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Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

nytimes.com

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Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#511

Post by Despegar »

node-bayarea wrote: post #468
walterbell wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other regulatory tools to level the playing field with foreign companies.

Dems/libs are fools when it comes to this. They never have the backbone to take on foreign Govts. I'm totally against this because we are in a globalized world and these companies need to be large and strong to out-compete with others across the world.

Saying "we are in a globalized world" makes it seem like that is just the nature of things and not the outcome of specific policies taken by primarily the US in the post-WW2 era. Corporate concentration is against capitalism, and dealing with global competitors can be dealt with with the tools we already have, like the current administration is with trade policy.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#512

Post by basch »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #393
basch wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If youre going to break up Amazon, AWS, and Whole Foods for being vertically integrated, how can you not break up the oil companies or the agriculture companies or the chemical companies.

You could also argue that Apple is "too vertically integrated" and separate them into either a Laptop / Phone company or a Hardware / software company. Or break out music / media / Beats into it's own company too.

I think it would be easier to argue that Apple is being anticompetitive by having undocumented API's only their apps can use, and by not allowing end users to change default mail, map, and browser apps etc.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#513

Post by giarc »

elamje wrote: post #483
iamnubsrs wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Amazon just fullfils orders on most of the products while collecting data , where as brick and mortar stores resell the competitions products

Don’t brick and mortar stores collect inventory and trend data too? Amazon isn’t the first one to do this, they just put the data closer to the center of their business so it’s more public that they collect data.

Until recently, brick and mortar really just knew what people tend to buy together. They can't tell, like Amazon, than a single customer buys XYZ over their lifetime. Brick and mortar now employee ways to aggregate using credit card numbers across stores.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#514

Post by int_19h »

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #344
velcrovan wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

George W Bush tried this against Microsoft. They were unsuccessful. You cannot just decide it's a crime to be large. The fundamental rights like unreasonable seizure and freedom of speech. Which means the government cant just steal the corporation from you or prevent your companies from working together.

There's no fundamental right for a corporation (which, to remind, is a separate legal entity) to be of a certain size. This doesn't have anything to do with freedom of speech. And if you trim them down to size by splitting them, the original owners would still own the fragments, so it's not a seizure, either.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#515

Post by cooooooffffeeee »

sol_remmy2 wrote: post #453
cooooooffffeeee wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Luck has absolutely nothing to do with it. If you attribute America industrializing before China/India as luck, then I will lose trust in anything else you say. By 1915 America had higher GDP per capita than most of Western Europe - BEFORE WW1. Western Europe had higher GDP per capita than China/India by like 1200 AD. You are so so far off the mark. Also, India's population only started exponentially growing in the l…

Alright slow down there, chief. I'm making a comment on the internet, I'm not trying to sell your firstborn or something.

I said that the US _lucked out_ in that China didn't industrialize first. I didn't say that industrialization was a product of luck.

If China were to develop to the extent that the US has, which it's on a path to do, then population will absolutely matter. An American company with a market of 650 million potential customers isn't going to hold a candle to a market with 1.4 Billion.

I'd absolutely divest in the US and invest in China if I were going to be alive for another 100 years. Africa wouldn't be a bad bet either... which is why China is already making significant investments there.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#516

Post by anisppp »

renholder wrote: post #324
pitaj wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the reasons that ISPs are territorial monopolies (local, state, and federal regulatory capture) are hard to address. Splitting territorial monopolies into smaller territorial monopolies is unlikely to help.

> Splitting territorial monopolies into smaller territorial monopolies is unlikely to help. It seemed have helped in the Ma Bell[0] days[1]. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

Splitting a large monopoly into smaller territorial monopolies gets you all the drawbacks of a monopoly with none of the benefits of centralization. Pretty much a total loss. Improvement in US telecom probably had more to do with demonopolization wholesale at the national level rather than the formation of the baby bells.. which pretty much all failed.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#517

Post by rexpop »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #452
lotu wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is this type of vertical splitting doesn't solve the problem of large tech companies. It's like treating a burst appendix with a kidney transplant. The problem of Amazon is that it is effectively the only online shopping place, and thus can act as a Monopsony in hiring it's workers for warehouses, splitting AWS out of that doesn't fix that problem. Maybe you could require that distribution centers be owne…

If we had a progressive corporate tax, I think all the problems would sort themselves out. You want to build a trillion dollar company? Fine. Corporate tax rate of 50%. You're a small business with less than $1M in revenue. Cool. Corporate tax rate of 0%. Big companies will break up to take advantage of the tax code. Problem solved. Instead, the bigger you are, the harder you can lobby for tax breaks. Currently, if y…

Netflix, Amazon, Boeing, Verizon, these companies are already dodging the regressive taxation we have. How will we enforce progressive taxes?

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#518

Post by Despegar »

prickledpear wrote: post #426
mal10c wrote: 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 answe…

You've confused some things. "Economic efficiency", as espoused by Bork and the rest of his Chicago School crew, came as a result of consolidation. His argument against strong antitrust enforcement was that it lowered economic efficiency to benefit smaller non-monopoly companies.

This of course was a disaster for the American economy and it's taken 30 years of increasing corporate concentration for the politics to finally swing back against monopoly.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#520

Post by wstrange »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #500
int_19h wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have claimed that it's a stranglehold, but never explained what actually makes it so, given that any would-be Google and Netflix competitor would have access to the same pipes as those two, and on the same terms.

Economy of scale. For instance, Netflix has CDN boxes all over the planet, colocated by the ISPs. ISPs have to colocate them for free, because with net neutrality, they have to either accept the massive network traffic over their peering connections, or accept the box. Any smaller provider would need to pay for the privilege of colocation in an ISP's datacenter, and they'd also have to supply all of those boxes, that…

That logic assumes ISPs would be interested in helping out smaller players.

That seems suspect to me...

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