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

cicilline.house.gov

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

#81

Post by stadium »

EastSmith wrote: post #59

One of the bills (The "Ending Platform Monopolies Act") specifically targets companies with $600 billion market cap (AAFG), and misses Walmart by around $200 billion (it currently has market cap of less than $400 billion). It will be really funny if Walmart stock rises due to Amazon being split, and hits the $600 billion.

What's to stop Amazon from splitting it's retail business into separate legal entities entities by category to stay under the arbitrary limits? Or increasing 3rd party GMS, decreasing Amazon direct sales, and decreasing the 3rd party sales royalties to capture market share and stay under the revenue targets?

Companies with strong financial engineering competencies will have no problem working around these limits.

Instead of the government picking winners and losers, how can the rules be structured to level the playing field for everyone?

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

#82

Post by ocdtrekkie »

jeffbee wrote: post #43
gsmo wrote: 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.

The fact that ISPs don't even come close to those numbers is a good example of why tech companies are a much bigger problem than ISPs. ISPs are the monster under the bed big tech has been paying people to scare you with so you don't look too closely at them.

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

#83

Post by mech422 »

Retric wrote: post #47
dantheman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>>Breaking up the bells quickly resulted in dramatic price drops.

I can't remember how different my bills were, but I do remember all the jokes about how breaking Bell up made things worse.

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

#84

Post by Judgmentality »

jeffbee wrote: post #43
gsmo wrote: 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.

> Since there has never been any company with $600 billion annual sales

I wonder if someone clever might exploit this loophole to kill the reverse repo market, which is almost hitting $600 billion daily. And technically it's run by the fed, which is technically a private entity. This is obviously an outlier within an outlier and God knows the government wouldn't let it's magical money maker come under fire, but it seems like with the right set of circumstances this going in front of SCOTUS could completely undermine how our entire concept of debt and lending works in the US economy.

Everything I'm saying is purely speculation. This actually happening is about as likely as the US admitting it invaded Iraq for oil (and a bunch of other more nuanced reasons). It's not about honesty; it's about money.

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

#85

Post by salawat »

stadium wrote: post #81
EastSmith wrote: post #59

One of the bills (The "Ending Platform Monopolies Act") specifically targets companies with $600 billion market cap (AAFG), and misses Walmart by around $200 billion (it currently has market cap of less than $400 billion). It will be really funny if Walmart stock rises due to Amazon being split, and hits the $600 billion.

What's to stop Amazon from splitting it's retail business into separate legal entities entities by category to stay under the arbitrary limits? Or increasing 3rd party GMS, decreasing Amazon direct sales, and decreasing the 3rd party sales royalties to capture market share and stay under the revenue targets? Companies with strong financial engineering competencies will have no problem working around these limits. Ins…

In the presence of financial engineers, you can't have it any other way.

This is how politics is supposed to work. You pick one organization (your government) that you bend over backwards to give everyone the ability to input to. Anything that starts to get too big for their britches, you implement controls for.

Then the regulatory arms race continues.

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

#86

Post by wbl »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #82
jeffbee wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fact that ISPs don't even come close to those numbers is a good example of why tech companies are a much bigger problem than ISPs. ISPs are the monster under the bed big tech has been paying people to scare you with so you don't look too closely at them.

The competition for my ISP is not a click away.

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

#87

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Judgmentality wrote: post #84
jeffbee wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Since there has never been any company with $600 billion annual sales I wonder if someone clever might exploit this loophole to kill the reverse repo market, which is almost hitting $600 billion daily. And technically it's run by the fed, which is technically a private entity. This is obviously an outlier within an outlier and God knows the government wouldn't let it's magical money maker come under fire, but it se…

> technically it's run by the fed

The Fed executes repos and reverse repos. It does not run the market. Primary dealers execute these through tri-party repo agents, which practically is like two banks.

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

#88

Post by JumpCrisscross »

stadium wrote: post #81
EastSmith wrote: post #59

One of the bills (The "Ending Platform Monopolies Act") specifically targets companies with $600 billion market cap (AAFG), and misses Walmart by around $200 billion (it currently has market cap of less than $400 billion). It will be really funny if Walmart stock rises due to Amazon being split, and hits the $600 billion.

What's to stop Amazon from splitting it's retail business into separate legal entities entities by category to stay under the arbitrary limits? Or increasing 3rd party GMS, decreasing Amazon direct sales, and decreasing the 3rd party sales royalties to capture market share and stay under the revenue targets? Companies with strong financial engineering competencies will have no problem working around these limits. Ins…

> What's to stop Amazon from splitting it's retail business into separate legal entities entities by category to stay under the arbitrary limits?

This doesn’t work. Beneficial ownership and common control would trace through the legal entities. If Amazon actually splits up its business, on the other hand, that’s fine! That’s good! No need for anti-trust action; they did it themselves!

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

#89

Post by Retric »

mech422 wrote: post #83
Retric wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>>Breaking up the bells quickly resulted in dramatic price drops. I can't remember how different my bills were, but I do remember all the jokes about how breaking Bell up made things worse.

Local rates went up before stabilizing, long distance rates quickly tanked.

In May 1984, AT&T implemented its first rate reduction in 14 years, knocking an average 6.1 percent off interstate long-distance prices. Long distance prices fell 38% by 1988 ignoring inflation. And continued to drop in the years afterwards.

Now how much this was a net benefit at the time really depended on how much you used long distance calling. Longer term it paved the way for people to call long distance ISP’s which made a real difference in early internet adoption.

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

#90

Post by treis »

mikeiz404 wrote: post #37
foolfoolz wrote: post #7

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

Maybe I’m taking you too literally here but none of the bills in the article talk about splitting companies up. The bills mentioned limit acquisitions of their competitors, increase funding for merger investigations, require data portability, limit self-preferencing on platform, and limit self-preferencing across business areas. At least this is what is stated in the article. I have not read the bills.

They de facto require a break up. The wording is so broad that it makes it essentially impossible to operate multiple lines of business. The only real option is to split up/divest enough to get under the market cap limit.
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