Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon • Hacker News Board

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#581

Post by tptacek » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 9:00 PM UTC

weberc2 wrote: post #340

psadauskas wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be odd if it were SV myopia, since I'm 1000 miles from there. In 90% of Denver Metro, your choice is Comcast or 1.5mbit CenturyLink. I just bought a house in a new neighborhood, and one of the major selling points was that both CenturyLink and Comcast offer 1gbit service. CenturyLink's service costs about 3/4 of Comcast, and Comcast's service here is already about 1/2 of what they change for gigabit in other…

I've got that SV myopia here in Chicago too ;)

Chicago has Comcast, AT&T Fiber, Spectrum, and RCN.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

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Post by sovnade » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 9:01 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #561

brmgb wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 act…

Wasn't Verizon given billions in subsidies for FTTH (which they installed on the east and west coast, the most profitable areas) and then sold off vast areas they didn't touch to companies like Frontier?

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

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Post by chillacy » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 9:01 PM UTC

cooooooffffeeee wrote: post #425

landryraccoon wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

American products get used all around the world. China’s market is hard to penetrate for US tech but on the flip side, Chinese tech doesn’t typically fare well outside China either. Maybe TikTok is the only exception. Wechat is used by overseas Chinese or people who want to talk to Chinese people.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

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Post by sovnade » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 9:02 PM UTC

cowl wrote: post #398

giggles_giggles wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a recent example, Net Neutrality involved massive amounts of lobbing and had very clear "pro-consumer" and "anti-consumer" sides This isn't as uncontroversial of an opinion as it might appear to be in a place like HN. What you're admitting here basically is that you think Comcast should be broken up because they lobby for things you don't like, but FAANG is fine because they lobby for things you do.

OFC that is the measure. If they have lobbied for things that actually make our life better or make it worse. Lobbing is inevitable and Desirable too.

Not sure about desirable. I'm not a huge fan of the company/person with the most money to donate basically dictating the direction of our country (as it is now).

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

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Post by onemoresoop » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 9:03 PM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #408

CPLX wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument that there won't be incentives for success is and has always been ludicrous. It's not based in any kind of empirical reality, just on an emotional theory that people won't work if you tax them more, and an Ayn Rand novel or two. The reality is that people compete for status, success, money, and power, within the framework they are given. I mean we've actually tried this. If you take a group of incredibly…

I mean we've actually tried this. If you take a group of incredibly skilled business people and tax them heavily you don't get some dystopia, you get Switzerland. And what important/useful companies, tech or otherwise, got their start in Switzerland?

There are many examples, but here's one: Logitech

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

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Post by rjf72 » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 9:04 PM UTC

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 think this is an absolutely incredible idea if it could actually be made in a way such that the taxation and other factors could not be easily avoided. But there's one unspoken problem with taxes and particularly corporate taxes.

Large companies are perceived as being proportionally beneficial to the US economy. If you made the US a place that was meaningfully undesirable for corporations, they can leave. And even if these companies did not leave, you would strongly deter new companies. For instance imagine you were able to create your system such that it could not be simply avoided through various typical methods. So big companies really did risk losing up to 50% of their net. How long would it take before e.g. YCombinator started requiring new companies to incorporate in e.g. Hong Kong (or wherever) instead of the US? Perhaps even moving the entire operation abroad.

So even though I think this would be an absolutely incredible idea, I do not think it would work or be meaningfully considered in practice.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

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Post by pedrocr » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 9:06 PM UTC

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…

In the middle of the process there was an election and the new executive didn't want to actually go after Microsoft. They then got off much easier than their misdeeds required. At one point an OS/Office breakup was in the cards and that would actually have been a major shift in the industry. It's not surprising that what was actually done didn't have that much impact.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

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Post by kelnos » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 9:07 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #465

Rebelgecko wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? If I don't like my internet provider, my only other option is dialup. If I don't like Google, there's multiple alternatives for all of their services that I use

While you can place your data in services which are not Google, if you want to consume data, you are often going to have to deal with Google. For instance, almost anyone who shares any sort of video whatsoever puts it on YouTube. It doesn't matter if I'm not a YouTube user, I have to go to YouTube if I want to watch someone else's videos. And Google is far more than just where you go to search or store your email. So…

> Firefox is nearly the last remaining holdout against Chromium.

And the reason they don't have more market share is because Chrome is still faster and provides a better experience on average than Firefox does. I switched (back) to Firefox a few years ago, and I'm mostly happy with it. But when I try to get others to switch, those that end up not switching try for a few days and run into horrible performance issues that cripple their browsing experience. Clearly this isn't a universal issue (my experience is fine), but it's a big enough issue that it likely hampers further adoption.

I pretty much never hear "Firefox doesn't work properly on X site" as a reason they can't use Firefox. In the end, people use Chrome because it tends to give a better experience for people, even given its lack of respect for their privacy.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

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Post by ArtDev » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 9:10 PM UTC

Amazon is a "marketplace". Like "Google Play" or iTunes. This seems very different situation.

As a progressive, I really want to support Warren but her policies need to solid. I am concerned the left is running off the rails with anti-vaxx, anti-GMO, anti-technology, extreme feminist wackadoodle ideas.

Can't just Bernie just dye his hair and wear a proper suit that fits?

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#590

Post by psadauskas » Fri, Mar 08, 2019, 9:11 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #504

elefanten wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's municipal, so the magnitude of threat you're implying (oooh Government ) is a misdirection. GP's point is that consistently lobbying to shut down the existence of any competition, public or private, is monopolistic behavior. And it is, pretty much by definition.

GP used an example of lobbying against the government entering what had heretofore been a private market. Pushing back on that is not "monopolistic" by any sense of the term. If you have examples of Comcast lobbying to prevent private competition, I'd like to hear them. The biggest impediment to private competition actually comes from the public interest sector, which insists on build-out requirements that make it ve…

Comcast lobbied heavily everywhere that Google was looking to build our their fiber. Eg, https://consumerist.com/2016/09/20/comcast-att-try-again-to-...