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She is overly obsessed with big tech when there are much more insidious anti-trust cases like banking, media, and broadband infrastructure. She only goes after

She is overly obsessed with big tech when there are much more insidious anti-trust cases like banking, media, and broadband infrastructure. She only goes after what is hot and politically popular (exactly like a lot of founders). Big tech is now the easy punching bag because they made newspapers lose money and politicians blame them for the whole Biden/Trump/Clinton election issue. They are a good distraction from the more entrenched interests. If I were a lobbyist for Goldman/AT&T, there is no better candidate than her. Her appointment in this case is politically charged. People don't usually go straight from academia to one of the highest seats in the executive unless they are put there by the incumbent administration to be an attack dog/push a very specific view of the world. She gives off opportunistic "during a gold rush, sell shovels" vibes, just on the regulatory side.

gamblor956 3y ago
There are hundreds of banks, and no bank has a monopoly on customers. If you mean credit card processing, that's a very different thing (and is one of the areas the FTC is already looking at...). Broadband infrastructure monopolies (and their predecessors, the telephone and utility monopolies) have passed court muster for decades because the primary moat is the intense capital requirements to enter the industry, not the minimal anticompetitive behavior the utilities engage in once they've established themselves. To put it bluntly: even Google, at its zenith, failed in this market because it wasn't willing to put in the capital necessary to properly compete. The newest competitors, like Starry, and SpaceX Starlink, have each spent billions on infrastructure to acquire single-digit percentages of the market. People don't usually go straight from academia to one of the highest seats in the executive The FTC is not one of the highest seats in the executive...Not even close. Even the lowly Secretary of Veterans Affairs, considered a throwaway position, is a higher executive seat than the FTC. The FTC has been regarded as a toothless agency for decades; if anything, appointing an inexperienced academic is proof of its lowly regard.

gamblor956 3y ago

There are hundreds of banks, and no bank has a monopoly on customers. If you mean credit card processing, that's a very different thing (and is one of the areas the FTC is already looking at...). Broadband infrastructure monopolies (and their predecessors, the telephone and utility monopolies) have passed court muster for decades because the primary moat is the intense capital requirements to enter the industry, not the minimal anticompetitive behavior the utilities engage in once they've established themselves. To put it bluntly: even Google, at its zenith, failed in this market because it wasn't willing to put in the capital necessary to properly compete. The newest competitors, like Starry, and SpaceX Starlink, have each spent billions on infrastructure to acquire single-digit percentages of the market. People don't usually go straight from academia to one of the highest seats in the executive The FTC is not one of the highest seats in the executive...Not even close. Even the lowly Secretary of Veterans Affairs, considered a throwaway position, is a higher executive seat than the FTC. The FTC has been regarded as a toothless agency for decades; if anything, appointing an inexperienced academic is proof of its lowly regard.