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John Oliver also covered tech monopolies recently. Tech Monopolies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXf04bhcjbg
That's not "antitrust reform". It's so narrowly drawn that it affects only maybe Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Read the definition of "covered platform". Arguably it's a bill of attainder.
Not arguable. Bills of Attainder refer to criminal laws and are specifically to stop government abuses of personal liberty. Corporations don’t have a guaranteed right to consistent laws, otherwise they wouldn’t spend so much on lobbying. The knife cuts both ways.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When a company can loose money on a competiting company just to drive the competing company out of business; I call that a monopoly. No not monopolies like we had like the Bell telephone, but we have 2-3 huge companies that collude and stifle competition. Proving collusion is hard these days though. Too many fresh faced MBA's who are atheists. (I'm a Watch Repairer. I can't buy parts from The Swatch Group, or Reichmo…
> When a company can loose money on a competiting company just to drive the competing company out of business; I call that a monopoly. You can't just redefine what words mean if you want to be taken seriously. Especially when what you described is a legitimate and very common business tactic [1] [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lossleader.asp
> (2) BUSINESS USER.—The term “business user”—
> [skip a little]
(B) does not include a person that—
> [skip a little]
> (ii) is controlled by the Government of the People's Republic of China or the government of another foreign adversary.
reap what you sow
This Techdirt piece describes that lawmakers fixed none of the problems and actually exempts a lot of actual monopolies such as telecom (Example: AT&T and Verizon) and retail (Example: Walmart and Target): https://www.techdirt.com/2022/05/27/senator-klobuchar-fixed-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I teach antitrust to grads and undergrads. It doesn’t do anyone any good to call any of these firms “monopolies.” It’s not accurate, not for any of them. Nor was monopoly the issue in the Microsoft case (that was about bundling). There may be reasons to look at antitrust law and to change it with some of these firms and their behaviors in mind but “vertical monopoly” isn’t an accurate characterization of any of them.
When a company can loose money on a competiting company just to drive the competing company out of business; I call that a monopoly. No not monopolies like we had like the Bell telephone, but we have 2-3 huge companies that collude and stifle competition. Proving collusion is hard these days though. Too many fresh faced MBA's who are atheists. (I'm a Watch Repairer. I can't buy parts from The Swatch Group, or Reichmo…
AT&T and T-Mobile did not combine, that purchase was (one of the few mergers) blocked by the DOJ under the Obama administration.
T-Mobile did later (2020) buy Sprint, but it was in a far worse position economically than T-Mobile was in 2011 at the time of the attempted AT&T purchase.
Why can't Mozilla offer a a way to make a recurring donation, Patreon-style, or Github-style? It should be locked to specific projects though: Firefox, Thunderbird, MDN, experimental projects, etc. Of course introduce gold / platinum / titanium / etc tiers for corporate donations, along with donations from private persons. They are already a non-profit, making this tax-deductible would be a piece of cake.
The vertical monopolies enjoyed by tech behemoths are absurd. Ever since the Internet Explorer antitrust case [1] it should be clear that things like Apple disallowing other browsers in iOS or Google promoting its own sites in search results are illegal and anticompetitive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor... .
I teach antitrust to grads and undergrads. It doesn’t do anyone any good to call any of these firms “monopolies.” It’s not accurate, not for any of them. Nor was monopoly the issue in the Microsoft case (that was about bundling). There may be reasons to look at antitrust law and to change it with some of these firms and their behaviors in mind but “vertical monopoly” isn’t an accurate characterization of any of them.