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> big tech is new to the game and doesn't have an existing regulatory capture system already up and running The career officials in the Obama FTC started proce

> big tech is new to the game and doesn't have an existing regulatory capture system already up and running The career officials in the Obama FTC started proceedings for an antitrust lawsuit against Google over a decade ago. The political appointees (of both parties) shut it down. It seems to me that regulatory capture has been working for Google for some time now.

tombert 6mo ago
I mean it's basically an extremely high-stakes version of the (possibly apocryphal) Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Most people (at least the people I've talked to, which admittedly is somewhat of a lefty bubble but I think even more generally) agree that companies getting to or close to "monopoly" status is a pretty bad thing, and that they should be broken up. Political candidates get a lot of social credit for claiming that they're going to do exactly that. The moment that they actually get into a position where they actually could do something about it, they suddenly remember who their campaign contributors are, and can then create reasons to avoid actually solving any of these problems. Very occasionally we have successes in this field, like the breakup of Standard Oil and AT&T), but of course both of these sort of became toothless since we basically allowed both of these companies to re-acquire each other and form the same problems again. There are similar reasons as to why politicians will occasionally push for regulations to not allow themselves to invest in companies that their policies affect, but somehow manages to never get through. Politicians are very rarely punished for breaking political promises, but often rewarded for making the promises. They are also rewarded by their corporate overlords for breaking these promises.
- Aerroon 6mo ago
  >they suddenly remember who their campaign contributors are, and can then create reasons to avoid actually solving any of these problems. There are very real concerns when you break up a company though. Rockefeller's wealth shot up a lot when Standard Oil was broken up. That could easily make a politician that's "politician out to get the big companies" into "politician making billionaires richer."
  - tombert 6mo ago
    Tough to say for sure, but I think it's probably still better to have more billionaires if there's more competition. I wasn't around during the breakup, but my parents told me that phone service got considerably better and cheaper after the AT&T breakup, which makes enough sense to me: if a consumer can drop you for someone else, you have a reason to try and compete on service and/or price.
  - vintermann 6mo ago
    > Rockefeller's wealth shot up a lot when Standard Oil was broken up. Most owners (weighted by share) do NOT seem to want their big monopolies broken up, despite the track record of Standard Oil.
- GeekyBear 6mo ago
  > Political candidates get a lot of social credit for claiming that they're going to do exactly that. The moment that they actually get into a position where they actually could do something about it, they suddenly remember who their campaign contributors are, and can then create reasons to avoid actually solving any of these problems. I read a good Google adjacent example of this in yesterday's NYTimes: > Mr. Brin, a Google co-founder and one of the world’s richest people, is a longtime friend of Mr. Newsom, the California governor. Both men attended each other’s weddings. But now Mr. Brin pulled Mr. Newsom aside to a different part of the property for a serious talk. Mr. Brin told Mr. Newsom that he could not stand the state’s proposed billionaire tax... Mr. Newsom, who had never seemed inclined to support the tax, came out the next month and pledged to defeat it. https://archive.ph/LTkix https://archive.ph/LTkix
WarmWash 6mo ago
Google has a monopoly because of the internet's insistence on ad blocking, and outright indignant refusal to dare pay a greedy company for thinking they could ask for money for a "free" web service. It's basically impossible to get off the ground competing against google when 30-40% of people are just freeloading your service, and 80-90% think the internet is an ethereal realm that everyone could have ad and subscription access to if we could only agree to starve these greedy middle men.
- tombert 6mo ago
  I've heard dozens of people say this (and I've even said it myself) but I don't think it actually holds water. People will pay for things if those things don't suck, and it's not even hard to find examples of that (even with Google products no less!). For search, Kagi has had a growing fanbase for a couple years now, but let's take things that have been easy to get for free for decades: Movies. People have been, with relatively impunity, able to torrent movies for free for a very long time. It's not hard, and the only way you're paying for it is ads for hot MILFs in your area. And yet, despite this having always been an option, somehow Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and HBO Max have managed to make fairly successful businesses selling movies that could have been pirated. I could get YouTube as ad-free with an ad blocker, but I pay for YouTube Premium. I could get all my music for free with Redacted, but I use YouTube music, or I buy CDs. I could torrent video games but I just buy them off Steam or GOG. This isn't new either; there were thousands of free forums on the internet in the late 90's, but yet people still bought accounts on Something Awful for quite awhile (and indeed still buy accounts, but with much lower numbers). We can certainly argue about how much value these companies are providing, and we can argue about how it's annoying how there's a million different streaming services now and how that's really irritating, but my point stands: people do pay for things on the internet. We don't have to accept that companies need to sell all our data. We don't have to accept being bombarded with ads. We don't have to accept that people won't pay to use services.
  - WarmWash 6mo ago
    The harsh reality is that conversion from "free" to paid is on the order of 1%. This is true for everything from patreon, to wikipedia, to kagi, to nebula, to home mailers for charity. 1% of the people pay, 60% watch ads, 39% are crusaders who conveniently are morally obligated to not pay or compensate for anything (but have their costs covered by the other two groups, who complain about ads/costs but somehow are blind to the dead weight they are dragging around). Worst of all is that it's impossible to have an honest conversation about it, because they people who haven't seen an ad or paid for a movie in 20 years go absolutely insane when called out. YouTube creators talk about it in private, but they would never dare say anything on their channel. Ad blocking is practically a religion.

tombert 6mo ago

I mean it's basically an extremely high-stakes version of the (possibly apocryphal) Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Most people (at least the people I've talked to, which admittedly is somewhat of a lefty bubble but I think even more generally) agree that companies getting to or close to "monopoly" status is a pretty bad thing, and that they should be broken up. Political candidates get a lot of social credit for claiming that they're going to do exactly that. The moment that they actually get into a position where they actually could do something about it, they suddenly remember who their campaign contributors are, and can then create reasons to avoid actually solving any of these problems. Very occasionally we have successes in this field, like the breakup of Standard Oil and AT&T), but of course both of these sort of became toothless since we basically allowed both of these companies to re-acquire each other and form the same problems again. There are similar reasons as to why politicians will occasionally push for regulations to not allow themselves to invest in companies that their policies affect, but somehow manages to never get through. Politicians are very rarely punished for breaking political promises, but often rewarded for making the promises. They are also rewarded by their corporate overlords for breaking these promises.

Aerroon 6mo ago
>they suddenly remember who their campaign contributors are, and can then create reasons to avoid actually solving any of these problems. There are very real concerns when you break up a company though. Rockefeller's wealth shot up a lot when Standard Oil was broken up. That could easily make a politician that's "politician out to get the big companies" into "politician making billionaires richer."
- tombert 6mo ago
  Tough to say for sure, but I think it's probably still better to have more billionaires if there's more competition. I wasn't around during the breakup, but my parents told me that phone service got considerably better and cheaper after the AT&T breakup, which makes enough sense to me: if a consumer can drop you for someone else, you have a reason to try and compete on service and/or price.
- vintermann 6mo ago
  > Rockefeller's wealth shot up a lot when Standard Oil was broken up. Most owners (weighted by share) do NOT seem to want their big monopolies broken up, despite the track record of Standard Oil.
GeekyBear 6mo ago
> Political candidates get a lot of social credit for claiming that they're going to do exactly that. The moment that they actually get into a position where they actually could do something about it, they suddenly remember who their campaign contributors are, and can then create reasons to avoid actually solving any of these problems. I read a good Google adjacent example of this in yesterday's NYTimes: > Mr. Brin, a Google co-founder and one of the world’s richest people, is a longtime friend of Mr. Newsom, the California governor. Both men attended each other’s weddings. But now Mr. Brin pulled Mr. Newsom aside to a different part of the property for a serious talk. Mr. Brin told Mr. Newsom that he could not stand the state’s proposed billionaire tax... Mr. Newsom, who had never seemed inclined to support the tax, came out the next month and pledged to defeat it. https://archive.ph/LTkix https://archive.ph/LTkix

WarmWash 6mo ago

Google has a monopoly because of the internet's insistence on ad blocking, and outright indignant refusal to dare pay a greedy company for thinking they could ask for money for a "free" web service. It's basically impossible to get off the ground competing against google when 30-40% of people are just freeloading your service, and 80-90% think the internet is an ethereal realm that everyone could have ad and subscription access to if we could only agree to starve these greedy middle men.

tombert 6mo ago
I've heard dozens of people say this (and I've even said it myself) but I don't think it actually holds water. People will pay for things if those things don't suck, and it's not even hard to find examples of that (even with Google products no less!). For search, Kagi has had a growing fanbase for a couple years now, but let's take things that have been easy to get for free for decades: Movies. People have been, with relatively impunity, able to torrent movies for free for a very long time. It's not hard, and the only way you're paying for it is ads for hot MILFs in your area. And yet, despite this having always been an option, somehow Netflix and Hulu and Disney+ and HBO Max have managed to make fairly successful businesses selling movies that could have been pirated. I could get YouTube as ad-free with an ad blocker, but I pay for YouTube Premium. I could get all my music for free with Redacted, but I use YouTube music, or I buy CDs. I could torrent video games but I just buy them off Steam or GOG. This isn't new either; there were thousands of free forums on the internet in the late 90's, but yet people still bought accounts on Something Awful for quite awhile (and indeed still buy accounts, but with much lower numbers). We can certainly argue about how much value these companies are providing, and we can argue about how it's annoying how there's a million different streaming services now and how that's really irritating, but my point stands: people do pay for things on the internet. We don't have to accept that companies need to sell all our data. We don't have to accept being bombarded with ads. We don't have to accept that people won't pay to use services.
- WarmWash 6mo ago
  The harsh reality is that conversion from "free" to paid is on the order of 1%. This is true for everything from patreon, to wikipedia, to kagi, to nebula, to home mailers for charity. 1% of the people pay, 60% watch ads, 39% are crusaders who conveniently are morally obligated to not pay or compensate for anything (but have their costs covered by the other two groups, who complain about ads/costs but somehow are blind to the dead weight they are dragging around). Worst of all is that it's impossible to have an honest conversation about it, because they people who haven't seen an ad or paid for a movie in 20 years go absolutely insane when called out. YouTube creators talk about it in private, but they would never dare say anything on their channel. Ad blocking is practically a religion.