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Congress is going to throw the kitchen sink at big tech

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Re: Congress is going to throw the kitchen sink at big tech

#331

Post by rdtwo »

zer00eyz wrote: post #109
rdtwo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but if the manufacturer went kaput or the store was negligent in sourcing beef you could sue. Both of these are a problem with amazon. If target sold Chinese cribs that killed kids for example you can bet folks would sue target and not the manufacturer

The idea of negligent sourcing is interesting... you would have to prove that they knowingly bought and sold a bad product. The idea of "blame the retailer" is, to a degree, protectionist. Your solving the problem of "can't sue the chinese manufacturer" by blaming the retailer. The reality of the world we live in has changed so drastically since those laws were made that we should probably revisit those. Blaming reta…

You don’t want a lot of fly by night foreign vendors just dumping unsafe goods. It’s a good idea to just eliminate them by making it too expensive to deal with liability claims for anyone that resells that crap.

Re: Congress is going to throw the kitchen sink at big tech

#332

Post by betwixthewires »

machello13 wrote: post #330
betwixthewires wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally I'd agree with you, but I've been thinking on this for a while and when you look at history this is not the case. Prominent examples are Southwestern Bell and Standard Oil. The elected officials in the US government are happy to take campaign contributions and play the game and let the monopolies run wild, but when their behaviors threaten the monopoly of power the US government has or threatens political st…

I think the problem there is the assumption that the US government of today will behave the same as the government of 1911 or 1982.

Well, you have to make an assumption either way. I'd say it's more likely they'll do what they've done in the past than not, particularly where the status quo of power structures is threatened.

Re: Congress is going to throw the kitchen sink at big tech

#333

Post by candiodari »

bobthepanda wrote: post #287
andreilys wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't an international tech co just be able to acquire domestic companies and/or launch products at a significant loss to gain market share in the US? For example, break up Amazon and you now create an opening for Alibaba to expand into the US. Spending billions in order to get customers to shift to Alibaba instead of Amazon.

This is probably overblown if only because practice has borne out that the Asian platform model has ported very poorly to the US. Americans don't seem to be interested in using massive platform apps that contain the kitchen sink; WeChat is available but not popular, same for LINE, and Messenger never successfully became that. Right now the most successful overseas strategy for a software company has been Tencent's ga…

Euhm ... tiktok ? In US and EU.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1100836/number-of-us-tik...

Re: Congress is going to throw the kitchen sink at big tech

#334

Post by biztos »

crazygringo wrote: post #326
Terretta wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonderful to academics? Yes, academics study what is, but at any given moment there are prescriptive rules and norms for what should be, Elements of Style if you will: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription Or even if you won’t: https://www.chronicle.com/article/50-years-of-stupid-grammar... Such take downs are often lamenting a lack of rule following in the style guides! “What’s wrong is that the gram…

> at any given moment there are prescriptive rules and norms for what should be But according to who? That's an entirely serious question. Because different "authorities" disagree about the rules and norms, and on top of that people disagree on who the "authorities" are or should be. That's the whole point.

> But according to who?

Whom.

;-)

Re: Congress is going to throw the kitchen sink at big tech

#335

Post by mucholove »

kmeisthax wrote: post #298
bobthepanda wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably overblown if only because practice has borne out that the Asian platform model has ported very poorly to the US. Americans don't seem to be interested in using massive platform apps that contain the kitchen sink; WeChat is available but not popular, same for LINE, and Messenger never successfully became that. Right now the most successful overseas strategy for a software company has been Tencent's ga…

>Americans don't seem to be interested in using massive platform apps that contain the kitchen sink I mean, Facebook's app is basically exactly that.

Dude. It’s a failed kitchen sink. We Chat was both my bank and my Amazon. I kept money on it and was the best way to go to the store. Heck—I even used WeChat as my Uber (Didi) because I didn’t have a Chinese card and the in-app WeChat app balance could pay for my ride.

Re: Congress is going to throw the kitchen sink at big tech

#336

Post by daniel-cussen »

majormajor wrote: post #180
wintermutestwin wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I should go back and read up on it more, but I thought Bell was the poster child for the breakup of a monopoly creating a multi-headed hydra problem. Also, wasn't Microsoft a huge waste of taxpayer time and money? AFAIK, Gates got away with his monopolistic practices and has since been recasting himself as a societal boon. Despite any possible gains society could gain by breaking them up, it seems like a hercul…

Microsoft never got broken up so it certainly didn't teach us anything about breaking companies up not being useful. We'll never know what would've happened had they been. It might tell us that our laws are too weak, though. Even if we reduce the story of Bell to "they got split up, then Southwestern Bell/Cingular/AT&T and Verizon gobbled up the rest of the others slowly" then we can see a big win: the n broken-up co…

> One interesting side-note I happened across recently was that Rockefeller's peak wealth was after Standard Oil was broken up.

According to whom? And compared to what? According to what I read the man had (from memory) 24 million at the time of his death, which seems so bizarre. The problem is the accounting is not only difficult, but that the richer you are, the harder it is to account for all of it, and the more expensive it is to do so. It's not like a regular Joe who can just check his wallet or banking app. By the time you've audited your own wealth, as a billionaire, you've lost millions of dollars. The cost of accounting impacts accounting.

Re: Congress is going to throw the kitchen sink at big tech

#337

Post by bobthepanda »

andreilys wrote: post #316
bobthepanda wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably overblown if only because practice has borne out that the Asian platform model has ported very poorly to the US. Americans don't seem to be interested in using massive platform apps that contain the kitchen sink; WeChat is available but not popular, same for LINE, and Messenger never successfully became that. Right now the most successful overseas strategy for a software company has been Tencent's ga…

Not sure how you were able to miss TikTok which has absolutely blown every other tech co out of the water with respect to stickiness and engagement.

ByteDance hasn't made substantial acquisitions since the launch of TikTok and it's not clear how they would leverage their current product's popularity into other domains.

Re: Congress is going to throw the kitchen sink at big tech

#338

Post by bobthepanda »

candiodari wrote: post #333
bobthepanda wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably overblown if only because practice has borne out that the Asian platform model has ported very poorly to the US. Americans don't seem to be interested in using massive platform apps that contain the kitchen sink; WeChat is available but not popular, same for LINE, and Messenger never successfully became that. Right now the most successful overseas strategy for a software company has been Tencent's ga…

Euhm ... tiktok ? In US and EU. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1100836/number-of-us-tik...

Responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27495441

Re: Congress is going to throw the kitchen sink at big tech

#339

Post by stephenhuey »

crazygringo wrote: post #324
stephenhuey wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those 5 boroughs are pretty unusual compared to a majority of the USA. There are about 5,000 towns in the USA with more than 5,000 people and Wal-Mart has about 5,000 stores with $340 billion in grocery sales. Kroger and Costco both have over $100 billion in annual revenue with over 3,000 stores between them. Wal-Mart has over 40% of grocery stores in the country and these 3 stores together have over 70%. https://www…

Your statistics aren't adding up. There are 38,000+ grocery stores in the US. There are less than 5,000 Wal-Marts. So if Wal-Mart is the largest grocery store, it's still less than 15% market share. Kroger has 2,800, and Costco has a little over 500. The overall picture is clear: the long tail of supermarkets is long , and even the largest grocery chains command only a small percentage of overall market share.

I did not downvote you, but I see why you were confused. I should have clarified, but one of the links said total grocery sales revenue is $750 billion, so that's how I was calculating what fraction of the market Wal-Mart and other stores have. All those tiny grocery stores in dense urban areas account for much smaller slices of the revenue pie.

Re: Congress is going to throw the kitchen sink at big tech

#340

Post by int_19h »

hardtke wrote: post #193
bogwog wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why the DOD/FTC/whatever can't/won't impose specific restrictions on companies in order to correct anti-trust issues? That seems a lot less drastic and risky than a break-up. For example, if Apple is forcing developers to use their payments SDK to collect 30%, why can't a government agency just force them to stop? Maybe there was a long official investigation by antitrust regulators, and that kicked off a lo…

Being large is not illegal. Having a monopoly in a specific product is not illegal. The standard by which the antitrust officials judge companies is whether the company controls a sufficient part of the market such that the consumer is harmed. The problem with the current regulations with respect to Google/Facebook is that their products are "free" to the "consumer," and free can't be harmful (harm is higher prices).…

To be more specific, the standard now is "whether the consumer is harmed" - which is notoriously hard to prove. It used to be "whether the competition is hampered" - which is much easier to prove, hence why anti-trust was much more aggressive back then. And why big biz gradually lobbied the new standard through.
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