Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 735 posts

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#551

Post by 18pfsmt »

brmgb wrote: post #470
rayiner wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With Comcast (and other ISPs), you have only one choice, and they spend tons of money and effort making sure you only have that one choice, and continue to have only that one choice. Comcast recently spent nearly $1M to prevent Fort Collins from creating a municipal ISP[1]. That is actively anti-competitive and monopolistic by definition. I'm sure if the U.S. government was proposing to sell public bonds to build a…

Search engine and ride-sharing don't seem to be natural monopolies however. Communication infrastructure in most part of the USA clearly is. Still I agree breaking up Comcast is not the solution. You will just end up with smaller more localized monopolies. That's pretty much what happened with Bell after all. The solution would be either nationalizing the infrastructure and leasing it to operators or forcing existing…

How about we stop trying to come up with "solutions" that just cause more distortions, and exercise a bit of patience?

The 'cost vs. benefit' analysis should reveal similar ROI as "the wall."

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#552

Post by jonahb »

plandis wrote: post #455
Despegar wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Where is the demonstrated consumer harm that warrants monopoly treatment? Adding private labels increases the amount of selection consumers have. You’d think we would hear more about it since basically every physical retailer owns their own brands that they sell in their own marketplaces already.

As Elizabeth Warren makes clear in her post, "demonstrated consumer harm" isn't the only justification for antitrust action. We can't demonstrate the innovation that would occur in a competitive marketplace, but we break up monopolies with the faith that it will. This was the prevailing view until the late 20th century. Hopefully we'll get back to it.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#553

Post by jonahb »

andrewla wrote: post #454

Does anyone actually believe that the US government's interventions against Microsoft made the slightest bit of difference, as opposed to huge shifts in the internet and mobile landscape? You could argue that the emergence of Firefox and Chrome was only made possible by the ability to assign a "default" non-IE browser in Windows, but that ability pre-dated any of the anti-trust stuff anyway; all you got out of that w…

I was but a lowly intern when the verdict came down, but I can tell you I heard the term "consent decree" more times than I could count.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#554

Post by r00fus »

rexpop wrote: post #517
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Perhaps actually funding and staffing the agencies that enforce it?

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#555

Post by jhall1468 »

mywittyname wrote: post #539
jhall1468 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is that different than a department store? If you go into housewares at Macy's you'll see their own branded stuff along with other brands. So at issue is not the practice itself, but rather that the digital marketplace makes it easier and more efficient. It's 100% the exact same thing. Go to Walmart and see thousands of "Great Value" products and you'll get the exact same thing. Warren is off her rocker on this…

The issue comes with the monopoly status. If a company controls a certain % of marketshare, that behavior crosses into anti-competitive. If 90% of retail stores were Walmart because they owned a significant percentage of real-estate in key markets (thus, preventing other retailers from moving in), then their Great Value offerings would also be anti-competitive. Amazon's behavior is a textbook anti-competition. They l…

> If a company controls a certain % of marketshare, that behavior crosses into anti-competitive.

That's just incorrect. There's nothing wrong with controlling 100% of the market share, as long as you don't use your position to illegally prevent competition.

> Amazon's behavior is a textbook anti-competition.

That completely counters the point you just made. Amazon accounts for maybe 5% of retail sales, and Walmart is closer to 15%. Even in the eCommerce market their share is around 50%. Vastly lower than the 90% you threw out there.

> They literally build copies of products offered by other merchants on their site

Every retail company does this through suppliers. It's called "white label" and it's an industry standard. And Amazon does not build them, they license another companies product.

> then rank them higher in search results,

Citation needed.

> often times, driving the merchants out of business.

Again, citation needed. Particularly the "often times".

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#556

Post by amelius »

Reminds me of this post by Richard Stallman, [1].

> Amazon has so much market share that its sheer size distorts the market.

> We should not allow a company to have a share over around 10% of any market. If in a certain field a single dominant company is beneficial for society, that means it is a natural monopoly, and should be served by a regulated utility.

[1] https://stallman.org/amazon.html

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#557

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

r00fus wrote: post #554
rexpop wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Perhaps actually funding and staffing the agencies that enforce it?

The IRS is pretty awesome and incredibly underfunded, yes.

But we could simplify the tax code... The bigger the surface area, the easier it is to find a vulnerability / loophole. And anymore, the tax code is basically being written by BigCos to protect their interests and provide breaks for themselves.

Enforcing a tax code that's 20-feet tall when printed out when companies are as complicated as they are -- it's a wonder anyone pays taxes. It would take years in court to figure out what a company honestly owes.

If it's simple -- you make x profit or y revenue -- then you pay z dollars -- for any public company, good luck grossly cheating that.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#558

Post by mywittyname »

wvenable wrote: post #386
sonnyblarney wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they are not monopolies in the classical sense, so the regulatory position has to be much more nuanced. But there are issues: + Amazon uses profits from AWS to dump in other sectors, selling goods and services below market value. The weird situation could mean Amazon pumps many billion dollars a year into pushing major grocers (who operate on thin margins) out of business. This is not good for anyone - but it's…

> Amazon uses profits from AWS to dump in other sectors, selling goods and services below market value. There is big competition in cloud computing so AWS is priced according to market rates. I seriously doubt AWS profit is significant enough to influence the rest of Amazon in way that would be considered monopoly abuse. Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods did not result in WF reducing prices (as was expected) to uncut…

AWS is 10% of sales but 58% of operating income. Margins on AWS are hovering around 30% and growth has been double-digit every quarter for several years now.

AWS profits were worth a few hundred billion over the past seven years. As Amazon only as $40 billion in cash on hand, it's hard to argue they haven't put that money to good use.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#559

Post by BookmarkSaver »

all2 wrote: post #66
untog wrote: post #14

Comparisons will be made to Microsoft and Internet Explorer but to me the really crucial part of this isn't market dominance in the "what app are you using" sense, it's data. Facebook, Google and Amazon really do have an unprecedented amount of data on us. And keep vacuuming up more and more of it. Facebook should never have been allowed to buy WhatsApp (and maybe not Instagram though I'm less concerned about that on…

> Companies with an annual global revenue of $25 billion or more ... Hiding revenue is something multi-national corporations do really well. If I ran a company that had a platform as described, and we were approaching the 25bn mark, I'd find ways to make sure we never crossed that line. Losing IP to what would become a 'public utility' would discourage me from ever trying to develop beyond the 24.9bn mark.

>Hiding revenue is something multi-national corporations do really well.

I thought it was profits that were easily hidden. Hiding revenue seems like it would be very difficult.

Post reply on HN