101–110 of 226 posts
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Good cop bad cop routine. You can insert team blue or red in to either role depending on your political bias. Either way though, you're under arrest xD
They are not equivalent, though.
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Everything you touch or use has a component going through china
I used to think the American leverage over China was not that great (I'm not American). Then Huawei was put on that Entity List (or whatever it's called) and prohibited from doing business with US companies. Huawei was the world's #2 phone producer after Samsung and rising rapidly, I think the forecast was that within 2 quarters it would be #1, overtaking Samsung. One year later, with the ban still ongoing, Huawei fe…
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The competition for my ISP is not a click away.
Neither is Google's, their marketing to the contrary. Installing another app store on their phone OS (which has no competition) requires several steps involving disabling so-called security protections and then side-loading the store. Search is largely protected by the fact that every business must do business with Google if they're to have any customers at all, etc. Obviously, physical infrastructure is a bit harder…
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That isn’t the premise at all. It makes the market stronger through competition. Typically it makes the company itself weaker since it no longer can leverage power in one market to corner another.
We agree. I said companies, plural, as a whole as in the whole economy.
“Online platforms” == operating systems according to the first linked.
If that’s the quality of legislation… I’m unsure how to proceed.
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> where not only do their tech companies have massive integration across so many products Why can't tech products have integration across each other, without tech giants buying up every small startup that comes across their way?
Because integration is very difficult to achieve in one company (just look at Google vs Apple products), let alone across multiple. I don’t see how that has anything to do with buying small startups. However since you mentioned that, preventing M&A will not only prevent our bigger tech companies from being globally competitive by restricting their access to talent, it’ll shut off one of the main exit routes that’s ma…
(I am not suggesting that as a credible alternative).
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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.
In both of those cases, consumers were being overcharged for good and services in a variety of concrete economic ways. It's not analogous to the current situation, I don't think. It's not like a broken up Google or Facebook would cease showing ads or show fewer ads. If anything, they'd show more, as we can see from all the random clickbait news sites that are more ad than material. It seems possible that a broken up…
Ad buyers are the consumers. You are the product.
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It is though. Imagine if every online forum was forced to promote government propaganda. That's not free speech. So to some degree, forum discretion is speech.
Just imagine if every telephone companies was prevented from discriminating on the basis of the speech.... Oh wait, that is literally how common carrier laws work. They are basically, forced to sell to everyone, and have to allow anyone to make speech over their network.
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In both of those cases, consumers were being overcharged for good and services in a variety of concrete economic ways. It's not analogous to the current situation, I don't think. It's not like a broken up Google or Facebook would cease showing ads or show fewer ads. If anything, they'd show more, as we can see from all the random clickbait news sites that are more ad than material. It seems possible that a broken up…
> ... but (with my consumer hat on), I don't really care about ad buyers that much. Ad buyers are the consumers. You are the product.
With these bills it seems like we are getting closer and closer to closing that frontier, and closing it for good.
Usenet is deader than dead (I have subscribed to some groups in thunderbird, but some of these haven't seen a post in several years), reddit is useful only in some small subreddits.
It seems like the end of an era. Maybe I should just, I don't know, log of?
Anybody else feels the same? Or better yet, know where the magic can be found these days?