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U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

nytimes.com

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Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#91

Post by pas »

Dalewyn wrote: post #40
roenxi wrote: post #8

Nvidia solved a hard problem and their competitors all failed. I spent years with an AMD card growing progressively more annoyed at their self-inflicted apparent inability to multiply matrices on demand. Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams. Hitting the only successful company in a difficult field with legal assaults is not the obvious path to…

>not the obvious path to success. It is if success is defined as deliberate failure. Personally, a lot of US government actions of the past few decades in hindsight do not look like they had the interests of America or Americans in mind.

Can you name a few examples please?

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#92

Post by jsnell »

roenxi wrote: post #68
kortilla wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need to intentionally structure a deal to avoid scrutiny and have it described that way, it implies what you really wanted was much worse. “We packed the goods in nondescript boxes to avoid scrutiny by the border guards…” Scrutiny isn’t something you need to avoid as a big company if you’re not fucking around. The lawyers are there to handle the scrutiny, not to hide stuff from it.

> If you need to intentionally structure a deal to avoid scrutiny and have it described that way, it implies what you really wanted was much worse. It doesn't. That is like saying that if someone structures their affairs to pay less taxes it implies that wanted to do something illegal. They had to choose some structure, they picked the safest and easiest one. In both the hypothetical tax case and the real MS case, I…

This is a funny discussion, because "structuring" has a very specific meaning when it comes to finance. It's about executing your financial transactions in a way that avoids regulatory scrutiny (for example sizing transactions such that they fall just under reporting thresholds).

Structuring is explicitly illegal in the US.

This is the point that vlovich123 was making, and given you totally missed it, it seems like you might not be familiar with what the term means in this context.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#93

Post by throwthrowuknow »

HWR_14 wrote: post #34
arvinsim wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that logic also apply to, say, Apple?

Apple doesn't control an entire industry. You can buy an Android phone and fully participate in the mobile phone world never talking to Apple. You cannot participate in the AI world without NVIDIA.

And why can’t you just use an AMD GPU? Is it because stores don’t sell them? Is it because motherboards don’t support them? Is it because you can’t rent one from a cloud provider? No, it’s because they don’t fucking work when you try to use them for ML.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#94

Post by AnthonyMouse »

vlovich123 wrote: post #88
pointlessone wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is spirit of the law ever a concern in the USA? I’m asking because it is in the EU and every US company seem to struggle with the concept if I am to judge by how they engage GDPR, DMA and similar regulations in the EU.

The US Constitution has largely been interpreted in a “spirit of the law” manner since the founding. Originalism has taken significant durable gains in terms of SCOTUS appointments since the 1980s; prior to that originalists had a good chance of changing their POV once appointed. I suspect similar viewpoints are reflected in the judge appointments as well. Letter of the law benefits the powerful because they can alwa…

> Letter of the law benefits the powerful because they can always stay ahead of legislative attempts to fix the letter of the law (or lobby to change the letter). Spirit of the law is much harder to corrupt.

This is precisely the opposite. "Spirit of the law" makes the rules squishy and indeterminate, providing opportunities for fancy lawyers to bend the result to their own interests.

"Letter of the law" often leads to harsh results when the law is drafted poorly, because if they wrote something dumb then you get something dumb instead of a judge rewriting the law to make people happy. But the people they're making happy are usually the powerful, so pick your poison.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#95

Post by roenxi »

jsnell wrote: post #92
roenxi wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you need to intentionally structure a deal to avoid scrutiny and have it described that way, it implies what you really wanted was much worse. It doesn't. That is like saying that if someone structures their affairs to pay less taxes it implies that wanted to do something illegal. They had to choose some structure, they picked the safest and easiest one. In both the hypothetical tax case and the real MS case, I…

This is a funny discussion, because "structuring" has a very specific meaning when it comes to finance. It's about executing your financial transactions in a way that avoids regulatory scrutiny (for example sizing transactions such that they fall just under reporting thresholds). Structuring is explicitly illegal in the US. This is the point that vlovich123 was making, and given you totally missed it, it seems like y…

Sorry for being unclear on this, I should have quoted. But I'm not, and never was, talking about vlovich123's point in any comment in this thread. I didn't have an opinion on what vlovich123 said.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#96

Post by maeln »

Seeing some of the comment here, you could make a conspiracy theory that NVidia/MS/OAI used their generative algorithm to write comment defending them on HN :p .

All jokes aside, I know that antitrust is not just about monopoly, but if we just focus on this part, it really does not matter if one company became a monopoly fair and square by just being better/smarter/luckier than everyone else, you still probably don't want it to be a monopoly. And making sure it still has competitor is usually beneficial in the long run. A monopoly might act "fair" for a long time (although it would be hard to know since you won't have anything to compare them with), but their power allow them to turn against the consumer whenever they want with little to no consequence. As an example, you can't really complain about an inquiry against NVidia, and then complain about their pricing and/or how hard it is to get some of their card (especially the one meant for training) because they don't care about you if you don't have a good relationship with them (and a lot of $$).

All in all, pretty sure this inquiry will lead nowhere, or just a slap on the wrist, as is usually the case. It is just a signal to those company to be careful and to avoid using their dominant position on one market to push themselves unfairly in another.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#97

Post by Synaesthesia »

null_investor wrote: post #79

People attribute great leadership to Satya, but to me it seems to be about be willing to fight with regulators, and funnily enough the regulators haven't been working so much recently. Just have a look at the size that Google, Microsoft, Meta others have got, not because they have a outstanding product (like Cuda), but because they can use their dominant market position to buy smaller businesses and monetize their pr…

Yes the US government is definitely assisting US tech companies, and their global monipoly. Look at how they went after Huawei.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#98

Post by eru »

vlovich123 wrote: post #18
roenxi wrote: post #8

Nvidia solved a hard problem and their competitors all failed. I spent years with an AMD card growing progressively more annoyed at their self-inflicted apparent inability to multiply matrices on demand. Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams. Hitting the only successful company in a difficult field with legal assaults is not the obvious path to…

The thing with monopoly laws is it doesn’t matter how you got into pole position. The point is that you’re illegally utilizing tangential benefits of the pole position to maintain that position as well as enter new markets. > including how the company’s software locks customers into using its chips, as well as how Nvidia distributes those chips to customers. The lock-in is probably a losing argument on technical meri…

> The thing with monopoly laws is it doesn’t matter how you got into pole position. The point is that you’re illegally utilizing tangential benefits of the pole position to maintain that position as well as enter new markets.

This depends on jurisdiction, and what judges you get.

Eg Standard Oil was slapped with anti-trust law, despite neither having a monopoly nor exploiting its market share like a monopoly. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#Legacy_and_critic... or https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-standard-oil-was-a-pr...

> Some economic historians have observed that Standard Oil was in the process of losing its monopoly at the time of its breakup in 1911. Although Standard had 90 percent of American refining capacity in 1880, by 1911, that had shrunk to between 60 and 65 percent because of the expansion in capacity by competitors.

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#99

Post by eru »

mike_hearn wrote: post #74
iforgotpassword wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because laws are always flawless and never contain any loopholes, and it has never happened ever that lawyers were specifically instructed by a company to find those loopholes and exploit them as hard as possible.

The idea of law as having loopholes is relevant for politicians, who are tasked with ensuring that the written law reflects their intent. It's not relevant for courts, regulators, people or companies, who are all tasked with following the law as actually written. For those people there is no "spirit" or "true law". The reason this is important is it's a sword that cuts both ways. It's always tempting to argue that wh…

> For those people there is no "spirit" or "true law".

Actually, there is. Many judges take various interpretations of the 'spirit' into account. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism for one example.

And if the courts use some 'spirit' guide them, companies and their lawyers better try and predict what that 'spirit' recommends.

> If they didn't write it down properly or the resulting compromise was a mess, that's on them, but a working legal system doesn't allow people to just blow off their written instructions and assume they know what was really meant.

Well, then by that definition the real life legal system of the US ain't working?

Re: U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

#100

Post by eru »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #49
roenxi wrote: post #8

Nvidia solved a hard problem and their competitors all failed. I spent years with an AMD card growing progressively more annoyed at their self-inflicted apparent inability to multiply matrices on demand. Nvidia had nothing to do with their failure, unless they had some sort of high-level mole in AMD's driver teams. Hitting the only successful company in a difficult field with legal assaults is not the obvious path to…

Some companies such as standard oil had extraordinarily effective vertically integrated monopolies. The issues came into play when they used their market dominance to secure things like rebate structures with rail roads and made agreements to buy up transit capacity at very favorable rates that left competitors at a serious disadvantage. A real question might be how Nvidia prioritizes capacity and delivery and pricin…

Standard oil wasn't a monopoly.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#Legacy_and_critic...

They even lost market share during the time they were alleged of having and exploiting a monopoly:

> Although Standard had 90 percent of American refining capacity in 1880, by 1911, that had shrunk to between 60 and 65 percent because of the expansion in capacity by competitors.

See https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-standard-oil-was-a-pr... for a more opinionated take.

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