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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

#561

Post by rayiner »

brmgb wrote: post #528
rayiner wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's working terribly in France. France has some of the slowest broadband in the OECD: https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t... . Just 18% of French households have connections faster than 15 mbps, versus 48% of American households.

That's mostly because France never used copper cable as a TV distribution system and is going straight to fiber. Deployment is admittedly slower than it should be especially in the countryside where it will never be profitable due to low density. Meanwhile, people are stuck with ADSL and VDSL which give connections closer to 10mbps than 15. Cost wise however, you can't even compare the USA and France. In France, a fu…

According to the December 2017 OECD data, France and the U.S. are basically tied in terms of fiber deployment (12-13% of total broadband connections): https://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/1.10-PctFibreToTotalBroad.... Which is pretty remarkable because in the U.S., fiber is a relatively smaller upgrade, because fast cable alternatives are available in almost every fiber market. (Just 1/3 of people who can get FiOS actually subscribe, for example. Google fiber has struggled to break 40% too.)

And how quickly is France's number going to grow given that France's second largest ISP recently cancelled its plans to deploy fiber? https://www.reuters.com/article/altice-sfr-france/altice-aba....

Also note that the French deployment is being heavily subsidized by the government (to the tune of $24 billion). Except for a small amount during the post-2008 economic stimulus, broadband deployment in the U.S. is not subsidized. Whereas the French government is paying a direct subsidy to build fiber in rural areas, in the U.S. rural deployment is financed by a cross subsidy (taxing ISPs in urban areas to subsidize ISPs in rural ones).

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#562

Post by abalone »

What's interesting about this proposal is it goes after "proprietary marketplaces".[1] Anti-trust has historically focused on breaking up huge companies that have acquired/merged with their competition. She's recognizing that another lever of power in the world: owning the platform.

Lots of tech "monopoly" power comes from network effects. Once you're Google or Amazon you don't necessarily need to buy up all the other search engines or ecommerce platforms. They can't even get off the ground.

Also interesting: she doesn't mention Apple at all. Yet they run one of the biggest platforms, and their cut (which they call "service revenue") is one of the highest growth categories for them.

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

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#563

Post by taurath »

jamroom wrote: post #510
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…

I agree 100% and have long felt this is the right approach. Basically the bigger you get, the harder it gets to keep getting bigger.

I feel like all that will create is "partnership contracts" where a large company will be split into the "ideal" size tax-wise while still being run by an "advisory board". Compensation gets interesting at that point though, so many its an interesting idea.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#564

Post by rasz »

sigmar wrote: post #423
psadauskas wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

good evidence its just politician talking and nothing will come out of it

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#565

Post by dnautics »

mushufasa wrote: post #330
fanzhang wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, does the public have the image of Comcast and Verizon CEOs as being specific people who are really rich and dislikable? So that taking them down a notch will make the public happy? And so taking them down a notch is a good political stance? To be fair, I think there is some argument that some of the larger tech giants would benefit consumer welfare by being broken up. Facebook probably less so since people alre…

In the past couple years, a new legal theory proposed that the definition of monopoloy needs to be updated for the 21st century. Instead of focusing on consumer welfare, antitrust law should focus on 'anticompetitive behavior'. In this argument, amazon is the platform through which all other online sellers go to market, like railroads in the late 19th century. Behaving as both a platform and participant is anticompet…

the old hay is, if you charge less than your competitor, you're engaging in anticompetitive behavior, if you charge the same as your competitor, you're engaging in collusion, if you charge more than your competitor, you're price gouging, so as a business, the only way to survive is to lobby politicians enough and buy yourself protection.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#566

Post by ulkram »

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…

I agree it should be harder the bigger you are, but it's not the tax rate. Right now, FAANGs either run a 0% profit margin, or book their profits to Ireland.

Changing tax rates don't fix either of those.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#567

Post by mywittyname »

jhall1468 wrote: post #555
mywittyname wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> as long as you don't use your position to illegally prevent competition.

Which is why I said, literally, "their behavior crosses into anti-competitive." You can compete with vendors, or you can control most of the market. But you can't do both: control the market, then use that advantage to drive competition out of business.

> Even in the eCommerce market their share is around 50%.

50% is a staggeringly high market share. For reference, Toyota has less than 10% market share.

> Citation needed.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-20/got-a-hot...

http://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/

> And Amazon does not build them, they license another companies product.

Those companies are accusing amazon of literally copying their unique products. We're not talking about buying batteries or something from a supplier. Amazon is literally copying existing products that do well.

Here's an ex-employee discussing the topic:

> Amazon sees your product is doing very well, they have the retained performance data, and Amazon copies to their best of their ability as a “generic version.” Through subtle advertising, and imitations of the successful attributes of your product, their product cuts straight to the top ranked in your categories.

https://www.skubana.com/the-best-kept-secrets-of-amazons-ama...

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#569

Post by ulkram »

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…

Isn't data collection by the ISPs/phone companies a bigger issue? Consumers truly have no choice there. Whereas you could get by without FAANG, though it'd be inconvenient.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#570

Post by geofft »

travisoneill1 wrote: post #409
geofft wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference, at least on paper, between the government and corporations: the government is big and powerful, but (in a republican society) is accountable in some way to the people and society as a whole. Corporations are also big and powerful, and (in a capitalist society) accountable only to a majority of their shareholders. So there's a reason to believe that you cannot have corporations serve the public i…

In theory. But in fact it is the opposite. Companies are accountable to their customers above all else, and the government to its voters. If the IRS makes a mistake with your taxes and Amazon makes a mistake with your order, which of these would scare you more?

I'm talking about accountability to society. I'm only a customer of Amazon in very limited ways (I own a Kindle that I received as a gift, which I buy a book for once every few months, and I spend about $30/month on AWS of which $29/month is a VM I should really decommission), but that doesn't change the ways they impact my life - their influence on the book market, the literally-everything-else market, the cloud computing market, their purchase of Whole Foods, their presence as an employer in my city, etc. None of those worries are a worry about Amazon making a mistake with my order.

So I'm a lot more worried about Amazon than the IRS - I feel the IRS is in fact accountable to me in a way which Amazon isn't.

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