Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 452 posts

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

#421

Post by spacemanmatt »

rincebrain wrote: post #148
spacemanmatt wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft's dirty tricks with DOS, Windows, and other would-be commodity software are legend. They should have gotten parted out into OS, Desktop suite, and probably several other fragments a long time ago. That stuff was a nightmare for me as a consumer.

Should they have, though? I agree they should have been penalized (ideally more harshly than they were) for their legendary anticompetitive behavior, I'm just no longer as sure that partitioning the company out into distinct divisions would have been a net gain for the consumer as I used to be, especially against the specific behaviors they were accused of. How, for example, would breaking up Microsoft into distinct…

If you were a competitor at the time, the Halloween documents were NOT NEWS to you, they were just a frightening admission of what everyone knew MS was already doing.

Yes, they absolutely should have been broken up into fragments, if not crushed and handed out to the rest of America for free.

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

#422

Post by throwaway2048 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #405
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strict liability, duty of care and ignorantia juris non excusat.

Right. Mens rea ("guilty mind") itself is not a uniformly applied principle. But it's the name of the concept you were attempting to address above. See also actus reus ("guilty act"). And note that in tort liability (as opposed to criminal liability) other standards may apply. "Strict liabilty" is more typically applied in civil law, though there are (I learned responding here) some applications in criminal law as we…

Antitrust law is a civil matter, not a criminal one.

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

#423

Post by noisem4ker »

mandeepj wrote: post #401
capableweb wrote: post #5

> potentially barring companies like Amazon.com from operating the markets in which they also compete Absolutely bananas that this haven't been fixed yet! How can Google own the entire ads market and still be allowed to compete in it? Obviously for-profit companies will abuse their positions if it'll earn them more money, and fines ends up being the cost of doing business instead of deterrents. How is Apple allowed t…

> How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers on their mobile devices? Ha! Did you even check? Chrome is available from a long time

Commenter should have said "other web browser engines" to be more precise.

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

#424

Post by baq »

jcrites wrote: post #319
baq wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example: Amazon doesn’t seem to care about fraudulent sellers and fake paid-for reviews on its platform.

Amazon cares substantially about stopping these things. As is the case when you are fighting against other humans, who are crafty, financially-motivated, and are willing to break the law, and may be operating from different jurisdictions where attempting to get the DA to prosecute them or filing a lawsuit against them is ineffective, it's a very difficult battle to fight. As an example I'd be surprised if Amazon coul…

imagine hiring a thousand people to do the work while engineering is figuring out how to make them redundant, eventually. not every problem needs a technical AI solution. if people need to be a part of the process, so be it. just don't pretend it's too difficult because somehow the scale of the problem on other platforms simply doesn't compare.

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

#425

Post by izacus »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #177
izacus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

What I've noticed over the past couple of years is that almost every article or news segment of importance is talking about, and quoting, Tweets. Whether Twitter has more influence than cable news now, I don't know, but it has embedded itself like a tick into the news rubric.

But the news writer actually chooses which tweets to highlight to drive the narrative right? I've rarely seen news media just copy ALL the tweets, but they pretty much pick the ones that fit their partisan leanings.

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

#426

Post by lotsofpulp »

srswtf123 wrote: post #236
slibhb wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many hours of work/travel would you do for a median plus or minus a standard deviation of a journalist’s wage?

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

#427

Post by indymike »

timoth3y wrote: post #406
kortilla wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The list goes on. I'm happy that it's being suggested, I'm just worried how it took so long to get here. Because this is a Gish Gallop of weak individual reasons batched together to make it seem like a stronger obvious argument when it’s not. > How can Google own the entire ads market and still be allowed to compete in it? They don’t. Amazon and Facebook both make a fortune from ads. You need to be more specific. >…

> Go to a store, this is what Walmart, Albertsons/Safeway, Costco, etc have been doing for longer than any of the FAANGs have existed. This one is substantively different. Amazon claims it is a market and not a store, and is therefore not legally responsible for things like the quality of products sold there or how they are represented. They claim that both buyers and sellers are their customers, unlike an actual sto…

> They claim that both buyers and sellers are their customers, unlike an actual store where only the buyers are the customers.

The garden department at your local department (Wal-Mart does this. So do most home repair places) store is operated by another company. So too is the salty snack aisle, soft drink aisle and many other departments where an outside vendor is basically renting shelf space, and paying the rent in margin at the register. In all of these cases, the store also has a house brand that is in the same aisle, competing with the big brands. So, what Amazon is doing is really the same, but in an ecommerce format. BTW, department and grocery stores were running their own logistics company long before Amazon even existed.

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

#428

Post by indymike »

capableweb wrote: post #20
lotsofpulp wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's not just whatever marketplace, anti-monopoly legislation focuses on markets where the players own a significant share of the full market. In the case of Amazon, it seems like they have above 52% of the e-commerce market in the US in 2019 ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/955796/global-amazon-e-c... ) so probably it's even higher now. When one player now has over half the market, you need to carefully watch w…

Nothing stops Wal-Mart from putting Sam's Choice product on the endcap to the soft drink asile. Amazon has scale problem, and the question shouldn't be about product x or product y, but why aren't there more Amazons and more Googles competing with each other.

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

#429

Post by kabdib »

anfilt wrote: post #415
bun_at_work wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controlling what market? The browser market? A large part of Apple's brand, at this point, is security from snooping, personal privacy, etc etc. It makes sense to control the browser on the iPhone for privacy than it does to seek to eliminate browser competitors. Safari isn't a crucial part of their revenue, devices with the security promise are. Furthermore, the browser seems to be the key space where use privacy is…

Apple does not own the hardware, why do they have any say what software I choose to execute. Moreover, when one is selling something that involves transferring all rights in tangible/real property being sold to be transfered. Here apple is reserving the right to decide what can and cant run on the device. This clearly is a violation of property rights. Last I checked apple did not have people sign rent/lease agreemen…

Apple definitely has a say in how its software is run. IOS is licensed for use on Apple-branded devices, with further stipulations requiring, amongst other things, that it remain unmodified (it's right there in the EULA).

I'll be the last one to prevent you from running your own software on the hardware you bought. So, knock yourself out: Wipe all the nasty, evil Apple software off of that device and have your way with it. I would not expect any help from Apple about how to do this.

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

#430

Post by sfifs »

capableweb wrote: post #5

> potentially barring companies like Amazon.com from operating the markets in which they also compete Absolutely bananas that this haven't been fixed yet! How can Google own the entire ads market and still be allowed to compete in it? Obviously for-profit companies will abuse their positions if it'll earn them more money, and fines ends up being the cost of doing business instead of deterrents. How is Apple allowed t…

There's a long way to go and it's not very clear who will prevail. In general in US jurisprudence, "consumer welfare" is the key consideration in antitrust over the last few decades and monopolization and vertical integration are not considered problems unless there is consumer harm due to it. This is different from how antitrust is looked at pretty much anywhere else in the world ( and i personally think its preferable).

This book [1] has been very influential in influencing the approach.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox

Post reply on HN