91–100 of 212 posts
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-...
How the hell are Walmart and Target, stark competitors in the same space, both monopolies?
Imagine how awful if we had 5 or 10 monopolies in the same market!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Microsoft can use Chromium backend for Edge than so can Mozilla, but here they are complaining that Google needs to allow them to compete. Geezus Mozilla really is something special, and not in a good way.
Why does the world need another Chromium reskin? What's the point of a Firefox that's just Chrome? How is it competing to slap your brand on top of a competitor's product like you're reselling wholesale electronics from an overseas manufacturer? Look at Edge's market share and explain to me how Mozilla is going to deliver a better Chrome reskin than Microsoft with a tiny fraction of the budget.
Mozilla was in "corporations should be able to do whatever they want" camp when something else was in question. reap what you sow
What something else? Be more specific
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-...
It's worse than you think. The definition of a Covered Platform is so overbroad that basically if you allow any kind of user interaction on your website (or OPERATING SYSTEM!) then yours is a covered platform. So imagine you run a restaurant and allow for a customer feedback form that is visible on the website... congratulations, you've now become a covered platform and are obliged to allow other people to sell produ…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worse than you think. The definition of a Covered Platform is so overbroad that basically if you allow any kind of user interaction on your website (or OPERATING SYSTEM!) then yours is a covered platform. So imagine you run a restaurant and allow for a customer feedback form that is visible on the website... congratulations, you've now become a covered platform and are obliged to allow other people to sell produ…
Doesn't the bill text also have thresholds that need to be met (such as revenue, user quantity, etc) for you to be subject to enforcement?
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.
> At trial, the district court ruled that Microsoft's actions constituted unlawful monopolization under Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed most of the district court's judgments. > I teach antitrust to grads and undergrads. Consider updating the curriculum? My understanding is that the bundling was actionable because they were considered a monop…
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Doesn't the bill text also have thresholds that need to be met (such as revenue, user quantity, etc) for you to be subject to enforcement?
Does that make it any better? "Oh, hey, here's this absolutely horrible law, but don't worry, it only applies if you're successful."
You know what you call a small cap monopoly?
Not a monopoly.
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Techdirt/Copia Institute is a lobbyist which is sponsored by Google. Mike Masnick reads like a Google public policy playbook, because that's what he's copying from.
Any evidence that Google pays masnick or techdirt?
EDIT: This version of the disclosure is still up: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/trade_association_...
Note that the Google Public Policy Team's explicit purpose is to influence laws to be favorable to the company. Paying "think tanks", lobbyists, and political action groups is explicitly about avoiding government regulation for Google, as Mike is doing here.
1) Does anybody have a digestible summary of what the the AICOA actually does and how this law might be abused? In this article they glossed over what effect they think it might have, but I don’t think they simply spelled out what the law actually is, or went over any possible unintended consequences. 2) Whether or not Mozilla’s opinion here is right is something I’m not quite sure about, but what I’m sure about is t…
What do "woke politics" have to do with Mozilla's failure? What is woke about that company to you in particular? Their political leanings are basically unchanged dating back to before Chrome even existed.
My main issue is them getting involved in them supporting censorship, deplatforming wrong-thinkers, and more nonsense. Plenty of articles about this here: https://reclaimthenet.org/?s=mozilla
> What do "woke politics" have to do with Mozilla's failure?
1) The more time and effort they spend focusing on non-technical issues is time away from the one thing that matters.
2) Also, the more they appear to be favoring certain political views, the fewer conservatives, libertarians, centrists, etc may want to use them. When a company starts favoring one political side over another and loses its appearance of non-bias, especially when it concerns information flow, it's hard to trust them again. DuckDuckGo made the same fatal flaw of trying to be explicit about bias and though there's some noise in the stats, it looks like their search results have peaked as well. Without as many users, you can't progress nearly as quickly.
> Their political leanings are basically unchanged dating back to before Chrome even existed.
I'm not sure, but I can't remember them supporting the censorship stuff until a bit more recently. Even when they were pretty gay friendly and whatever, they never supported censorship as far as I can remember.
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-...
How the hell are Walmart and Target, stark competitors in the same space, both monopolies?
IMHO appropriate laws should be applied to any company which directly or indirectly affects some "high" threshold of people. Or another way to think about it would be if it's practically impossible to enter a market even with a decent start capital because of it being dominated by a small number of mega cooperation it's not (much) different then a monopoly.
What does it matter if there are 1 or 5 companies which effectively undermine competition in a harmful way. It's either way harmful.