companies give evenly to both parties, it wouldn't matter to politicians if those donations stopped. If one party gets more than the other, one party would gain, relatively, if donations became illegal. So the story isn't quite complete without mentioning: It's mostly the Republican party that has stopped acting in ways that could be considered good for the country. It's gotten so bad they are actively trying to undermine democracy in every imaginable way, including opposing any constraints on campaign donations and even the regular application of the few safeguards left after Citizen United.

la6471 5y ago

The politicians and policy makers have failed in their job to come up with a well developed policy addressing various impact of new technology , partly because they do not understand it and do not have the expertise to solve it. They however have been successful in covering their ineptitude by diverting the general public’s attention and putting the tech companies in the defendants chair in the public court and this shifting the blame from the government to the tech companies. And then they of course get profited from lobbyist efforts and the huge spend behind them. It all works to the politicians benefits and they can shrink from their responsibility of coming up with same legislation and finish the endless debate , which frankly is getting tiring.

acdha 5y ago
This take isn’t uncommon but I think it’s far too simple. We do have members of Congress with CS degrees but they all have advisors and groups like the Congressional Research Service because nobody is an expert on everything. The problem isn’t lack of knowledge but the fact that this isn’t happening in a vacuum. The lobbyists you mentioned, for example, aren’t like mosquitoes which just show up in DC — companies and industry groups hire them to make sure members of Congress hear their preferences. Some are hired by tech companies, others by their opponents or special interest groups. The tech companies have a ton of money and an enviable reputation as one of the best growth industries for the future so they’ve been very successful at preventing or defanging regulation. That doesn’t mean that people don’t know what’s going on – more commonly, they don’t think it’s a problem, know they don’t have the votes, or have other priorities.
hilbert42 5y ago
"The politicians and policy makers have failed in their job to come up with a well developed policy addressing various impact of new technology , partly because they do not understand it and do not have the expertise to solve it." Agreed, and one of the reasons for the failure of policy is the millions of dollars spent by companies like Google and Facebook in lobbying and spreading FUD among politicians and the GP alike. That said, eventually some remedial laws will have to filter through, as you cannot keep sweeping shit under the carpet and ignoring it forever. However, that's when the real problems of policing new laws begin, as the long and tortured history of trying to get corporations to comply with laws repeatedly attests. Cigarette companies deliberately lying and obfuscating the truth about the dangers of cigarettes for decades is a quintessential example. The only surefire way of resolving this is to simultaneously legislate that company employees are equally liable under the law for a company's violations of the law. This would mean that employees would be in violation of the law if they engaged in or formulated company policies that violated the law or if they learned about such violations and did nothing about them. In essence, as employees could no longer hide behind corporate structures, self preservation would kick in and to save themselves from possible prosecution they would make the company's wrongdoing public. (There is little doubt that this would be very effective law if penalties were high enough.) The fact that laws aren't already properly framed in this way shows how successful corporate influence has been on government policy up until now. If citizens feel sufficiently strongly about this then they'll be politically motivated to do something about it. Personally, I find it very odd that there hasn't been a general call from the citizenry along these lines long ago. The fact that all past blustering about corporate misbehavior has amounted to essentially nothing and that there has been no change of any significe along these lines to remedy matters tells me that either the general public doesn't really care sufficiently about the issue and or that too many people own shares in corpations and thus have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

gary_0 5y ago

Political entanglements aren't the half of it. Facebook and Google (Alphabet) make up about 6% of the S&P500 by market cap, and that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how much of the global economy depends on the online advertising market. Nobody wants to risk popping that bubble.

fourtrees 5y ago
Something like that concurrent with the Evergrande bs in China, the pandemic, ect. seems like a recipe for a financial disaster. I agree Facebook should be dealt with, but let's have a few quarters of normalcy beforehand.

ootsootsoots 5y ago

To what end though? Ownership aside isn’t big tech something of an expert workers council? If there’s literal logistics value to these systems we’ll build them anyway. Political labels like cartel help politicians sell us on big ownership. Let’s do novel things literally and ditch figurative political tradition. No more political tradition, no more big corp. Obviously it can’t happen over night. We could invoke old politics or let big tech takeover the world and let workers takeover big tech as they forget about politics