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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”

#191

Post by stadium »

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!

It depends, if 3rd party marketplace and direct sales were split up into separate independent companies, the "sold by Amazon" items could easily flow through as 3rd party marketplace sales. And they would also be free to sell "sold by amazon" items on any other platform, even competing directly with the 3rd party marketplace and leaving it to fester. Product listing quality is already about on parity with eBay so it's not a big stretch.

Possibly a better solution is to make all of the sales and inventory movement data available to amazon internally, available to anyone externally too. For example, the private lable shenanigans would die off quickly with more competitive pressure enabled by giving external players access to the same data Amazon has internally.

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

#192

Post by lmm »

nexuist wrote: post #178
easytiger wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why take risks and innovate if there is less purchase exit opportunity? Who writes these laws?

Why not just work for big tech directly if your ultimate end goal is to have your work be purchased by big tech? It's a lot more stable and you'll probably make more money.

Worse working conditions, less interesting work?

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

#193

Post by ctdonath »

Seems a remarkable number of people don't grasp the difference (in context of US Constitution) between a press and a postal road - as in they think Facebook et al _is_ the internet, not comprehending they have any number of options to choose from. Hence the non-sequitur accusations of "monopoly!"

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

#194

Post by aerosmile »

tmotwu wrote: post #115
aerosmile wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The impact TikTok has had on the social media landscape is undeniable. This year, it is projected to reach 2.1 billion users, and its success hasn’t gone unnoticed by other key players, most notably Instagram. [1] > in addition to gaining more users than Instagram, TikTok is also earning the attention of top power users. [2] [1] https://digitalagencynetwork.com/tiktok-vs-instagram-who-is-... [2] http://instagram-ti…

I am not exactly sure what you are trying to prove here. As far as I am concerned, Google and Facebook have not been broken up into pieces of YouTube and Instagram yet. How does this in any way demonstrate what would happen if we broke up big tech? Sounds like further evidence they need to be released from their mismanagement.

You said:

> I cannot see how YouTube or Instagram could suffer or lose market share.

The references I shared make it very clear that Instagram is losing market share. Not sure why those dots were difficult to connect.

Moving on to your next point:

> Sounds like further evidence they need to be released from their mismanagement.

It's interesting you said that. Obviously a lot of people are in favor of breaking up Facebook from Instagram, but my guess was that it was always for antitrust concerns. More recently, I started to sense that an additional flavor has entered this conversation recently, something like "Facebook and Instagram would be better products if they were run by independent companies." I think what people don't realize is how much effort went into building the world's most sophisticated ad targeting platform, and how convenient it was for Instagram to benefit from Facebook's resources. Not to mention the shared spam/adult/community moderation, shared hosting, etc, etc. Breaking up those apps into separate companies would definitely increase their cost of operation and would slow down their rate of development.

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

#195

Post by nl »

aerosmile wrote: post #64
mikeiz404 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Breaking up big tech" or "throwing monkey wrenches into their gears" is related enough that it might be worth paying attention to the OP's overall point - we're applying these rules only to American companies which will automatically a) help Chinese companies like Tik Tok compete against Facebook and Snap, and b) disincentivize them from opening US offices. Why isn't there a 6th bill saying something like: "because…

> Who is going to prevent ByteDance from acquiring every competitive Chinese company?

The US can make laws about how companies that operate in other markets can behave. The US can enforce those rules on any subsidiaries that operate in US markets.

This isn't even uncommon - we see it in (eg) mining all the time, where corporate regulators stop overseas takeovers from occurring.

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

#196

Post by aerosmile »

nl wrote: post #195
aerosmile wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Breaking up big tech" or "throwing monkey wrenches into their gears" is related enough that it might be worth paying attention to the OP's overall point - we're applying these rules only to American companies which will automatically a) help Chinese companies like Tik Tok compete against Facebook and Snap, and b) disincentivize them from opening US offices. Why isn't there a 6th bill saying something like: "because…

> Who is going to prevent ByteDance from acquiring every competitive Chinese company? The US can make laws about how companies that operate in other markets can behave. The US can enforce those rules on any subsidiaries that operate in US markets. This isn't even uncommon - we see it in (eg) mining all the time, where corporate regulators stop overseas takeovers from occurring.

This is new to me, so let's confirm just to be sure: US regulators have stopped non-US companies from acquiring other non-US companies? How would that even be regulated, purely logistically? A non-US company doesn't have to report to the US regulators any part of its non-US business.

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

#197

Post by PostThisTooFast »

ethbr0 wrote: post #57

Links to the individual bills: American Innovation and Choice Online Act https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/... Platform Competition and Opportunity Act https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/... Ending Platform Monopolies Act https://cicilline.house.gov/sites/cicilline.house.gov/files/... Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching (ACCESS) Act…

And nothing to abolish one of the biggest tools used by monopolists or oligarchies to steal from others: software patents.

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

#198

Post by PostThisTooFast »

jimbob45 wrote: post #113
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.

It doesn’t have to be the way you’re describing. There was a bill a while back to force bill contents to be narrowly scoped (I.e. no pork barrel spending). It failed, but that doesn’t mean we can’t push for its passage in the future anyway.

It might be stricken down anyway. Did you know that a bipartisan effort to grant the president line-item veto power succeeded during the Clinton administration, but was struck down by the Supreme Court?

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

#199

Post by zizee »

kmeisthax wrote: post #163
jimbob45 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t have to be the way you’re describing. There was a bill a while back to force bill contents to be narrowly scoped (I.e. no pork barrel spending). It failed, but that doesn’t mean we can’t push for its passage in the future anyway.

The problem with getting rid of pork-barrel spending is that it removes the one incentive for reps to cooperate on legislation with people they'd otherwise oppose. The only remaining force in legislation post-pork-barrel is ideological extremism.

This is a pretty poor solution for trying to get people to cooperate. If people are opposing good legislation just because it is being proposed by "the opposition", then the system is broken. Better to solve the problem directly, rather than some unplanned round-about solution with pretty clear downsides.

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

#200

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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