4 ms·

None of those. All we need is enforcing laws that are already on the books. Antitrust laws. Break up big tech.

• pixl97 7mo ago
  Which requires voting in politicians that would do that. Of course we're much more likely to elect politicians that get the support of billionaires in general so this shit ain't never happ'ning
• xp84 7mo ago
  Idk. Our antitrust laws present a high burden of proof and so much subjectivity. The question “Are customers really being hurt?” has to be argued in court (and then argued on appeal at like 3 levels). I think it harms our whole market system, and arguably even harms the capitalist system, to have players with so much power, and the antitrust laws are focused narrowly on proving specific harm mainly in the area of pricing, which isn’t the whole picture. Too many markets are utterly dominated by one or two big players. I know it’s a tricky problem because market share is hard to define (Does Amazon have 80% share of e-commerce? Or 30% share of all retail?) but I think we would be better off if there were a more aggressive set of rules about anti-competitive behavior that automatically applied to these huge firms, which didn’t rely so much on subjective judgment.
• surajrmal 7mo ago
  Anti trust laws do not generally apply to these situations. The government has had an appetite for antitrust, but the cases are far from a slam dunk. We need modern laws for modern problems.
  • cratermoon 7mo ago
    Those laws used to apply, until the courts adopted Robert Bork's "consumer welfare standard" in the 80s, under Reaganism. Analyzed well here: https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf
• ferongr 7mo ago
  Breaking up Apple would be glorious. Great hardware without an Orwellian OS on top.
  • com2kid 7mo ago
    Apple only holds on monopoly position on the smartphone market for people with lots of money. They aren't a majority in any other market segment.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    • deaux 7mo ago
      They have an even much bigger monopoly position on the tablet market.
  • exidy 7mo ago
    There was a brief period of time where you could buy your car like this. You'd purchase a rolling chassis from one manufacturer, and commission a coachbuilder to put a body on top. Many premium brands such as Bugatti, Rolls-Royce and Jaguar (Swallow) started in this fashion. Today, outside of a few niche areas such as motorsport and commercial uses such as buses and coaches, nobody buys a vehicle this way. If you walked into your local Ford or Toyota and asked for a rolling chassis they would look at you as if you were insane, and rightly so. Integrating the development of the chassis and body into a single unit (both philosophically and literally [0]) has given us cars which are lighter, faster, more efficient, more featureful and safer by every measure. We had our coachbuilding period in personal computing and it's all but over[1]. Nobody asks for the hardware and operating system to be sold separately for their washing machine, their TV, their microwave oven or Tesla EV. And yet for some reason some still cling to the idea that tablets and smartphones are personal computers rather than recognising them for the appliances they are. As Steve Jobs allegedly said, design is not how something looks, design is how something works. How a feature works on a highly evolved device like an iPhone is a function of tightly coupled and carefully designed hardware and software. Having this design process take place in different teams inside different companies, selling in different commercial models would not lead to a better outcome, it would be worse, much worse. The staggering commercial success of both iPhone and iPad is all the proof you need. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_frame#Unibody https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_frame#Unibody [1] Servers/Linux are the commercial vehicles in this analogy