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Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

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421–430 of 735 posts

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#421
This is one reason I still support Bernie over Warren, his ideas are more sound, and he has a purpose. I feel like Warren can come off fringe on a lot of things, and is really just trying to make herself appear progressive, she tosses out ideas into the progressive ether to see which ones will 'stick' per se and drops others. Some days she sounds on point and very intelligent, and some days she does shit like this and feels completely out of touch.

She's also very self-serving and has no sense of loyalty to other left-leaning politicians - else she might've backed Bernie from day one in 2016, instead of play things 'safe'. Her playing safe hurt her career more than anything else ever will in my opinion.

That aside, I don't think breaking up google, fb, amazon will do much...if I were to break them up, I think the only thing I'd do is perhaps have them split their cloud services from their other offerings, and maybe media services -- youtube | amazon prime video, but it's small potatoes.

I think a MUCH bigger issue is media consolodation -- when 1-2 CEO's control 80% of the media and thus the 'message' that people see, that's a much scarier proposition.

For example Sinclair Broadcasting I think owns something like 90% of local broadcasting stations now - and they send talking points and control what newscasters say in order to get political messages out - it's basically propaganda that they control, and it's very powerful esp in the wrong hands.

Comcast/nbc/hulu, att/time warner, disney/fox/espn/etc are all companies that probably are more dangerous than google/fb/amazon (w/ the exception that FB really needs to get it's privacy shit together or just die...), and if you're going after big tech why not Apple/Microsoft, Microsoft is as big if not bigger than it was when they had their antitrust case, Apple is the biggest company in the world ? Maybe we should also have a 25BN = auto-breakup for banks, since banks caused the last great recession, and are obviously dangerous when they get too big to fail.

Or maybe instead of breaking up companies we just figure out ways to tax them better -- esp. on speculation and at the investment layer, so that the money they make that 'you - the politician' feel they shouldn't be making is used for the benefit of society as well as enrichment of the CEO and their ilk.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#422
post #401

I ran across two quotes by Warren that caught my attention: > "unwind tech mergers that illegally undermine competition" > "I want a government that makes sure everybody — even the biggest and most powerful companies in America — plays by the rules" The word "illegally" in the first quote really set off my alarm bells. What have large companies like Amazon, Google, FB, etc. done that is considered illegal in this reg…

You're high if you think someone can compete with Amazon out of their garage now.

Hell, you can't even sell a product on Amazon without a good chance that Amazon will just slap their Amazon Basics logo on it and undercut you to death.

Similar to Wal-Mart many of their competitors are dead because they optimized their supply chain. No one gets that kind of access out of their garage.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not both? Dumping on someone’s policy because you don’t who they target first doesn’t really help. God knows I’d trust her to break up ISPs before pretty much any other candidate.

I'm not "dumping" on her policy, I'm dumping on her choice of targets. I'm not happy about the App Store monopoly, but I'm actually upset at Comcast's behavior in every area they do business.

"Elizabeth Warren Slams Comcast, Wants More Antitrust Enforcement" https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Elizabeth-Warren-Slams-C...

2016, but still..

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 organizations. It's not illegal to be big, it's illegal to use your influence to prevent competition in a way that's illegal. There's zero evidence of that, which is why she's talking about a new law. And pl…

Google was hit with a big antitrust violation fine in the EU in 2017 for demoting rival shopping services: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/google-fined-e2-42bn-for-e...

The FTC looked into the same issue and ruled in 2013 that Google did not violate US antitrust laws: https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_sta...

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#425

> 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…

I wonder how people’s perspectives might change if the largest and most influential companies of the next century aren’t American.

Spoiler alert: They probably won't be either way. Our population is too small by comparison, we just lucked out in that it took China/India longer to industrialize.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#426
post #401

I ran across two quotes by Warren that caught my attention: > "unwind tech mergers that illegally undermine competition" > "I want a government that makes sure everybody — even the biggest and most powerful companies in America — plays by the rules" The word "illegally" in the first quote really set off my alarm bells. What have large companies like Amazon, Google, FB, etc. done that is considered illegal in this reg…

It's a little hard to tell if you're asking "are there laws against monopolies?" or "should there be laws against monopolies?".

The answer to the first is a certain yes. There are laws against businesses forming monopolies in the United States. You can read up on the Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts from the 1890s and 1910s to start with. There is also considerable case law stemming from this legislation.

The answer to "should there be laws against monopolies" is a little more open. One theoretical justification for breaking up monopolies, is that in some cases monopolies cause economic inefficiencies. Look up "deadweight loss from monopoly pricing".

It's very complicated to measure any efficiencies or inefficiencies from tech monopolies, so I don't think there's a clear answer.

It's also not generally agreed upon that economic efficiency should be the goal of government, so there is a lot of room for debate on that question.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#427

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 offer…

> I think amazon : amazon basics is a great example of antitrust/unfair monopoly

Store brands have been around *forever."

> They know what users are looking for, spend the most on, and they can give their own products dominate positions in the UI.

If you own a grocery store, you have every right to place the store brand products wherever you think they will sell best. You could (gasp) not sell any name brands at all! And if your grocery store becomes successful, you're allowed to sell advertising inside it however you want.

> It’s kind of like standard oil buying up the railroads so they owned the supply chain and no other oil could be moved.

Railroads are to some extent natural monopolies, and they have a massive barrier to entry. E-commerce websites do not. Many businesses of all sizes still sell products directly from their website and do fine. Now if Amazon bought UPS and FedEx and refused to ship any other packages, that would be different. But all they're doing is running their "department store" the way they want to. If consumers want a competitor, they're free to start one with next to no initial cost.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#428

How about going after Comcast and Verizon first, the actual tech monopolies ? I already don’t use Facebook, I buy things online from places other than Amazon, and have email accounts that aren’t hosted by Google. However, all of that goes over Comcast’s network because that’s my only viable choice for Internet service. Also, while FAANG occasionally do things I don’t approve of, they don’t actively lobby congress for…

Those are hard because the are natural monopolies. In the UK it was decided to privatise the national telecom provider and open the market up to to allow other suppliers. We got one other supplier who built all their infrastructure during a few years in the 90s and only in the choicest urban areas. The old monopolist is now solely responsible for supplying all the hard to reach rural areas.

The best solution is probably to accept the national monopoly and socialise the infrastructure, but like that will ever happen...

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#429
post #97

There'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,…

How would this work in practice though? Eg Amazon. Bezos is a major shareholder. Imagine splitting AWS from the retail arm, which I guess would be a sensible split point. If Bezos controls both, then what would really change? I'm not critical to the idea nor supportive - I'm just curious to learn more.

Did you read her proposal? There would be a structural separation from distribution and first party goods. Just like railroads couldn't own interests in the commodities they were transporting, Amazon couldn't operate a market place and also own private label brands.

https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

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