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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

#91

Post by untog »

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.

> Losing IP to what would become a 'public utility' would discourage me from ever trying to develop beyond the 24.9bn mark.

(it wouldn't be a public utility but) I feel like that's kind of the point? Encourage dozens of smaller (if multi-billion counts as "small") businesses to thrive rather than one 25bn+ business. And if you do want to go big, you have to do it in a way that lifts up significantly smaller businesses.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#92

Post by stilist »

Shivetya wrote: post #51
sleepysysadmin wrote: post #16

To what end? "illegally undermine competition?" She is inferring that Google/Amazon/Facebook are committing anti-trust crimes? What proof does she have? >Companies would be barred from transferring or sharing users’ data with third parties. That can be done without breaking them up. I don't think she realizes that splitting up amazon and amazon basics will do little to nothing. There are other things that can be done…

She has no proof, she does not need any. this is typical politician using FUD to scare the populace into letting them take actions which in the end only go to bolster their own campaign coffers and personal riches. With the upcoming Presidential campaign you can expect politicians tripping over each other using jealously and fear to get people to plea for action. Amazon is not a Standard Oil by any measure as they ha…

Amazon has competition, but what competitor can afford to intentionally lose millions or billions a year in order to dominate a market segment?

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#93

Post by fatnoah »

untog wrote: post #28
travisoneill1 wrote: post #19

What is the alleged anti-competitive behavior? The article doesn't mention it. It sounds like she is calling for their breakup merely for being big and powerful, and if that were cause enough to break up an entity we would logically start with the government.

The Medium article[1] mentions a couple - Google prioritizing their reviews above Yelp in search results, Amazon copying third party products that were successful on its marketplace. [1] https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

> Google prioritizing their reviews above Yelp in search results

This is one reason I use Google. I can view all Google review w/out downloading an app. I'd classify Yelp reviews in browser search as nothing more than an ad.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#94

Post by logicchains »

Shivetya wrote: post #51
sleepysysadmin wrote: post #16

To what end? "illegally undermine competition?" She is inferring that Google/Amazon/Facebook are committing anti-trust crimes? What proof does she have? >Companies would be barred from transferring or sharing users’ data with third parties. That can be done without breaking them up. I don't think she realizes that splitting up amazon and amazon basics will do little to nothing. There are other things that can be done…

She has no proof, she does not need any. this is typical politician using FUD to scare the populace into letting them take actions which in the end only go to bolster their own campaign coffers and personal riches. With the upcoming Presidential campaign you can expect politicians tripping over each other using jealously and fear to get people to plea for action. Amazon is not a Standard Oil by any measure as they ha…

>Google is, well google. I don't have to use their search engine if I don't want to.

When threads like this come up I always wonder how the engineers who worked on Bing must feel. I'd feel pretty disheartened if people had such a low opinion of my product that my competitor was considered a monopoly.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#95

Post by CivBase »

You might be able to divide Amazon into two distinct pieces (retail and cloud services), but I don't know how you'd even start with a company like Google or Facebook. Most of the services offered by those two are only justified by the amount of data they provide for ad targeting. You can't take away those services without ruining their ad-revenue model.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#96

Post by sarbaz »

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…

This is also the first idea I've seen that tries to deal with the free speech problem on the internet. A lot of platforms today apply varying amounts of censorship (like youtube's copyright takedown mess), but there isn't really anything we can do because it's a privately owned platform and they can do whatever they want. But when they control such a large amount of mindshare, we end up putting the idea of free speech at risk.

Perhaps the platform utility designation will let us enforce a kind of "content neutrality" instead.

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#97

Post by mabbo »

There's precedent to this in the USA. The US Government once passed regulations that caused one of the largest companies in America to break up into three smaller companies. Today those, three companies are entirely independent, employ over 400,000 people combined, and have a combined net work of over $400B.

Those companies are Boeing Aircraft (153k employees, $244B market value), United Technologies (202k employees, $148B market value), and United Airlines (88k employees, $33B market value).[0]

What most people perceive as a threat to the market is when one company takes over an entire single market. And that is a problem, no doubt. But in the case of Boeing, the problem was that one company had such an advantage vertically- lose money on planes in order to make money on shipping, or vice versa, as needed. It meant it could win in whichever market it wanted to and slowly come to dominate all of those markets. The synergies of doing it all internally meant it could win at everything.

If one uses that situation as a precedent, one can start to see the parallels in many of the FAANG companies today.

[0] "The Air Mail Act of 1934 prohibited airlines and manufacturers from being under the same corporate umbrella, so the company split into three smaller companies – Boeing Airplane Company, United Airlines, and United Aircraft Corporation, the precursor to United Technologies." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#99

Post by elliekelly »

ropeladder wrote: post #44
c0nducktr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm still amazed that when AT&T was split up, there wasn't anything in the ruling preventing them from just joining the parts back together again.

Yeah it seems ridiculous in hindsight. I think what enabled the mergers though was less someone with a brilliant idea that they could just recombine, and more the drastic change in the government's conception and enforcement of antcompetitiveness laws. That is, they wouldn't have tried to merge back together if the they didn't think the government might let them. The government can and does does block mergers, still,…

This is the exact issue. The DOJ's Antitrust Criminal Enforcement Division breaks up the companies by making an argument that's then directly contradicted by the DOJ's Merger Enforcement Division's (very outdated) policy on approving mergers. From the Merger Enforcement Guidelines[1] (last updated in 1997):

> By definition, non-horizontal mergers involve firms that do not operate in the same market. It necessarily follows that such mergers produce no immediate change in the level of concentration in any relevant market as defined in Section 2 of these Guidelines.

The Merger Enforcement Division's assumption may have been true in 1997 but it's difficult to argue that simply because Google and Amazon don't operate in the "same market" as their primary businesses that their combination would "produce no immediate change in the level of concentration" of the market for both online advertising and computing services. Yet, under these guidelines, if a Google + Amazon merger were proposed it wouldn't present any immediate issue for the Antitrust Division to oppose it.

[1]https://www.justice.gov/atr/non-horizontal-merger-guidelines

Re: Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Giants Like Amazon

#100

Post by helen___keller »

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.

>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.

I feel like shareholders wouldn't be very happy with this

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