> potentially barring companies like Amazon.com from operating the markets in which they also compete
Absolutely bananas that this haven't been fixed yet! How can Google own the entire ads market and still be allowed to compete in it? Obviously for-profit companies will abuse their positions if it'll earn them more money, and fines ends up being the cost of doing business instead of deterrents.
How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers on their mobile devices? We already went through this with Microsoft in the past but suddenly it's different?
How can Amazon be allowed to sell competing products in their own marketplace, when they own the actual marketplace? They should have been forced to divide their business long time ago. Of course they are gonna use metrics from competitors that only they have access to, in order to make their own product line get better.
Why is Google allowed to rank their own products in front of more general results? Try searching for "Earth" on Google and see what the top hit is. Is that really a fair ranking? We don't even know, because no one knows how their algorithm is working, but one thing is clear, Google products consistently rank higher than anything else in the search engine.
The list goes on. I'm happy that it's being suggested, I'm just worried how it took so long to get here.
> The list goes on. I'm happy that it's being suggested, I'm just worried how it took so long to get here.
Because this is a Gish Gallop of weak individual reasons batched together to make it seem like a stronger obvious argument when it’s not.
> How can Google own the entire ads market and still be allowed to compete in it?
They don’t. Amazon and Facebook both make a fortune from ads. You need to be more specific.
> How can Amazon be allowed to sell competing products in their own marketplace, when they own the actual marketplace?
Go to a store, this is what Walmart, Albertsons/Safeway, Costco, etc have been doing for longer than any of the FAANGs have existed.
> How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers on their mobile devices? We already went through this with Microsoft in the past but suddenly it's different?
The same reason you can’t put software you want on a Xbox/PlayStation/Switch.
> Why is Google allowed to rank their own products in front of more general results?
Because it’s their algorithm to do with what they want. If they want to erode public trust by using it to advertise their products, that’s their choice. Other things they adjust the algorithm to do: filter malware, filter porn (by default), filter unreliable sites, etc. You’re going to have a really hard time defining what’s “fair” for a black box algorithm to do.
> Go to a store, this is what Walmart, Albertsons/Safeway, Costco, etc have been doing for longer than any of the FAANGs have existed.
This one is substantively different. Amazon claims it is a market and not a store, and is therefore not legally responsible for things like the quality of products sold there or how they are represented. They claim that both buyers and sellers are their customers, unlike an actual store where only the buyers are the customers.
So when Amazon decides to set up its own logistics company, no problem. When they use private market data to place their own products into their market, that's a different matter.
> They claim that both buyers and sellers are their customers, unlike an actual store where only the buyers are the customers.
The garden department at your local department (Wal-Mart does this. So do most home repair places) store is operated by another company. So too is the salty snack aisle, soft drink aisle and many other departments where an outside vendor is basically renting shelf space, and paying the rent in margin at the register. In all of these cases, the store also has a house brand that is in the same aisle, competing with the big brands. So, what Amazon is doing is really the same, but in an ecommerce format. BTW, department and grocery stores were running their own logistics company long before Amazon even existed.
> Amazon claims it is a market and not a store, and is therefore not legally responsible for things like the quality of products sold there or how they are represented.
While on its face the outcome doesn't seem surprising to me, this may nonetheless turn out to be a very important national precedent as California was, IIRC, the first jurisdiction to both clearly establish strict product liability for manufacturers and also extend that liability to intermediate sellers in the distribution chain.
I agree. I don't think Amazon can continue this kind of legal equivocation much longer. The claim to be "a neutral market" when questions of consumer protections arise and "just one web store among many" when questions of improper use of their market ownership arise.
The California decision makes a lot of sense.
Looking at their business model with their ownership of the customer relationships, control of the payment methods, and the co-mingling of inventory, it's hard to claim that Amazon is just matching buyers and sellers.
I'm not really in the "break-up big tech" camp. We already have the laws needed to make companies play fair, we just need to enforce them.
That said, the whole Amazon Basics model is kind of questionable. I could see that being split off and forced to operate without access to private market data or preferential placement in the marketplace.
When people say they got a solution to “the problem” for me this sounds every time like they not even started to understand anything they are talking about.
FAANG is a sui generics case. And looking at Amazon’s service, I believe they do a lot of things right that others do not. And that’s part of “the problem”.
> > How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers on their mobile devices? We already went through this with Microsoft in the past but suddenly it's different?
> The same reason you can’t put software you want on a Xbox/PlayStation/Switch.
The iPhone is a general purpose computer, not a gaming toy. You do finances, email, chat, dating, games, spreadsheets, GPS navigation, photos, video - your entire life, all one one device.
For half of Americans, this is the only computer they own.
For half of Americans, Apple controls what software you can use, and it extorts a 30% cut.
That's mafia behavior.
Gamers can choose between Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, PC, Steam, Epic, and dozens of other platforms. There's lots of choice, and this is just one industry with a very narrow impact on consumers' lives.
Mobile computer (aka smartphone) users get to choose between Apple and Android for the entirety of everything they do, and both of these companies try to butt into everything. They even want to control banking and payments.
The App Stores aren't given to us benevolently out of the good will of a loving Apple and Google. They're means of exerting control and extracting profit in a monopolistic fashion. They both need to die.
> You do finances, email, chat, dating, games, spreadsheets, GPS navigation
> For half of Americans, Apple controls what software you can use, and it extorts a 30% cut.
30% (or even 15%) of $0 is $0.
Apple gets nothing from me for my finance apps, my email client, my chat apps, my spreadsheet apps, or my GPS apps, because they are free.
I can’t comment about dating apps as I’m not using any. Complaining that Apple charges for gaming, however, is weird given you choose to reject them as gaming devices.
People use Google because the algorithm is a black box that is constantly updated to keep away black hat SEO crap. An open web page ranking algorithm is useless in an adversarial environment. There is no current signal that can’t be trivially gained that doesn’t effectively require mass user surveillance (to see “what’s really popular”).
> 2. “This is why the search engine company should be separate from the company which owns all the other products”
This doesn’t solve the problem. They can still alter top listings to push things for “preferred partners and truths”.
I have experience, and this is trivially true. Search engines can only look at proxies for relevance , as General AI hasn't been achieved yet. Proxies can always be gamed.
> An open web page ranking algorithm is useless in an adversarial environment.
We here know that, politicians don’t seem to and they set the rules.
Regardless: the fear here is that Google itself is gaming its own algorithm — or just directly bypassing it because they can. I make no claim about the validity of this fear.
If technical limitations are incompatible with social concerns, the social concerns are what needs to take priority.
If society wants to make sure algorithms are fair, it may decide one option is to ban black boxes algorithms — if DNNs can’t be comprehended, that means no DNNs. Alternatively, if society says the only way to have a black box is to not compete in the domain the black box judges, then Google et al will have to change their business models.
We don't even understand the consequences of the laws we pass in plain English. The idea that news feed algorithms are going to be meaningfully interpretable by anyone is just not practical, even if those algorithms are relatively simple.
The other problem with transparent algorithms is that they are trivial to game. Gaming is almost certainly worse than obscurity.
A. Laws aren’t written in plain English (or other vernacular), they are written in legalese. This is why lawyers have to train so long and why people should not represent themselves.
B. Hence the alternative of “don’t let the company which runs the algorithm benefit from the results of that algorithm”, which I’ve phrased differently in each post on this topic.
There are really clear conflicts of interests, even if you believe (as I happen to) that they are not exploiting their positions to the detriment of consumers: Google has products and services which people search for using Google’s own algorithm; Apple gets to write and enforce the rules of the App Store while having products in that store; Amazon sells both e-book readers and owns a e-book brand & platform, and would benefit from the Amazon.{com|co.uk|de|etc} stores listing the Kindle devices higher than they might otherwise be.
Again, I am not claiming they are actually engaging in anti-consumer behaviours (that would be outside of my expertise, and anecdotally I don’t feel like I’m being harmed by any of this), I’m saying it’s a conflict of interest and society is suspicious.
As the boundaries of hardware, firmware, and “software defined” blur, I disagree with forcing manufacturers to implement and enable some arbitrary magical line between proprietary hardware and open software. The whole thing can be IP; the whole thing can be a product.
I’m just fine with saying this thing is an appliance that does what it does, including only accepting paired cartridges (gate-kept apps).
Consumers buy toasters instead of open grills for valid reasons, same for mobile devices. Forcing the toaster maker to support open grilling is over-regulation, the opposite of letting markets decide. If consumers don’t want a no muss no fuss appliance, they can buy something else.
"The same reason you can’t put software you want on a Xbox/PlayStation/Switch."
Stop using this argument, its daft and convinces noone.
Furstly, which law or court case actually establishes that those business practices are right and proper?
Secondly, which law or court case establishes that smartphones can be equated with game consoles? There is a huge body of law that governs mobile connectivity, spectrum, emergency services, etc. that has no bearing on a gaming device.
>>"The same reason you can’t put software you want on a Xbox/PlayStation/Switch."
> Stop using this argument, its daft and convinces noone.
Letting anyone put any software they wanted on an Xbox/Playstation/Switch would diminish the platform's value by eroding security and trust.
For instance, compare online cheating ecosystems between those three platforms and the PC (where you can run any software you want). The PC is a much, much worse platform in terms of cheaters, scammers and account hijacks.
I have no problem with people running whatever they want on the hardware they purchase, but extending that to "I should also be allowed to be trusted when I do this" does not logically follow. In other words, feel free to reflash your Xbox, but don't expect to be able to play games or connect to your Xbox Live account from that hardware after your jailbreak.
This about not allowing competing browsers as a blanket policy. If this was trully about security, Apple can do as many security audits as they want. They can even charge for them. They can require affidavit, security officers, insurance policy, indemnity, etc.
But they dont because this is not about security, it is about controling the market
Not allowing arbitrary code on a platform is hardly an irrelevant point. It's a fundamental architectural decision that makes deep statements about what a platform can do, and who has permission to do it. These decisions define both business models AND features such as user security and trustworthiness.
For instance, to be competitive in terms of performance, a browser almost certainly needs to JIT Javascript. If a platform prevents apps from generating code and enabling the 'X' bit in PTEs then this isn't going to work. Even if the platform provides JIT services (e.g., pass in an AST, out pops a few pages of callable code) there is still a ton of added risk.
Designing and maintaining the security of a platform is a ton of work and a big investment (assuming it's done well). Security teams are already quite busy, and adding whole app categories that are suddenly able to break previously established design decisions is not easy -- "just do a security audit on a handful of titles" is a phrase that we've all heard, many times, and it sends shivers down our spines. Having seen it tried, and been on some projects that did it, I think it's impossible to do well even at a small scale.
Been there, done that, seen projects canceled because PMs couldn't internalize the nature of the risk to the platform.
A large part of Apple's brand, at this point, is security from snooping, personal privacy, etc etc. It makes sense to control the browser on the iPhone for privacy than it does to seek to eliminate browser competitors. Safari isn't a crucial part of their revenue, devices with the security promise are. Furthermore, the browser seems to be the key space where use privacy is violated from, via cookies and other tracking software. If Apple want's to say they have a pro-privacy device, controlling the browser makes sense for that goal.
It just doesn't make business sense for Apple to be attempting to control the browser market. Maybe you mean they are controlling some other market through the browser, though.
Apple does not own the hardware, why do they have any say what software I choose to execute.
Moreover, when one is selling something that involves transferring all rights in tangible/real property being sold to be transfered. Here apple is reserving the right to decide what can and cant run on the device. This clearly is a violation of property rights. Last I checked apple did not have people sign rent/lease agreements for the hardware.
Apple definitely has a say in how its software is run. IOS is licensed for use on Apple-branded devices, with further stipulations requiring, amongst other things, that it remain unmodified (it's right there in the EULA).
I'll be the last one to prevent you from running your own software on the hardware you bought. So, knock yourself out: Wipe all the nasty, evil Apple software off of that device and have your way with it. I would not expect any help from Apple about how to do this.
"I would not expect any help from Apple about how to do this."
This argument is straight up disingenuous- Apple is actively preventing you from running whatever you want on your property and they are preventing you from repairing it. You cannot get them to remove their crap from it.
The hardware still will not run any software that is not signed by apple. So even if I wanted to run linux on the device, I can't. The software EULA is not the problem. It's how they are controlling the underlying hardware.
Speaking of these devices, software is just virtual hardware, hardware is just statically fixed software. It’s all just patterns of logic gates configured to operate other cartridges of capability.
Conjuring up some arbitrary boundary constrains device maker innovation, reliability, security, and other consumer value.
You are free to pick your own water line, find a device that draws the line there, and vote with your wallet — or make and market your own thesis.
I believe the principal is that everything which is not banned is legal. This probably has a funky Latin translation, but I don’t know as I’m not a lawyer.
John has gone to the pub, a random person gave him $5,000 and said he can keep half if he transfers the rest to Bob. Later it turned out it was drug money.
The question in court will not be "is money laundering illegal" or "is taking money from random people illegal". The question in court will be "does this amount to money laundering, or is john just an idiot and it was not his responsibility to know".
Similarly, here we are discussing not "is market manipulation illegal", but "does the activity carried out by Apple amount to market manipulation"
Comparing Apple to game consoles is basically: "stop selling drugs" - "John does it too, and he is not in jail, so it's fine."
That argument only works if John has been to court and a judge has ruled that he is innocent. That's case law - it established that previously, in similar circumstances, a court has rules that this was / wasn't a crime.
Mens rea ("guilty mind") itself is not a uniformly applied principle. But it's the name of the concept you were attempting to address above.
See also actus reus ("guilty act").
And note that in tort liability (as opposed to criminal liability) other standards may apply. "Strict liabilty" is more typically applied in civil law, though there are (I learned responding here) some applications in criminal law as well. In the latter case it seems to be similar to my understanding of prima facie violation. That is, the fact of a thing is a violation of law, regardless of intent.
I first seriously discussed how Google is a systematic internaliser with my cofounder in 2003. The next year Google together with a consortium of major publishers abandoned and wrote off a $350MM initiative to enable trading in traditional and print media and the Advertising Age piece even reported specifics why they were disbanding which read close enough to what we began doing since 1996. The reasons involve a lot of micro market theory and since there's a involved corporate history that's about as much as I can say other than it looked very clear to us that Google merely found that the traditional media had managed to stitch up their markets in similar ways without any theoretical appreciation for their actions.
> > How can Google own the entire ads market and still be allowed to compete in it?
> They don’t. Amazon and Facebook both make a fortune from ads.
Yes, but they own search ads and a large percentage of web ads (though the non-siloed web is becoming less and less relevant each year), and they do everything in their power to put people into their ad funnel.
They control 50% of the mobile OS, 70%+ of the browser monoculture, and nearly 100% of search. They can order sites according to which ones use AdSense or AMP, neuter ad blocking (especially of AdSense), and collect behavior across the web even when website owners don't want it.
They're fucking up an entire set of technologies to further their goals.
That's not monopolistic. That's horrific. I don't think we even have a term to describe this yet, it's so bad.
> Yes, but they own search ads and a large percentage of web ads (though the non-siloed web is becoming less and less relevant each year), and they do everything in their power to put people into their ad funnel.
You can call any company as a monopoly if you define its market narrowly enough. The hard question is making a good argument for your choice of market. Google is absolutely a monopoly in search advertising. But is search advertising the right market to consider? Google would argue the appropriate market is advertising as a whole, where they are clearly not a monopoly.
The ultimate question at hand is whether and to what extent consumers are being harmed by anti-competitive practices. I think in Google's case that's a hard case to make. It might be a bit easier for e.g. Facebook or Amazon, though.
> How can Amazon be allowed to sell competing products in their own marketplace, when they own the actual marketplace? They should have been forced to divide their busin
Depends on how you define “marketplace”. Costco/Walmart/Best Buy/Target/Home Depot/Lowe’s/grocery stores all sell their own brands next to competing brands in their stores.
Is their one store the marketplace? It takes considerably more effort to go to a different store than going to a different website.
It's not just whatever marketplace, anti-monopoly legislation focuses on markets where the players own a significant share of the full market. In the case of Amazon, it seems like they have above 52% of the e-commerce market in the US in 2019 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/955796/global-amazon-e-c...) so probably it's even higher now.
When one player now has over half the market, you need to carefully watch what they are doing in order for them not to start exploiting their position. This is why it's different between Amazon and Home Depot, they hold different amount of the market, so even if Home Depot wanted to exploit their position, they probably couldn't. Amazon with their marketshare, can do so much easier.
Then there is the issue of specifically Amazon ranking their own products above others in their search results, even if others have better reviews, more purchases, more page views and so on. Then we start getting into "abusing their market position" territory, and this is what is getting investigated now.
The standard for antitrust enforcement for decades has been when the action of a company harms consumers.
How does Amazon harm consumers? I mean precisely, how?
Amazon is one of the most highly rated companies in the US by its customers. Its NPS score is 69 and 70 is considered "world class".
I can get almost anything online shipped to my house the SAME DAY. If Amazon sends you the wrong item they'll let you keep the wrong one and immediately ship you a new one!
How is taking action against Amazon going to help consumers? Seems to me that just ends up being a giant win for Walmart and target who offer worse service and often worse prices!
It's possible for a monopolist to have a great product that allows people to do amazing things that were never previously possible and still be harming the consumer.
Microsoft had the leading desktop operating system in the 90s that allowed millions of ordinary people to start using computers for the first time, yet their browser bundling was considered problematic.
Bell telephone allowed you to talk to people across town and across the country in real time. People love talking to their far away friends and relatives! But they were simultaneously providing this futuristic service and harming consumers with their anti-competitive practices and monopoly pricing.
It's possible for Amazon to both be providing a great service to you and me and be harming consumers with priority placement of Basics products and even harming competitors by abusing their access to product metrics in deciding what Basics products to make.
Let's be clear about something misunderstood about Microsoft: Microsoft won that litigation in America, which is the jurisdiction we're talking about. Framing Microsoft's browser bundling as being "considered" problematic is the same as framing someone who was acquitted as being "considered" a criminal. The Microsoft approach remains an acceptable practice in law and is one of the principle points of the Apple v. Epic fight.
> the district court ruled that Microsoft's actions constituted unlawful monopolization under Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed most of the district court's judgments.
To expand on this: they basically won the right to bundle on appeal, but they were found to have abused their market power in support of IE.
First Trial:
> On June 7, 2000, the court ordered a breakup of Microsoft as its remedy.[19] According to that judgment, Microsoft would have to be broken into two separate units, one to produce the operating system, and one to produce other software components.
Appeal:
> On November 2, 2001, the DOJ reached an agreement with Microsoft to settle the case. The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel of three people who would have full access to Microsoft's systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure compliance.[29] However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future.
If you’re convicted of murder because the government dismissed black jurors due to their racial prejudices in order to assure the jury was all white and then the conviction is overturned on appeal and the prosecutor declined to reprosecute, are you guilty of murder? No. You aren’t.
More closely: if you take a plea bargain and plead guilty to breaking and entering instead of murder, are you guilty of murder? What if you only agreed to the plea bargain because you didn’t want to spend the millions of dollars to litigate again? This latter hypothetical is the reality of corporate prosecution in America: companies will settle just to avoid tainting their reputation and spending the cash to win on the merits. That doesn’t mean that they’re guilty.
Most jurisdictions do not consider American Plea bargains a proper legal process.
You are suppose to be tried in a public process by an impartial judge and a jury of peers, not making a deal behind closed doors with a prosecutor looking to advance his career.
Microsoft's dirty tricks with DOS, Windows, and other would-be commodity software are legend. They should have gotten parted out into OS, Desktop suite, and probably several other fragments a long time ago. That stuff was a nightmare for me as a consumer.
I agree they should have been penalized (ideally more harshly than they were) for their legendary anticompetitive behavior, I'm just no longer as sure that partitioning the company out into distinct divisions would have been a net gain for the consumer as I used to be, especially against the specific behaviors they were accused of.
How, for example, would breaking up Microsoft into distinct divisions prevent, say, the OS division from enforcing the same anticompetitive requirements on companies licensing the OS?
I also think consumer perception of what's reasonable in an OS has shifted since then. I don't think any of us would argue now, for example, that shipping a desktop OS with no browser installed by default would be a reasonable choice. (Likewise probably a media player.)
Should it be impossible to uninstall? Maybe not, but there's a not-unreasonable argument to be made for preventing someone from winding up in a situation where they have no browser installed at all and can't look up how to fix it. (Having no media player installed is obviously less catastrophic.)
If you were a competitor at the time, the Halloween documents were NOT NEWS to you, they were just a frightening admission of what everyone knew MS was already doing.
Yes, they absolutely should have been broken up into fragments, if not crushed and handed out to the rest of America for free.
> How, for example, would breaking up Microsoft into distinct divisions prevent, say, the OS division from enforcing the same anticompetitive requirements on companies licensing the OS?
That kind of breakup wouldn't have solved that anti-competitive problem, but it would have solved others (e.g. the Office Team being able to use undocumented OS APIs to get an edge on competitors).
Though, personally I kinda think a breakup of a tech monopoly should be more extreme, for instance by breaking it up by division and splitting some of those divisions further into competitors (e.g. split the OS division in two, each with their own Windows fork to sell, and all the Windows trademarks go to some independent interoperability consortium).
> it would have solved others (e.g. the Office Team being able to use undocumented OS APIs to get an edge on competitors).
I mean, it might have prevented learning about and using new undocumented APIs going forward, but it would be in none of the newly-broken-up companies' interests to break the existing usage.
> splitting some of those divisions further into competitors
Even that I'm skeptical of - first, because you'd need enforcement to prevent them from simply merging again after a while (glares at Ma Bell breakup companies reforming into a few huge companies which usually deliberately avoid competing in markets), and second, I'm not convinced that deliberately fragmenting Windows into 2 distinct codebases is beneficial for consumers?
Even assuming you could avoid one of the two competitors simply winning the vast majority of the marketshare after one round of OS upgrades, you'd likely end up with mutually incompatible API surfaces, thus breaking one of the main reasons people like Windows - compatibility.
(I still claim, though, that given two initially equal products and equal resources, that one will probably relatively quickly eat the other's lunch. Look at what's happened almost every time a large open source project has had a high-profile fork - look at egcs and gcc, or OpenWRT and LEDE, or libav and ffmpeg.)
They are using their power to force competitors out of the market. That's what antitrust is about anyway -- it's not really about how happy customers are. "We're the best!" is easy to say when you've decimated any potential rivals.
Laws that prohibit anticompetitive practices do just as the name implies -- they prohibit companies from acting in a way that inhibits competition with their competitors in the market.
The impact on consumers is often used as a justification and evidence of that, but it's not usually a requirement. It is assumed that the act of being anticompetitive itself is harmful to consumers as it limits their options.
And they would be wrong. The fact that everyone does it is the reason no one truly succeeds, not in the long run. A MAD strategy not only with two players but with millions.
That is why every free market monopoly that has ever existed has passed and we are not living under the thumb of a single all encompassing mega-corporation and the only pseudo-monopolies possible are the ones guaranteed by law in regulations.
>How does Amazon harm consumers? I mean precisely, how?
but burying alternatives, they basically drive smaller product competitors away, reducing their sales and their ability to grow and innovate.
Amazon has been blatantly copying products that other brand sold, and made them cheaper.
Great for consumers if the only thing you care about it price.
Because the game is getting rigged and Amazon products will always be more prominent, no-one can compete with Amazon on these products.
You end up with less competition and less choice.
Amazon can just undercut you, push you down in their listings and get the lion's share of any product type they find lucrative.
Certainly not all that bad but where do you imagine this is going if no-one else is able to compete with Amazon?
Amazon is already king and has power of life and death on countless businesses that rely on it being an impartial party so they have a chance to sell their ware.
The same things were said against Walmart, the exact same arguments word for word.
And yet we saw the rise of independent stores, gentrification, Whole Foods, the rise of e-commerce, the rise of etsy, amazon, ali, ebay, the rise of the Apple Store, the rise of...
And then we saw an explosion of "third party" brands. Millions and millions of alternatives flooded the market despite Walmart "undercutting everyone of their suppliers". From soda to nailclippers, to phone cases to chairs, to spoons, to...everything. Despite all the fear mongering, today there is not a single product category where only one brand exists, there is not a single product category where only the Walmart brand exists.
Competition cannot be stopped, the business cycle cannot be stopped. Birth, growth, death, repeat. Amazon is huge today because Walmart was so huge before it; people actively went out of their way to avoid it just out of spite.
Competition cannot be stopped, except by regulations. Give amazon by law a pen to play in and you are making sure they'll never let anyone else in.
Things never stay as they are, and retail has never been so competitive. Amazon won't be top dog forever, just as Sears wasn't, just as Walmart wasn't. Just as the mighty GE wasn't, or the even mightier East India Co. wasn't.
>The same things were said against Walmart, the exact same arguments word for word.
And?
>And yet we saw the rise of independent stores, gentrification, Whole Foods, the rise of e-commerce, the rise of etsy, amazon, ali, ebay, the rise of the Apple Store
They seem to have a lot of sellers (relatively speaking) that do "triangle fraud". So they sell the part, order it from another site using stolen card, ship to original customer. They could be doing a lot to combat this but basically say "call the police" if they don't just ignore well sourced reports. Moving to more "fulfilled by Amazon" helps but that's never going to cover of all the inventory so fraudsters will always have a home there.
Amazon cares substantially about stopping these things.
As is the case when you are fighting against other humans, who are crafty, financially-motivated, and are willing to break the law, and may be operating from different jurisdictions where attempting to get the DA to prosecute them or filing a lawsuit against them is ineffective, it's a very difficult battle to fight.
As an example I'd be surprised if Amazon could get China to prosecute a business operating from their country that's selling counterfeits on Amazon. Additionally, it's hard for Amazon to know if a product sold in its marketplace is counterfeit: there's no global API or method to look up if a product is authentic. The best you can do is rely on the trust of the seller. If you want to mitigate your risk, buy products that are only sold by Amazon itself, or name-brand 3rd party sellers who have high reputation (like Belkin for electronics; Apple even lists Belkin products that integrate with theirs on Apple's online store: https://www.apple.com/shop/accessories/all/power-cables?fh=4... ).
People occasionally experience counterfeits, but once reported the seller is typically caught and banned. (But if they're a corporation in another country, and willing to break the law and ToS, they'll reincorporate under another name and try to do it again. Stopping this is difficult.)
Reviews are also a difficult problem to tackle. Amazon decided long ago to allow people to leave reviews without purchases, though reviews from people who purchased the item get an extra "verified purchase" badge. But that doesn't stop the abusers: they "buy" the item under various accounts they've created themselves, give the product a good review, and then return it to their own inventory. Small sellers might get a bunch of friends & family to do this, which would be hard to detect as ToS-violating conspiracy; larger sellers will use sophisticated schemes to create many accounts and identities to do the same thing (or simply pay a network of actual people to do it, such as by asking on Craigslist and similar places), to boost reviews of their own products, or if they're willing to burn cash, buy and negatively-review products of competitors. When done from many names/addresses/credit cards/IP addresses, it requires sophisticated intelligence analysis to detect and stop.
Please consider the attackers that Amazon is actually up against when trying to stop these abusive behaviors before concluding that they don't care. They have multiple hundreds of people working on the problems. They are simply hard problems to solve, because Amazon is fighting against other smart, sophisticated humans who gain financially from their abuse.
Amazon could shut down its marketplace, which accounts for 50% or more of all sales on the store, and only sell products it acquires directly from manufacturers, but that would destroy many businesses who have built themselves up using Amazon as a primary venue to sell their product. Furthermore, it would disallow people who have legitimately acquired the product another way from reselling it--for example, say I buy a pallet of some authentic product from a retail store that's going out of business; shouldn't I be able to resell those products? The law says that I can. If Amazon has a marketplace, shouldn't I be able to resell there? These could be Nike shoes or any name-brand products.
(Sophisticated manufacturers who want to protect their supply chains from 3P reselling will repurchase inventory from retailers who are going out of business; or alternatively provide it to retailers on consignment --meaning Nike owns all the shoes being sold in a retailer's store up until the point where they're sold to a consumer; so upon going out of business the retailer is expected to return the inventory.)
Now you run into tricky situations. I buy a pair of Nike shoes brand new from a retail store and never use them. I decide I don't like their look after all. Should I be able to sell my shoes on Amazon as new at a lower price than Nike does? Yes, you should and you can (though you're unlikely to be selected as the default offer as a new untrusted seller with a single product; unless Nike is one of the companies with brand protection for what may be offered as "new"; though I believe you could still sell as "like new"--I am not an expert on this space).
Some brands were counterfeited so frequently that Amazon has started to offer the ability to limit who can sell trademark-protected items that are only sold by their manufacturers with its Brand Registry: https://brandservices.amazon.com/
I believe the sellers who are accused of fraud or counterfeiting will be asked by Amazon to provide proof of authenticity, such as purchase orders from the manufacturer or other proof of authentic origin, but allowing people to open accounts and sell means they start with a presumption of trust -- creating the possibility that some people will have bad experiences with counterfeiters until they're caught and shut down.
Imagine you're the Amazon engineer responsible for figuring out how to stop people willing to break the law and all of your policies to make profit; then put yourself in an attacker's shoes and imagine all the things you could do to circumvent the best ideas you can come up with for stopping fraudulent reviews and counterfeits. (Assume for the sake of argument that your company is committed to allowing third-parties to sell on the store.)
I don't buy it. This is why companies have (sometimes government-mandated) know-your-customer policies.
Allowing anyone to sign up and do business on your platform with minimal friction is great for growing your platform, but it's terrible for growing a trustworthy platform.
The things you bring up are the result of an allow-all policy with a denylist. Deny-all with an allowlist would fix the problem. But of course that costs a lot more to implement, and as long as people still buy stuff on Amazon despite the hassle of dealing with counterfeits, Amazon will continue to fail to fix the problem.
> Amazon cares substantially about stopping these things.
And yet Amazon doesn't even let their customers choose the correct reason for returns when they receive counterfeit items. Instead of being able to choose "This item is a counterfeit" or "I believe this item is a counterfeit", the customer must choose between reasons for their return that aren't entirely accurate, like "Inaccurate website description" or "Item defective or doesn't work".
You'd think that a company that claims it is throwing vast amounts of resources at stopping counterfeiting on their platform would at least try to collect data on the counterfeits their customers receive.
They care substantially, yet still don't have the ability for users to report counterfeit and fraudulent goods in their report form reasons after 25 years.
Yeah, I've personally run into that myself. It's not that the listings are being renamed, it's typically that the seller is listing their product as a "variation" of the other product has has good reviews.
What you're describing is another kind of abuse called Listing Abuse, specifically Variation Abuse. If you encounter Listing Abuse, use the link on the page "Report Incorrect Product Information" [1] and say that the product is experiencing Listing/Variation Abuse, and give a couple examples of reviews that are clearly for unrelated products. It will be investigated, taken down/unlinked from those reviews, and the seller will be punished as appropriate.
("Variations" are products that have different SKUs but are all linked together and share reviews, such as the same product that comes in different colors or patterns or sizes. For example, the Speedo Swim Cap has 20+ color and pattern variations: https://www.amazon.com/Speedo-Silicone-Solid-Swim-Black/dp/B... . Each is actually a distinct product SKU, but since they're all functionally the same, just with different colors or patterns, they have one page and share reviews.)
The fundamental problem that makes Listing Abuse hard to stop is that, if you allow people to sell on your store, that means you allow them to enter their own product information -- which you don't have any way to verify. There's no World Authority for Product Information that you can check against. And not all sellers use Fulfillment-by-Amazon where Amazon holds the inventory; plenty of sellers ship the product themselves, meaning that Amazon never has an opportunity to see or inspect the product. Even if Amazon had a policy requiring new sellers to ship a product to Amazon to inspect, that wouldn't stop malicious sellers from shipping something different to customers.
Sellers have a lot of power to describe the products they're selling that they legitimately need. Unfortunately this means they have the power to list their products as variations of other highly-rated products to falsely make them look like they have a lot of good reviews. This is another one of those problems that is difficult to solve, because you need to give sellers access to describe their products to support legitimate usage patterns, like adding a new variation. (Like Speedo deciding to offer yet another color or pattern beyond their existing 20+).
All that being said, I agree that this should really be one of the easier types of fraud to stop, and don't understand why it's taking so long for the company to shut it down effectively. I think they need to build some machine learning systems that compares product information to review content when new variations are created, to flag likely variation abuse for human review. I also don't understand why variations are not required to all be shown on a single page (which would stop the abuse); there are probably legitimate use-cases that require it.
imagine hiring a thousand people to do the work while engineering is figuring out how to make them redundant, eventually. not every problem needs a technical AI solution. if people need to be a part of the process, so be it. just don't pretend it's too difficult because somehow the scale of the problem on other platforms simply doesn't compare.
As one example, I used to sell textbooks on Amazon. Our account would be suspended at ANY report of potential issues with a book, despite a 98%+ positive feedback rating. It was a constant battle against the platform, despite doing everything under the sun to ensure our customers had a perfect experience.
Meanwhile, Amazon Warehouse was slinging hot garbage and getting constant negative feedbacks (80% positive range) and they never got suspended. Amazon Warehouse even cancelled a massive number of their own negative feedbacks by blaming Amazon Prime for things that had nothing to do with shipping.
We were undercutting Amazon on price for a long time, but in the end we threw in the towel because it was just an impossible marketplace to participate in. Interestingly there was another textbook seller that had a similar experience that got their testimony read to Bezos by Congress.
But just offering better service for a lower price destroys competiting businesses. There is a reason competitor harm wasn't the standard for anti-trust despite it being about competition between companies.
Under the Bork standard, to which skystarman is alluding, rising price is the only concern. "Consumer harm" doctrine.
This was invented from whole cloth by Robert Bork, Richard Posner, and Aaron Director, at the University of Chicago, as part of a decades-long project and organisation to redraft US antitrust policy. It was devastatingly effective.
It also has little if any basis in the legislative rationale of original antitrust legislation in the US.
Thanks for clarifying! That "consumer harm" is a term of art here, and not a catch-all for all downsides the consumer experiences is exactly the kind of confusion I was hoping to clear up.
I’d rather see legislation that focused on both improving worker wage and making it easier for new companies to enter the marketplace and compete with Amazon rather than punishing Amazon for having a store brand or whatever (store brands very often seem to be a good thing for consumers, even if companies don’t like being undercut).
“The standard for decades”... the article is about a new laws being proposed because the current laws don’t properly account for the harms monopoly actors cause.
Isn't that itself very suspicious that they are going all Calvinball and changing the rules which long stood out of the blue?
Now they say it is a monopoly is a problem after Walmart managed to become the biggest employer in several states and literally becoming the only option in many areas? Now they cite vague unspecified harms while long ignoring concrete ones and claim the ones with no ability to exclude from the market are too far? That just screams "pretext".
Out of the blue? We’ve been talking about Amazon’s market power for a long time—longer in tech years. If we expect tech companies to move fast, I’d like regulation to be less than a decade behind.
Price and selection. You may love what Amazon offers today. I think they're moderately terrible, even compared to the Amazon of 10 years ago, and I have fewer alternative marketplaces to choose from and products in those marketplaces. Try finding the exact thing/seller/manufacturer you're looking for... for some things I find it damn near impossible due to how they now consolidate listings. I'm also pretty sure that the prices aren't as good as they would in a more competitive environment but can't be certain as Amazon has wiped out much of it. Competition is a key mechanism that allows markets to self regulate.
The vast majority of companies are incapable of self regulating because it is contrary to their primary mission of 'maximizing shareholder value'. This generally just means eliminate your competition and then maximizing profit. In the absence of competitive markets, the government often needs to step in at some point.
Yes, so the issue is not just selling your own products in your own marketplace.
> This is why it's different between Amazon and Home Depot, they hold different amount of the market, so even if Home Depot wanted to exploit their position, they probably couldn't.
I would say Home Depot has far more control of their markets than Amazon does. Pick any smaller metro, and the only consumer building materials store around is Home Depot or Lowes. The two basically split up all the markets, and if there’s not enough business to sustain both, then there will be just one. But no other store will be able to compete.
If you’re a manufacturer and you can’t convince Home Depot or Lowes to stock your item in their store, then you’re not going to reach 90% of people via in store attention (for home improvement stuff).
Almost all big box store brands have whittled down to two viable options, or even one in the case of Best Buy. Although, I think that might be the natural state of things given how low profit margins are for retail (low single digit percentages).
I’m from a rural county in Illinois and our largest city has Lowes, HD, Menards, Ace, Farm and Home Supply and a number of specialty stores. There’s considerably more competition in Home Depot’s field.
I forgot about Ace, but searching on Maps shows there’s still a few around! I wonder if they are franchised. I only recall seeing HD and Lowes on the coasts though.
How is it more competition? You’ll visit at most what 2 of those stores looking for a product?
I can use plugins in a web browser to effectively visit 100 stores to shop for the best price on an item. Amazon is just another vendor.
-edit-
To add to this. If you want to compare to Amazon then you have to look at the market share and revenue of those stores too. Not simply their existence. It doesn't matter if an ACE hardware is in the area if it is 3% of the market.
> I can use plugins in a web browser to effectively visit 100 stores to shop for the best price on an item. Amazon is just another vendor.
Sure you could, but is that how most users use the web? According to Statista (2019 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/955796/global-amazon-e-c...) [same link I put before], over 50% of the market is just Amazon, even though it's soooo easy to chose another one.
Since they now have a grip of the majority of the market, they should be having lots of eyes on them, as they can easily abuse their position, which most of us don't want to them to do.
Could it be that people choose Amazon because despite its faults it provides the best service?
I dislike Amazon and try to avoid them wherever possible, but in practice I probably use them 50% of the time, because in those instances there isn’t a better alternative.
It doesn't matter what percentage of people choose an option so long as competing options are readily available. The fact is Amazon can't abuse it's position and raise prices dramatically or severely reduce service or otherwise take advantage of a captive market because the market is not captive.
I can’t view the link without paying unless you are simply showing that Amazon has 13% of the global e-commerce market and 50%~ of the U.S. market.
To answer your question - it doesn’t matter. We don’t determine monopolies simply because of market share. If we did, why aren’t we filing another anti-trust investigation against Microsoft and Windows?
The point anyway is that people have no switching cost. Amazon faces stiff competition not just in America but globally. I remain unconvinced that they have a monopoly on e-commerce. Sure they may have take some monopolistic actions which could be addressed, but that’s not enough for me to demonstrate that they are a monopoly.
Frankly, I think Amazon has really been struggling. Prime sucks. 2-day shipping is slipping not just in service but as new competitors enter the market. It’s a fierce competition.
Google and Facebook on the other hand are monopolies. That’s a no-brainer.
Apple I’m not sure how they’ve even been in the discussion.
>Apple I’m not sure how they’ve even been in the discussion
Remember that Apple and Google pulled a legal app from their stores, regular Apple users (like 50% of US) can't install stuff on their device without Apple parental approval and the "make it a website argument also fails because Apple is does not let you install a better browser".
50% still affects a lot of people, though Apple fanboys will attempt to say is not a big enough number (remember you could install other browsers and whatever application you wanted on Windows without a Microsoft approval or tax).
Depends on how you look at it. Are we comparing operating systems? Then we have a duopoly and should regulated Android as well. Are we comparing phone manufacturers? Well, there's a ton of them, Apple just competes and does the best.
> Apple and Google pulled a legal app from their stores
I can't sell anything I want at Wal-Mart. Doesn't PayPal not allow porn sites to do business? I don't see how this is different.
> Windows without a Microsoft approval or tax
So is it market share or what? What exactly is the monopoly? Microsoft doesn't allow me to play PlayStation games on Xbox. Most computers are sold with Windows operating systems. I don't know what the monopoly is supposed to be with Apple.
- consoles, I am against their locking too , there is less complains about them so far since people can jailbreak them and their mostly media/enterteiment devices, but again I don't agree with the locks on consoles either
- monopoly, duopoly is not that important, you can have 3 big actors in a market that are cooperating against the users for their own interests, so the market share is irrelevant and the abuse/damage is relevant. Is Apple not allowing say 10 million users to install some app because of political reasons or 50 million users to install a game because some other policy reason? This people were affected , for example Joe did not know when he bought his iPhone that Apple can block his favorite game , or some app , is friend Bob has Android and he side loaded it, Joe is pissed now and feels tricked because on the box it was not printed that Apple can abuse his trust like this.
> "make it a website argument also fails because Apple is does not let you install a better browser".
I'm currently on chrome on my iphone. Maybe you can't install arbitrary browsers, but you can certainly install different ones. And there's always jailbreaking.
Chrome is a bit more then a skin and you know it and I am sure you can't expect to trick competent people with this argument. If iOS would implement PWA then some native applications could be implemented as as PWA and Apple would lose money(I don't believe the security or privacy excuse either, a PWA will always have less access then a native app)
I will have to let someone else to continue this since I don't own a iOS device and at work we don't target mobile.
Though I had to fix soem iOS issue sin a third party plugin, it was using some WebGl and it was broken on iOS, so the plugin was using a software(slow and ugly thing) for iOS but then Apple change things so tablets pretend they are desktops and broke the plugin(so from my limited experience iOS browsers are inferior ).
I can't tell if you're joking or not. Apple refuses to implement Web APIs that make PWAs usable, the same Web APIs that Google, Chrome, Firefox, etc have all implemented 8+ years ago.
I don't want to name it, because the US guys will start again a big debate why X event is worse then Y event, why this P app is worse then F app, and since X > Y and P< F then Apple is right to ban the legal app P to protect the citizens.
That is a very visible case, but there were other smaller cases , where smaller applications were blocked because they had a link and that link was going to a page and on that page a developer would accept donations and Apple wanted a but from that.
Then you have apps blocked on totalitarian states, an entire nation is affected because they can't side load applications.
> Yes, so the issue is not just selling your own products in your own marketplace.
Of course not, the final issue is companies becoming monopolies and companies abusing their market positions, that is what we want to prevent, in order to foster innovation and open markets.
> I would say Home Depot has far more control of their markets than Amazon does
Maybe you're right, I know nothing about what's going on on the ground of the US. So if Home Depot do have more control of their market than what Amazon has of the e-commerce market (more than 50%), then they should also be under watch to see what "strategies" they employ to get more profits.
Just because the House is now investigating technology companies doesn't mean that hopefully whatever legislation comes out of this, cannot be applied to other industries.
> It's not just whatever marketplace, anti-monopoly legislation focuses on markets where the players own a significant share of the full market.
It depends on what you call the marketplace. Look at the broader "retail" sector
> The eCommerce giant [Amazon] accounted for 3.2 percent of total consumer spending in Q2 (spanning all categories, including retail) and 9 percent of total retail spending... When it comes to consumer spending, Walmart accounts for 3.4 percent overall and 10.2 percent for retail. That’s up from 9.6 percent in Q1 2020.
Walmart has a considerable share.
> so even if Home Depot wanted to exploit their position, they probably couldn't
Do you really think Amazon has more pricing power than Walmart? I'm much more likely to switch online retailers than my brick and mortar store. It's a lot easier to compare prices and switch.
If you define the marketplace as the US economy, Amazon looks like a tiny blip. If you define it as in-person retail Amazon is non-existent.
The analogy I would use is that e-commerce retail is smart phones in 2008 (maybe a bit later) and the broader retail market includes landlines and feature phones. Even today landlines exist and feature phones are sold. The growth trajectory for e-commerce won’t change and big box retail won’t encounter a meaningful resurgence. Amazon is the second biggest retailer alone as compared with Walmart which primarily makes money on big box store and has a retail presence in name only (if you take just their online sales it’s not meaningful competition). The concern is that the reason Amazon holds such dominance in e-commerce is because it’s really leveraging cross-market dominance. AWS subsidizes their marketplace to be extra competitive, their data on retail has them introducing first-party products that compete with suppliers selling through their platform by focusing on high-margin items.
The better question is whether or not this kind of behavior needs regulation, or needs regulation yet. I’d argue yes having read the story from the diaper.com founder and Bezos’ laughable diversion.
As for ease of switching, I think e-commerce can’t be directly compared as the driving user behaviors are different. I could argue it’s easier with a big box store because I could just drive to a different one, use my CC and move on whereas in e-commerce I have yet another account to manage, I have to make sure I’m not getting scammed, etc.
> The growth trajectory for e-commerce won’t change and big box retail won’t encounter a meaningful resurgence.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. I like the convenience of online shopping, but I also like convenience of immediately taking possession and curation. I'm price sensitive of course. I buy most of my electronics from Best Buy. Their prices are almost always the same as Amazon and if they're not its trivial to ask for a price match, which they always do.
Obviously Best Buy or other retailers can't stock everything, but they can stock a lot of the things I want to buy in Electronics. And they leverage Amazon search, ratings and price. They're just more convenient. They have been doing very well over the last decade.
I think people extrapolate too much of the current trends. Physical retail has been around longer than Amazon and will likely be around when Amazon is gone.
We can't regulate competition in online retail over concerns about what might happen in the future based on an analogy to a completely different market.
Nothing stops Wal-Mart from putting Sam's Choice product on the endcap to the soft drink asile. Amazon has scale problem, and the question shouldn't be about product x or product y, but why aren't there more Amazons and more Googles competing with each other.
Search result positioning is equivalent to physical placement in brick and mortars. Are you going to start legislating where exactly Whole Foods or Target can place its house-brand items? Should Starbucks be forced to reorder its menu items in descending order of popularity?
There's basically nothing on Amazon that can't be purchased elsewhere online, so to say that the answers to the above questions can change because lots of people choose to buy from Amazon doesn't ring of "protecting the consumer". If anything, the fact that so many people choose to shop there makes me think the consumers have spoken and they like the deal they're getting.
the percentage share of a market is an indicator but not the defining characteristic of monopoly practices, rather it’s control. principally that manifests as pricing power and leverage over competitors. a monopolist can have a 20% share and still exert anti-competitive power over that market.
For an increasing number of product lines, Walgreens is selling only their house brand.
Last time I needed one, I was unable to buy an effective bandage wrap in person, I had to order online. My local Walgreens only had their own house brand "self stick" type that doesn't really stick at all.
Went to buy some wrist braces, again, only their house brand. Many styles of wrist braces exist, they sold one type, the type I didn't want.
For some house brands, such as Costco, they provide a huge competitive force in the marketplace. An example is Costco Diapers, which are rated really well, and basically establish a price at which other "name brands" have to complete. There is a possibility that they are creating a downwards pressure on the price of diapers overall. (Or that they are colluding to ensure prices don't fall too far, huh, never thought of that angle before!)
My local grocery store's brand is generally untrustworthy. I hate it when they are the only option for buying something. The 3 times I have tried their yogurt coated pretzels I have gotten an upset stomach, and I normally have an iron stomach that allows me to eat street food around the world with aplomb.
Funny enough their house brand "sweetened flavored sparking water" is really my preferred brand, so they get it right some of the time.
But from one perspective, isn't this argument hypocritical of us? If I go to a baker, I kinda expect everything in the bakery to be "store brand", and in fact many bakeries been scandalized for not selling their own goods! Heck if I go to my local farmer's market I expect what the farmer sells what they grew, and again if they are just reselling produce, social media scandal!
This entire idea of stores being a "marketplace" for multiple brands is only a recent aberration.
So maybe what are seeing is just things are just slowly returning to a world where everything is "store branded".
> This entire idea of stores being a "marketplace" for multiple brands is only a recent aberration.
Replace marketplace with platform, anyone who calls themselves a platform and competes on the “kill all competitors” level should be regulated as common carrier/public space.
There are numerous ways to identify platforms vs marketplaces and not all of them are related to total market penetration. But I think the legislation should look in that direction, give the FTC the power to declare a company a platform in its space and then allow it to regulate that company in the same way utilities are regulated but obv updated for the internet age.
I think the biggest hinderance to this sorta thing is that all law makers are increasingly biased and refuse to acknowledge their favor. They pretend instead that they are in fact impartial and any appearance to the contrary is simply necessary due to the importance of the issue at hand, or the extremists involved (“I’m really a centrist, they’re just nazis, so I appear to be far left” and vice versa).
Should Costco/Walmart be allowed to sell products along competing ones in their own marketplace? No! Of course!
I’d like to see how well they would perform on Target/Best Buy shelves, they probably wouldn’t sell at all. Therefore the only origin for their success is an abuse of marketplace ownership, and it has distorted the market, and therefore has harmed consumers by simply reducing quality brand’s ability to scale, by imposing higher shelf costs for the same brand exposure, and therefore fewer sales.
Although it’s not a monopoly — and another law should be drafted against competing on a marketplace you own.
I feel like this ship sailed many many decades (centuries?) ago. Pretty much any store aside from small mom-and-pops will have their own brand of commodity items that they sell alongside third-party brands. Complaints about those seem to be pretty rare.
I think the difference is that the playing field is more level. Most stores that I've seen won't make it harder to buy the name-brand version or easier to buy the store-brand version (aside from the store brand often being cheaper). They tend not to really market the store brand, so the name-brand version generally has advertising behind it and is often seen as superior, even when it really isn't. The two versions sit side-by-side on the shelves without preferential placement to either.
Meanwhile, I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon gives preferential treatment in search results to stuff that gives them a better margin, regardless of whether or not it's a better product or a better value.
I don't necessarily agree that they wouldn't sell outside their own store, though. I generally look at the store brand as the usually-cheaper "generic brand". For example, if I'm looking for cold medicine, I'll never buy NyQuil, because the equivalent store brand is more or less the exact same thing and is cheaper. But I don't really care which store brand. If the CVS-branded version somehow ended up in a Walgreens, I'd still buy it. (Obviously CVS would never sell the Walgreens version, but... yeah.)
(Speaking of mom-and-pops, I actually find it annoying when I need cold medicine, walk into my local corner store, and only find NyQuil rather than the generic CVS/Walgreens/whatever store brand. The corner store usually sells NyQuil at an even higher price than the chain pharmacy would, and there's no alternative.)
>I’d like to see how well they would perform on Target/Best Buy shelves
I don't understand that comparison at all. Do you know what percent of the Target floorspace is Target owned brands? Or Ikea?
Imagine being a store that sells its own product, AND wants to augment their own product with some third party products. Like a sweatshirt company that also throws sunglasses on a rack. They arent really "making" either of these things. In one case they are throwing some branding over a product and having having it manufactured by contract. The other they buy generic wholesale. Because they want to sell both branded and unbranded goods they shouldnt exist? That would shut down nearly every retail business in the country overnight.
Where has the idea of a neutral marketplace ever been realized in brick and mortar America?
Should Costco/Walmart be able to sell their own brands on their own website? Should retailers who sell other brands be able to sell their own brand at all?
> and therefore has harmed consumers by simply reducing quality brand’s ability to scale, by imposing higher shelf costs for the same brand exposure, and therefore fewer sales.
How come brand name items cost more on the brand’s website compared to Walmart’s brands on Walmart’s website? There is no shelf cost online.
Isn’t it because resellers like Walmart always require lower prices than what the brand sells publicly, otherwise brands would always undercut all their resellers? It is the case with electronics, I don’t know for food.
I doubt it, that would be ascribing immense sway to Walmart over other enormous companies like Procter and Gamble, Unilever, etc.
What is more likely is this is a simple example of price discrimination or price segmentation. Theoretically, you can earn the most money by selling each item at the maximum price the buyer is willing to pay. But if the buyers all have varying levels of income or willingness to pay, how do you scale this? Obviously, you can't barter with every single person for every $5 bottle of lotion.
What you can do is create various brands, and maybe differentiate the products slightly, or maybe not. Similar to binning with silicon chips where the chips with higher probabilities of performing better and longer get sold for higher.
So Walmart can go to Johnson and Johnson and say hey, you're selling Lubriderm for $5, make me some lotion that's similar or lower in quality (but still acceptable to Walmart), and we'll sell that for $4. Now, J&J get to sell their $5 lotion to people willing to pay $5, and a cheaper line to people wanting to pay less, but they don't have to lose the people paying $5.
And they do this in many, many layers. P&G, Unilever, J&J, and others all have countless brands they use to hit various price points. And the products may be the same, or may be marginally less in quality. And maybe it behooves some people to pay more for the extra assurance of quality.
> It takes considerably more effort to go to a different store than going to a different website.
That seems like it must be true - Going to Lowe's instead of Home Depot takes getting to know a different store layout, and likely at least an extra half hour if you still have to go to HD.
But evidently, by the way people talk about ordering everything from Amazon (despite its numerous problems) and look at you like you have three heads if you talk about going to even say just Target.com, there seems to be some counterintuitive hurdle for switching websites that's actually worse than for physical stores. Perhaps because web widgets are so un-affordanced that figuring out a new one can actually be hard, or that the majority of orders are reorders, or the smaller stakes dopamine feedback from getting what you need while sitting down, or the dark forest feeling makes people extremely conservative. Whatever it is, it exists.
Of course there are also plenty of people who have no problem switching between online stores at the drop of a hat. I'd posit that these people have a model of buying based on manufacturers, viewing the web stores as mere means to some ends, and understand credit card chargeback policies. For example I buy a decent amount of stuff from Zoro (whose descriptions can be lacking), and so I often end up referencing manufacturers' catalogs directly. Which are fantastically informative and easy to read (single PDF, well-specified comparison tables, no middle clicking dozens of search results, no page load lag, no flipping between tabs to spot a minute difference hidden by web chaff, no surveillance, etc), but I'm certainly paying a fixed effort overhead to get to that point.
Whatever the case for such stickiness is, I think one of the best tech reforms possible would be to mandate open APIs. As Amazon (et al) are stores, then their business is selling specific products for specific prices. This data should be openly available such that it can be retrievable by every user agent (no CAPTCHA harassment), and ideally, orders placed through the same system. This would enable price competition as well as UI competition, rather than the two being bundled as they are now.
> But evidently, by the way people talk about ordering everything from Amazon (despite its numerous problems) and look at you like you have three heads if you talk about going to even say just Target.com, there seems to be some counterintuitive hurdle for switching websites that's actually worse than for physical stores.
I think there is truth to this since I personally for a long time would go to Amazon for everything. Over time I have shifted to using them less and less.
However I think it’s just a matter of consumer maturity. Apple Pay has done a lot to make it easier for me to buy from 3rd party websites. There is a lot of money to be made in services to help the rest of the web be more competitive to Amazon. We are just at a certain stage in the cycle.
That’s what concerns me about getting the government involved. These ‘monopolies’ have arisen very quickly - on the order of a decade. Things can change in the marketplace just as fast.
We can look at general principles and see problematic couplings and incentives. In fact we could do this ten years ago before the problem grew so large, but there was no political will.
For example, by bundling product sales and web UI, what Amazon (et al) are doing is making it so that customers have to use Amazon's software to shop Amazon (and conversely they're prevented from using software of their own choice). Of course Amazon's software hasn't been designed to benefit the user, but has been designed to benefit Amazon - eg "dark patterns". Hence my call to unbundle the two by mandating API access. A public API is straightforwardly in Amazon's capabilities (it's literally just making a version of their website in a predictable format without all the extra crap), and would tie right into your "services to help the rest of the web be more competitive to Amazon".
Facebook et al are doing the same thing with regards to Metcalfe's law, and a similar remedy would be appropriate.
Not that I think any specific legislation will be anything resembling sensible reforms. Hell, we'll be lucky if it doesn't end up being a boon for big tech.
I'm proposing it and saying it would be a better remedy than whatever regulatory-capture-ripe "reform" they're proposing is.
I actually like house brands of stuff, when compared to the thousands of gensym brands. The problem isn't marketplace companies privileging their own brands - it's with singular companies owning the marketplace to begin with.
Humans are creatures of habit, and the way to make it so we aren't in the habit of just buying everything from $Amazon is to replace that with the habit of buying things through non-affiliated aggregators. I'd rather have one familiar UI showing me (Amazon Basics, Zoro Select, HDX, etc), than multiple UIs each showing me the same "competing" gensym brands.
Why not just outlaw dark patterns in general as deceptive practices?
All this focus on fixing particular companies or government mandating software architecture seems like it just gets the government more and more invovled while not doing anything to prevent the actual abuses.
It's impossible to formally define dark patterns, especially when trying to except traditional dark patterns (recurring sales, coupons, strategically placed roasting chickens, etc).
And so any attempt to do that will necessarily "get the government more and more involved". Either through some administrative body that decides whether a certain thing is a "dark pattern", or through judicial remedies ("Here is your 57 cent media credit because Amazon lied about shipping cutoff times. They admit no wrongdoing but promise to never do it again").
Meanwhile mandating APIs isn't mandating "software architecture". It's merely just a different form of the website that has a predictable structure. Amazon could even choose whatever structure they want, as long as it is documented and versioned.
Both approaches aren't mutually exclusive, so I'm not arguing against the former. I just don't hold out hope for it to create meaningful reform - centralized bodies are just as likely to bless abusive practices.
That's like calling a bike shed "civil engineering". I don't know what point you're making with the term "software architecture" other than trying to make it sound burdensome.
My point is that once you mandate that, then forever all stores must be architected around providing this web API, based on technology assumptions frozen in law.
Building a P2P or distributed store, not based on a central website, just as an example, would be illegal.
This is just one example of how the future would be encumbered forever based on a 90’s software architecture becoming enshrined in law.
The web as it is today is not some endpoint in software evolution.
A Government mandated API is literally the government regulating software architecture.
A law would be horribly broken if it said something like "all stores must have a web API". Alternatives of "web stores must have a web API" or "all businesses with a digital UI must have a published API offering the same features" wouldn't succumb to that.
That's why I take issue with the word "architecture". If a business has chosen to offer a web storefront, a web API can be supplied right alongside that. There's no need for any "architecture" mandate - the business has chosen the architecture, and the law would mandate accessibility.
Also a P2P/distributed store would itself be defined by an open API, making the issue moot.
> A law would be horribly broken if it said something like "all stores must have a web API". Alternatives of "web stores must have a web API" or "all businesses with a digital UI must have a published API offering the same features" wouldn't succumb to that.
There would have to be a lot more than that. Who would govern API quality, what about service levels, how about authentication and sign up? Data formats, etc. Would these all be up to the vendor? What happens when there is a bug in the API?
> That's why I take issue with the word "architecture". If a business has chosen to offer a web storefront, a web API can be supplied right alongside that.
No, see above. It just isn’t that simple.
> There's no need for any "architecture" mandate - the business has chosen the architecture, and the law would mandate accessibility.
Well this isn’t what you said before.
> Also a P2P/distributed store would itself be defined by an open API, making the issue moot.
Not at all. There is no reason at all for distributed store network would need to have an open API. It could operate in terms of user facing pages for people to interact with - or be like a network of chat bots.
You are basing this entire hypothesis on the basis that computer architectures are what you imagine them to be today, which is an invalid assumption.
> You are basing this entire hypothesis on the basis that computer architectures are what you imagine them to be today, which is an invalid assumption.*
It seems to me that you are the one who is pulling in details from today, asserting that they must be incorporated into any law, and then pointing out how that's a bad idea.
My lone assumption is a business that provides user-facing software. That's it. With that assumption, I'm arguing for the principle that when a business provides customers a human-targeted "UI", they need to provide a corresponding machine-usable "API" that bypasses the accidental complexity of human interaction. We know there must be a machine-friendly format before the user-friendly format, because the software is itself operating on a machine.
>> the business has chosen the architecture, and the law would mandate accessibility.
> Well this isn’t what you said before.
This is what I said before. Having some type of public API is not "architecture". It's mandating open access to the same thing any front end needs to access anyway.
Authentication and sign up: It's a public API, so this is irrelevant for read access. For ordering, the same exact account system as using the web/app UI. You keep ignoring existing implementations, pretending like what I'm saying would require some huge ground-up design rather than tweaks to what already exists.
Data formats: The company. If a company is big enough to dictate formats, then they're big enough for developers to pay attention to. After the custom of using aggregators for shopping becomes commonplace, it becomes in their own interest to stick with common formats rather than get left behind.
Bugs: The company, while leaving the old "buggy" version in place for some period of time.
In general, you seem to be succumbing to the programmers-don't-understand-the-law trap whereby you're imagining that any such law would be useless since a company could just deliberately create an unusable API. But courts see right through those type of "bad faith" approaches.
> It seems to me that you are the one who is pulling in details from today, asserting that they must be incorporated into any law, and then pointing out how that's a bad idea.
You say this but then go on to pull in far more detail from today than I have...
> My lone assumption is a business that provides user-facing software. That's it. With that assumption, I'm arguing for the principle that when a business provides customers a human-targeted "UI", they need to provide a corresponding machine-usable "API" that bypasses the accidental complexity of human interaction. We know there must be a machine-friendly format before the user-friendly format, because the software is itself operating on a machine.
False. Actual machine friendly formats are not the same as the data structures that power UIs.
>> the business has chosen the architecture, and the law would mandate accessibility.
> Well this isn’t what you said before.
>This is what I said before. Having some type of public API is not "architecture". It's mandating open access to the same thing any front end needs to access anyway.
As already stated, the front end is not the same thing as an api suitable for clients. Maintaining a stable API is quite different from building a front-end site.
> Authentication and sign up: It's a public API, so this is irrelevant for read access.
Is it? Front ends often require sign up for read access. Why wouldn’t an API?
> For ordering, the same exact account system as using the web/app UI.
Wait - I thought your idea was architecture neutral. Why are you talking about the web ui?
> You keep ignoring existing implementations, pretending like what I'm saying would require some huge ground-up design rather than tweaks to what already exists.
Ahh, so this is just about how things are built today with minor tweaks.
> Data formats: The company. If a company is big enough to dictate formats, then they're big enough for developers to pay attention to.
Ok, so your law requires people to dictate formats?
> After the custom of using aggregators for shopping becomes commonplace, it becomes in their own interest to stick with common formats rather than get left behind.
Aggregators owned by whom? Google, Facebook, Amazon?
> Bugs: The company, while leaving the old "buggy" version in place for some period of time.
Seems like you have just introduced an architectural requirement to be able to run old versions in parallel with new ones. Who determines the person of time?
> you're imagining that any such law would be useless since a company could just deliberately create an unusable API. But courts see right through those type of "bad faith" approaches.
You are the only one talking about bad faith. I’m simply pointing out that supporting API clients requires architecture that is different from only supporting UI visitors.
If you are iterating on the UI frequently, and changing the structures that supports that UI, the by definition you don’t have a stable API unless you engineer one separately. No bad faith needed.
> You say this but then go on to pull in far more detail from today than I have...
I'm referencing details that today's businesses are already operating with. I'm not proposing them to be part of the law, but analyzing how a generally abstract law would be applied to today's implementations.
> Actual machine friendly formats are not the same as the data structures that power UIs.
You're right. I tried to simplify by leaving off the network, and that was a mistake. It is true, a business offering in-person user-facing software would have to design a protocol to get the data out of memory (ie a security boundary). But when a business offers the software over a communications network, such serialization formats are already a requirement. So I do have a second assumption of a communications network.
> Front ends often require sign up for read access
I have yet to see a popular consumer store that requires a signin to browse products.
> Wait - I thought your idea was architecture neutral. Why are you talking about the web ui?
Because we're still talking about businesses who have chosen to make their software available over the web. That is complexity that they've chosen.
> Aggregators owned by whom? Google, Facebook, Amazon?
Whomever, at your own individual choice, as they're not bound by network effects of selling products as well. I'd personally choose a local client from the apt repository or nixpkgs.
> If you are iterating on the UI frequently, and changing the structures that supports that UI, the by definition you don’t have a stable API
So you're telling me that the back end engineers at Amazon just make whatever changes they feel like, remove the old version, and the front end engineers just deal? Or when the front end engineers want some additional data, they simply edit the backend code and deploy it directly?
In reality, there is versioning and change control going on internal to any large company. But once again you're blindfolding yourself to the common structure and customs that already exist, only to throw your hands up.
I really don't see how we can productively continue this conversation, as you keep superficially dragging in orthogonal complexity and then point outing how complex it is, rather than focusing on my proposal as stated.
FWIW, look at the EU's mandate for a common charging connector that both avoided locking in one implementation forever, while leveraging modern industry consensus to provide a massive market benefit.
> So you're telling me that the back end engineers at Amazon just make whatever changes they feel like, remove the old version, and the front end engineers just deal? Or when the front end engineers want some additional data, they simply edit the backend code and deploy it directly?
No - they work as a team and make changes together without any regard for the needs of API consumers outside their company.
This is exactly the point.
Front and back end teams work together to make changes and don’t have to maintain a stable API for any other consumers.
> look at the EU's mandate for a common charging connector that both avoided locking in one implementation
If I was interviewing someone for a technical role and they told me that APIs were like charging connectors, I would say ‘no hire’, and complain to the recruiter.
> you keep superficially dragging in orthogonal complexity
It’s not orthogonal.
Your argument seems to be that supporting external API clients in addition to an in-house UI imposes no burden on someone’s architecture.
This is patently false.
If you could accept that there are architectural constraints imposed by your demand, then it would be possible to reason about them, but simply denying them leads nowhere.
> Front and back end teams work together to make changes and don’t have to maintain a stable API for any other consumers.
So you agree that they already have to maintain stable APIs for each other? Meaning the mandate would be just adding a requirement for external visibility into the existing internal process, not anything significantly different from what they're already doing.
> If I was interviewing someone for a technical role and they told me that APIs were like charging connectors, I would say ‘no hire’, and complain to the recruiter.
So are you closed minded to analogies in general, don't appreciate that the physical layer has its own complexity, or what? The same type of arguments you're making were also levied at micro USB, by companies trying to keep their bespoke proprietary connectors so they could charge $50 for a spare phone charger. In the end they lost and the market benefited.
> Your argument seems to be that supporting external API clients in addition to an in-house UI imposes no burden
I agree there's a "burden". It's a small burden. One easy bound on this burden is that it is much less effort than developing a mobile app or another whole website specifically for mobile users. And most companies have eagerly done both.
> If you could accept that there are architectural constraints imposed by your demand
You keep using this word architecture. The current de facto deliverable includes XML or JSON documents. The deliverable for the mandate would be differently-formatted XML or JSON documents. Calling a second formatting an "architectural constraint" is a stretch.
>Costco/Walmart/Best Buy/Target/Home Depot/Lowe’s/grocery stores all sell their own brands next to competing brands in their stores.
These are almost all 'control brands'; similar or identical products from the same suppliers, but they don't have marketing spend allocated to them. The delta in sales between the control brands and the 'brand-name' ones allows you to calculate goodwill.
Not in my experience. Except for very well known brands like Coca Cola and Mars, the store-brand products are always front and center in all shelves, and all in-store marketing (flyers, catalogs, promotions) is for the store branded products. This is for Carrefour, Franprix and Monoprix, not sure how it is in the US.
Target creates knock offs (Up+Up brand) for almost all the household products they sell. They're placed directly next to the item from the known brand, such as Neutrogena. I would say if anything, the known brand item is more front and center, but it's impossible to ignore the adjacent facsimile that's 2/3 the price.
I’ve never seen it used in a context other than trying to pass an item off as something else. I would be surprised to hear someone refer to a generic version of something as a knockoff.
Consignment is still a stocking risk. They are on the hook for holding costs.
Amazon doesn't do shit with marketplace inventory. Sellers are either stocking it themselves, or they are explicitly paying amazon to hold it in their inventory.
The difference matters because retail stores always have an incentive to sell the things they stock. Even pure consignment stores will refuse to consign items that they don't think they can sell. Amazon has zero incentive to sell marketplace merchant stock, as they bear zero cost to not sell it. So anytime they start to compete against their merchants, they can effectively hide competitors listings in a back room out of sight and never have to deal with the consequences of doing so.
Antitrust legislation usually kick in when there is a dominant participant in the market that is abusing their position. So shops having their own-brand products competing with products from vendors is fine until the company in question has an effective hold on that market.
Bing.com has Google Earth first on the list as well.
I think you are overreacting to how many searches give Google products as the first result.
The only products that do rank high are literally the most popular products. What do you think they should rig the results against themselves? Why would that help people?
WebKit on iOS has special sandbox privileges not available to other user frameworks. I think it allows it to spawn other processes, and do special stuff to increase its performance and decrease energy consumption. It seems like an engineering challenge to expose these features to arbitrary 3rd party frameworks in a way that doesn’t allow these features to be abused.
Not sure of Apple’s full motives, but I think this is at least part of the reason other rendering engines are not supported.
> WebKit on iOS has special sandbox privileges not available to other user frameworks.
Okay so WebKit cannot be used as is, but then why forbid other alternatives [1]? Seems like a Catch-22.
> It seems like an engineering challenge to expose these features to arbitrary 3rd party frameworks in a way that doesn’t allow these features to be abused.
How does literally every single other platform manage this? AFAIK none of Android, Windows, the many Unix-like OSs, even Apple's MacOs have such restrictions on browser apps.
And I think it'd be unfair to characterize the users of those other platforms as being "abused" by their browser apps. E.g. Firefox seems pretty trustworthy.
> How does literally every single other platform manage this? AFAIK none of Android, Windows, the many Unix-like OSs, even Apple's MacOs have such restrictions on browser apps.
They don’t. All of those platforms are less secure than iOS.
> All of those platforms are less secure than iOS.
Do you have a source for this statement, specifically in relation to browsers?
Let's consider Android. I wouldn't automatically assume that using Safari on iOS is more (or less) secure than using Chrome or Firefox on Android - they are all provided by well known tech companies with years of expertise building browsers and a focus on security.
Android is definitely less secure than iOS, you can easily verify this by googling.
Controlling the execution environment is part of iOS’s defense in depth strategy. Focussing on browsers alone is a red herring. You have to look at the whole system.
It’s true that Google or Mozilla may be able to produce an equivalent level of security in a browser engine, but that’s a false comparison, since alternative browsers are not limited to just these companies.
I was mainly referring to how every browser app on iOS is forced have Safari underneath. The wiki page on Firefox for iOS [1] mentions this in some detail - it cannot use Gecko like it does on desktop and Android, it must use WebKit instead.
This is a technical detail most people don’t care about. You still get all the competing browsers with all their specific features on iOS, regardless of the rendering engine.
All non-Safari browsers on iOS use the Safari engine underneath, which doesn't currently support WebRTC. It's a pretty huge blocker for a lot of sites (video conferencing, etc) to have to throw up a "Please use Safari" banner for iOS users using anything other than Safari.
I believe due to webkit no browsers are allowed to do full screen with multitouch. It is possible this only affects Safari and Chrome and isn't a webkit limitation, I haven't tested Firefox.
That's precisely the problem though. Apple have been allowed to extend privileges to their own applications that that their competition are explicitly prohibited from using.
Key word in your statement being “maybe”. No one knows for sure if they’re exploiting their advantages or not. That’s really the biggest issue: the lack of transparency. I think if companies want to participate in their own marketplaces, they need to be required to publish all data they have that could potentially give them an edge. This obviously isn’t possible in many cases, so companies will just not go through the trouble.
Google earth is just one more website about the earth, and you can't get the real thing through your tiny tubes. If more people searching for earth want to use that website to explore the real earth rather than say, read the wikipedia article about the earth (and most obviously more people use GE than visit that one page on the wiki), it is correct for it to be ranked higher according to most typical search algorithms. OPs point is perfectly valid, it's just not a great example.
> We already went through this with Microsoft in the past but suddenly it's different?
What happened was that the DOJ did everything they could to get Microsoft broken up. They got pretty much the entire country on their side, and during the trials they extracted some hilarious quotes from Microsoft and Bill Gates, like arguing about the definition of the word "ask", the infamous "knife the baby" email. Details emerged about their "Embrace-Extend-Extinguish" policy and their plans to try and bulldoze the free software movement.
Popular perception of Bill Gates and Microsoft at that time sunk to an all-time low [0], picturing Gates as a greedy global capitalist, and Microsoft as a cartoonishly evil company. There was no small fix, the only option left was to to shatter Microsoft into multiple pieces, the way Bell Labs had gone. That's what the final ruling said.
Then George W. Bush comes in, clears out basically the entirety of the DOJ, guts them to a fifth of their size, and tells them "never do that again". The case then went to appeal, where it was reduced from a mandatory break-up to a small fine.
The DOJ never went after big tech again. Bill Gates resigned as CEO, and decided to go into philanthropy to clear their image, like many capitalists do.
FWIW, looking just at your final paragraph (as I agree strongly with everything you said, but feel a need to note that it wasn't all a complete waste of time): Bill Gates was effectively forced out of his own company after nearly driving the company to destruction by provoking a judge with his arrogance, and the Microsoft that was left after this mess--notably run by Steve Balmer--had a very difficult time hiring strong talent or having any reasonable strategy for its offerings, and as such was no longer organizationally able to maintain some basic technologies that had become mired in the antitrust case (such as Internet Explorer, which was trivially disrupted by Chrome, and is now effectively gone).
How can grocery stores be allowed to own food brands when they're also marketplaces! How can Aldi be allowed to sell competing products in their own marketplace, when they own the actual marketplace?
Is it a good thing that supermarkets have their own brands, typically cloning other packaging/branding and being at a price advantage due to not paying supermarket fees? Is this something we should try to protect?
All of these "What about x" points just make me think that we need to go further and stop those as well rather than using them as a justification to not bother.
I generally agree. But the "status quo" is to allow exclusivity deals all over by default, and it's worth recognizing that when trying to craft messages for lawmakers.
Another problem with Google is their popups... I.E.: If you are not using Chrome, and visit Google.com, they will let you know. That is how they got so many people to switch to it.
It never made me switch to Chrome (still use Firefox), but I think that it made a lot of people switch... by having a daily popup telling them that they are using the wrong browser.
> How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers on their mobile devices? We already went through this with Microsoft in the past but suddenly it's different?
How can Microsoft control what games you play on Xbox or how can Nintendo control what games you play on switch?
Why are grocery stores allowed to sell private brand products that compete?
I'm worried we don't quite have a good grip on how to solve this problem.
There's a long way to go and it's not very clear who will prevail. In general in US jurisprudence, "consumer welfare" is the key consideration in antitrust over the last few decades and monopolization and vertical integration are not considered problems unless there is consumer harm due to it. This is different from how antitrust is looked at pretty much anywhere else in the world ( and i personally think its preferable).
This book [1] has been very influential in influencing the approach.
Not to deter from the point but DDG also returns Google Earth as a first result of the search for Earth. The algorithms can be (and are) manipulated; it's called SEO. Fun example is an image search
of "white couple".
It's a rough road to fight that. Trader joes sells non-branded but also branded products. Albertsons/Safeway/Vons sells O brand stuff (the organics), Open Nature, Signature, Primotaglio, etc...
Kroger sells a boat load of branded products as well. So it won't be just amazon that would be affected by something like that. However - having only read the article and not the actual bill, maybe it's only affecting "tech".
> Try searching for "Earth" on Google and see what the top hit is. Is that really a fair ranking? We don't even know, because no one knows how their algorithm is working, but one thing is clear, Google products consistently rank higher than anything else in the search engine.
If you search "earth" on bing or duckduckgo, google earth is the first result for both.
> How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers on their mobile devices? We already went through this with Microsoft in the past but suddenly it's different?
Microsoft is a monopoly, Apple is not. Microsoft compelled their hardware partners to not do business with competitors, Apple is vertical regards to hardware.
While I like protocols and interoperability, it’s hard to achieve that through antitrust laws because antitrust focuses on consumer harm and without monopoly power that’s hard to show. I’m trying to think of any anti-trust for non-monopolies or threat of monopoly and can’t.
Should my NAS have to include third party browsers just because they have a browser?
The mobile phone market is an oligopoly, with each participant pushing their own (sometimes terrible) agendas.
Given that Apple is very deliberately resisting the adoption of PWAs in order to protect their app store, I think it's fair to say they're playing dirty. I mean, why are they restricting other browsers from using their own web views?! So that they can't implement annoying web push notifications (which users can turn off anyway)?! That's a terrible excuse to hold the web back, and it annoys the heck out of me. Especially given the number of apps in the app store with a bunch of security issues and equally annoying push notifications.
You're not using Firefox, you're using Safari with another skin. Browser engines other than Apple-approved Safari/WebKit are illegal on Apple platforms, effectively rendering it the biggest blocker for the web right now (no PWAs, no push notifications, no offline support, no support for free audio codecs, extensions ... and the list goes on!)
Users also "didn't care" about using Internet Explorer in the Microsoft days and the browser market was STILL severely handicapped with their monopolistic abuse.
Same goes for Apple - with no ability to build an alternative browser engine the market IS handicapped, especially since Apple is abusing this restriction to prevent web applications from competing with applications from which they charge tax on every single monetary transaction.
The difference here of course is that Microsoft we’re shown to be threatening to withdraw OEMs licenses if they provided Netscape preinstalled. They also threatened the same if OEMs provided alternative OSS such as Linux.
Apple on the other hand are preventing alternative rendering engines. It’s a very different situation. That’s not to say that it isn’t problematic, but it not as simple or as cut and dried as “but Microsoft and IE!?!”
It's actually even simpler - Apple doesn't even open an option to even have any kind of threats for withdrawing licenses because they own everything and use hard DRM to prevent any alternatives.
Call me stupid, but what exists on android that users on iOS are begging for that only exists on android because of the "freedom" of the platform. I'd like to take a moment to say that android is just handicapped because I can't run a different OS, or screw around in the OS and change things to my whims. But no ones talking about that, why not?
Epic is trying to strong arm their way into a position of power against steam and apple so they increase their take off the casino they've filled with children. Like under 10 years old children, asking parents to buy them skins. Skins and loot boxes are the worst thing to happen to gaming and should be regulated. I, and many others are firmly on Apple's side on this issue. If Epic made revolutionary or just great games and didn't get children addicted to digital heroin then I'd give their argument more consideration. I don't want kids sideloading random casino malware just because the kid at recess says it's cool.
> Epic is trying to strong arm their way into a position of power against steam and apple so they increase their take off the casino they've filled with children.
And Apple has the moral high ground wanting a cut of proceeds because they make it easy for children to get to the casino? Not a great analogy.
Apple has a better record on this than every other company I can think of. So it is actually a good analogy. Perhaps Epic didn't want to abide by these rules and used the fees as a cover?
> Apple has a better record on this than every other company I can think of.
Rent seeking on things you find immoral?
> Perhaps Epic didn't want to abide by these rules and used the fees as a cover?
Is this something Apple has alleged? Because otherwise it looks like you're speculating wildly to appeal to emotion. "It's ok because maybe they're bad people."
That's not even an argument. It seems you're commenting in bad faith trying to trap me in some linguistical mistake.
I did say perhaps which, last I checked, is a sign of a rhetorical thought.
Apple is not perfect, I don't like Apple, but epic is selling crack to kids in my community. at least apple keeps intermediaries between them and their child slaves. I'm not taking sides here. All these huge companies are deplorable and should never have been allowed to grow so large.
Apple had no issue with Epic selling crack to your kids... as long as they got their 30% cut: there are no universally good actors here, and deciding your opinions on right and wrong based not on what should have happened but on your general opinions about the parties isn't how any of this should ever work.
Depending on your interests, that could be anything from: Fortnite, Tasker[0], NewPipe, Ublock Origin[1], Syncthing, xCloud and GeForce Now (until pretty recently[2]), RetroArch, the Dolphin emulator (as of iOS 14.4), and the most recent addition, NSFW Discord servers.
> android is just handicapped because I can't run a different OS, or screw around in the OS and change things to my whims
You totally can. I've been running LineageOS for a while, it's great. Improves my battery life, allows me to quarantine apps, gives me more access to the firewall for adblocking, and lets me get rid of cruft like the launcher. You can even completely de-Google Android, or install a community-maintained shim called MicroG that enables some of the features without the tracking.
The Android situation could be much better, this is why some people are excited about Linux phones. But I don't know a ton of Android users who are clambering to make it harder to use storefronts like F-Droid. I literally can not imagine going to a phone platform that didn't support NewPipe, I watch too many videos on my device, using the official Youtube apps would degrade the experience way too much.
I do think that the number of Android-exclusive things you can do is much lower than it used to be. It used to be pretty easy to make a compelling case that if you cared about flexibility at all, you bought an Android phone. I don't think that's the case anymore. But Apple still hasn't really stopped being Apple, so while the differences have become a lot less glaring, they also haven't completely disappeared. And sure, you can get some of this functionality back by jailbreaking, but in comparison the vast majority of the stuff you do on Android won't require root access, and all of the apps I listed above can be installed on a stock Android device without flashing or breaking anything at all.
Whether or not iOS users actually care about that stuff... :shrug: I suspect many of them don't. I'm not going to try and make a giant case about whether your average person on the street wants to be able to emulate Gamecube games on their phone. But I also don't really care; I'm a consumer and I want to be able to emulate Gamecube games on my phone. I'm a consumer, and I want to be able to install alternative Youtube front-ends that increase my privacy. I want to be able to block ads in my browser.
At the moment, Android provides an alternative for me. I'm very lucky that I never got locked into Apple's ecosystem so I don't have to make a choice between losing access to my credit card and being able to have a user-respecting Youtube client. But if you are locked into Apple's ecosystem, making a switch between phone platforms can be really prohibitively expensive and time consuming, so I sympathize with people who are in that position.
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[0]: To be fair IFTT is pretty good, but it just can't offer the same level of functionality.
[1]: I know someone will jump in on this, but adblocking in Safari is just not comparable to Firefox. There is no way to get what I would consider to be adequate adblocking on the web in iOS.
[2]: Microsoft/Nvidia have only been able to launch on iOS using webapps, which given Safari's current limitations are arguably a worse experience than having native apps.
I don't own any apple devices. I'd support movements to get Apple to be more open to allowing the apps you mentioned, excluding fortnite, onto their platform through alternative means. However, epic seems to be dominating the discussion and they are a bad actor acting in bad faith who peddle digital crack to children fleecing their parents. If we can disambiguate between useful apps, or apps that aren't designed to vacuum money out of children and the flaws with apples model that'd be great.
To say that you can just install lineage is disingenuous. I've never had an android phone that allowed custom ROMs at launch so my argument stands against these phone manufacturers as much as they do against Apple.
Simply, my perspective is that people are going too hard on apple and not hard enough on Google. They both need to be broken up and forced to allow more programs on the products they sell. Epic is tainting the argument and trying to disingenuously spin their self interests as a benefit for consumers.
If it makes you feel any better, Epic also sued Google; that lawsuit just doesn't get much press, as the narrative surrounding Apple's store is so much easier to attack due to how almost all Android devices technically support sideloading (though as a second-class feature which is actively crippled and discouraged by Google in ways that are maybe anticompetitive).
Epic is also currently in a lawsuit against Google over Google threatening phone manufactures who include alternative stores alongside Google Play. I'm not sure where the argument is that Android is the ideal; Google does restrict a lot of functionality to the Play store, arguably illegally. They're just comparatively less restrictive than Apple is.
> I've never had an android phone that allowed custom ROMs at launch
Valid concern, but this is less a Google problem and more a hardware problem. Google isn't doing anything to block LineageOS, it just takes time to support the new hardware. You'll see the same problem with consumer laptops and Linux. This is why we have increasing movement to try and get Open hardware/firmware. Nevertheless, the situation with LineageOS is still comparatively much better than it is on Apple hardware. At least with LineageOS, you don't need to find a jailbreak to get it working.
Part of the reason Apple dominates these conversations is because it's the most obvious, clear example of what we're talking about -- not because the situation on Android is ideal or because we wouldn't like the Android situation to be better. Check out the discussions about the Librem 5/Pinephone if you're interested in getting involved in the effort to make hardware compatibility better in general.
> epic seems to be dominating the discussion
It's not so much that everything revolves around Fortnite, it's just that Epic is currently one of the biggest forces in play surrounding antitrust. It's a bit like how Google and Oracle dominated the conversation around API Copyright -- not because Google was a saintly company, but because they were currently arguing about it in front of a judge, and that's a newsworthy event that might have large effects on the industry.
That being said, I'm also a little bit confused about why you're voicing this objection here, because this article doesn't mention Epic at all, and outside the comment thread that you started, I don't really see anywhere else in the comments where anyone has brought Epic up. Fortnite was 1 out of 10 apps that I mentioned in a comment thread that was originally talking about Apple's refusal to allow alternative browsers like Firefox. So while Epic is certainly getting a lot of coverage in general, it's not like nothing else is being talked about. I certainly didn't zero in on Epic in my comment other than to list Fortnite as one of multiple examples of apps some consumers might care about.
On the note of "unequal coverage", it's also worth mentioning that the legislative effort being covered in this article is targeting both Apple and Google and would affect both companies equally. So I'm not even sure it's accurate for you to say that Google is getting a free pass legally. The Judiciary Committee is certainly not ignoring Google right now.
Doesn't matter what users care about, what matters is: "Is Apple abusing their position in the market?"
One could claim since Apple IS the iOS market, for them to disallow competitors in certain app categories but not others, they are indeed abusing their position as a market owner, especially since they are the only one allowed (by them) to develop a browser engine.
Users don't object to a lot of things when either they aren't aware of them or they believe they can't do anything about them. That doesn't mean they aren't still being harmed.
Where do you draw a line between abusing and feature?
If Apple didn't position itself as privacy-focused, then not allowing other browsers would be clearly violation, but if this is basically part of the product description - and many people buy iPhones in the first place because they don't want or case about other browsers - they want safety - why should Apple be forced to do it?
>Where do you draw a line between abusing and feature?
When there's articulable harm.
Microsoft forcing the junk that was IE, and all their other thuggish tactics, is articulable.
The differences between chrome and safari are insignificant enough that you'll bore most people when trying to superficially explain how pretty much the only people negatively effected are advertisers, who have been avoiding their public reckoning over the straight up horrific things they do in closed rooms.
Maybe I'm wrong and there are consumers that harmed by the lack of chrome or Firefox on ios, but that'd be news to me.
Maybe I'm wrong and there are consumers that harmed by the lack of chrome or Firefox on ios
Well, developers of modern web apps can offer a qualitatively better experience on those other platforms in some ways than they can with iOS Safari. The offline working features are one clear example. The use of open (=> cheaper and sometimes better-performing) standards for things like audio and video content is another.
Unless you contend that the only reason any web developer ever uses the features available in other browsers but not iOS Safari is to abuse or exploit users, in other words that no-one is (or would, if Apple supported them) make any legitimate use of those features that would improve the user's experience in some way, it is clear that users are materially disadvantaged by the limitations of iOS Safari, unless they have the choice to use another browser that does offer those features instead.
Well, the alternative to PWAs is publishing through proprietary app stores - the users might not care to much, but it's incredibly important for us as devs. Also, one really can't trust a proprietary browser like Safari with their personal data - while one might be able to switch from Chrome due to FLOC on Android, Linux, Windows etc., Safari would _force_ the change on their users, with them being unable to switch to anything but the "officially approved" browser.
> Well, the alternative to PWAs is publishing through proprietary app stores
This is what PWA really boils down to isn’t it. It’s not about standards or openness it’s about money. It’s about bypassing the App Store to do whatever the fuck you want.
As a user and as a dev I have strong opinions about PWAs. I'm not a fan. If I want to visit a website, I'll use a browser to go to a website.
As to your other point, yes if Safari started doing anti-privacy things, I would ditch the iPhone and go Android. Right now, they seem to be supporting my privacy.
I’d hate to see the mobile landscape dominated by web apps the way the desktop is. PWAs benefit developers, but I’ve yet to see how they improve my UX as an end user (when compared to native)
I should have been more clear. I'm not talking about the "browser shell" (the UI for tabs, settings and so on) but about the "rendering engine" which in the case of Firefox is Gecko on PC, but since Apple has this arbitrary restriction, is Webkit on iOS, which is the same engine everyone on iOS is forced to use, no matter what.
So yes, you're using Firefox, but you're still using the same rendering engine for your browser, as any other browser on iOS. Effectively limiting how powerful browsers can be on iOS, as Apple has full control over Webkit and doesn't allow anything else, literally anti-competitive behavior.
On Desktop, how many rendering engines are there out there today? 3? Most browser creators cannot afford to create their own rendering engine, so we get Gecko, WebKit, or Blink.
With this in mind, when you’re asking for alternative rendering engines, you’re really asking for Google to be able to get their hooks into iOS. It would be nice if Mozilla were free to develop their own engine but that’s not without downside and the most likely outcome is an iOS dominated by Chrome and ad-tracking.
> It would be nice if Mozilla were free to develop their own engine but that’s not without downside and the most likely outcome is an iOS dominated by Chrome and ad-tracking
The impacts go beyond iOS. The reality is that Safari is the only thing standing in the way of Google having IE-style dominance of browser usage share. As of now, Chromium has just under 80% usage share. If Chromium were as dominant as iOS as it is on desktop, it’s usage share would likely exceed 90%
Alternate engines are a fine idea in principle, but we need to consider whether a Chromium monopoly on the web is indeed an improvement from the status quo.
> How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers on their mobile devices? We already went through this with Microsoft in the past but suddenly it's different?
Nope, total Apple and Oranges.
Forbidding other HTML rendering engines on iOS, prevented other massive players (Google) from forcing their browser platform onto Apple’s user base and Electron-ized Apple’s ecosystem making iOS a marginal runtime.
Or worse, Adobe could have spun their own Adobe Flash app “now with web access too!”.
How does preventing competition in a specific application category lead to Apple preventing Google from "forcing" iOS users to use Chrome? Not sure I follow your argument here or how allowing browsers would somehow make it possible for Google to automatically install Chrome for iOS users.
Imagine if Google suddenly made their Chrome browser behave differently on Google websites compared to others, like 0.5 the performance for no reason. This could be seen as a strategy to increase engagement on Google properties, but I'm fairly sure most of us would see it as an attempt on monopolizing the web in Google's favor. Why is it different for Apple and browsers? They are intentionally making it impossible to create competitors to their own browser, for no technological reason besides "we don't want that".
> Imagine if Google suddenly made their Chrome browser behave differently on Google websites compared to others, like 0.5 the performance for no reason.
You're pitching the prevention of certain competitive products as a good thing, which it may have been for Apple, but it is absolutely not for the consumer.
You think so? So please elaborate on how having your platform marginalized to a mere window decoration around the ubiquitous, 100% dominant UI toolkit (Crome) is better for the consumer.
Besides, there’s plenty of choice on the market, unless you want to complain about a car manufacturer selling only their own models...
Platforms should disappear into the background. The great benefit of the web is that it presents roughly the same UI everywhere across all manner of devices and browsers. (The big downside of course is that it's not exactly the same).
> car manufacturer selling only their own models...
My car doesn't tell me who or what it's willing to transport. Yet.
> browsers should be able to alter the system outside the browser (e.g desktop shortcuts and notifications).
I've not seen the argument about desktop shortcuts?
Notifications are one of those features which has already been added and is a nuisance in 99% of cases, but I can see there being one or two use cases where a website sending notifications without requiring a full native app (and approval process!) is worthwhile.
The "should this hardware be available to the browser" fight happens for every feature.
Yup, same shoddy, lowest common denominator, inconsistent UI across all devices and manufacturers.
And to complete the scenario: 1 dominant supplier whose interest is not ideal UX but just invasive and pervasive tracking, and all other actors - being marginalized to mere window decoration - don’t invest a penny in challenging the dominant‘s position, and content themselves with scooping some adware crumbs left over from the market dominator.
You don't use the right back end, therefore you aren't cool.
It's absolutely absurd. I mean, about on par for teenagers, but gah... I can picture the conversation about "Your "friends" are complete morons, and you shouldn't feel ashamed or ostracized at what is probably one of the most silliest social signaling practices on the planet."
It hurts being an engineer sometimes. These networks are marvels of human ingenuity, and people take them and use superficial differences in UI and completely miss the point.
God bless. I keep thinking UX/UI can't get any worse, but what humanity takes out of it never ceases to amaze.
It wasn't about UX. When Android users join iOS conversations, they lose the ability to use stickers, high quality pictures, etc... But instead of bringing iMessage to Android, Apple has intentionally created a way to get teenagers to look down on non-Apple users (yes, it's seen as a major status symbol, too) to promote their products.
Is there a relevant law or court case that takes sectors of consumers into account? That one could be more relevant because they are vulnerable, or less relevant because the devices are bought in their parents name.
IOS is 100% of the iPhone market though, given that unlike Windows in the PC market, Apple disallows installing an alternative OS, and an alternative app store in addition to disallowing alternate browsers.
Microsoft was taking a vibrant and competitive market for browsers and crushing it. Apple is taking a monoculture for browsers and providing a powerful bulwark against Chromium.
It's 100% competitive advantage. The main driver of Apple's lack of support for Flash was to damage the web's ability to distribute DRMed video and force it into apps on iOS, where Apple could rent seek a 30% commission from subscription fees.
Precisely. Jobs didn’t want to be at the mercy of anyone else’s priority, strategies or convenience.
Remember: Adobe was dragging its feet on MacOS because why bother, Windows PC is the market, iPhone was mostly welcomed as a “won’t fly” and Flash for iOS would have been another drama of unfixed vuls, shoddy performance and battery drain. (I guess everyone forgot or wasn't still around, reminder: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/134551-why-flash-faile...)
Not unreasonable to imagine Google making Chrome engine prio 1 on Android and “perhaps later” on iOS.
Given the volume and profitably of tech trading by members of Congress (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26821601) I have ZERO confidence that any useful legislation will come of it. It will just be a bunch of earnest and disingenuous theatre by the very people profiting from a bunch of companies who make Microsoft circa 1995 look like a kitten.
For my part, I think the fundamental business model of profiting from user engagement (where screen time is money) is toxic, and we can’t fix anything until we find a way to effectively eliminate it.
Obama's campaign manager said that Facebook flat out told them "we're on the same side" when they allowed them to abuse the same API Cambridge Analytica did.
There’s two ways to look at donations from companies. When you donate to a political campaign in the us you need to write down your employer. So one way to look at it is by looking at where eg all the donations from people employed by Google went (big surprise: democrats, but also, the kind of democrats who have safe seats and policies to rein in big tech companies).
Another way to look at it is to look at the PACs run by tech companies. These are paid into by employees (often they may sign up to give some small amount of their pay automatically, and then forget about it), but they tend to make donations in the companies interests (mainly to an assortment of politicians with an aim to be balanced in some way) and do not lean massively towards democrats, or even towards politicians that align with the companies’ stated values (I’m talking about values that tend to be pro-immigration or pro-lgbt for example here). Two big tech companies that don’t have a PAC are Apple and IBM. Microsoft has one that disappears for a few months when employees start complaining about it (but it doesn’t ask for its donations back from politicians which it can do with likely success)
It's a little misleading to quote that without the context. The "98%" number is referring specifically to personal donations by the CEOs of tech companies (out of those who donated politically to someone at all) in the 2020 presidential election, not to political contributions from the companies they run.
Shorting is much more legally risky. SEC basically doesn’t view shorts as investors, and that has interesting outcome.
The don’t care if you illegally cause stock to go up, and you profit from it, as other investors also profit.
But causing stock to go down opens you to much higher liability, for hurting investors. And if you profit of it via short, you’re in much more legal risk.
Do they? He got financial slap on his wrist, didn’t have to admit to any wrong doing, kept absolute power in the company, ignored any corrective actions of the settlement, and continues to pump stock on weekly basis, to a place that made him one of the richest people in the world. And in the free time he’s pumping other meme investments, just for fun.
SEC vs Musk is perfect example of how powerless/not interested in pumping stock schemes regulators are. Until stock start to go down, then they get more power.
CEOs say all the time that the stock is too low (musk was weird for saying high). They can express an opinion. They can’t make a false material statement of fact
Fair point, but there’s less predictability (both in timing and valuations) on the way down. It’s also harder to disguise the insider nature of shorts based on upcoming legislation.
On top of that, these companies spend millions on lobbying and have SO MUCH INFLUENCE among DC insiders that reform doesn’t have a chance. It’s more corrupt than anything Hollywood ever made about Big Oil.
I’m not sure, but I think we have to start with Congressional reform. I don’t generally subscribe to the notion that legislating should be a lucrative, lifelong profession.
I think term limits, pay reduction, and abolishment of the Congressional pension would be an excellent start. It would eliminate some of the career aspects of legislating while forcing lobbyists to regularly deal with new people, somewhat limiting their influence.
However, getting this would require Congress to vote on something that’s against their own interest.
I think Congressional term limits would be one of the easiest fixes for the current state of affairs. Overturning Citizens United and repealing the 17th would be great steps too. However, I think we should pay Congress people at least $1M/yr. Pay them like Fortune 100 CEO's. Make it so they don't even CARE about playing games with insider trading. If we want to run this capitalist country like the capitalists we think we are, then scrap the notion that Representatives were supposed to be farmers that went and represented their districts for a couple of sessions, and then went back to work. Pay them in a way that attracts truly talented people, instead of the usual suspects who have just enough intelligence to recognize that they have just enough EMOTIONAL intellect to handle the campaigning and the backroom dealings. Of course, then we get into the argument about whether the average Fortune CEO is really any more talented than the average representative, but you get the idea.
The tone of this is a little hard to read, so forgive me if I've misread anything.
I mostly agree with the other changes, except for increasing pay as a means of eliminating the motivation to play games. If there's one thing we've seen play out over and over, it's that excesses and greed just beget more greed. Look at the number of executives, financial managers, and politicians who already had vast wealth yet STILL engage in shenanigans. Furthermore, the job of legislating is an elected one, which means it will always go to those who are best able to convince the most people to vote for them (frequently by promises and pandering), not those who will do the best job. Now, I don't think legislators should get pauper's pay, but I also think we should do what we can to limit it's use as a career path for power and wealth.
I have no problems with capitalism. If the market has healthy competition and the referees (regulations and the courts) are fair and transparent, capitalism is good. Unfortunately, many of those elements have gotten worse in recent decades. We regulate more than ever, but it's the small businesses who suffer the burden and have no real voice in DC.
Capitalism done right means that I'm not upset by Wal-Mart's success, as it's kept in check by other companies like Amazon and Target. If you think anybody is invincible, take a look at what happened to Sears, K-Mart, and Toys-R-Us. Capitalism done wrong means that big companies use regulations and unfair referees to keep out competition. The power wielded by FAANG today dwarfs anything Microsoft ever had.
The people you want running the country aren’t likely people who are willing to get paid minimum wage too.
You want the best? Usually have to pay more. People in congress are barely paid anything as far as the private market goes. (<$200k/yr and that’s while having to live in two places and frequently travel between them) Considering how many have law degrees and other professional degrees, being a congress person certainly is a step down in terms of certain income. They just make up for it with should be illegal forms of market manipulation. (And other things)
I don't want legislators who think they're "running the country". That's the first problem. Rulemaking should never be construed with "running".
Secondly, I've never had any illusion about trying to attract "the best" in Congress. It's an elected position, both the House and Senate, and so it will merely attract those with aspirations of power and wealth who are good at campaigning. Oftentimes we also get people who forge a decades-long career by leveraging the access to power and influence they have in such a position. This last part is toxic, and won't be fixed by increasing pay.
Very nice to see to genuine interest on HN in solving our Democracy's problems, instead the general cynicism, apathy and self-interest we all too often see. But to be fair, I think it's first important to realize that we are discussing historical forces. The kind of movements that we all read about in school, are happening now. And I think when we look at history we'll see that social forces strong enough to reform empires have always started in the marginalized communities. Our role here is to become active participants, on a day-to-day basis, in these communities and aid them, both technically and morally, in building -- and here is the key concept -- decentralized quasi-autonomous [1] communities. No amount of reform, sorry being a cynic, will "fix" Washington and its relationship with "corporate capitalism". The Supreme Court settled this question, campaign money is "free speech". [2] But we can build new social structures in the gaps. It happened about 2,000 years in empire built in Rome. Why not today?
"A year after initiating the investigation, we received testimony from the Chief Executive
Officers of the investigated companies: Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai.
For nearly six hours, we pressed for answers about their business practices, including about evidence
concerning the extent to which they have exploited, entrenched, and expanded their power over digital
markets in anticompetitive and abusive ways. Their answers were often evasive and non-responsive,
raising fresh questions about whether they believe they are beyond the reach of democratic oversight.
Although these four corporations differ in important ways, studying their business practices has
revealed common problems. First, each platform now serves as a gatekeeper over a key channel of
distribution. By controlling access to markets, these giants can pick winners and losers throughout our
economy. They not only wield tremendous power, but they also abuse it by charging exorbitant fees,
imposing oppressive contract terms, and extracting valuable data from the people and businesses that
rely on them. Second, each platform uses its gatekeeper position to maintain its market power.
By controlling the infrastructure of the digital age, they have surveilled other businesses to identify
potential rivals, and have ultimately bought out, copied, or cut off their competitive threats. And,
finally, these firms have abused their role as intermediaries to further entrench and expand their
dominance. Whether through self-preferencing, predatory pricing, or exclusionary conduct, the
dominant platforms have exploited their power in order to become even more dominant."
PG tried to say that "tech" was focused on building better mousetraps, but that's hogwash. THIS is precisely the play that all VC's are after now: find a channel, throw billions at it, run everyone else out of the space, and monopolize it. When people talk glowingly about "unicorns," this is what they're really saying: monopolies.
This is well known. The thesis of Peter Thiel's Zero to One was precisely about how a tech company's ultimate goal should be about creating a monopoly. An op-ed by Thiel in the WSJ talk about exactly this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...
> By controlling the infrastructure of the digital age, they have surveilled other businesses to identify potential rivals, and have ultimately bought out, copied, or cut off their competitive threats.
Is this accurate? I would think control of the infrastructure is with companies like Comcast/ATT/Verizon/Verisign/ and others who you can’t bypass by typing in different characters into the URL bar.
Would it be more accurate to write the big tech companies have control of the network of users?
Comcast and friends are essentially utility companies. If the internet is "a bunch of tubes", they keep the tubes clear. They don't get involved at the content layer. Comcast may be a crappy provider in many ways, but they've never made the news for politically-motivated network traffic filtering.
FAANG on the other hand all get their hands dirty in deciding what content people get to see and what not, which would largely be a non-issue if there was mainstream competition, but there isn't, so rather than change their behavior and support/make/demand alternatives, consumers (including politicians) want Big Brother to step in, somehow forgetting that rarely solves anything and will simply consolidate more power with those who already have it.
I support anything that makes life harder for the FAANG style companies - I'm just never going to believe that the US house will do what this article signals they do.
Facebook and Twitter are profound influences on politics. I look on the politically aligned mainstream news, practices like gerrymandering, the general state of political discourse, do some quick joining of dots and ... well. Political involvement isn't going to move the situation in a direction I like.
FAANG is bad. I'll be on the record as saying whatever comes out of the House will be proven worse in time.
It's hard to measure. It's part of a network of feedback loops. There's no good way to single out any piece of it.
Fox News pumps legitimacy into it. It's explicitly partisan but done in the style of a conventional news broadcast. That helps normalize and smooth the echo chamber that comes from the generalized outrage machine of social media. That allows the extreme wing and the supposedly moderate wing to coexist, while slowly shifting the Overton window away from the latter and towards the former.
So there's no way to say which is more important. They use each other, not always in ways that they like but ultimately towards keeping them pointed in the same direction. The combination is so much more effective than any of them alone, while simultaneously having enough redundancy that you could remove any one of them but quickly reroute around that damage.
> can you explain if Facebook and Twitter actually have bigger sway than obviously partisan news media like Fox News?
More people get their news from social media than from... let's call it "big media" (CNN, Fox, etc). Sometimes that's from people linking content from those sources, but the point being people are spending a -lot- more time trawling social media than they are specifically checking their news media feeds.
There are some crucial differences between Facebook and your TV, though. Your TV shows you content from a set list of channels which content providers like Fox have made commercial arrangements to broadcast on. So if you want to watch Fox, you go to their channel.
Facebook has profiles so you can still go to Fox's profile page, but the default way of interacting with it is via a stream that Facebook's algorithm tailors through magic algorithm pixie dust.
More importantly, this pixie dust could hypothetically decide that one party is spreading misinformation that doesn't belong on their platform while another party speaks only truth. And they'd technically be within their rights to do so as an online community, but since we've let them become the online community, that power in the hands of a single company poses problems for society.
Because media self-censorship (such as on TV) is bound only by the minimal legal requirements rather than the whims of some algorithm concocted by Silicon Valley, the desire of this upcoming bill seems to be to give legacy media special privileges/negotiating power with online media platforms to enforce the legacy media status quo online.
What I've noticed over the past couple of years is that almost every article or news segment of importance is talking about, and quoting, Tweets. Whether Twitter has more influence than cable news now, I don't know, but it has embedded itself like a tick into the news rubric.
But the news writer actually chooses which tweets to highlight to drive the narrative right? I've rarely seen news media just copy ALL the tweets, but they pretty much pick the ones that fit their partisan leanings.
This seems like a massive problem. Instead of going out and getting a story, they let trendy topics on Twitter & Facebook dominate? Well that doesn’t seem like their job to me —- it seems lazy and self-serving.
Not sure what else to expect; they’re human after all.
I’m providing the numbers below for context, but cable news has a lot less daily active users than Twitter or Facebook. In my view, though, the daily news watchers are much more entrenched in their views, less likely to change, and believe strongly that the rest of the country watches the news like they do. I’ve had family members on both sides of the isle be extremely passionate and get physically worked up that the world was ending because they relied on cable news as their source of truth. The Fox follower was miserable when Obama was in office and the MSNBC follower was miserable more often than not when Trump was in office.
“Over the first full week of 2021 (Jan. 4 through Jan. 10), CNN ranked first among cable networks (roughly 2.8 million viewers per day; 4.2 million in primetime) followed by MSNBC (2.3 million per day ;3.8 million in primetime) and Fox News in third (1.7 million per day; 3.2 million in primetime).”[1]
Not looking forward to a future where the US sabotages its best tech companies and we all end up working for Alibaba, Tencent or Baidu (or founding startups with the aim of being acquired by them.)
Chinese tech companies have to toe the line of the CCP. A long, drawn out example is being made of Alibaba and Jack Ma precisely for not toeing the line last fall.
> Despite their ire, most Republicans have not backed the report's proposed changes in antitrust law but instead discussed stripping social media companies of legal protections they are accorded under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The law gives companies immunity over content posted on their sites by users.
Most of what I have heard Republicans focusing on has been "anti-Conservative bias" in social media platform, but I don't understand how limiting Section 230 protections would address that. Is the idea that any proposals would require moderation practices that follow certain standards set out to avoid "political bias?" I can't understand this push as anything other than a punitive measure to hurt tech companies.
Depending on what happens the net outcome of repealing 230 might actually hurt conservatism on online platforms, since right now Twitter, Youtube, Facebook et al are not party to things like the billion dollar Dominion lawsuit against Fox News and Newsmax.
Those news networks have deplatformed Mike Lindell because him actively spewing conspiracy theories on the Dominion voting machines undermines their defense in that lawsuit.
Of course it would hurt "conservatism on online platforms", repealing section 230 would effectively cause social media companies to shut their business down over night to avoid liability. Hackernews would certainly shut down. Nobody with any familiarity with the law actually supports repealing it, but for some reason it became a cause celebre of the far right. Maybe, "fuck the mods!!!" just doesn't have the same ring it used to?
One thing repealing section 230 would definitely do is bring big tech business operations to a screeching halt. Republicans are betting on the fact that big tech would be willing to do anything to avoid that outcome.
> One thing repealing section 230 would definitely do is bring big tech business operations to a screeching halt.
Not all big tech business, just the no-prior-review dissemination of user-generated content.
EDIT: At least, without some kind of financial protection against publication liability, such as the user providing indemnification with proof of adequate liability coverage. So, things like say Github Enterprise would still exist but probably be more costly once all associated costs are take into account, but free-of-charge individual accounts would either not continue or, if MS could subsidize them from Enterprise profits and saw value in having them, they’d be much more aggressively scanned for “bad” content and summarily deleted if there were any signs detected. And the same kind of calculus would apply all over the net.
It would definitely narrow the voices that have reach, both in number and ideological distribution.
While I quibble with your original presentation, the impact is much bigger than “social media” as usually understood; see my edit. While it wouldn’t kill big tech, it would radically transform big tech and every person, business, and other entity that interacts with it.
It might not be the single biggest economy-slowing piece of legislation adopted in the history of the US, but…ok, yeah, it definitely would be.
>Most of what I have heard Republicans focusing on has been "anti-Conservative bias" in social media platform, but I don't understand how limiting Section 230 protections would address that.
It's a meaningless flag to gather behind, not something they ever wanted to actually do. They can shout their support because they know the Democrats will stop it and thus fall into the "bad guy" role. It's a wedge issue now.
> Most of what I have heard Republicans focusing on has been “anti-Conservative bias” in social media platform, but I don’t understand how limiting Section 230 protections would address that.
The idea is to return to the non-online liability regime where reduced (distributor, notice-based) liability for unlawful content generally requires the absence of involvement in crafting/altering/moderating content (though it does allow binary select/not-select, including with an ideological bias.) 230 allows immunity to publisher (on its face, and as applied by the courts even distributor) liability so long as its terms are met.
This probably wouldn’t help the cause Republicans nominally seek to advance with it (though it would help the cause of narrowing political engagement that they are pursuing through every other means, which suggests an alternative motivation to the public one), since while it might encourage providers to not moderate content from users while continuing to allow them to distribute material on the site, it would encourage blanket bans like the one Trump received, at a minimum, or shutting off public access entirely; its dubious that free public distribution, even with ad support, is viable online with distributor liability generally applied , and its clear it is not with publisher liability generally applied. Responding to notice of unlawful content on more than a best-effort basis (as distributor liability would require) is very hard to scale, and preemptively preventing it entirely as publisher liability would require absolutely does not scale.
The top 10 tech companies have collectively acquired and shut down hundreds of small, successful startups.
I believe this is very detrimental to the web and the economy. Founders need to have that as an option for an exit though. What are the alternatives? Limiting ownership to 49%?
The whole notion of starting a company, possibly ignoring profits, with a buyout as the endgame is frankly ridiculous, and emblematic of the excesses and war chests that these big corps yield.
What happened to building a profitable company, or at least one close enough to ipo, and “making it” that way?
There are people leading those companies, but they're so few and far between that you can probably list them off the top of your head in the tech space. When a successful company like GitHub can't pass up double-digit billions, then, really, what hope is there? Companies like Microsoft have $130B of cash on hand, and (almost) everyone has a price. They can go buy several more of those companies, and that's why we hear a new $20B buyout rumor every week. If you could, you would too. IMO, that's why we need to start capping company size/valuation. There's no social good in Microsoft owning all the things they do. It only benefits the executives at MS and large shareholders, and I think they're benefitting enough already.
> but they're so few and far between that you can probably list them off the top of your head in the tech space.
I disagree. You can't name them because they aren't worth billions of dollars and they don't make any headlines. They're usually called "lifestyle" businesses on here, and while sometimes this site discusses them most discussions are about building the next Google.
>Founders need to have that as an option for an exit though. What are the alternatives? Limiting ownership to 49%?
No they don't. To rephrase, you're suggesting that companies are entitled to getting bought out. That's ridiculous. Owning a company is a privilege, people who abuse that privilege, billionaires, should be stripped of that power. Corporate America is cancerous, consuming and destroying everything indiscriminately for vanity, numbers on a screen, and authoritarian control over the less privileged.
You've gotta be kidding. 99% of companies in the U.S. are small businesses, and over half of those have annual revenue under $500K (that's revenue, not profit). In many cases, small businesses offer immigrants a pathway to the middle class, despite lack of credentials, connections, or English skills. Are you saying they shouldn't have the right to sell their business? You talk about "authoritarian control," but what could be more authoritarian than denying people basic property rights?
And even if you limit discussion to only tech startup companies, taking away the option of selling the company in the future completely changes the risk calculation. You'd end up with fewer companies getting started, which would entrench the big players even more.
You're talking past my arguments. Owning a company is a privilege just as much as owning guns are. Companies are registered with government and violators are prosecuted. Do I need to link to articles about children getting their lemonade stands destroyed by cops or what?
Point taken. I just personally feel like the reasoning for taking a company needs to be insanely strong. A lot of current talk on both sides feels very partisan.
Government has the job of arbitrating between the needs of all people. Companies should be meeting the needs and wants of consumers without causing harm. When Companies, and the people that own and operate them, cause harm, it is the obligation of government to remedy these problems through action, forceful if need be, against the offenders. Governmental failure to remedy problems results in vigilantism without fail.
> Government has the job of arbitrating between the needs of all people. Companies should be meeting the needs and wants of consumers without causing harm. When Companies, and the people that own and operate them, cause harm, it is the obligation of government to remedy these problems through action, forceful if need be, against the offenders. Governmental failure to remedy problems results in vigilantism without fail.
What has this ominous generalization got to do with the question?
There's an interesting intersection of monopoly and The Tech Recruiting Problem which Cory Doctorow highlighted in a Exponential View (HBS) podcast.
Acqui-Hiring is the new recruiting model.
Very roughly paraphrased, assessing tech talent has become so painfully difficult that the most effective model is essentially to assign a class assignment to a set of founders, along with a few million in seed capital, to build some Minimum Viable Proof of Talent. The seed funders act as matchmakers to the buying (typically: tech monopoly) firm, and take a finder's fee. The project is shut down (it's done its work of demonstrating competence), and the team is brought into the acquiring firm.
For Microsoft, absolutely nothing. The majority of the case was related to Windows coming with IE pre-installed, which it still does.
They've reached a settlement which was not even a slap on the wrist. They've agreed to share some APIs and have a couple of people in charge of ensuring compliance for some years. Nine states + DC objected the settlement claiming that it didn't go far enough, but the appeals court dismissed their objections.
In my view Microsoft antitrust is blown way out of proportions and didn't achieve absolutely anything concrete. One can claim that it discouraged similar behaviour in the next decade or so, but that's about it. As to why Microsoft is no longer considered a monopoly, I'm more of an opinion that it's Microsoft's internal decisions that did that, not anything antitrust-related.
What sector does Microsoft dominate these days? They actually are pretty good at competing.
Major units at Microsoft:
OS. This one is old, gone through anti trust stuff already. There's Mac / Linux.
Cloud. Azure is competing against AWS, GCP, everyone else.
Gaming. Xbox has Sony and Nintendo.
The strongest monopoly argument is still operating system/office, but even that Google is eroding away at office. The server market is dominated by *nix.
Microsoft do have enormous stockpiles of cash and are acquiring things and behaving similarly to the others. But their major monopoly has already been tested and their power is waning according to market share (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...).
I don’t see their power waning. Their control of Office and Windows lets them bundle things like Teams and OneDrive, which puts pressure on smaller companies like Slack (sold to Salesforce) and Dropbox, who have a harder time selling when MS is throwing in OneDrive for free if you’re already buying Windows/Office/Exchange/Azure/etc.
Let’s all shed a tear for the billionaire founders of slack and dropbox, if it wasn’t for Microsoft they’d have 10 billion each instead of 1-2 billion. Poor Drew, poor Stewart, the world has been cruel and unforgiving to them.
Have you considered that perhaps file storage and chat rooms aren’t innovative ideas that deserve massive multi-billion dollar rewards?
> Have you considered that perhaps file storage and chat rooms aren’t innovative ideas that deserve massive multi-billion dollar rewards?
I made no claim regarding what ideas deserve what. Simply that Microsoft is not losing power, by showing the kind of effects it can have on other businesses.
You're forgetting a entire ecosystem: developers. Microsoft owns NPM Inc, GitHub and Linkedin, all but Linkedin focused on developers and both GitHub and NPM owns their respective markets (GitHub for source code management and NPM Inc for JavaScript distribution)
Does anybody seriously expect anything to change. On Capitol Hill, they are going to posture and make grandiose statements. Later in the day, everybody will meet at one of those fancy beltway pubs and get all cozy.
The fundamental problem here is one that the law cannot solve: we as consumers have become addicted to free tech apps that use us as the product in order to make money. That addiction comes with a price, and no amount of legislation can shield us from ultimately paying that price if we refuse to give up our addiction.
The only thing the law could really do to "fix" the problem would be to outlaw the "free app that harvests people's time and attention to make money" business model altogether. And every lawmaker who voted to do that would be voted out of office by all the people who are angry that they can no longer have their free apps.
The root problem is not "Big Tech". The root problem is us.
I'm pleased to see that Netflix has been kicked out of FAANG. Makes sense since they are facing robust competition and no-longer qualify for near monopoly status. I also support the reordering of the words as presented in the article since GAAF is way more appealing than leaving it as is with Netflix removed.
I suspect that France has their own version on this (years in the making) and will act in alignment with the USA as the fines and oversight begin to form.
If this went through, what second order effects would there be that could be business opportunities? Particularly for a bootstrapped or small startup to get into.
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ANTITRUST, COMMERCIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE LAW PROFILES
Technical staff: Anna Lenhart
Anna Lenhart: Technologist
- B.S. Civil Engineering and Engineering Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University (2011)
- M.P.P., Science & Technology Policy (Artificial Intelligence), University of Michigan (2018)
Non-technical staff: everyone else
Slade Bond: Chief Counsel
- B.A. History, Mary Washington College (2008)
- J.D., University of Kansas School of Law (2011)
- LL.M., Intellectual Property and Information Privacy, The George Washington University Law School (2012)
Lina Khan: Counsel
- B.A. Political Theory, Williams College
- J.D., Yale Law School
Phillip Berenbroick: Counsel
- B.A. Political Science, Tufts University (2004)
- Law, University of Virginia School of Law (2008)
- JD, Law, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Amanda Lewis: Counsel on Detail, Federal Trade Commission
- B.A. Political Science; Latin American Studies, New York University
- J.D. Law, Columbia Law School
Joseph Ehrenkrantz: Special Assistant
- B.A. English and Government & Politics, University of Maryland (2014)
- J.D. Law, Georgetown University Law Center (2020)
Catherine Larsen: Special Assistant
- B.A. Political Science and Government, English, University of Nebraska (2014)
- J.D. Law, New York University School of Law (2020)
Joseph Van Wye: Professional Staff Member
- B.A. Political Science and Government, Brown University (2015)
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY PROFILES
Non-technical staff: everyone
Perry Apelbaum: Staff Director and Chief Counsel
- Bachelor General Studies, University of Michigan (1981)
- J.D. Harvard University, 1984
Aaron Hiller: Deputy Chief Counsel
- BS Biology & BA Philosophy, University of North Carolina (2003)
- J.D., MPP, Georgetown University Law Center (2007)
Shadawn Reddick-Smith: Communications Director
- B.S. Communications and Public Relations, Towson University
Jessica Presley: Director of Digital Strategy
- Penn State University
Madeline Strasser: Chief Clerk
- B.A. International Politics, National Security Policy Studies, Penn State University (2017)
Amy Rutkin: Chief of Staff
John Williams: Parliamentarian
- B.A. University of Virginia (1988)
- Ph.D. Medieval History, The University of Chicago (1995)
- J.D. Georgetown University Law Center (2001)
Daniel Schwarz: Director of Strategic Communications
- B.A. Political Science and Jewish Studies, Indiana University (2008)
- MSc Politics and Communication, London School of Economics and Political Science (2011)
Moh Sharma: Director of Member Services and Outreach & Policy Advisor
- B.A. and M.A. Economics, University of Connecticut
- M.S. Global Affairs, New York University
- J.D., City University of New York School of Law
John Doty: Senior Advisor
- B.A. History, Middlebury College
David Greengrass: Senior Counsel
- BA Government, Wesleyan University (1998)
- JD, Law, American University Washington College of Law
Arya Hariharan: Deputy Chief Oversight Counsel
- BA Law and Society, International Studies, American University (2007)
- JD, The College of William and Mary – Marshall Wythe Law School (2012)
Matthew Robinson: Counsel
- B.A. Yale University (2003)
- JD New York University School of Law (2012)
Kayla Hamedi: Deputy Press Secretary
- B.A. Political Science and Government, The George Washington University (2015)
- M.A. Political Management, The George Washington University
I'm open to discussion. My inclusion of Netflix is based upon their ownership of content and distribution, last mile excluded. Which reminds me to mention: Comcast, and co, as well as the mobile carrier companies for inclusion. I'd definitely agree that Oracle should face more scrutiny but don't know enough about their business to say much besides the fact that they're starting to look like Yahoo and IBM. Facebook is a given.
How do you define "last mile"? I worked at ISPs that housed Netflix storage boxes in their access layer, i.e. the last site before the cable/fibre/copper pairs went to customers' houses or mobile towers.
So do you specifically mean "except the access layer" (not accurate) or "except the last mile pairs" (accurate)? I think the distinction matters when considering monopolistic behaviour, because it determines service quality (access speed, loading times, maximum throughput...)
I'll defer to the experts on a definition here. I'm trying to speak generally about the tax funded infrastructure versus the actual work of connecting to the backbone providers and providing satellite rack space. The infrastructure costs virtually nothing to maintain and is great for rent seeking monopolists to own and neglect while running a city scale network connected to the backbone requires constant maintenance and upgrades to keep up with demand and the dynamic security landscape.
I guess my argument is Comcast shouldn't be they only competition for coaxial internet if they can't offer an internet only service, without discounts, for less than their cheapest regular rate off contract package.
Imperialism and colonialism are the greatest threats to humanity. The actors don't matter, intentions don't matter. Actions matter. CCP and the US elite are the two worst group of actors by number in the world.
At the expense of whataboutism, I'd love to see some kind of legislation against themselves as opposed to trying to bring these business entities under their heel. Something along the lines of: "GOP and Democratic party hold a duopolistic power over significant portions of our political representation options. This duopoly moment must end" (borrowed from the article and replaced appropriately).
Every business that they are trying to "crackdown" against faces varying levels of competition in almost every space they are in, and consumers either have numerous options to choose from to get a particular service, or the default that they end up using on is actually the best among the available alternatives.
God forbid politicians focus on taking action against actual monopolies as opposed to these stupid theatrics.
A lot of this just looks like punishing success to me. Or rather success combined with a lack of political involvement aka donation.
If it cares about monopolies go look at comcast or Disney or big chunks of agriculture or Boeing etc. If the house really cares about privacy, it should look at the patriot act. If it cares about workers, go look at Walmart.
I'm not sure there's any chance that the US government comes down on the side of "You know this monopoly power we (the US government) explicitly grant and protect by default? You can't have it any more"
Disney took 45% of the US box office in 2019. Much more if if you narrow it to kids media. There are few competitors in either market so it's an oligopoly. You can see the effect in spiraling prices.
Amazon only managed 35% of ecommerce. There are a lot of other companies trying to eat their market (Ebay, Shopify, Ali). Hence prices there stay low.
There’s also a much lower barrier to entry in online retail.
Technically, the barrier to kids’ media is low too, and there’s tons of it, for free even, but it’s mostly garbage. What Disney has is a curated, higher quality (according to the market) product.
They own the Disney Theme Park Market. Vendors have to get approved to sell in Disney parks, a commissions gets paid to Disney for each sale, and Disney doesn’t allow Universal Studios products in any of the Disney park stores.
> A lot of this just looks like punishing success to me
I guess if you think "success" means companies ending up as monopolies, I guess you're right. In general, capitalism gravitates to a "winner takes it all" situations as with more capital, you can also capture more of the market. But we also generally prefer to have many players in the market so competition still exists.
All this work here is trying to prevent monopolies from forming, because currently the US is very much lacking in any tooling to prevent monopolies, as we see in a lot of industries, not just technology.
The standard in most places (US included) is that monopolies (and duopolies etc) are allowed. But they are not allowed to abuse their positions.
That leaves us with 2 issues I think:
1. If people want competitive markets, that's fine but that's a new policy, and big tech is a bad place to start because it's much more competitive than many many other markets. You can pick 1001 other stores than amazon, but you will be paying with Visa or Mastercard...
2. We need to regulate a lot of new utilities. Are you sure you want the FCC deciding what innovations are allowed in search or social media? Aren't there massive free speech issues there?
People are tired, their products and services are becoming more and more pushing on a string with regards to quality of life.
The iPhone is more than 10 years old and nothing new came after that.
At the same time people see these mega organizations which are more powerful than nation states, with people like Bezos worth 200B.
When companies are worth 2T with founders worth 200B, the whole "what have you done for me recently" thing becomes pretty extreme, very quickly.
If they want to avoid being broken up they have to at least bring about nuclear fusion or landing on Mars (maybe that's why Bezos is doing Blue Origin).
Absolutely bananas that this haven't been fixed yet! How can Google own the entire ads market and still be allowed to compete in it? Obviously for-profit companies will abuse their positions if it'll earn them more money, and fines ends up being the cost of doing business instead of deterrents.
How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers on their mobile devices? We already went through this with Microsoft in the past but suddenly it's different?
How can Amazon be allowed to sell competing products in their own marketplace, when they own the actual marketplace? They should have been forced to divide their business long time ago. Of course they are gonna use metrics from competitors that only they have access to, in order to make their own product line get better.
Why is Google allowed to rank their own products in front of more general results? Try searching for "Earth" on Google and see what the top hit is. Is that really a fair ranking? We don't even know, because no one knows how their algorithm is working, but one thing is clear, Google products consistently rank higher than anything else in the search engine.
The list goes on. I'm happy that it's being suggested, I'm just worried how it took so long to get here.