Whoops. Guess she won't be winning then...
If, as usual, people are voting heavily against their own interests and more according to the lobbyist propaganda fed by economics 101 professors, then you are likely on point.
Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
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Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#172If there has ever been a monopoly, those 3 companies are it. I wont speak for social media and search, but Amazon has a complete stranglehold on retail in the United States. People keep saying 'retail is dead', thats bullshit, Amazon has a monopolistic stranglehold on the selling of all goods. If that weren't the case, small shop brick and mortar shopping would still be a thing.
Apparently no one around here has ever heard of Standard Oil.
Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#173This is a really interesting conversation but I really want to read the full proposal. As many have noted, what about AWS? Does Apple's App Store count as a platform? What does the data clause mean? Etc.
Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#174There's precedent to this in the USA. The US Government once passed regulations that caused one of the largest companies in America to break up into three smaller companies. Today those, three companies are entirely independent, employ over 400,000 people combined, and have a combined net work of over $400B. Those companies are Boeing Aircraft (153k employees, $244B market value), United Technologies (202k employees,…
But the companies will all still have the same owners. So one wonders if splitting them actually helps with anything?
I don’t know about “help”, but it will still change something - over time the different management teams will diverge (in some sense), even if the shareholders stay mostly the same.
Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#175Google/Facebook/Amazon have the power to push any startup competition out of the market in ways that are hard to even enumerate. Think about all of the services, devices, and standards that they control. Watching the fanboys defend their favorite tech giant is incredible. These companies are not behaving in the markets or people's best interest and they are way too big, at a scale that dwarfs most of the worlds organ…
As long as those services are profitable and they can outcompete startups then there’s nothing illegal or wrong about that. There’s no right that startups need to survive or have bias to succeed.
That really depends on how you interpret the nuance of antitrust law.
In the past we've taken a harder stance on giants like this and as a matter of precedence we can do it again.
Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#176Nitpicking here, but in Warren’s post she writes:
> Google couldn’t smother competitors by demoting their products on Google Search.
Isn’t this already illegal?
Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the exact issue. The DOJ's Antitrust Criminal Enforcement Division breaks up the companies by making an argument that's then directly contradicted by the DOJ's Merger Enforcement Division's (very outdated) policy on approving mergers. From the Merger Enforcement Guidelines[1] (last updated in 1997): > By definition, non-horizontal mergers involve firms that do not operate in the same market. It necessarily fo…
Amazon and Google do operate in several of the same markets. Amazon sells Kindle/Fire devices. Google sells Android phones. Amazon does product search. Google has a product search engine.
Antitrust enforcement focuses on the "primary market" of the entities. Google's primary market is advertising and Amazon's primary market is retail products. The DOJ does consider the potential anti-competitive impact on tertiary markets the two entities operate in but it wouldn't be a barrier to the hypothetical merger because those markets have plenty of other competitors.
Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#178> The key components of the Warren plan include passing legislation that would designate companies with annual global revenue above $25 billion that provide marketplace, exchange, or third-party connectivity as “platform utilities” and prohibit those companies from owning participants on their platforms.
As a Googler, speaking for myself, this seems like an interesting idea that could positively impact the tech scene.
Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#179This 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?
If you think the debate is purely about relative wealth, you are misunderstanding most of it.
But even still: relative wealth distribution getting too extremely unequal has negative ramifications for any society, regardless of the absolute wealth. But again: that is NOT the issue in this case.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/anti... for more perspective, a bunch of discussion about antitrust issues in big tech and NONE, ZERO, NADA of it is about wealth and money in itself.
Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon
#180If there has ever been a monopoly, those 3 companies are it. I wont speak for social media and search, but Amazon has a complete stranglehold on retail in the United States. People keep saying 'retail is dead', thats bullshit, Amazon has a monopolistic stranglehold on the selling of all goods. If that weren't the case, small shop brick and mortar shopping would still be a thing.
Yeah no one cares about monopolies anymore. But how exactly do you split up a search engine for instance?