10 ms·

It sounds good as long as the White House doesn't try to use the FTC as a political weapon to disadvantage their opponents. Like going after Amazon for their un

It sounds good as long as the White House doesn't try to use the FTC as a political weapon to disadvantage their opponents. Like going after Amazon for their union stance or Facebook for their censorship stance.

uoaei 4y ago
Amazon and Meta are both obviously engaging in "unfair methods of competition". To blame moves from the FTC on anything else seems like a pointless, truth-agnostic move.
- megaman821 4y ago
  The FTC is free to investigate whoever they want, but if it only ends up being companies the White House opposes then that doesn't seem to be furthering the goal of increasing competition. There is the obvious bad behavior of cable companies in uncompetitive markets or the recent consolidation of movie studios or even car dealerships. I will reserve judgment until the FTC announces their targets.
  - sharemywin 4y ago
    don't forget news and oil and food.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - iudqnolq 4y ago
    It's much more complicated than that. For one, you're conflating targeting industries vs targeting individual corporations. One of the core jobs of the president is deciding which lawbreakers to go after. This is needed because (among other reasons) the government is far too small to enforce every law. In general the President is supposed to set general parameters but not pick specific individuals or companies. Deciding a specific sector's violations are more pressing is squarely within the traditional discretion of the executive branch.
    - megaman821 4y ago
      Social Media and Online Retail are big nothings compared to Finance and Health Care. Finance shenanigans cause global recessions and health care is consuming 20% of GDP and growing. Since politicians and journalists love Twitter though, we get to hear more about that instead.
      - acdha 4y ago
        On the other hand, healthcare companies aren't an integral part of a cycle which leads to armed mobs. The other thing to remember is that healthcare costs, while significant, are both familiar and legal, and the government uses the regulatory powers which Congress has granted it. Finance similarly has existing agencies and laws and while there are periods of lax regulation which end badly most people would say that the problem is regulators choosing not to use their powers or Congress underfunding staffing rather than an unclear question of how to handle a particular problem. In contrast, something like what should be acceptable on social media doesn't have public consensus and runs into thorny constitutional issues. It's understandable that this gets more attention, especially a time when one of the major political parties is making unfounded allegations in an attempt to keep their voters active.
  - juve1996 4y ago
    So basically you're saying "if he goes after my guys I'm against it even if there is evidence of wrongdoing?" If not, then why not look at the merits of the case?
    - megaman821 4y ago
      If police only gave speeding tickets to those with Trump bumper stickers, would that not be a misapplication of the law? I think most people would think that is wrong even if they all happened to be speeding.
      - bobkazamakis 4y ago
        The difference here is that these "Trump bumper sticker" cars are going 100+ over the speed limit -- why the fuck would you waste your time arresting 10 people going 5mph over instead?
        concordDance 4y ago
        The cable companies are much much worse than Amazon.
      - eyelidlessness 4y ago
        > If police only gave speeding tickets to those with Trump bumper stickers, would that not be a misapplication of the law? Surely that depends where you live. Seattle (where I live)? Yeah, that would be obvious discrimination. A few counties further inland? Probably not statistically significant. I’m not sure how or if that reasoning applies to FTC purview, but my intuition is that corporations of the size that might warrant interest aren’t likely to be partisan targets in any stable or persistent way.
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        What you're saying makes it seem like you think that any big tech monopoly is a Trump bumper sticker, and that any enforcement against them is unfair.
      - 4y ago
  - grumple 4y ago
    Both the previous administration and the current one have expressed issues with those companies, and they couldn't be more opposed to one another. Most of these big companies are anticompetitive at the very least. Every acquisition over the past decade has been a move towards oligopoly. Add to that widespread union-busting behavior, manipulation of the American people by spreading political or foreign psyops, exerting control over self-contained markets, etc... there's a lot of behavior that's been allowed over the past few decades that should have been reigned in.
    - dnissley 4y ago
      Sounds like what you're describing is that certain companies have become scapegoats. Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Tesla, and Microsoft all add a lot of value to people's lives both through the products they sell as well as the tax revenue they provide for the greater benefit of all. They aren't the primary drivers of any of our society's largest problems. We could quibble about exactly what those are, but they'd probably include: the high cost of health care, the high cost of housing, climate change, immigration, pollution, crime, etc. And yet these companies occupy the headlines constantly, and evidently the mindshare of our legislators instead of those issues!
      - grumple 4y ago
        > Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Tesla, and Microsoft all add a lot of value to people's lives both through the products they sell as well as the tax revenue they provide for the greater benefit of all. That's a very bold claim, and one that I think is generally untrue and possibly extremely so. That might be true for a wealthy software engineer, but I don't think it's true for most people. For example, anyone who doesn't own a Tesla has benefited exactly 0 from the company's existence. If you don't order from Amazon or aren't doing lots of Google searches... same. And in fact, some of these companies - like Amazon, Meta - take far more than they give back. Amazon has killed local stores nationwide, on demand delivery and packaging is awful for the environment, etc. Meta just consumes attention and spreads misinformation. > They aren't the primary drivers of any of our society's largest problems. Except in some cases they quite obviously are. Amazon is the case study for abusive workplaces. It's the poster child for foreign-produced, cheap knockoffs. Meta is credited for spreading misinformation that has resulted in the near-destruction of our democracy. Apple, Microsoft, and many others have been implicated for using slave labor in their supply chains. How many products sold on Amazon are products of such labor? -- I think it's important that we examine these issues critically. These are not benevolent super-corporations. Sometimes they do good, sometimes they do evil, and either way it's generally on a huge scale due to the scale of the companies.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- pitaj 4y ago
  > Amazon and Meta are both obviously engaging in "unfair methods of competition" I don't think that's obvious at all. Give specifics.
  - wyldfire 4y ago
    From my casual understanding, Amazon is executing the same vertical integration strategy used by Standard Oil which resulted in its breakup.
    - dnissley 4y ago
      Standard Oil was vertically integrating around oil -- what is Amazon vertically integrating?
      - treeman79 4y ago
        Selling things. Almost all the things.
        _-david-_ 4y ago
        Selling things is selling things. That isn't vertically integrating. A good example would be selling and shipping now that Amazon is getting into delivery as well.
        zaroth 4y ago
        Amazon ships more packages through its DSPs than anyone. But I don’t see them doing delivery as anti-competitive. It is highly integrated and streamlined however. They put a absolutely massive amount of resources on solving delivery. And they probably do it better than anyone. You couldn’t split that out without totally breaking it.
      - bobkazamakis 4y ago
        Basics; AWS; Prime Video; Advertising. You don't get to deny vertical integration just due to them being involved in everything.
jjtheblunt 4y ago
Or Tesla for their union stance, which famously halpened more than knce over the last two years?
favorited 4y ago
The FTC is an independent federal agency, and the President doesn't have the same amount of control over it that he has over federal executive departments. For example, the President could fire the Secretary of Labor at any time, for any purpose, because executive department heads serve "at the pleasure of the President." The same is not true for FTC commissioners, who are statutorily protected from firing except for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." SCOTUS held in Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935) that an FTC commissioner could not be removed by the President for policy reasons, because it was explicitly granted non-executive powers by Congress. His power to issue Executive Orders to independent agencies is unclear, and often Presidents will "recommend" they do things, rather than "direct" them, as he would an executive department.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  >> It sounds good as long as the White House doesn't try to use the FTC as a political weapon to disadvantage their opponents. Like going after Amazon for their union stance or Facebook for their censorship stance. > The FTC is an independent federal agency, and the President doesn't have the same amount of control over it that he has over federal executive departments. Isn't that the same as the FCC? We all know what happened with it and Net Neutrality during the Trump administration. If it's staffed/led by the right people, it could act as a semi-autonomous political weapon.
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    You think Trump lead the repeal of Net Neutrality?
    - dmix 4y ago
      Fortunately most of the worst examples the anti-net neutrality crowd used never made sense from both a business model and technology perspective. Trying to turn the internet into tiered internet packages like early 2000s cable companies offered would be a disaster even without neutrality laws. There's probably a reason the only real-life example in history that Wikipedia lists was some bottom-of-the-barrel Portuguese mobile network that experimented with a discount plan that never took off. The lobbyists either bought into the bullshit benefits like everyone else or more likely were just taking the default anti-gov interference position. The internet is so far from ever being the extremely limited centralized platforms that cable offerings were that the analogies never made sense if you spent any amount of time considering them.
xmonkee 4y ago
>Like going after Amazon for their union stance why the fuck not? It helps the american people vs helping a company
- megaman821 4y ago
  Because that is what the National Labor Relations Board is for.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  Amazon is good for some consumers (people who value convenient shopping and fast shipping) and bad for others (people who really like independent shops). It’s also good for some employees (people who couldn’t have found a better job elsewhere) and bad for others (people who could have found a better job at a business that got outcompeted by Amazon). Whether it’s a net positive or negative force is basically too complex a question to answer without resorting to an overarching unfalsifiable ideology like neoliberalism or socialism. However, rule of law, predictability, and stability are unambiguously good for everyone. Attacking businesses or people on pretexts unrelated to the underlying reason a politician wants to hurt them is a hallmark of corrupt countries. If we decide as a society to legislate stronger union protections then sure, enforce them against Amazon (and everyone else), but it seems bad for that to motivate selectively enforcing unrelated antitrust laws.
  - chrischen 4y ago
    Independent shops can still exist… just not the useless ones. Amazon is known for more generic commodity items, but if you want premium brands you often still have to go direct to manufacturer. In fact the “independent” shop niche is probably why Shopify even has a market.
  - p1necone 4y ago
    > good for some consumers (people who value convenient shopping and fast shipping) and bad for others (people who really like independent shops). It's bad for them too once the monopoly is strong enough that Amazon can stop caring about those things. Preventing monopolies isn't done because it satisifies some abstract sense of justice, it's done because they genuinely hurt consumers in the long term, even if the monopoly became a monopoly because they were really good for consumers to begin with.
bobkazamakis 4y ago
>as the White House doesn't try to use the FTC as a political weapon to disadvantage their opponents. Like going after Amazon for their union stance or Facebook for their censorship stance. Hm, lets think for a second and wonder why someone might consider Amazon or Facebook an "opponent" of the government. What's the argument here? That corporations should be immune from the government enforcing a level playing field?

uoaei 4y ago

Amazon and Meta are both obviously engaging in "unfair methods of competition". To blame moves from the FTC on anything else seems like a pointless, truth-agnostic move.

megaman821 4y ago
The FTC is free to investigate whoever they want, but if it only ends up being companies the White House opposes then that doesn't seem to be furthering the goal of increasing competition. There is the obvious bad behavior of cable companies in uncompetitive markets or the recent consolidation of movie studios or even car dealerships. I will reserve judgment until the FTC announces their targets.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  don't forget news and oil and food.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  It's much more complicated than that. For one, you're conflating targeting industries vs targeting individual corporations. One of the core jobs of the president is deciding which lawbreakers to go after. This is needed because (among other reasons) the government is far too small to enforce every law. In general the President is supposed to set general parameters but not pick specific individuals or companies. Deciding a specific sector's violations are more pressing is squarely within the traditional discretion of the executive branch.
  - megaman821 4y ago
    Social Media and Online Retail are big nothings compared to Finance and Health Care. Finance shenanigans cause global recessions and health care is consuming 20% of GDP and growing. Since politicians and journalists love Twitter though, we get to hear more about that instead.
    - acdha 4y ago
      On the other hand, healthcare companies aren't an integral part of a cycle which leads to armed mobs. The other thing to remember is that healthcare costs, while significant, are both familiar and legal, and the government uses the regulatory powers which Congress has granted it. Finance similarly has existing agencies and laws and while there are periods of lax regulation which end badly most people would say that the problem is regulators choosing not to use their powers or Congress underfunding staffing rather than an unclear question of how to handle a particular problem. In contrast, something like what should be acceptable on social media doesn't have public consensus and runs into thorny constitutional issues. It's understandable that this gets more attention, especially a time when one of the major political parties is making unfounded allegations in an attempt to keep their voters active.
- juve1996 4y ago
  So basically you're saying "if he goes after my guys I'm against it even if there is evidence of wrongdoing?" If not, then why not look at the merits of the case?
  - megaman821 4y ago
    If police only gave speeding tickets to those with Trump bumper stickers, would that not be a misapplication of the law? I think most people would think that is wrong even if they all happened to be speeding.
    - bobkazamakis 4y ago
      The difference here is that these "Trump bumper sticker" cars are going 100+ over the speed limit -- why the fuck would you waste your time arresting 10 people going 5mph over instead?
      - concordDance 4y ago
        The cable companies are much much worse than Amazon.
    - eyelidlessness 4y ago
      > If police only gave speeding tickets to those with Trump bumper stickers, would that not be a misapplication of the law? Surely that depends where you live. Seattle (where I live)? Yeah, that would be obvious discrimination. A few counties further inland? Probably not statistically significant. I’m not sure how or if that reasoning applies to FTC purview, but my intuition is that corporations of the size that might warrant interest aren’t likely to be partisan targets in any stable or persistent way.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      What you're saying makes it seem like you think that any big tech monopoly is a Trump bumper sticker, and that any enforcement against them is unfair.
    - 4y ago
- grumple 4y ago
  Both the previous administration and the current one have expressed issues with those companies, and they couldn't be more opposed to one another. Most of these big companies are anticompetitive at the very least. Every acquisition over the past decade has been a move towards oligopoly. Add to that widespread union-busting behavior, manipulation of the American people by spreading political or foreign psyops, exerting control over self-contained markets, etc... there's a lot of behavior that's been allowed over the past few decades that should have been reigned in.
  - dnissley 4y ago
    Sounds like what you're describing is that certain companies have become scapegoats. Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Tesla, and Microsoft all add a lot of value to people's lives both through the products they sell as well as the tax revenue they provide for the greater benefit of all. They aren't the primary drivers of any of our society's largest problems. We could quibble about exactly what those are, but they'd probably include: the high cost of health care, the high cost of housing, climate change, immigration, pollution, crime, etc. And yet these companies occupy the headlines constantly, and evidently the mindshare of our legislators instead of those issues!
    - grumple 4y ago
      > Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Tesla, and Microsoft all add a lot of value to people's lives both through the products they sell as well as the tax revenue they provide for the greater benefit of all. That's a very bold claim, and one that I think is generally untrue and possibly extremely so. That might be true for a wealthy software engineer, but I don't think it's true for most people. For example, anyone who doesn't own a Tesla has benefited exactly 0 from the company's existence. If you don't order from Amazon or aren't doing lots of Google searches... same. And in fact, some of these companies - like Amazon, Meta - take far more than they give back. Amazon has killed local stores nationwide, on demand delivery and packaging is awful for the environment, etc. Meta just consumes attention and spreads misinformation. > They aren't the primary drivers of any of our society's largest problems. Except in some cases they quite obviously are. Amazon is the case study for abusive workplaces. It's the poster child for foreign-produced, cheap knockoffs. Meta is credited for spreading misinformation that has resulted in the near-destruction of our democracy. Apple, Microsoft, and many others have been implicated for using slave labor in their supply chains. How many products sold on Amazon are products of such labor? -- I think it's important that we examine these issues critically. These are not benevolent super-corporations. Sometimes they do good, sometimes they do evil, and either way it's generally on a huge scale due to the scale of the companies.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pitaj 4y ago
> Amazon and Meta are both obviously engaging in "unfair methods of competition" I don't think that's obvious at all. Give specifics.
- wyldfire 4y ago
  From my casual understanding, Amazon is executing the same vertical integration strategy used by Standard Oil which resulted in its breakup.
  - dnissley 4y ago
    Standard Oil was vertically integrating around oil -- what is Amazon vertically integrating?
    - treeman79 4y ago
      Selling things. Almost all the things.
      - _-david-_ 4y ago
        Selling things is selling things. That isn't vertically integrating. A good example would be selling and shipping now that Amazon is getting into delivery as well.
        zaroth 4y ago
        Amazon ships more packages through its DSPs than anyone. But I don’t see them doing delivery as anti-competitive. It is highly integrated and streamlined however. They put a absolutely massive amount of resources on solving delivery. And they probably do it better than anyone. You couldn’t split that out without totally breaking it.
    - bobkazamakis 4y ago
      Basics; AWS; Prime Video; Advertising. You don't get to deny vertical integration just due to them being involved in everything.

jjtheblunt 4y ago

Or Tesla for their union stance, which famously halpened more than knce over the last two years?

favorited 4y ago

The FTC is an independent federal agency, and the President doesn't have the same amount of control over it that he has over federal executive departments. For example, the President could fire the Secretary of Labor at any time, for any purpose, because executive department heads serve "at the pleasure of the President." The same is not true for FTC commissioners, who are statutorily protected from firing except for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." SCOTUS held in Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935) that an FTC commissioner could not be removed by the President for policy reasons, because it was explicitly granted non-executive powers by Congress. His power to issue Executive Orders to independent agencies is unclear, and often Presidents will "recommend" they do things, rather than "direct" them, as he would an executive department.

tablespoon 4y ago
>> It sounds good as long as the White House doesn't try to use the FTC as a political weapon to disadvantage their opponents. Like going after Amazon for their union stance or Facebook for their censorship stance. > The FTC is an independent federal agency, and the President doesn't have the same amount of control over it that he has over federal executive departments. Isn't that the same as the FCC? We all know what happened with it and Net Neutrality during the Trump administration. If it's staffed/led by the right people, it could act as a semi-autonomous political weapon.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  You think Trump lead the repeal of Net Neutrality?
  - dmix 4y ago
    Fortunately most of the worst examples the anti-net neutrality crowd used never made sense from both a business model and technology perspective. Trying to turn the internet into tiered internet packages like early 2000s cable companies offered would be a disaster even without neutrality laws. There's probably a reason the only real-life example in history that Wikipedia lists was some bottom-of-the-barrel Portuguese mobile network that experimented with a discount plan that never took off. The lobbyists either bought into the bullshit benefits like everyone else or more likely were just taking the default anti-gov interference position. The internet is so far from ever being the extremely limited centralized platforms that cable offerings were that the analogies never made sense if you spent any amount of time considering them.

xmonkee 4y ago

>Like going after Amazon for their union stance why the fuck not? It helps the american people vs helping a company

megaman821 4y ago
Because that is what the National Labor Relations Board is for.
School-Cotton 4y ago
Amazon is good for some consumers (people who value convenient shopping and fast shipping) and bad for others (people who really like independent shops). It’s also good for some employees (people who couldn’t have found a better job elsewhere) and bad for others (people who could have found a better job at a business that got outcompeted by Amazon). Whether it’s a net positive or negative force is basically too complex a question to answer without resorting to an overarching unfalsifiable ideology like neoliberalism or socialism. However, rule of law, predictability, and stability are unambiguously good for everyone. Attacking businesses or people on pretexts unrelated to the underlying reason a politician wants to hurt them is a hallmark of corrupt countries. If we decide as a society to legislate stronger union protections then sure, enforce them against Amazon (and everyone else), but it seems bad for that to motivate selectively enforcing unrelated antitrust laws.
- chrischen 4y ago
  Independent shops can still exist… just not the useless ones. Amazon is known for more generic commodity items, but if you want premium brands you often still have to go direct to manufacturer. In fact the “independent” shop niche is probably why Shopify even has a market.
- p1necone 4y ago
  > good for some consumers (people who value convenient shopping and fast shipping) and bad for others (people who really like independent shops). It's bad for them too once the monopoly is strong enough that Amazon can stop caring about those things. Preventing monopolies isn't done because it satisifies some abstract sense of justice, it's done because they genuinely hurt consumers in the long term, even if the monopoly became a monopoly because they were really good for consumers to begin with.

bobkazamakis 4y ago

>as the White House doesn't try to use the FTC as a political weapon to disadvantage their opponents. Like going after Amazon for their union stance or Facebook for their censorship stance. Hm, lets think for a second and wonder why someone might consider Amazon or Facebook an "opponent" of the government. What's the argument here? That corporations should be immune from the government enforcing a level playing field?