House lawmakers release anti-monopoly agenda for “a stronger online economy” • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by throwaway894345 » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 11:01 PM UTC

zer00eyz wrote: post #121

We are talking about the big tech companies... Name one that is an ACTUAL monopoly? Facebook? Apple? Google? Amazon? Vertical integration is NOT monopoly, and thats what many of them are doing. I see a lot of arguments about these companies that are tantamount to "I didn't know how the world worked till I saw them do it and now I'm unhappy". After starting to dig a bit further than this article into what some of thes…

> Name one that is an ACTUAL monopoly? Facebook? Apple? Google? Amazon? Vertical integration is NOT monopoly, and thats what many of them are doing.

I think we should be less interested in whether these companies are literal monopolies and more interested in whether these companies represent a net harm to society (or even more narrowly, to their respective competitive landscapes). I don’t posit an answer, but I think this criteria will lead to more fruitful discussion than the fixation on monopoly.

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

#142

Post by vitus » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 11:01 PM UTC

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.

Walmart is close to that $600B sales number (~$560B revenue in 2020), but not quite there. Their website claims 100M MAUs, though, so they'd be covered [0].

Comcast likely does meet that 50M number, depending on how you look at things. They have ~30M residential customer relationships, but that's likely only counting each household once (as opposed to per person in the household).

AT&T's Q1 earnings listed 44.2M domestic subscribers, just considering WarnerMedia (HBO + HBO Max). Again, probably counting customers as opposed to household members that use the service.

Verizon's Q1 earnings listed 94 million "total wireless retail connections".

(While we're listing subscriber counts for video streaming -- Netflix also meets the 50M threshold, and Disney+ probably does.

Netflix has 74M US+Canada subscribers, but there are only 10M households in Canada... Likewise, Disney+ "only" has 40M US subscriptions but again, subscriptions vs household members.)

[0] "Our largest website, Walmart.com, sees up to 100 million unique visitors a month, according to comScore, and is growing every year." https://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/our-business

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_wireless... says AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile all have >100M US subscribers.

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

#143

Post by bawolff » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 11:01 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #125

zer00eyz wrote: post #121

We are talking about the big tech companies... Name one that is an ACTUAL monopoly? Facebook? Apple? Google? Amazon? Vertical integration is NOT monopoly, and thats what many of them are doing. I see a lot of arguments about these companies that are tantamount to "I didn't know how the world worked till I saw them do it and now I'm unhappy". After starting to dig a bit further than this article into what some of thes…

You don't need to have a full monopoly to be considered a monopoly under the law in the United States. You can be considered a legal monopoly if you have significant market power and can charge overly high prices for things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

Hard to charge overly high price for something that is free.

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

#144

Post by indigochill » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 11:05 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #96

wbl wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Letting users sideload an alternative store the Android way seems like a pretty reasonable solution to me. The experience is pretty much identical to installing arbitrary executables from the internet on PC (in that sometimes your system will pop up a security warning but you can continue despite it). The key difference being people are used to doing that on PCs and not on mobile devices.

But the only alternative seems to be mandating that app stores host competitors, which feels too specific to make for good legislation in my opinion.

But there's another problem which is the Google Play marketplace has a nation's worth of advertising spend to throw at getting eyeballs on it while something like F-Droid... doesn't advertise? And while there are good apps there, the level of polish is nothing like what you see at the top of the Google Play store. People are just so conditioned by shiny trillion-dollar tech that human-scale tech seems old/shady/etc and no amount of legislation is going to change that.

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

#145

Post by forrestthewoods » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 11:06 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #88

stadium wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> 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!

Let's assume for a moment that Amazon spun out... something.

What specific problem does that solve? What specific benefit will the public/customers/clients/government receive? By what metrics is the split-up measure to measure whether it was a success or failure?

I'm genuinely asking. I'm not sure. If the metric is "no business shall have a market cap north of $X" then it's pretty easy to declare it a success! But that's not a very interesting metric imho. So what is the precise goal? And how do you know you've hit the goal and not made things worse?

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

#146

Post by throwaway894345 » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 11:07 PM UTC

pope_meat wrote: post #101

efnx wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not equivalent, though.

of course not, the side you like is obviously a little less evil, and thus worth supporting.

Plus it’s a convenient way to never have to improve—we just have to be a little better than the worst caricature of the other side! “Why are you criticizing my tribe when the other tribe is literally Hitler?”

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

#147

Post by bawolff » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 11:08 PM UTC

Looking at the first page of one (https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/... ), it will make it illegal to:

"restrict or impede businesses users from communicating information or providing hyperlinks on the covered platform to covered platform users to facilitate business transactions;"

Does this make it illegal to ban spammers? (I havent actually read these. They are long).

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

#148

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #2

I fundamentally distrust these people (on both sides) which will make it hard to not presume there are perverse incentives in these bills, but I’m open to it. My sense is that antitrust is as wrong a model for correcting this as the prior regime was that led to the creation of antitrust laws.

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 11:13 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #125

zer00eyz wrote: post #121

We are talking about the big tech companies... Name one that is an ACTUAL monopoly? Facebook? Apple? Google? Amazon? Vertical integration is NOT monopoly, and thats what many of them are doing. I see a lot of arguments about these companies that are tantamount to "I didn't know how the world worked till I saw them do it and now I'm unhappy". After starting to dig a bit further than this article into what some of thes…

You don't need to have a full monopoly to be considered a monopoly under the law in the United States. You can be considered a legal monopoly if you have significant market power and can charge overly high prices for things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

[deleted]

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

#150

Post by throwaway894345 » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 11:18 PM UTC

efnx wrote: post #127

jimbob45 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not at specific points in time but, over the long term, they make exceedingly similar choices. The GOP backed No Child Left Behind which was an abject failure. Back then, it was easy for the left to claim that they would do better when given the opportunity. However, now the left is pushing Critical Race Theory in schools which is equally stupid and damaging. You can point to the left as doing a much worse job…

No, full stop. The two American parties are not equivalent in their modern forms. You can use “over the long term” to further any point you like because at one point the Republican Party was the liberal, progressive party before it adopted the original southern strategy. Studying race and systemic racism in school is absolutely not “as damaging” as dictating the terms of school funding in a way that disadvantages the…

> Studying race and systemic racism in school is absolutely not “as damaging” as dictating the terms of school funding in a way that disadvantages the poor (and subsequently non-white people).

To be fair, when people talk about CRT these days they’re talking about a specific set of beliefs about race, notably a variety of race essentialist beliefs. Reducing CRT to “merely studying race” is dishonest. Moreover, as race essentialist ideas are want to do, I posit that CRT does harm poorer people because it lets rich whites absolve themselves by way of ritual while characterizing poorer whites as the aggressors. Similarly, we prioritize issues that are almost certainly harmful for poorer communities of color, like (de facto or de jure) de-policing high-crime areas (we celebrate fewer police-related fatalities and sweep under the rug the enormous spike in murders).

Note that this isn’t a partisan issue. The best criticism of CRT comes largely from liberals, progressives, and independent conservatives (CRT seems like it should be a slam dunk for establishment Republicans but in increasingly normal form they are finding innovative ways to bungle it).