It's been out for almost two weeks now, but I just got to reading the House's antitrust report on big tech companies. It's real good. The target is the big 4, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.
https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/competition_in_digital_markets.pdf
From,
Although these firms have delivered clear benefits to society, the dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google has come at a price. These firms typically run the marketplace while also competing in it—a position that enables them to write one set of rules for others, while they play by another, or to engage in a form of their own private quasi regulation that is unaccountable to anyone but themselves.
The effects of this significant and durable market power are costly. The Subcommittee’s series of hearings produced significant evidence that these firms wield their dominance in ways that erode entrepreneurship, degrade Americans’ privacy online, and undermine the vibrancy of the free and diverse press. The result is less innovation, fewer choices for consumers, and a weakened democracy.
The intro goes on the describe the nature of the 4 monopolies and their anticompetitive practices. Acquisitions, selective policy enforcement, collusion, etc. And the effects they've had on different markets. All fine stuff, but its in recommendations where things get really good (page 20).
a. Restoring Competition in the Digital Economy
- Structural separations and prohibitions of certain dominant platforms from operating in adjacent lines of business;
- Nondiscrimination requirements, prohibiting dominant platforms from engaging in self preferencing, and requiring them to offer equal terms for equal products and services;
- Interoperability and data portability, requiring dominant platforms to make their services compatible with various networks and to make content and information easily portable between them;
- Presumptive prohibition against future mergers and acquisitions by the dominant platforms;
- Safe harbor for news publishers in order to safeguard a free and diverse press; and
- Prohibitions on abuses of superior bargaining power, proscribing dominant platforms from engaging in contracting practices that derive from their dominant market position, and requiring due process protections for individuals and businesses dependent on the dominant platforms.
b. Strengthening the Antitrust Laws
- Reasserting the anti-monopoly goals of the antitrust laws and their centrality to ensuring a healthy and vibrant democracy;
- Strengthening Section 7 of the Clayton Act, including through restoring presumptions and bright-line rules, restoring the incipiency standard and protecting nascent competitors, and strengthening the law on vertical mergers;
- Strengthening Section 2 of the Sherman Act, including by introducing a prohibition on abuse of dominance and clarifying prohibitions on monopoly leveraging, predatory pricing, denial of essential facilities, refusals to deal, tying, and anticompetitive self-preferencing and product
- design; and
- Taking additional measures to strengthen overall enforcement, including through overriding
- problematic precedents in the case law.
c. Reviving Antitrust Enforcement
- Restoring robust congressional oversight of the antitrust laws and their enforcement;
- Restoring the federal antitrust agencies to full strength, by triggering civil penalties and other relief for “unfair methods of competition” rules, requiring the Federal Trade Commission to engage in regular data collection on concentration, enhancing public transparency and accountability of the agencies, requiring regular merger retrospectives, codifying stricter prohibitions on the revolving door, and increasing the budgets of the FTC and the Antitrust Division; and
- Strengthening private enforcement, through eliminating obstacles such as forced arbitration clauses, limits on class action formation, judicially created standards constraining what constitutes an antitrust injury, and unduly high pleading standards.
Just straight going for the jugular. It's not legislation, but it is basically the anti-monopolist wish-list. I can't really bold anything in that list, because it's not one of those padded recommendations list, with one great item and a series of ok ones. Presumptive prohibitions against mergers and interoperability requirements are my personal favorites, though. The expanded recommendations section is worth reading.
Restore the Antimonopoly Goals of the Antitrust Laws
The antitrust laws that Congress enacted in 1890 and 1914—the Sherman Act, the Clayton Act,
and the Federal Trade Commission Act—reflected a recognition that unchecked monopoly power
poses a threat to our economy as well as to our democracy.2467 Congress reasserted this vision through
subsequent antitrust laws, including the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, the Celler-Kefauver Act of
1950, and the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act of 1976.2468
In the decades since Congress enacted these foundational statutes, the courts have significantly
weakened these laws and made it increasingly difficult for federal antitrust enforcers and private
plaintiffs to successfully challenge anticompetitive conduct and mergers.2469 Through adopting a
narrow construction of “consumer welfare” as the sole goal of the antitrust laws, the Supreme Court
has limited the analysis of competitive harm to focus primarily on price and output rather than the
competitive process2470—contravening legislative history and legislative intent.2471 Simultaneously,
courts have adopted the view that under-enforcement of the antitrust laws is preferable to overenforcement,
a position at odds with the clear legislative intent of the antitrust laws, as well as the view
of Congress that private monopolies are a “menace to republican institutions.”
2472 In recent decades,
the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have contributed to this problem by taking
a narrow view of their legal authorities and issuing guidelines that are highly permissive of market
power and its abuse. The overall result is an approach to antitrust that has significantly diverged from
the laws that Congress enacted.
In part due to this narrowing, some of the anticompetitive business practices that the
Subcommittee’s investigation uncovered could be difficult to challenge under current law.2473 In
response to this concern, this section identifies specific legislative reforms that would help renew and
rehabilitate the antitrust laws in the context of digital markets. In addition to these specific reforms, the
Subcommittee recommends that Congress consider reasserting the original intent and broad goals of
the antitrust laws, by clarifying that they are designed to protect not just consumers, but also workers,
entrepreneurs, independent businesses, open markets, a fair economy, and democratic ideals.2474
Maybe other have concerns about it, not that I've seen any, but my only question is how much of it survives to turning into actual legislation. Not much to complain about here. I don't like giant OPs, so I'll post highlights in subsequent posts.
Posts
Bet you wish that was already in place, Oculus fans.
Intel and Nike crash the economy of Hillsboro, OR all the time. As soon as one of the two lays off people they bring on a bunch of people who are contract and not employees and every employer in the area uses it as an excuse to get rid of people, even in non-adjacent industries.
I'm sure the big 4 do the same thing on a much grander scale, though I haven't lived in The Bay Area in around 10 years now their presence was like the fucking Eye of Sauron.
This stuff all seems pretty good news for unions, even if that's not necessarily the intention. This would knock on the door for a lot of industry that has always been successful by way of tampering with the labor market and clubbing start-ups to near death before Shang Tsung'n them.
Amazon and Microsoft don't do a lot of mass layoffs of employees in this region because their headquarters are located here. They'll lay off contractors and contract firms, but by and large they've been expanding their workforce and campuses to a detrimental degree. The chief problem they cause is the incredible pressure on available housing stock and inflating the overall cost of living index. Same problems San Francisco is having, but with colder weather.
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
It literally came out of an errant comment that a Supreme Court Justice made in a ruling, stating that arbitration should be treated as equal to the courts.
I hope the power of these companies, and large corporations in general, gets pounded down.
I have never understood how those can be squared with the first amendment right to petition, since the most basic and fundamental form of that is a civil suit. The federal arbitration act is clearly unconstitutional because of that, and it keeps getting used to prevent states from stopping this shit instead.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
Antitrust isn't just about monopolies - it's about anticompetitive organization of corporations. In the case of Facebook, they buy up potential competitors early on to prevent them from becoming a threat - they did this with Instagram and Snapchat, for example.
Companies hiring lots of people and paying excellent wages is typically considered a good thing
Not when it's fundamentally unbalancing city populations and driving out families who have lived there for generations, replacing diverse communities with what can be best described as a monoculture.
Ah yes, we should definitely tell people "no, you can't live here, we're full" because we don't like them very much
Because it's not like SF and Seattle aren't in the middle of massive gentrification spikes that have seen the working class and even the middle class being displaced out of communities that they have lived in for generations, being forced to live in marginal communities on the outskirts of those cities.
How is it not? Facebook is more or less the only comprehensive social media. If you want the kind of data and exposure that can be produced via social media you must go through facebook. This makes them a monopoly.
Facebook employs 45000 people. The SFBA has a population of 7.75 million. Even if all their employees are in the bay, that's one half of one percent of the population. Hardly an epidemic or a problem that any one company can solve by... not existing I guess? People go where the jobs are and companies form where the people are
Even if you were to shut down facebook those 45k probably aren't going to quickly leave either. There will be other companies hiring them and they've already put in the time and effort to move there in the first place
Microsoft leans heavily on contractors, Amazon does not. This also doesn't relate to monopoly issues.
Monopoly issues are things like being able to push out a product that's so cheap that nobody can compete so you can dominate the market, or being able to buy up all the resources, or bully all the resource providers in a sector because you're most of their potential customer base.
Not exactly. It's a whole suite of products that tracks your every goddamn move across the internet, even if you've never signed up for the service, for one thing. Look up shadow profiles and the tracking stuff they sell to other websites.
Snapchat is actually the only competitor I can think of that they didn't buy. They tried multiple times but were rebuffed.
When the only place that some significant number of people ever go to shop online is Amazon, that damages the competitiveness of the marketplace, even if it's not a complete monopoly. That sets up Amazon or an entity like it to abuse that position in the market.
It's still difficult to square that with "is a monopoly". Websites have a Facebook tracker, and a Google tracker, and an Adobe tracker, and an Oracle tracker and a...
Like, the existence of this sort of 3rd party surveillance is problematic, but it doesn't make it a monopoly in any meaningful way, at least consumer facing.
I feel like the attempt to attach monopoly law to go after problematic social tech is a mistake in general. Like you'd be hard pressed to call Twitter a monopoly of anything (where Facebook is in fact it's direct competitor, as are open source technologies, as are message boards) - but it's been a damn plague on the world for entirely different reasons.
It's the digital version of Wal-Mart in the 90s-00s. Build a store at the first exit and last exit from the freeway/interstate and watch everything in between wither away.
It's just not a physical building that everyone can point to in most places, so it's harder to articulate. It's the difference between drowning competition in the bathtub versus sucking all the oxygen out of the room.
Antitrust != monopoly, and the reason you think otherwise is thanks to the way the Reagan Administration broke antitrust law in the 80s, by requiring demonstration of monopoly harms to enact antitrust actions. Part of the recommendations that Elki posted above are to fix that damage by no longer using monopoly as the standard for antitrust action.
The term is monopsony - a dominant buyer, in comparison to a monopoly being a dominant seller. And in some key ways, monopsonies are worse than monopolies.
Snapchat was effectively destroyed by Facebook when they stole the Stories feature and put it into Instagram before Snapchat could file a patent for it. This feature being ported to the larger platform with the bigger audience more or less hollowed Snapchat out into the uninspired husk it is.
They're also a great way to make sure that juggernauts like Facebook don't take a feature that you pioneered and steal it so their comparatively massive customer base can enjoy the benefits of your ingenuity and hard work while you're left out in the cold.
Seriously. If you want to defang the big players here, wipe out software patents and let them go after each other on cost.
There's no serious risk of losing knowledge here since no one has actually managed to make a truly tamper proof consumer ROM module.
They don't need to, they'll bury you with their army of relevant patents first or you'll have to spend a fortune as a startup going over everything you do to ensure what you're doing isn't patented first. One feature doesn't break a juggernaut
I'm wondering if with the four tech companies named, if there are still priorities even there on who gets dismembered first. All four need to be broken up, but IMO since you'll probably get an order of when things are filed in the courts. I'd argue that FB and google would be the priority because one of the issues with both of them, is just how much control they have over the information people are fed. With luck, those four will only be the start and we'll see action brought against the various companies that have gotten too fucking big and that are actively using their size to fuck the American people over for the sake of profits.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.