Why Did Congress Just Vote to Break Up Big Tech?

Perhaps they saw how the big national monopolies, like Siemens and BASF and Samsung, and Sanyo and . became stultifying nepotistic monopolies in various fields, and when faster and quicker more innovative US companies came along that ran past them - and seeing this, decided to have a way to limit these monopolies. Look up Standard oil monopoly for some aspects, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil That is the wiki and here.... https://www.investopedia.com/insights/history-of-us-monopoli...

This all sounds nice, but it still has to make it through the rest of congress

> The ACCESS Act mandates that big tech firms have to make their systems open to competitors and business rivals, in the same way that AT&T customers can talk to T-Mobile customers, or users of different email systems can communicate with one another.

Okay, this is plausible, but it can turn into all kinds of mess as federated systems aren't simpler to design, build, or operate. For example, how would Signal inter-communicate with e2ee intact with say, Facebook Messenger? They'd have to do a matrix.org style bridges, which is going to be super tricky to maintain, at their scale. Hardware is doomed: USB-C for all inter-connects...

> The merger bill makes it harder for big tech firms to buy rivals.

Well, the race to $2T market cap just got harder. Can get behind this. I can do without Zuck in my WhatsApp, or Satya in my GitHub. Such a restriction may, instead, result in a marked increase in venture investments from BigTech, which may not be as bad a thing, after all?

> The nondiscrimination bill is intended to ban the ability to big tech firms to preference their own products, the way Google substitutes its own reviews for Yelp reviews, even if Yelp’s reviews are better.

Much needed. Looking at you "Amazon's choice".

> The break-up bill is supposed to split apart big tech firms by prohibiting platforms from owning any line of business that uses that platform.

Affects tech companies ranging from AWS and Stripe to platforms like Android and iOS? This bill can be the straw that breaks the camel's back, imo, if they get the details right. Either the incumbents remain entrenched because of the loopholes, or they no longer wield undue advantage, leaving some breathing room for upstarts. Unsure if this is good or bad for software engineers. They've enjoyed higher salaries for a while on the back of some of the most ridiculous growth ever seen, driven in no part by unabated monopolistic practices.

> And that is truly stunning.

Indeed.

> Hardware is doomed: USB-C for all inter-connects...

I am down for a standard, it doesn't matter which one it is, so long as it's consistent. Mostly it's for power distribution, I want every single one of my devices to be able to draw from a USB battery bank.

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