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Where Warren’s Wrong

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Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#31

Post by apcragg »

anon0000 wrote: post #14

Noticeably absent from Warren's target list is Comcast. IMHO, they are more anti-trust than any of the tech companies she is targeting. Comcast also happens to be the 15th biggest donor to her campaign. https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/contributors...

Wow. Your post is so misleading it borders on outright lying. Those $31k contributions come entirely from individuals. Comcast the company did not donate any money to her. Conflating individual contributions with Corporate contributions is massively misleading. Comcast has 164k employees. Do you honestly expect that most employees of Corporations agree with the political goals and objectives of their parent companies?

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#32

Post by elicash »

chj wrote: post #22

The author is nitpicking. Warren may be wrong about the history of bing and google, but that's not really important. She's 100% right about Amazon, and the author conveniently forgot to mention. Most people in tech industry always strive to build monopoly and dominance. In their eyes, Warren's idea is of course insane. But viewing from another point, in order to protect competition and small businesses, her proposal…

Also, some would argue it's also good to protect democracy from any entity getting too powerful and having too much influence. None of this of course only applies to tech companies.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#33

Post by cm2187 »

chj wrote: post #22

The author is nitpicking. Warren may be wrong about the history of bing and google, but that's not really important. She's 100% right about Amazon, and the author conveniently forgot to mention. Most people in tech industry always strive to build monopoly and dominance. In their eyes, Warren's idea is of course insane. But viewing from another point, in order to protect competition and small businesses, her proposal…

Actually amazon is the one that I would say doesn't have a monopoly. It doesn't have a monopoly in the retail space (far from it), nor in the cloud hosting (let alone server hosting) business, nor in online streaming (music/tv).

Google on the other hand has close to a monopoly on search (and browsers). Facebook on social medias.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#34

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

maxxxxx wrote: post #10
philipodonnell wrote: post #7

I have to admit I'm a little taken aback by the focus on how the stated rationale is weak or doesn't fit every company equally while agreeing that there are real problems that would be addressed. Is there a word for this? Its almost nit-picking? Pedantry? Like dismissing someone who is fighting against anti-vaxxers because they didn't quote the most definitive study as rationale. Explanations of policy ideas aren't t…

I had the same impression. But this is how political discourse seems to work this day. Instead of making suggestions for improvement an idea gets dismissed completely and nothing happens as a result. Happened with Obamacare and also with the discussion about regulations. Instead of suggesting specific improvements it turns into a black and white debate without results.

I’m interested that many people seem to be under the impression that inaction is never the right solution.

If the choices are ”we must do something, even if it’s the wrong thing” (a fallacy) and doing nothing because we aren’t sure - I prefer the latter. Anyone with government experience should understand this.

In this case, the truth is Warren isn’t sure. No one is. This entire thing isn’t Standard Oil, it’s just a hollow campaign bulletin point to get her name used.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#35

Post by gimmeThaBeet »

> the next generation of great American tech companies can flourish. To do that, we need to stop this generation of big tech companies from throwing around their political power to shape the rules in their favor and throwing around their economic power to snuff out or buy up every potential competitor.

This is part I find interesting. If there is a difference between the titans of now vs old, its that they behave like Kronos, swallowing any potential threat for fear someone may disrupt them as they themselves had done to the original mammoths, not brushing off the threat they know is there, no matter how small.

But, on a separate note, I think that the current anti-trust philosophy isn't equipped to deal with companies whose business isn't driven by physical products, or behaves a certain way in highly competitive markets (i.e. Apple).

Matt Levine often talks about how practically, modern anti-trust in the US isn't there to regulate bigness, but protect consumers via promoting price competition.

I can see that they have a lot of power, and some of the effects that power can have, I just struggle to see how potentially impacting the way these businesses operate leads to better outcomes for consumers and citizens as customers.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#36

Post by _red »

chj wrote: post #22

The author is nitpicking. Warren may be wrong about the history of bing and google, but that's not really important. She's 100% right about Amazon, and the author conveniently forgot to mention. Most people in tech industry always strive to build monopoly and dominance. In their eyes, Warren's idea is of course insane. But viewing from another point, in order to protect competition and small businesses, her proposal…

The redefinition of the term 'monopoly' to just be 'large marketshare' is very dangerous.

However, as a bit of schadenfreude, its nice to see the leftist big-tech receive the unintended consequences of their beliefs.

Sadly, the realities is that they will just hire ex-regulators as 'consultants' to help enshrine their businesses into quasi-state protected monopolies.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#37

Post by swinnipeg »

philipodonnell wrote: post #7

I have to admit I'm a little taken aback by the focus on how the stated rationale is weak or doesn't fit every company equally while agreeing that there are real problems that would be addressed. Is there a word for this? Its almost nit-picking? Pedantry? Like dismissing someone who is fighting against anti-vaxxers because they didn't quote the most definitive study as rationale. Explanations of policy ideas aren't t…

I disagree. I think Ben's main point is that regulation needs to be a vector, while Warren is proposing a scalar.

He agrees with her for raising this, and does think that some regulation should be in place, but sufficiently understanding the underlying nature of the problem is important to do less harm than good.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#38

Post by yathaid »

jmrobertson wrote: post #24

Reading her stuff, it seems like proposals to separate Apple from the App store indicate a total lack of awareness about InfoSec, and at best a poorly researched policy proposal from a technical standpoint. The only reason the App Store isn't a simmering cesspool of malware is that Apple heavily moderates what gets on there, and Google does somewhat the same. That doesn't mean that there perhaps isn't a less MSFT + I…

It's not Apple's oversight of the app store that is the problem Warren is targeting, it is the participation. Apple can either take 30% from Spotify or have iTunes, not both. Similar argument for Amazon and Amazon Basics.

The article does raise an interesting point though about not thinking of these companies as "tech"; the Amazon argument can be applied to any private label I guess, hence the point about unintended consequences.

It is an interesting concept though, almost like the logical extension of the net neutrality argument. DirecTV, HBO and ATT merging would be something that directly runs foul of this. You either get to provide the platform (be an ISP) or be a content producer, not both.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#39

Post by almost_usual »

chj wrote: post #22

The author is nitpicking. Warren may be wrong about the history of bing and google, but that's not really important. She's 100% right about Amazon, and the author conveniently forgot to mention. Most people in tech industry always strive to build monopoly and dominance. In their eyes, Warren's idea is of course insane. But viewing from another point, in order to protect competition and small businesses, her proposal…

We’re going to see more and more defensive content come out and it’s only going to help Warren. Strategically she’s positioned herself well, she could easily be the most publicized democratic candidate because of this topic alone.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#40

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

dnautics wrote: post #19
monster2control wrote: post #4

While I agree to some extend with the author, he too is making large leaps without truly backing them up. He's fighting over semantics. While Warren may be wrong in her history, she's not truly wrong in the results. Amazon does exactly what she says, Amazon sees a Marketplace item is selling really well, so they start to sell it too at or slightly cheaper. The reason people tend to use Google over Yelp as in his exam…

It wasn't Microsoft's meddling with the browser that was it's major anticompetitive sin; it was it's control over the bootloader. https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ Yet here we are, and windows is not at all the dominant consumer os, and is not the dominant general purpose os any longer.

>Yet here we are, and windows is not at all the dominant consumer os, and is not the dominant general purpose os any longer.

Are you sure about that?

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