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House lawmakers release anti-monopoly agenda for “a stronger online economy”

cicilline.house.gov

41–50 of 226 posts

Re: House lawmakers release anti-monopoly agenda for “a stronger online economy”

#41

the problem with “breaking up big tech” is it only breaks up american companies. it has a long run impact of letting foreign companies take over american market share

Historical parallel: a movement to abolish patents in England in 1850-1880 foundered because it would enable cheap imports, threatening local manufacturing jobs.

But big tech employs proportionately few, and pays no tax.

Re: House lawmakers release anti-monopoly agenda for “a stronger online economy”

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a liberal and it's clear that big tech is suppressing dissenting voices. It's not targeted at conservatives specifically, but it captures them in larger number because tech and corporate media is mostly liberal and progressive. As such, conservative is by default a dissenting voice. Edit: See the lab leak hypothesis where big tech was suppressing and even banning people last year for questioning the approved narr…

https://medium.com/cybersecurity-for-democracy/far-right-new... Where is the evidence? Because by in large, the use and effectiveness of these platforms in study after study goes the other way.

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Re: House lawmakers release anti-monopoly agenda for “a stronger online economy”

#43
post #35

Hard to tell from the summaries. I hope this addresses ISPs too. Comcast, AT&T seem to operate like a cartel.

Spoiler: they don't! The ACCESS act, for example, applies only to services with > 50 million MAU and either sales or market caps over $600 billion. Since there has never been any company with $600 billion annual sales, it applies to only 7 companies in the world, and really only 6 because I don't think Saudi Aramco really qualifies.

Re: House lawmakers release anti-monopoly agenda for “a stronger online economy”

#44

Odds any of it gets out of committee? It seems a greater priority of this Congress is social reforms and the President and VP also have other priorities that are keeping Congress’ attention

Pretty good, actually. It's a rare area of agreement between the parties that Big Tech has too much power.

Re: House lawmakers release anti-monopoly agenda for “a stronger online economy”

#45

the problem with “breaking up big tech” is it only breaks up american companies. it has a long run impact of letting foreign companies take over american market share

> the problem with “breaking up big tech” is it only breaks up american companies. I understood it as targeting companies whose products are used by Americans.

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Re: House lawmakers release anti-monopoly agenda for “a stronger online economy”

#46
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, breaking up monopolies has been very good for the end consumer. Bell Labs and Standard Oil both ended up being good things. Instead of breaking them up though, we should simply be more stringent with anti trust hearings and merger approvals. There have been a few mergers recently that absolutely shouldn’t have been approved.

>Instead of breaking them up though, we should simply be more stringent with anti trust hearings and merger approvals. There have been a few mergers recently that absolutely shouldn’t have been approved. Recently? Competition bureaus have been green lighting consolidation in key industry sectors for bullshit reasons with bad evidence for decades. Also, if we acknowledge that bureaus have allowed the over-consolidatio…

yes, and the focus on tech is a red herring distraction du jour. every company over $100MM should be scrutinized for breakup into smaller entities. m&a should be default deny, with extraordinary evidence required for approval, with penalties that pierce the corporate veil for not meeting stated fair market objectives.

that would actually encourage competition and functional markets without harming substantive efficiency/productivity gains from economies of scale, which, despite the popular conception, tend to be sublinear rather than superlinear. that's because coordination problems scale superlinearly with size (a la mythical man month), which in turn is why there is a optimum firm size both for the firms themselves as well as for the markets they compete in. markets (independent actors loosely coordinating via price signals) actually specifically arose to solve these very coordination problems.

Re: House lawmakers release anti-monopoly agenda for “a stronger online economy”

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, breaking up monopolies has been very good for the end consumer. Bell Labs and Standard Oil both ended up being good things. Instead of breaking them up though, we should simply be more stringent with anti trust hearings and merger approvals. There have been a few mergers recently that absolutely shouldn’t have been approved.

Not actually true - Bell Labs was a government created and enforced monopoly, so the break up definitely helped people but it did not earn its 'monopoly' status. As for Standard Oil at the height of it's market dominance the price of oil went down drastically, and by the time it was broken up it was nowhere near as dominant - iirc it was in the high 60%s of market share. The only monopolies that ever seem to truly ex…

The big benefit was long distance calling. Breaking up the bells quickly resulted in dramatic price drops.

Technology clearly helped, but you can adjust for that by compare to other countries telecoms which had the same benefits.

Re: House lawmakers release anti-monopoly agenda for “a stronger online economy”

#48
post #5

> Big tech has routinely suppressed conservative voices and violated consumers’ privacy,” said Rep. Gooden. “We must rein in their destructive behavior and preserve the constitutional rights of all Americans.” First, this whole suppressing conservatives voices thing is just totally unhinged from reality. The few tiny examples of this violate clearly defined platform rules (which pale in comparison to the giant gain o…

I'm a liberal and it's clear that big tech is suppressing dissenting voices. It's not targeted at conservatives specifically, but it captures them in larger number because tech and corporate media is mostly liberal and progressive. As such, conservative is by default a dissenting voice. Edit: See the lab leak hypothesis where big tech was suppressing and even banning people last year for questioning the approved narr…

> Managing director of Thiel Capital

> posted a paper describing Geometric Unity online and went on Joe Rogan’s immensely popular podcast to discuss it

What makes someone an old school progressive, in your opinion?

I'm having trouble finding anything progressive about this person. His crackpot "theory of everything" has apparently been around since about 2013.

Re: House lawmakers release anti-monopoly agenda for “a stronger online economy”

#49
I wonder if this an inadvertent dark pattern used by Congress. Doesn’t this fundamentally set up lobbying infrastructure? You set up a racket where you start regulating a business, then said business reacts by funding massive lobbying toolkits to buy the crooks in Congress off to curtail regulation.

Re: House lawmakers release anti-monopoly agenda for “a stronger online economy”

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, breaking up monopolies has been very good for the end consumer. Bell Labs and Standard Oil both ended up being good things. Instead of breaking them up though, we should simply be more stringent with anti trust hearings and merger approvals. There have been a few mergers recently that absolutely shouldn’t have been approved.

I wish basic IRS functions could be get the same level of attention as these efforts. What would be particularly good for consumers would be bringing some level of fairness to the tax system.

Why hurt the middle class to help "consumers"? Nah.

If you wanted to make the tax system "more fair" it would mean lowering the outrageously high taxes on the middle class, but that's not within the Overton window and not what you're talking about.

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