Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon • Hacker News Board

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#111

Post by ApolloFortyNine » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 3:29 PM UTC

jsutton wrote: post #35

travisoneill1 wrote: post #19

What is the alleged anti-competitive behavior? The article doesn't mention it. It sounds like she is calling for their breakup merely for being big and powerful, and if that were cause enough to break up an entity we would logically start with the government.

For starters, Amazon provided a marketplace platform for third parties to sell goods. They then gathered data on which items sold the best, created their own line of products based off this data, and crushed their customers-turned-competitors using their massive advantage in economies of scale.

Looking at the vast majority of Amazon Basics goods, I just don't see how they would have needed to use marketplace data to come up with what products to sell.

Batteries, clothes (lots of clothes), backpacks, these are all products that are cheap to produce and where brand loyalty plays a large role. People generally trust the name Amazon. It's not rocket science to realize people want cheap clothes and batteries.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#112

Post by will_brown » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 3:30 PM UTC

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #16

To what end? "illegally undermine competition?" She is inferring that Google/Amazon/Facebook are committing anti-trust crimes? What proof does she have? >Companies would be barred from transferring or sharing users’ data with third parties. That can be done without breaking them up. I don't think she realizes that splitting up amazon and amazon basics will do little to nothing. There are other things that can be done…

>I don't think she realizes that splitting up amazon and amazon basics will do little to nothing.

I think amazon : amazon basics is a great example of antitrust/unfair monopoly the same as google search : almost all consumer facing google products.

Both amazon and google search are the dominate online market leaders in their respective categories. In amazons case they unfairly use their market position to begin offering amazon private label products on their platform. They know what users are looking for, spend the most on, and they can give their own products dominate positions in the UI. In the case of google they too unfairly use their position as a market leader against their own customers (advertisers), so say you are a hotel booking platform and spend $x with google, google knows the market (searches, clicks, etc...) so google launches their own hotel booking, gives their in-house service priority in search results over existing market incumbents and self bids on google search advertising for key industry terms to drive up costs of advertisers to keep in business.

It’s kind of like standard oil buying up the railroads so they owned the supply chain and no other oil could be moved. It’s unfairly using your market position, not to compete, but to be anti competitive to the detriment of consumers.

I’d like to see the tech giants prevented from unfairly using their market dominance to stifle competition. As we saw with the break up of standard oil...competition is good for consumers.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#113

Post by fluffycat » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 3:31 PM UTC

logicchains wrote: post #94

Shivetya wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She has no proof, she does not need any. this is typical politician using FUD to scare the populace into letting them take actions which in the end only go to bolster their own campaign coffers and personal riches. With the upcoming Presidential campaign you can expect politicians tripping over each other using jealously and fear to get people to plea for action. Amazon is not a Standard Oil by any measure as they ha…

>Google is, well google. I don't have to use their search engine if I don't want to. When threads like this come up I always wonder how the engineers who worked on Bing must feel. I'd feel pretty disheartened if people had such a low opinion of my product that my competitor was considered a monopoly.

I think Bing engineers laugh uncontrollably when people at HN claims DuckDuckGo is a search engine.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#114

Post by SlowRobotAhead » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 3:31 PM UTC

logicchains wrote: post #17

thr_w wrote: post #3

Is breaking them up really a priority? What benefit would that have that we couldn't achieve via properly taxing and regulating them in the first place?

It would help give China a fairer chance in the AI race. Due to economies of scale and the sheer amount of resources they command, Facebook and Google are able to conduct research that would otherwise be incredibly expensive (e.g. training AlphaZero), and offer incredibly high salaries to lure in researchers. Apparently 80% of all machine learning engineers work at Google or Facebook! Breaking this concentration of m…

> It would help give China a fairer chance in the AI race.

Interesting platform for a US presidential candidate to promote regulations against US companies to promote world corperate “fairness”.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#115

Post by pmcollins » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 3:33 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #58

This is an excellent goal, and Paul Graham has articulated the reasoning pretty clearly: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/886953410356011008 > Here's how to explain to people the distinction between fighting poverty and fighting economic inequality. If you're fighting poverty, you might say "Let's have universal health care." If you're fighting economic inequality, you have to say "Let's have universal health care. A…

So if a very capable, a hard working, effective person is able to increase their wealth by 20x, and in so doing increases my wealth by 2x without my doing anything, you'd be in favor of using the power of the state to prevent this from happening because it would increase inequality?

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#116

Post by velcrovan » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 3:34 PM UTC

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #16

To what end? "illegally undermine competition?" She is inferring that Google/Amazon/Facebook are committing anti-trust crimes? What proof does she have? >Companies would be barred from transferring or sharing users’ data with third parties. That can be done without breaking them up. I don't think she realizes that splitting up amazon and amazon basics will do little to nothing. There are other things that can be done…

There is a case for splitting Amazon and AWS.

The point of anti-trust laws is to break up monopolies because they represent a massive and dangerous concentration of market and political power in the hands of the few. You don't need evidence of any specific crime to do it.

You can say you'd prefer it not be that way. But it's a provision of existing law, with precedents. To really argue for your preference you'd need to show how those applications didn't turn out well.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#117

Post by giarc » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 3:34 PM UTC

deegles wrote: post #103

I used to work at Amazon and the idea of spinning out Marketplace just seems unworkable. It's like saying that Microsoft should spin out Xbox... they are 100% dependent on each other.

The easiest target would be for Amazon to spin out AWS.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#118

Post by throwaway5752 » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 3:34 PM UTC

0815test wrote: post #40

throwaway5752 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. It's to split Amazon retail and AWS. Not that I'm opposed to that or not, but it is the most obvious. If you look at templates of prior antitrust action, you'd probably see roadmaps of splitting ad presentation/platform from ad brokering/targeting in all of the companies mentioning.

AWS has plenty of viable competitors. They should split Amazon-the-website and Amazon-the-supplier-logistics-and-physical-retail-company, and force Amazon-the-website to accept listings from competitors fairly and openly.

I think you're getting downvoted because the "AWS has plenty of viable competitors" is not really material - it's just that Amazon gets anticompetitive advantages as a combined entity.

And that's really a shame, because you're also dead on about the logistics/product point. I almost mentioned that, but it's complicated by competition from Walmart, Target, et al. Upvoted you on that basis. That similar to my point of "ad distribution / ad sourcing" split on FB and Google.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#119

Post by rayiner » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 3:38 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #76

all2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that also means conglomerates like GE, or Raytheon, or Lockheed Martin... There is a place in the world for massive technologically focused organizations.

Er, what is the place in the world for them? Defense contractors should be ground to bits.

This view misunderstands the nature of modern science and R&D. Interesting R&D is shockingly expensive, and you need mega-corps to do it. The cost of a new fab is $10 billion now, and it's been increasing exponentially. The 747 cost $7.5 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars to develop. The 787 cost almost $30 billion. The future of science and technology is not Edison inventing the lightbulb in his private lab. It's mega-corps doing mega-R&D.

This used to be less true in CS, but that's changing due to machine learning. Google has a huge leg-up in self-driving-car R&D because of the enormous amount of data it has from Google services. In "hard" R&D, even "startups" are spending the kind of capital that previously used to only be in the province of established conglomerates.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#120

Post by rubinelli » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 3:39 PM UTC

Planet Money looks prescient again, with a three-part series on how antitrust rules evolved in the US, and how they are changing in response to Big Tech:

* https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/15/695131832/anti...

* https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/20/696342011/anti...

* https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/anti...