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

591–600 of 735 posts

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#591

Post by jimmy1 »

I disagree with these proposals, and think the sights should be aimed at companies like Verizon and Comcast, but at least Warren's proposals tend to be coherent. Although, it isn't too hard to be a "policy pacesetter" on the democratic side these days -- they lack any semblance of unified vision, and so far we have been given 3 magical proposals for legislation for fixing all the worlds problem lacking any coherent way to pay for them other than a bunch of magic handwaving and "let's just tax millionaires and billionaires more" -- the most atrocious of them being the "New Green Deal", and the second most atrocious is the "Medicaid for all"

Given recently how AOC and her cohorts were flat out embarrassed by the NY state budget director and given a lesson in basic financial literacy and economics, I think the freshman and sophomore democrats should probably lay low for a while and learn a thing or two from the adults in the room.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#592

Post by jgamman »

psadauskas wrote: post #211

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…

actual how-about-ism detected in the wild. more of a debating trick than a comment.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#593

Post by elefanten »

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…

Monopoly refers to being a sole provider. It is completely by definition monopolistic to take action to prevent a second provider from emerging.

Is it possible for them to have other strategic incentives for their action, such as preventing a type of competitor from emerging? Yes. And if you take the perspective that government is a uniquely troublesome competitor, it's understandable to feel extra strong about it.

But it's still monopolistic in context. A counterpoint to "competition from the government is uniquely unfair" is "having only one provider is uniquely unfair". One is from the perspective of a profitable $100B corporation, the other is from the perspective of the consumers.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#594

Post by Gpetrium »

Despegar wrote: post #511
node-bayarea wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is not as simple as it looks. Some degree of globalization already existed for tens of thousands of years, whether through colonialism, Asia-MiddleEast-Europe trade and many more. Even though there are ups and downs in the cycle of regional/global trade, it has continued to move towards more integration, especially due to technological innovations seen in the past 500 years.

Nations that decide to close down in certain areas, may find themselves in a competitive disadvantage to peers making use of data, economies of scale, technology, labour, etc. This is something we have seen happen in history.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#595

Post by rpedela »

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…

Microsoft's behavior changed and they stopped trying to own every single niche market within the software field by any means necessary. I think that allowed for an opening by other players in addition to the tech trends you mentioned.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#596

Post by ocdtrekkie »

kelnos wrote: post #588
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

AFAICT, Firefox almost exclusively has performance issues on Google's websites. Which is a reinforcing point to the threat of Google's monopoly.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#597

Post by chiefalchemist »

I'd like to say this is just politics but I'm not even sure it's good politics. How many people are really concerned about the size of Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc. If people are that concerned, why do so many people I know have Prime?

The fossil fuel industry continues to run rampant. As does the Military Industrial Complex. The former is a key player in the degradation of the planet; the latter is a money sucking Hover that is sucking the life out of infrastructure, education, etc.

The environment and peace are much bigger issues than taking down and busting up the tech giants.

Editorial: I want to like Liz Warren. I can related to some of her ideals. Unfortunately, as a politician she too often comes off as inexperienced, out of touch and/or naive. This is another one of those times.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#598

Post by bitcurious »

delfinom wrote: post #432
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...

So what about Walmart who does double Amazon in revenue AND has their own private label brands? They have so much retail power they are known to get manufacturers by the balls and make manufacturers accept the cost they want instead.

Walmart isn't a platform (excluding Jet.com). They purchase goods (take on risk) prior to selling them.

Amazon is a marketplace meaning the seller takes on all of the risk and pays Amazon for the privilege. Amazon then uses the data that marketplace generates to undercut the sellers with their private labels.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#599

Post by Nullabillity »

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…

Except this usually works out the exact opposite, where the big companies get discounts in exchange for (predictable) volume.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#600

Post by throwaway2048 »

int_19h wrote: post #480
mushufasa wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not a new legal theory, though. It's a return to the old one that predated the current state of affairs. In other words, it's a return to what the people who originally wrote our anti-monopoly laws meant them to do.

Yep people forget the economic impact of monopsonies aswell as monopolies
Post reply on HN