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Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

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Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#101

Post by cratermoon »

CSMastermind wrote: post #60
gumby wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ship has sailed. “Tech” is simply a positioning or branding term. Meta and Amazon are businesses that depend on developing technology (so are true tech companies as much as NVIDIA or Apple) but nowadays “tech” merely means at best “online”. Most so-called “tech” companies don’t actually develop any technology at all, often being less technical than a non-“tech” company like, say, State Farm. The term has become…

My personal test for this is: what percentage of the company's total value is comprised of the intellectual property their software source code holds. The higher the percentage the more of a "tech" company you are - the lower the more "traditional" you are. No company will ever be 100% - all companies have other assets that are worth money and even a company that sells software as its main product might have lots of…

You may find that Amazon would fall into the "traditional" on this scale.

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#102

Post by cratermoon »

scarface_74 wrote: post #75
CPLX wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important word in the phrase is “big” not “tech”. The problem with these firms is they have too much concentrated power, which they obtained through anti-competitive practices that are now cemented into the business model. This is bad for society and it’s imperative on society to break up these entities and the power they wield as it’s incompatible with a democratic society.

So how do you propose to break them up. And which one has a “monopoly” to the point you can’t choose an alternative? People are using their own free will to use their products

Lina Khan explains it all: Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...>

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#103

Post by cratermoon »

scarface_74 wrote: post #93
CPLX wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So how do you propose to break them up. Court order, legislation. > And which one has a “monopoly” to the point you can’t choose an alternative? Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, for starters. By the way that’s not the definition of a monopoly. > People are using their own free will to use their products From an artificially constrained set of options. Anti competitive behavior has clear definable negative outcomes,…

> Court order, legislation. That’s not what I meant. What would a break up for them look like? For instance AT&T was broken up into the baby bells. > From an artificially constrained set of options There is no other option for phones? Social media? Computers? Online commerce? And how is it “artificial”? > Or, if it’s easier for you, you can just understand that organizations that wield massive amounts of power over t…

There's a little book by James Williams titled Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy that I highly recommend. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/stand-out-of-our-light/...> If you're not up for a whole book, however short, Ian Leslie's "The scientists who make apps addictive" is a great primer.https://www.economist.com/1843/2016/10/20/the-scientists-who...>

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#104

Post by acituan »

speak_plainly wrote: post #56

It’s not a popular opinion, but I think the negative impacts of social media are overstated and unconvincing. You can get a big dopamine hit from meditation or as a response to stress but you don’t see kids running to Buddhist monasteries in droves or rushing to the stress of public speaking. It’s probably not healthy to live your entire life online, which is what youth are encouraged to do by everyone around them, a…

> You can get a big dopamine hit from meditation or as a response to stress but you don’t see kids running to Buddhist monasteries in droves or rushing to the stress of public speaking.

Dopamine obviously is a shorthand for a more complex psychological phenomena. While having their own failure modes, meditation or public speaking are not entirely ego-syntonic endeavors, there is a continuous contact with reality that puts your identity into question. Whereas social media has a near perfect psychological profile on its users and manufactures a purpose built personal “reality” that fits with their self concept - however dysfunctional it may be. There may be still frustration but it is still conforming to the user, because the challenge is optimized to drive engagement, not to make the person a better person through contact with reality.

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#105

Post by joe_the_user »

lr4444lr wrote: post #44

Gonna risk the downvotes and qualify that I am a parent who keeps social media away from my kids: what big tech is peddling is IMHO not on the level of addiction, carcinogenicity and all cause mortality as smoking. It's up to me to raise a mentally resilient kid, part of which is limiting their screen time, but it is not something I cut out altogether. It's not like I have some special parenting power to protect thei…

I downvoted you specifically for the "risk the downvotes" line. I'm on HN a fair amount and there's never been anything like a strong sentiment that parent should expose their to social media as much as possible. Stop the posturing.

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#106

Post by pharrington »

lr4444lr wrote: post #44

Gonna risk the downvotes and qualify that I am a parent who keeps social media away from my kids: what big tech is peddling is IMHO not on the level of addiction, carcinogenicity and all cause mortality as smoking. It's up to me to raise a mentally resilient kid, part of which is limiting their screen time, but it is not something I cut out altogether. It's not like I have some special parenting power to protect thei…

The threat model is different. An apt analogy is the difference between compromising a network by through software exploits, vs compromising a network via social engineering.

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#107

Post by scarface_74 »

cratermoon wrote: post #103
scarface_74 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Court order, legislation. That’s not what I meant. What would a break up for them look like? For instance AT&T was broken up into the baby bells. > From an artificially constrained set of options There is no other option for phones? Social media? Computers? Online commerce? And how is it “artificial”? > Or, if it’s easier for you, you can just understand that organizations that wield massive amounts of power over t…

There's a little book by James Williams titled Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy that I highly recommend. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/stand-out-of-our-light/... > If you're not up for a whole book, however short, Ian Leslie's "The scientists who make apps addictive" is a great primer. https://www.economist.com/1843/2016/10/20/the-scientists-who... >

And you still also haven’t come up with a reasonable way to “break up the BigTech”. If you ban the sale of apps with in game purchases that still doesn’t break up tech

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#108

Post by scarface_74 »

cratermoon wrote: post #102
scarface_74 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you propose to break them up. And which one has a “monopoly” to the point you can’t choose an alternative? People are using their own free will to use their products

Lina Khan explains it all: Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado... >

Amazons share of commerce is 37% and it’s share of commerce is even smaller.

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#109

Post by moneywoes »

> Big Tech spent more on federal lobbying from 2010-202 than the nation’s largest banks from 2000-2010 or Big Tobacco from 1996-1999 Since 2000, the four largest Big Tech companies – Amazon, Apple, Alphabet/Google, and Facebook – have spent $465,026,307 on federal lobbying. $434,474,221 of that total has come since 2010. Additionally, nine groups that the four Big Tech companies fund have spent $98,061,827 on federal lobbying since 2000. $80,400,019 of that total has come since 2010. Big Tech’s federal lobbying total eclipses that of other major toxic industries: Since 2010, the nation’s largest opioid manufacturers have spent $282,292,834 on federal lobbying. America’s seven largest banks in the leadup to the financial crisis spent $194,193,858 on federal lobbying from 2000 to 2010. From 1996 to 1999, the nation’s largest tobacco companies spent $155,750,398 on federal lobbying, or $261,306,596 in 2021 dollars.

Very interested, where does this money go?

Re: Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco

#110

Post by genmud »

chinchilla2020 wrote: post #68
paxys wrote: post #32

Apple sells devices and consumer services. Microsoft sells an OS and Office suite to businesses. Amazon is a retail marketplace and a cloud operator. Nvidia sells graphics cards. Adobe sells graphics software. Netflix makes movies and TV. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments all design chipsets. Salesforce sells CRM. Oracle, IBM, Cisco and the like all sell various business services. Go down the list of big tec…

Thank you. I've always been bothered by this lack of seperation. The 'dirty' parts of tech: * media * social media * PII repackaging and unethical sourcing * targeted ads Neutral or clean parts: * e-commerce * business automation * technical and educational information

But all of these businesses have dirty, neutral and clean heavily commingled.

Meta is an ad company and has a device business and happen to use social media to sell ads.

Amazon is rapidly shifting to be an ad company, who happens to use an e-commerce platform to place ads. They bought a healthcare company who collects massive amounts of PII and provide affiliate programs which funnel traffic into their ads and marketplace.

Apple, Microsoft and Google all have ad units that are major contributors to their overall profitability.

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