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Antitrust: Democrats vs Big Tech
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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)
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
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.
I'm not sure this makes the point you wanted to make.
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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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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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
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
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.
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.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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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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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."
This is tearing my family apart.
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.)
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
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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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).
Come Overwatch with meeeee
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?