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Antitrust: Democrats vs Big Tech

13

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  • zepherinzepherin Russian warship, go fuck yourself Registered User regular
    kime wrote: »
    Microsoft's cloud offering, Azure, has definitely not surpassed AWS? Unless this is a super recent development?
    8m1esomp1ov3.png

  • ElkiElki get busy Moderator, ClubPA Mod Emeritus
    DoJ's stats for abuse of monopoly cases from 2010 until the Google suit today (from Center for Democracy & Technology).


    EkxtS_VWAAg2xhW?format=jpg&name=small

    smCQ5WE.jpg
  • zepherinzepherin Russian warship, go fuck yourself Registered User regular
    Elki wrote: »
    DoJ's stats for abuse of monopoly cases from 2010 until the Google suit today (from Center for Democracy & Technology).


    EkxtS_VWAAg2xhW?format=jpg&name=small
    I would have thought a little more... we should do better.

  • 38thDoe38thDoe lets never be stupid again wait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered User regular
    Wow, that's depressing. Do they have stats going back to when they actually did anything?

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  • AiouaAioua Ora Occidens Ora OptimaRegistered User regular
    zepherin wrote: »
    kime wrote: »
    Microsoft's cloud offering, Azure, has definitely not surpassed AWS? Unless this is a super recent development?
    8m1esomp1ov3.png

    AWS has more market share than Azure (though not by much... it depends on how you measure it ofc but they're both in the 20-35% range)

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  • asurasur Registered User regular
    edited October 2020
    zepherin wrote: »
    kime wrote: »
    Microsoft's cloud offering, Azure, has definitely not surpassed AWS? Unless this is a super recent development?
    8m1esomp1ov3.png

    Microsoft is only ahead of Amazon in cloud if you use Microsoft's definition which includes Office 365 Commercial, Dynamics 365, commercial portion of LinkedIn, and other cloud properties that aren't defined. That's not what most people mean when they refer to the cloud and the competition between AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

    asur on
  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    zepherin wrote: »
    MorganV wrote: »
    zepherin wrote: »
    I know this isn’t a popular view, but I don’t consider Amazon a monopoly. They aren’t even the market leader in most of the areas they compete.

    The one area where they are a bonefide monopoly is the ebook space, but that’s less than 1% of their revenue.

    Google on the other her hand, definitely monopoly.

    While Amazon might technically not be a monopoly, they act like it often enough that they should probably be treated like one.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/retailwire/2014/10/30/is-amazon-undercutting-third-party-sellers-using-their-own-data/#4cf8ee0253d8

    That's from six years ago, and I've been hearing similar reports since.

    Things like Amazon and Ebay work off the same principle of Walmart. The cyclical nature of an all in one store feedback loop that drives places that aren't really niche, out of the market. I know I catch myself going there when I'm looking for something, before I think to look elsewhere on competing platforms.

    Amazon is absolutely a monopoly. They use their enormous resources and reach to force shitty quality products into the market with no repercussions, have a stranglehold on enormous parts the whole digital marketplace market, do all sorts of shit with strongarming media groups, etc etc. They are hideously damaging to a competitive environment in basically any venue they undertake. Further, their size alone has shielded them from the enormous labor law problems they should be facing and they should be broken down on that basis alone.

    There's basically nothing that can actually compete with Amazon. It needs to be broken up, and the sooner the better.

    Walmart the largest company in the world, competes quite effectively with Amazon. Microsoft has surpassed AWS.

    Amazon is second in several markets, but then being big and the owner being rich is not a legitimate basis to break up a company.

    Although a monopsony is interesting, because the other options for user market places are scarce. eBay is dying because they are awful. Walmart marketplace may be something to be wary of. It looks like they are trying to take Amazons lunch.

    I'm not sure this makes the point you wanted to make.

  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited October 2020
    Hypothetically, what is the largest share of a given market that a single company should be able to have?

    Edit: Obviously market capture is much more complex than this, just trying to find a starting point.

    Incenjucar on
  • PolaritiePolaritie Sleepy Registered User regular
    Incenjucar wrote: »
    Hypothetically, what is the largest share of a given market that a single company should be able to have?

    Edit: Obviously market capture is much more complex than this, just trying to find a starting point.

    Depends on their behavior.

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  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    Polaritie wrote: »
    Incenjucar wrote: »
    Hypothetically, what is the largest share of a given market that a single company should be able to have?

    Edit: Obviously market capture is much more complex than this, just trying to find a starting point.

    Depends on their behavior.

    Okay... so what are the ranges here, given either extreme, and an average?

  • PolaritiePolaritie Sleepy Registered User regular
    Incenjucar wrote: »
    Polaritie wrote: »
    Incenjucar wrote: »
    Hypothetically, what is the largest share of a given market that a single company should be able to have?

    Edit: Obviously market capture is much more complex than this, just trying to find a starting point.

    Depends on their behavior.

    Okay... so what are the ranges here, given either extreme, and an average?

    I think there's a lot of factors that make it hard to put a specific range to it. At the lower end, it seems like below 15-20% market share it's hard to pull anything (barring local concentrations of market share, etc. which is why this is really complicated dammit). At the upper end... well, what's SpaceX at for instance? It's possible for someone to honestly capture a market via superior product alone... in which case sure, north of 80-90% wouldn't be a problem... but would probably justify constant scrutiny due to the potential for misbehavior.

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  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    Part of why I'm looking for hard numbers (again, obviously, much more complicated than that) is because you need some sort of line in the sand, since you otherwise have companies simply needing to be good friends with the government in power and/or to have good PR. See: Disney.

  • Eat it You Nasty Pig.Eat it You Nasty Pig. tell homeland security 'we are the bomb'Registered User regular
    in the U.S. it's not really about market share; it's not illegal to have a monopoly per se unless you are causing harm to consumers. The classic example of such behavior is price gouging; in the past google has argued that they cannot be harming consumers, since their consumer services are nearly all delivered for free.

    that said, essentially every time a major firm has been broken up (forcibly or otherwise) good consumer outcomes have burst out in all directions, so maybe google et al ought to be broken apart just on principle

    hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
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  • zepherinzepherin Russian warship, go fuck yourself Registered User regular
    in the U.S. it's not really about market share; it's not illegal to have a monopoly per se unless you are causing harm to consumers. The classic example of such behavior is price gouging; in the past google has argued that they cannot be harming consumers, since their consumer services are nearly all delivered for free.

    that said, essentially every time a major firm has been broken up (forcibly or otherwise) good consumer outcomes have burst out in all directions, so maybe google et al ought to be broken apart just on principle
    Principle is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether they violate the law, and what laws we should pass. I do think we should treat all acquisitions as anticompetitive unless proven otherwise. I like that.

    Alphabet is going to be tough to breakup, and I don’t mean from a technical perspective (which it is), but from a practical matter. This is going to last for years. And no matter the result it will land in a conservative Supreme Court, which takes a much narrower view of laws than a liberal court. We aren’t going to know if DOJ has the stomach to fight a bigger better resourced opponent.
    Viacom vs google is a good example of this kind of fight. Google spent roughly 100 million dollars, and there were 400 motions filed during this.

    Google can tie up DOJ with both bad publicity to put them on the defensive from a political standpoint. 100 million in attack adds saying the government wants to take away your free search engine. And just crushing amounts of paperwork.

    I don’t know if that’s going to be how it goes, but google can play way dirtier than the government.

  • Eat it You Nasty Pig.Eat it You Nasty Pig. tell homeland security 'we are the bomb'Registered User regular
    oh yeah I mean, based on what I've seen so far it seems like the government has quite a weak case. The best way they seem to be able to argue their way to consumer harm is that google's paid placement stuff is stifling to new competition, but that seems fairly vacuous since it's trivial to change your default search if you're actually interested in doing so (on iphones at least, I dunno about androids.) It's far less aggressive than what microsoft were up to in the 90s.

    plus I mean, google can make what I would think is a compelling case that they simply have the best product, and in a market where price competition basically doesn't exist you'd expect a preponderance of users to prefer the best product.

    hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
    that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
  • AngelHedgieAngelHedgie Registered User regular
    in the U.S. it's not really about market share; it's not illegal to have a monopoly per se unless you are causing harm to consumers. The classic example of such behavior is price gouging; in the past google has argued that they cannot be harming consumers, since their consumer services are nearly all delivered for free.

    that said, essentially every time a major firm has been broken up (forcibly or otherwise) good consumer outcomes have burst out in all directions, so maybe google et al ought to be broken apart just on principle

    Yes, this is how Reagan broke antitrust - by tying the definition purely to consumers. Which is why we need to fix antitrust law to say that consumer harm is not the only sort of harm to be considered.

    As for Google providing their software for free, that can be argued to be a form of dumping - we saw this with Google Reader, where their entry basically undercut the RSS reader market, and their subsequent abandonment left few alternatives because of that undercutting.

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  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    in the U.S. it's not really about market share; it's not illegal to have a monopoly per se unless you are causing harm to consumers. The classic example of such behavior is price gouging; in the past google has argued that they cannot be harming consumers, since their consumer services are nearly all delivered for free.

    that said, essentially every time a major firm has been broken up (forcibly or otherwise) good consumer outcomes have burst out in all directions, so maybe google et al ought to be broken apart just on principle

    Yes, this is how Reagan broke antitrust - by tying the definition purely to consumers. Which is why we need to fix antitrust law to say that consumer harm is not the only sort of harm to be considered.

    As for Google providing their software for free, that can be argued to be a form of dumping - we saw this with Google Reader, where their entry basically undercut the RSS reader market, and their subsequent abandonment left few alternatives because of that undercutting.

    You see this all over the place in software. Giving things away for free strangles a lot of different business models. You see this very obviously in a lot of video games.

  • PhyphorPhyphor Building Planet Busters Tasting FruitRegistered User regular
    in the U.S. it's not really about market share; it's not illegal to have a monopoly per se unless you are causing harm to consumers. The classic example of such behavior is price gouging; in the past google has argued that they cannot be harming consumers, since their consumer services are nearly all delivered for free.

    that said, essentially every time a major firm has been broken up (forcibly or otherwise) good consumer outcomes have burst out in all directions, so maybe google et al ought to be broken apart just on principle

    Yes, this is how Reagan broke antitrust - by tying the definition purely to consumers. Which is why we need to fix antitrust law to say that consumer harm is not the only sort of harm to be considered.

    As for Google providing their software for free, that can be argued to be a form of dumping - we saw this with Google Reader, where their entry basically undercut the RSS reader market, and their subsequent abandonment left few alternatives because of that undercutting.

    They undercut the RSS reader market? The dominant RSS reader at the time was also free and web-based. I don't think there even were any paid RSS readers

  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    Phyphor wrote: »
    in the U.S. it's not really about market share; it's not illegal to have a monopoly per se unless you are causing harm to consumers. The classic example of such behavior is price gouging; in the past google has argued that they cannot be harming consumers, since their consumer services are nearly all delivered for free.

    that said, essentially every time a major firm has been broken up (forcibly or otherwise) good consumer outcomes have burst out in all directions, so maybe google et al ought to be broken apart just on principle

    Yes, this is how Reagan broke antitrust - by tying the definition purely to consumers. Which is why we need to fix antitrust law to say that consumer harm is not the only sort of harm to be considered.

    As for Google providing their software for free, that can be argued to be a form of dumping - we saw this with Google Reader, where their entry basically undercut the RSS reader market, and their subsequent abandonment left few alternatives because of that undercutting.

    They undercut the RSS reader market? The dominant RSS reader at the time was also free and web-based. I don't think there even were any paid RSS readers

    Open Source and other free-with-limits stuff kind of messes with this, too.

    Globalization also muddies waters. Does Alibaba count in discussions, for example?

    There are also tons of mom and pop online stores still, too. It's a very different scenario than the old Microsoft days.

  • MrMonroeMrMonroe passed out on the floor nowRegistered User regular
    oh yeah I mean, based on what I've seen so far it seems like the government has quite a weak case. The best way they seem to be able to argue their way to consumer harm is that google's paid placement stuff is stifling to new competition, but that seems fairly vacuous since it's trivial to change your default search if you're actually interested in doing so (on iphones at least, I dunno about androids.) It's far less aggressive than what microsoft were up to in the 90s.

    plus I mean, google can make what I would think is a compelling case that they simply have the best product, and in a market where price competition basically doesn't exist you'd expect a preponderance of users to prefer the best product.

    Is it "trivial"? If you had to guess, what would you estimate as the percentage of smartphone users who understand that it's even possible to change your default search engine on your home screen? On Android phones that would entail downloading a separate app (almost certainly from the play store) when most users are at a level of understanding of about, "that's the button for the internet". Would you guess that figure is higher or lower among iOS users?

    I would not expect a preponderance of users to prefer the "best product" unless the rest of the conditions of Pareto-optimality were present: especially perfect information and no barriers to entry into the market... two conditions that are obviously not true in basically any case but are fairly glaring here.

    Cutting Google Search off from the rest of Alphabet seems like a perfectly reasonable way to ensure they don't self-deal in the results because they won't have the incentive to do so any more. It also seems like perhaps this case was rushed out because the people calling the shots have no understanding of the issues and are concerned principally with "rar Google unfair to conservatives!" and bringing the case before the election to show off.

  • PhyphorPhyphor Building Planet Busters Tasting FruitRegistered User regular
    edited October 2020
    Incenjucar wrote: »
    Phyphor wrote: »
    in the U.S. it's not really about market share; it's not illegal to have a monopoly per se unless you are causing harm to consumers. The classic example of such behavior is price gouging; in the past google has argued that they cannot be harming consumers, since their consumer services are nearly all delivered for free.

    that said, essentially every time a major firm has been broken up (forcibly or otherwise) good consumer outcomes have burst out in all directions, so maybe google et al ought to be broken apart just on principle

    Yes, this is how Reagan broke antitrust - by tying the definition purely to consumers. Which is why we need to fix antitrust law to say that consumer harm is not the only sort of harm to be considered.

    As for Google providing their software for free, that can be argued to be a form of dumping - we saw this with Google Reader, where their entry basically undercut the RSS reader market, and their subsequent abandonment left few alternatives because of that undercutting.

    They undercut the RSS reader market? The dominant RSS reader at the time was also free and web-based. I don't think there even were any paid RSS readers

    Open Source and other free-with-limits stuff kind of messes with this, too.

    Globalization also muddies waters. Does Alibaba count in discussions, for example?

    There are also tons of mom and pop online stores still, too. It's a very different scenario than the old Microsoft days.

    Software is a very unique area because of open source yeah. There's piles of professional-grade software that basically cannot cost any money - a bunch of which is used to produce the commercial software!

    The browsers for example, the cores of both chrome and firefox are open source. Unless those projects shut down nobody can ever really sell the basic functionality of a browser for non-zero amounts of money (and get non-negligible market share), but it simultaneously costs a fortune to develop them

    Phyphor on
  • GoumindongGoumindong Registered User regular
    edited October 2020
    in the U.S. it's not really about market share; it's not illegal to have a monopoly per se unless you are causing harm to consumers. The classic example of such behavior is price gouging; in the past google has argued that they cannot be harming consumers, since their consumer services are nearly all delivered for free.

    that said, essentially every time a major firm has been broken up (forcibly or otherwise) good consumer outcomes have burst out in all directions, so maybe google et al ought to be broken apart just on principle
    The trick is that you are not a consumer of google. Google’s consumers are companies who want to advertise. Google has a monopoly on search based advertising and information. Facebook has a monopoly on social network based advertising and information. These two segments do not functionally compete with each other. There are a thousand TV channels competing for eyeballs and thus competing for advertising. There is one search engine. There is one social network.

    Open source and free with license stuff cannot compete because it does not have the money to make things slick and efficient for the product(user)*. The price of the products may be “zero” but it’s not economically zero, it still costs time and effort and so something that is faster and easier is lower cost. So yea, google really did undercut the RSS reader market.

    On top of this advertising is generally pure deadweight loss once there has been a general saturation of knowledge. Nike doesn’t need to inform you that shoes exist and are things you may want. It needs to make you think of their brand before you think of another. So money into advertising is functionally a tax. If you don’t pay the advertising tax you lose market share.

    It’s a double whammy of shit. A monopoly in a net negative market segment. Google is causing harm to Nike, who ups their prices, which harms you.

    *as in, the product Nike sells is shoes. The product google sells is you.

    Goumindong on
    wbBv3fj.png
  • archivistkitsunearchivistkitsune Registered User regular
    in the U.S. it's not really about market share; it's not illegal to have a monopoly per se unless you are causing harm to consumers. The classic example of such behavior is price gouging; in the past google has argued that they cannot be harming consumers, since their consumer services are nearly all delivered for free.

    that said, essentially every time a major firm has been broken up (forcibly or otherwise) good consumer outcomes have burst out in all directions, so maybe google et al ought to be broken apart just on principle

    Yes, this is how Reagan broke antitrust - by tying the definition purely to consumers. Which is why we need to fix antitrust law to say that consumer harm is not the only sort of harm to be considered.

    As for Google providing their software for free, that can be argued to be a form of dumping - we saw this with Google Reader, where their entry basically undercut the RSS reader market, and their subsequent abandonment left few alternatives because of that undercutting.

    I have to wonder if anyone has done any studies on the interaction of dumping with a UBI system in place. Google does it to pretty much fuck up the market because they know they have the capital to burn. One has to wonder how that will impact things, when you have people that can make a living off a UBI forming a group to create free software.

    Anyways, to get further into one of AngelHedgie's points. Antitrust needs to stop being just about how consumers are impacted directly. I'd argue that there are other practices which should be counted towards this because it does negatively impact consumers indirectly. People get caught up on, "this isn't too bad for the market because X thing now costs 50% less!," but the they neglect to notice how the megacorp has slashed the total number of jobs available by 20%, found a way to coordinate with the remaining business in the industry to pretty much suppress wage growth and used all the money they just made to successfully lobby the government to cut their taxes, which has resulted in the government cuttings jobs & services, plus resulting in infrastructure being neglected. Finally, they also succeed in getting regulations reduced so both the workplace and environment are less healthy. Sure the 50% cost reduction to X, which happens to be smartphones is tons of money saved, but I'd argue it's not even close to worth all the trade offs that were made to get there.

  • AngelHedgieAngelHedgie Registered User regular
    Mill wrote: »
    in the U.S. it's not really about market share; it's not illegal to have a monopoly per se unless you are causing harm to consumers. The classic example of such behavior is price gouging; in the past google has argued that they cannot be harming consumers, since their consumer services are nearly all delivered for free.

    that said, essentially every time a major firm has been broken up (forcibly or otherwise) good consumer outcomes have burst out in all directions, so maybe google et al ought to be broken apart just on principle

    Yes, this is how Reagan broke antitrust - by tying the definition purely to consumers. Which is why we need to fix antitrust law to say that consumer harm is not the only sort of harm to be considered.

    As for Google providing their software for free, that can be argued to be a form of dumping - we saw this with Google Reader, where their entry basically undercut the RSS reader market, and their subsequent abandonment left few alternatives because of that undercutting.

    I have to wonder if anyone has done any studies on the interaction of dumping with a UBI system in place. Google does it to pretty much fuck up the market because they know they have the capital to burn. One has to wonder how that will impact things, when you have people that can make a living off a UBI forming a group to create free software.

    Anyways, to get further into one of AngelHedgie's points. Antitrust needs to stop being just about how consumers are impacted directly. I'd argue that there are other practices which should be counted towards this because it does negatively impact consumers indirectly. People get caught up on, "this isn't too bad for the market because X thing now costs 50% less!," but the they neglect to notice how the megacorp has slashed the total number of jobs available by 20%, found a way to coordinate with the remaining business in the industry to pretty much suppress wage growth and used all the money they just made to successfully lobby the government to cut their taxes, which has resulted in the government cuttings jobs & services, plus resulting in infrastructure being neglected. Finally, they also succeed in getting regulations reduced so both the workplace and environment are less healthy. Sure the 50% cost reduction to X, which happens to be smartphones is tons of money saved, but I'd argue it's not even close to worth all the trade offs that were made to get there.

    To come back to the recent antitrust case against Google, the company is arguing that it's not their fault that the public chooses them over other providers, and as such antitrust law should not apply. Which is pants-millinery. Even if they got and maintain their position "legitimately" (and that's an open question, mind you), that doesn't change the fact that because of that monopoly position, Google can, in a very real way, wipe a website from the face of the Web - and that's something that should be regulated.

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  • PolaritiePolaritie Sleepy Registered User regular
    Mill wrote: »
    in the U.S. it's not really about market share; it's not illegal to have a monopoly per se unless you are causing harm to consumers. The classic example of such behavior is price gouging; in the past google has argued that they cannot be harming consumers, since their consumer services are nearly all delivered for free.

    that said, essentially every time a major firm has been broken up (forcibly or otherwise) good consumer outcomes have burst out in all directions, so maybe google et al ought to be broken apart just on principle

    Yes, this is how Reagan broke antitrust - by tying the definition purely to consumers. Which is why we need to fix antitrust law to say that consumer harm is not the only sort of harm to be considered.

    As for Google providing their software for free, that can be argued to be a form of dumping - we saw this with Google Reader, where their entry basically undercut the RSS reader market, and their subsequent abandonment left few alternatives because of that undercutting.

    I have to wonder if anyone has done any studies on the interaction of dumping with a UBI system in place. Google does it to pretty much fuck up the market because they know they have the capital to burn. One has to wonder how that will impact things, when you have people that can make a living off a UBI forming a group to create free software.

    Anyways, to get further into one of AngelHedgie's points. Antitrust needs to stop being just about how consumers are impacted directly. I'd argue that there are other practices which should be counted towards this because it does negatively impact consumers indirectly. People get caught up on, "this isn't too bad for the market because X thing now costs 50% less!," but the they neglect to notice how the megacorp has slashed the total number of jobs available by 20%, found a way to coordinate with the remaining business in the industry to pretty much suppress wage growth and used all the money they just made to successfully lobby the government to cut their taxes, which has resulted in the government cuttings jobs & services, plus resulting in infrastructure being neglected. Finally, they also succeed in getting regulations reduced so both the workplace and environment are less healthy. Sure the 50% cost reduction to X, which happens to be smartphones is tons of money saved, but I'd argue it's not even close to worth all the trade offs that were made to get there.

    To come back to the recent antitrust case against Google, the company is arguing that it's not their fault that the public chooses them over other providers, and as such antitrust law should not apply. Which is pants-millinery. Even if they got and maintain their position "legitimately" (and that's an open question, mind you), that doesn't change the fact that because of that monopoly position, Google can, in a very real way, wipe a website from the face of the Web - and that's something that should be regulated.

    That's also deceitful because the public aren't their consumers, they're the product.

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  • SimpsoniaSimpsonia Registered User regular
    This seems like an appropriate thread for this article. Turns out, as everyone already knew, Facebook was actively engaged in promoting right-wing rags and purposefully decreased traffic and postings for legitimate, but left leaning, news outlets like Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/media/2020/10/facebook-mother-jones/
    In fact, we have now learned that executives were even shown a slide presentation that highlighted the impact of the second iteration on about a dozen specific publishers—and Mother Jones was singled out as one that would suffer, while the conservative site the Daily Wire was identified as one that would benefit. These changes were pushed by Republican operatives working in Facebook’s Washington office under Vice President of Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan (who later made headlines for demonstratively supporting his friend Brett Kavanaugh during confirmation hearings).
    To be perfectly clear: Facebook used its monopolistic power to boost and suppress specific publishers’ content—the essence of every Big Brother fear about the platforms, and something Facebook and other companies have been strenuously denying for years.
    Back to January 2018. The graphs and slides appear to have appeased Kaplan. Zuckerberg signed off on the algorithm changes. And soon, the million-plus readers who had chosen to follow Mother Jones saw fewer of our articles in their feeds. Average traffic from Facebook to our content decreased 37 percent between the six months prior to the change and the six months after.

  • This content has been removed.

  • PolaritiePolaritie Sleepy Registered User regular
    in the U.S. it's not really about market share; it's not illegal to have a monopoly per se unless you are causing harm to consumers. The classic example of such behavior is price gouging; in the past google has argued that they cannot be harming consumers, since their consumer services are nearly all delivered for free.

    that said, essentially every time a major firm has been broken up (forcibly or otherwise) good consumer outcomes have burst out in all directions, so maybe google et al ought to be broken apart just on principle

    Yes, this is how Reagan broke antitrust - by tying the definition purely to consumers. Which is why we need to fix antitrust law to say that consumer harm is not the only sort of harm to be considered.

    As for Google providing their software for free, that can be argued to be a form of dumping - we saw this with Google Reader, where their entry basically undercut the RSS reader market, and their subsequent abandonment left few alternatives because of that undercutting.

    You keep saying this, but the Rule of Reason was firmly in place, even before the Standard Oil case. Monopolies have never been illegal per se. It's only when they use their market power to unreasonably restrain trade that it becomes an issue. That's why nobody bothered about Microsoft's dominance with the Window OS, until they started leveraging that to put down competition to Internet Explorer (and a big reason why IE became a fully-integrated part of Windows). It's also one of the reasons the case against Apple is going to be so problematic. It's going to be hard to build a case against them, unless they also want to dismantle the entire Walled Garden business model (with all the ramifications that would have).

    As for Google, the first thing that comes to my mind is them raising the price of calls for apps using the Google Maps API by a factor of 14.

    I think the most damning thing Apple does is to push out competing products once someone has already established a user base on the platform. You can't compete with Apple when you have a 30% cut of your proceeds going to them, and it's direct competition, unlike the other walled garden everyone's familiar with in video games. Video games don't directly compete in the same way, where someone picks one and ignores the rest. Sure, nobody wants to try and release on the Switch the same week a new Mario or Zelda drops, but that effect is temporary.

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  • AngelHedgieAngelHedgie Registered User regular
    in the U.S. it's not really about market share; it's not illegal to have a monopoly per se unless you are causing harm to consumers. The classic example of such behavior is price gouging; in the past google has argued that they cannot be harming consumers, since their consumer services are nearly all delivered for free.

    that said, essentially every time a major firm has been broken up (forcibly or otherwise) good consumer outcomes have burst out in all directions, so maybe google et al ought to be broken apart just on principle

    Yes, this is how Reagan broke antitrust - by tying the definition purely to consumers. Which is why we need to fix antitrust law to say that consumer harm is not the only sort of harm to be considered.

    As for Google providing their software for free, that can be argued to be a form of dumping - we saw this with Google Reader, where their entry basically undercut the RSS reader market, and their subsequent abandonment left few alternatives because of that undercutting.

    You keep saying this, but the Rule of Reason was firmly in place, even before the Standard Oil case. Monopolies have never been illegal per se. It's only when they use their market power to unreasonably restrain trade that it becomes an issue. That's why nobody bothered about Microsoft's dominance with the Window OS, until they started leveraging that to put down competition to Internet Explorer (and a big reason why IE became a fully-integrated part of Windows). It's also one of the reasons the case against Apple is going to be so problematic. It's going to be hard to build a case against them, unless they also want to dismantle the entire Walled Garden business model (with all the ramifications that would have).

    As for Google, the first thing that comes to my mind is them raising the price of calls for apps using the Google Maps API by a factor of 14.

    While the rule existed beforehand, it wasn't until the 80s where it basically got centered as "you cannot establish an illegal monopoly without demonstrating harm (often defined as economic harm) to consumers."

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  • Fuzzy Cumulonimbus CloudFuzzy Cumulonimbus Cloud Registered User regular
    zepherin wrote: »
    kime wrote: »
    Microsoft's cloud offering, Azure, has definitely not surpassed AWS? Unless this is a super recent development?
    8m1esomp1ov3.png

    This is tearing my family apart.

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  • AngelHedgieAngelHedgie Registered User regular
    in the U.S. it's not really about market share; it's not illegal to have a monopoly per se unless you are causing harm to consumers. The classic example of such behavior is price gouging; in the past google has argued that they cannot be harming consumers, since their consumer services are nearly all delivered for free.

    that said, essentially every time a major firm has been broken up (forcibly or otherwise) good consumer outcomes have burst out in all directions, so maybe google et al ought to be broken apart just on principle

    Yes, this is how Reagan broke antitrust - by tying the definition purely to consumers. Which is why we need to fix antitrust law to say that consumer harm is not the only sort of harm to be considered.

    As for Google providing their software for free, that can be argued to be a form of dumping - we saw this with Google Reader, where their entry basically undercut the RSS reader market, and their subsequent abandonment left few alternatives because of that undercutting.

    You keep saying this, but the Rule of Reason was firmly in place, even before the Standard Oil case. Monopolies have never been illegal per se. It's only when they use their market power to unreasonably restrain trade that it becomes an issue. That's why nobody bothered about Microsoft's dominance with the Window OS, until they started leveraging that to put down competition to Internet Explorer (and a big reason why IE became a fully-integrated part of Windows). It's also one of the reasons the case against Apple is going to be so problematic. It's going to be hard to build a case against them, unless they also want to dismantle the entire Walled Garden business model (with all the ramifications that would have).

    As for Google, the first thing that comes to my mind is them raising the price of calls for apps using the Google Maps API by a factor of 14.

    While the rule existed beforehand, it wasn't until the 80s where it basically got centered as "you cannot establish an illegal monopoly without demonstrating harm (often defined as economic harm) to consumers."

    No, it was the Standard Oil case that did that. The Sherman Antitrust Act was very poorly written and, basically, had to be rewritten through court interpretation. That was the whole point of the Rule of Reason; as written Sherman didn't target unreasonable restraints of trade, but, technically, any restraint, whatsoever. In Standard Oil, SCOTUS laid out the factors that would make a monopoly illegal:
    The evils which led to the public outcry against monopolies and to the final denial of the power to make them may be thus summarily stated: 1. The power which the monopoly gave to the one who enjoyed it to fix the price and thereby injure the public; 2. The power which it engendered of enabling a limitation on production; and, 3. The danger of deterioration in quality of the monopolized article which it was deemed was the inevitable resultant of the monopolistic control over its production and sale.

    In short, you cannot establish an illegal monopoly, without demonstrating harm to the consumer via actions that would lead to increased prices, decreased availability and/or inferior quality.

    Yes, and for a long time after, the courts were relatively loose in that interpretation. To go back to an earlier example, it's hard to argue of any direct impact to the consumer over the vertical integration of the movie studios and their control of both production and distribution, alongside of practices such as block booking. It wasn't until the 70s and especially the 80s that courts started putting economic harm of consumers to the forefront, arguing that for antitrust actions to succeed, the government had to show actual direct economic harm to consumers - something that wasn't too difficult for corporations to dodge. (It's not exactly coincidence that the modern era of media consolidation occurred with this shift of antitrust interpretation.)

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  • L Ron HowardL Ron Howard The duck MinnesotaRegistered User regular
    I wonder if ISPs could be gone after next. I have the idea that that discussion might fit in here, but also that it might be offtopic.

  • dlinfinitidlinfiniti Registered User regular
    i need legal eagle to do video on this

    AAAAA!!! PLAAAYGUUU!!!!
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  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    Well good news, the regulations that prevented the studios from owning theaters have been killed.

  • PolaritiePolaritie Sleepy Registered User regular
    DarkPrimus wrote: »
    Well good news, the regulations that prevented the studios from owning theaters have been killed.

    Not that Disney isn't going to own all the studios anyways in another 5 years. They need smacked down too for tying from what I hear.

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  • RedTideRedTide Registered User regular
    Polaritie wrote: »
    DarkPrimus wrote: »
    Well good news, the regulations that prevented the studios from owning theaters have been killed.

    Not that Disney isn't going to own all the studios anyways in another 5 years. They need smacked down too for tying from what I hear.

    I've been thinking it would be smart for them to spin studios back off with their lesser ip to try and get ahead of this.

    Like the name of Fox is functionally worthless but the X-Men, Star Wars and The Simpsons were worth gangbusters for rights purposes and streaming. If you can legally separate them and then spin off the company again then Disney hasn't gotten bigger per se but owns a lot more of what people want to see (and has mostly just consolidated it's holdings in regards to ips they already hold).

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  • DrezDrez Registered User regular
    edited October 2020
    Elki wrote: »
    DoJ's stats for abuse of monopoly cases from 2010 until the Google suit today (from Center for Democracy & Technology).


    EkxtS_VWAAg2xhW?format=jpg&name=small

    Honestly, I have been turning this phrase - "abuse of monopoly cases" - over in my head all day and I still don't know how to parse it.

    Are we talking about the government abusing monopoly litigation for their own ends or government litigation against corporations abusing their monopolistic practices?

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