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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”

#201

Post by LordDragonfang »

JPKab wrote: post #181
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.

I think it's important to point out here that neither side really understands tech but one side was viciously against any form of antitrust with these companies until the absolutely foolish decision by these companies to start targeting that one side for censorship. Their employees demanded it as did the Democratic party leadership. And they did their thing and lost the only friends they had on this front. Any GOP po…

>until the absolutely foolish decision by these companies to start targeting that one side for censorship.

Tech companies did not start "targeting" one side for censorship, multiple internal reports have come out showing they actually have to be artificially lenient to right-wing views to avoid be perceived as being biased [1]. Right wing politics just has either a higher incidence of socially unacceptable speech, or a persecution complex - or more than likely, both.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/1/21544501/facebook-rules-p...

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

#202

Post by stale2002 »

jayd16 wrote: post #108
stale2002 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not everything is a common carrier and I don't think it should be.

I didn't say that everything is a common carrier.

Instead, I am pointing out the ridiculousness of saying that every single instance of the governement "enforcing" speech, in the context of powerful platforms, is somehow some huge infringement on free speech.

Because clearly, we are OK with the government requiring phone companies, which are platforms, into allow most people to make phone calls.

Therefore, you cannot come out, swinging very hard, with this free speech stuff, when, if I were to guess, you are totally OK with phone companies being covered under common carrier laws.

So you need to either chill with this whole "free speech" argument, or you need to instead come out and say that common carriers are some horrible, really evil thing. Pick one.

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

#203

Post by LordDragonfang »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #150
efnx wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rac…

>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.

Critical race theory and Race essentialism are fundamentally incompatible theories of race. If you're equating the two, you, or whoever presented them to you, has a deeply flawed (or actively malicious) understand of one or the other.

CRT posits that differences among racial/ethnic groups are the result of, as wikipedia puts it, "social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors." Even its critics claim it relies too heavily on social constructivism - the literal opposite of essentialism. (Racial essentialism, in contrast, claims that "races" are biologically district categories that result in innate individual differences)

Of course, you used a throwaway account here, so you must, on some level, know you argument doesn't hold to educated scrutiny.

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

#204

Post by TuringTest »

robomartin wrote: post #155
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.

> I fundamentally distrust these people (on both sides) I always try to understand which votes they are trying to buy. Seriously. If we model politicians as individuals evolving through an evolutionary algorithm it becomes very clear that their fitness function has very few variables. Money and votes. Not sure what else. Once they learned that votes can be had with promises, rather than execution, all was lost. Polit…

> I have no clue how we fix this.

Radical transparency. With all data of public institutions open for accountability, and a layer of independent people studying their areas of interest and creating explanations of actual execution and how it really affects us.

The free press used to be this, before it got captured and become part of the opaque system. With open distributed networks, we get a second chance to build such a counter-information system, and this time make it de-centralized so it cannot be captured by owning a single node.

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

#205

Post by foolmeonce »

syshum wrote: post #79
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.

Anti-Trust is not the best path Better action would be reforms in contract law to limit binding Arbitration, make ToS unenforceable if they do not have at least SOME provisions in favor of the users (i.e stop allowing unconscionable contracts as Terms of Service), and stronger enforcement of Truth in Advertisement For ToS, one thing that should absolutely be require for a ToS to be enforceable is a mandate that Vendo…

A laundry list of new barriers to entry is going to prevent consolidation in an industry?

That's like saying if FB buying startups like WhatsApp was a problem, then let's prevent startups from ever competing.

I think government can ban itself from using anything that isn't a federated protocol and should not be doing stupid things with private platforms.

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

#206

Post by nl »

aerosmile wrote: post #196
nl wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If a business does business in the US then the US can (and does) make laws demanding reporting of corporate ownership. This is usually done as part of tax law. See for example https://www.internationallawoffice.com/Newsletters/Private-C...

A specific example of this kind of action: In 2016 the Obama administration block the Dutch Phillips company from selling (Dutch) Lumiled to Chinese investment companies.

More recently there was the (disastrously administed) attempt to force US ownership of TikTok as well as a less well known attempt to force the sale of Grindr.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170227090607/https://www.nytim...

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

#207

Post by syshum »

foolmeonce wrote: post #205
syshum wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-Trust is not the best path Better action would be reforms in contract law to limit binding Arbitration, make ToS unenforceable if they do not have at least SOME provisions in favor of the users (i.e stop allowing unconscionable contracts as Terms of Service), and stronger enforcement of Truth in Advertisement For ToS, one thing that should absolutely be require for a ToS to be enforceable is a mandate that Vendo…

A laundry list of new barriers to entry is going to prevent consolidation in an industry? That's like saying if FB buying startups like WhatsApp was a problem, then let's prevent startups from ever competing. I think government can ban itself from using anything that isn't a federated protocol and should not be doing stupid things with private platforms.

The only thing in my list that could even remotely be a barrier to entry would be the additional requirements of official government communications, which IMO would be a good thing because I dont think there should be any official government communications happening on any of these platforms in the first place.

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

#208

Post by foolmeonce »

syshum wrote: post #207
foolmeonce wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A laundry list of new barriers to entry is going to prevent consolidation in an industry? That's like saying if FB buying startups like WhatsApp was a problem, then let's prevent startups from ever competing. I think government can ban itself from using anything that isn't a federated protocol and should not be doing stupid things with private platforms.

The only thing in my list that could even remotely be a barrier to entry would be the additional requirements of official government communications, which IMO would be a good thing because I dont think there should be any official government communications happening on any of these platforms in the first place.

Your ToS processes will be perfect for keeping companies out that aren't already affiliated with a big tech and using their legal.

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

#209

Post by ethbr0 »

missedthecue wrote: post #179
ethbr0 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Facebook, or Google, sells ad pricing via a live auction doesn't opine on whether that results in overcharging. The mere fact that participation is effectively mandatory itself skews the market.

Most things we buy are effectively mandatory though. Food, shelter, water, clothing, medicine, and so on and so forth. That can't be the criteria for breaking up a company, which in Facebooks case basically means making them spin Whatsapp and Instagram. (But the management and most of the owners stay the same, mind you)

Mandatory to buy, but available from a choice of competitors with adversarial interests to each other.

IMHO, an adversarial bidding process (under control of one party) is no replacement for a strategic adversary (capable of planning and executing strategy).

The former may prevent the most egregious price raises, but it's insufficient for creating the broader competition that ultimately drives prices down.

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

#210

Post by throwaway894345 »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #203
throwaway894345 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 rac…

>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. Critical race theory and Race essentialism are fundamentally incompatible theories of race. If you're equating the two, you, or whoever presented them to you, has a deeply flawed (or actively malicious) understand of one or the other. CRT posits that differences among raci…

> Critical race theory and Race essentialism are fundamentally incompatible theories of race. If you're equating the two, you, or whoever presented them to you, has a deeply flawed (or actively malicious) understand of one or the other.

I knew someone was going to be pedantic which is why I phrased it as I did. The term is becoming overloaded, and we can either debate semantics or we can engage substantially and I’m choosing the latter.

> Of course, you used a throwaway account here, so you must, on some level, know you argument doesn't hold to educated scrutiny.

Your account is called “LordDragonfang” with 800 karma, so you're not exactly posting with your legal name yourself. No, I’m not using my legal name, but this is my main account. I post here regularly, in good faith, and overall my contributions have been well-received.

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