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U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

reuters.com

231–240 of 452 posts

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#231

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> How can Amazon be allowed to sell competing products in their own marketplace, when they own the actual marketplace? They should have been forced to divide their busin Depends on how you define “marketplace”. Costco/Walmart/Best Buy/Target/Home Depot/Lowe’s/grocery stores all sell their own brands next to competing brands in their stores. Is their one store the marketplace? It takes considerably more effort to go t…

All of those companies buy their inventory and take on the full risk of potentially not selling it. They're retailers, not marketplaces.

Not sure about the other stores, but that's not always true for walmart, which has at least some goods on consignment.

https://blog.softwareag.com/in-future-retailers-may-be-missi...

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#232

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They are using their power to force competitors out of the market. That's what antitrust is about anyway -- it's not really about how happy customers are. "We're the best!" is easy to say when you've decimated any potential rivals.

> They are using their power to force competitors out of the market. Everyone does this, it is called competition .

In fact, many would say that monopolistic powers are the end result of capitalism. Thus the reason for antitrust regs to act as a reset.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#233

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I’m not sure, but I think we have to start with Congressional reform. I don’t generally subscribe to the notion that legislating should be a lucrative, lifelong profession. I think term limits, pay reduction, and abolishment of the Congressional pension would be an excellent start. It would eliminate some of the career aspects of legislating while forcing lobbyists to regularly deal with new people, somewhat limiting…

I think Congressional term limits would be one of the easiest fixes for the current state of affairs. Overturning Citizens United and repealing the 17th would be great steps too. However, I think we should pay Congress people at least $1M/yr. Pay them like Fortune 100 CEO's. Make it so they don't even CARE about playing games with insider trading. If we want to run this capitalist country like the capitalists we thin…

The tone of this is a little hard to read, so forgive me if I've misread anything.

I mostly agree with the other changes, except for increasing pay as a means of eliminating the motivation to play games. If there's one thing we've seen play out over and over, it's that excesses and greed just beget more greed. Look at the number of executives, financial managers, and politicians who already had vast wealth yet STILL engage in shenanigans. Furthermore, the job of legislating is an elected one, which means it will always go to those who are best able to convince the most people to vote for them (frequently by promises and pandering), not those who will do the best job. Now, I don't think legislators should get pauper's pay, but I also think we should do what we can to limit it's use as a career path for power and wealth.

I have no problems with capitalism. If the market has healthy competition and the referees (regulations and the courts) are fair and transparent, capitalism is good. Unfortunately, many of those elements have gotten worse in recent decades. We regulate more than ever, but it's the small businesses who suffer the burden and have no real voice in DC.

Capitalism done right means that I'm not upset by Wal-Mart's success, as it's kept in check by other companies like Amazon and Target. If you think anybody is invincible, take a look at what happened to Sears, K-Mart, and Toys-R-Us. Capitalism done wrong means that big companies use regulations and unfair referees to keep out competition. The power wielded by FAANG today dwarfs anything Microsoft ever had.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#234

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They could just as easily profit from shorting tech etc. True whales make money on the up and down.

Shorting is much more legally risky. SEC basically doesn’t view shorts as investors, and that has interesting outcome. The don’t care if you illegally cause stock to go up, and you profit from it, as other investors also profit. But causing stock to go down opens you to much higher liability, for hurting investors. And if you profit of it via short, you’re in much more legal risk.

>The don’t care if you illegally cause stock to go up, and you profit from it, as other investors also profit.

They clearly do, as we've seen with musk's "funding secured" tweet.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#235

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>Apple I’m not sure how they’ve even been in the discussion Remember that Apple and Google pulled a legal app from their stores, regular Apple users (like 50% of US) can't install stuff on their device without Apple parental approval and the "make it a website argument also fails because Apple is does not let you install a better browser". 50% still affects a lot of people, though Apple fanboys will attempt to say is…

What app?

I don't want to name it, because the US guys will start again a big debate why X event is worse then Y event, why this P app is worse then F app, and since X > Y and PThat is a very visible case, but there were other smaller cases , where smaller applications were blocked because they had a link and that link was going to a page and on that page a developer would accept donations and Apple wanted a but from that.

Then you have apps blocked on totalitarian states, an entire nation is affected because they can't side load applications.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#236
post #112
post #52

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I'm not an american so can you explain if Facebook and Twitter actually have bigger sway than obviously partisan news media like Fox News? (At least in our part of the world that media seriously outstrips any kind of influence FB and Twitter yelling has.)

Since Trump was banned from Twitter have you heard anything that he has said? Whether or not you use Twitter and Facebook, that's what journalists spend their time doing, so one way or another it's affecting the news.

This seems like a massive problem. Instead of going out and getting a story, they let trendy topics on Twitter & Facebook dominate? Well that doesn’t seem like their job to me —- it seems lazy and self-serving.

Not sure what else to expect; they’re human after all.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#237
post #223

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> Amazon (et al) are doing is making it so that customers have to use Amazon's software to shop Amazon This is true of almost all online stores and nobody is proposing legislation against it, so it’s not at all clear what you are saying. Government mandating APIs seems like a fatally destructive move against software freedom forever.

I'm proposing it and saying it would be a better remedy than whatever regulatory-capture-ripe "reform" they're proposing is. I actually like house brands of stuff, when compared to the thousands of gensym brands. The problem isn't marketplace companies privileging their own brands - it's with singular companies owning the marketplace to begin with. Humans are creatures of habit, and the way to make it so we aren't in…

Why not just outlaw dark patterns in general as deceptive practices?

All this focus on fixing particular companies or government mandating software architecture seems like it just gets the government more and more invovled while not doing anything to prevent the actual abuses.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#238
post #3

And Microsoft is not in this list. Who would have predicted that?

Probably Reuters editors who made it so, Microsoft is mentioned plenty in the report itself ( https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20210414/111451/HMKP... ), I'm getting 74 hits when searching for "Microsoft".

Most of those references are talking about how Microsoft can’t compete with its competitors who own the market (AWS, chrome, Google search, etc...).

There is some talk about Office though.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are using their power to force competitors out of the market. Everyone does this, it is called competition .

In fact, many would say that monopolistic powers are the end result of capitalism. Thus the reason for antitrust regs to act as a reset.

And they would be wrong. The fact that everyone does it is the reason no one truly succeeds, not in the long run. A MAD strategy not only with two players but with millions.

That is why every free market monopoly that has ever existed has passed and we are not living under the thumb of a single all encompassing mega-corporation and the only pseudo-monopolies possible are the ones guaranteed by law in regulations.

Re: U.S. House committee approves blueprint for Big Tech crackdown

#240
post #226

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What prohibited browsers are you referring to?

I was mainly referring to how every browser app on iOS is forced have Safari underneath. The wiki page on Firefox for iOS [1] mentions this in some detail - it cannot use Gecko like it does on desktop and Android, it must use WebKit instead. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_for_iOS

This is a technical detail most people don’t care about. You still get all the competing browsers with all their specific features on iOS, regardless of the rendering engine.
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