Warning Shot
Opponents of big tech monopoly power on the left and right should be excited about this Lina Khan nomination. Judging from @matthewstoller‘s write-up of the hearing, they are, at least in the Senate. Now more GOP House members need to get behind the Cicilline anti-trust report. https://t.co/FebzJFnQhE
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 21, 2021
In general, if Matt Stoller is for it I am against it. Directly or indirectly he always wants consumers to pay more for goods in the name of competition.
I have yet found an exception to that general rule, at least that I recall.
I follow many people with whom I disagree. It’s important to consider the other side.
Antitrust Rock Star Lina Khan
Today there was a Senate hearing over Biden’s FTC appointee Linda Khan.
Stoller notes Lina Khan Fires a Warning Shot at Big Tech – “Potential Criminal Activity” – and Senators from Both Parties Love It.
Today was Lina Khan’s nominating hearing for her slot as a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, which is one of America’s antitrust enforcement agencies. Khan is known as a rock star of antitrust, and for good reason. She helped lead the 16-month investigation of big tech firms by the House Antitrust Subcommittee, and before that she wrote one of the most important law review articles in recent history, Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.
That piece, as Senator Amy Klobuchar noted while introducing Khan, went viral, and helped reframe how we understand antitrust and competition law. To have Khan as a nominee for an enforcement slot is therefore quite significant.
Both Republicans and Democrats seemed to appreciate Khan’s approach. Republican Senator Roger Wicker, for instance, asked for her views on Clarence Thomas’ opinions on big tech and common carriage. They went back and forth on the problem of big tech, and you wouldn’t know which was a Democrat and which was a Republican.
https://twitter.com/rachelbovard/status/1384890405238546436
still thinking about how Ted Cruz told Lina Khan during her nomination hearing that he looks forward to working with her on Big Tech issues
— Sam Sabin (@samsabin923) April 21, 2021
Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox
Kahn is the author of Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox
It’s a lengthy bashing of Amazon but with some interesting, and correct observations.
When pressed on why, critics often fumble to explain how a company that has so clearly delivered enormous benefits to consumers—not to mention revolutionized e-commerce in general—could, at the end of the day, threaten our markets. Trying to make sense of the contradiction, one journalist noted that the critics’ argument seems to be that “even though Amazon’s activities tend to reduce book prices, which is considered good for consumers, they ultimately hurt consumers.”
Due to a change in legal thinking and practice in the 1970s and 1980s, antitrust law now assesses competition largely with an eye to the short-term interests of consumers, not producers or the health of the market as a whole; antitrust doctrine views low consumer prices, alone, to be evidence of sound competition. By this measure, Amazon has excelled;
Interest of Consumers
Who should decide what is in the long-term interest of consumers?
Consumers or activists like Matt Stoller and Linda Khan?
Kahn also questions the focus on consumer welfare arguing that “assessing structure is vital to protect important antitrust values”.
Health of the Market as a Whole
Who should decide the health of the market as a whole?
Consumers or activists like Matt Stoller and Linda Khan?
What If?
If either Stoller or Khan set policy years ago, Amazon, Google, Uber, Lyft, and Microsoft would not even exist.
In the name of protecting consumers and allegedly preserving competition, those companies would have failed or been broken up before they ever got off the ground.
Instead, consumers do not have to pay absurd taxi prices and they do pay cheap prices at amazon.
Like it or not, consumers have embraced Amazon, Google, Uber, Lyft, and Microsoft.
Consumers enjoy amazing benefits from Google Maps and other technologies. Google is also responsible for much of the self-driving car technology soon to be in every car.
Competition is now intense on most of these technologies.
None of those companies could every have started in France, or the EU in general.
Lina Kahn @linamkhan and Matt Stoller @matthewstoller are on an important mission …
to save the family bookstore!
They fit right in with ongoing strategies in France.
— Mike “Mish” Shedlock (@MishGEA) April 21, 2021
France is still on a mission to save the family-run bookstore. So it seems are Stoller and Khan.
Mish
I believe in the Government’s Capacity.
-Ryan | link to sanbernardinoappliancerepair.com
Amazon is a very good consumer experience and they are not price gouging. Walmart never price gouged either…they made things cheaper. I found the most obscure stuff on Amazon and it’s a long tail business model. How they treat employees-thats a labor dispute and nobody has to work there. Facebook and Google however do use their technology to spy on people…but again, that’s the price of essentially a FREE service
Warren was right. It’s time to break up Amazon, Google and others. Probably throw Microsoft and Facebook in there. Anyone who is double dealing is violating antitrust should be broken up. This will be a boom for the American economy on main street. Biden’s tax plan is also good as it will force high net worth investors to speculate less on wall street and invest in businesses on main street. Hedge funds should be taxed at 50%.
Don’t forget Apple
All run by corrupt liberals, take em down.
Governments know what’s best for us.
Apologies for the repeat.
Governments apparently know what’s best for us better than we do.
That goes from health to all aspects of live.
Mish, Stoller wants consumers to have choices. With an “s”. Plural.
Comsuners arent choosing anymore.
True, there would be no Google, no Microsoft, no Uber (as we know it today).
Instead, we would have Google search, Google Mail, Google Maps, Youtube, Chrome, Android, Xbox, Windows, Office, Outlook, and more companies with plenty of users, because the products would be better. What is a tech company product now? An entire stack of tech more optimized to lock other things out than be useful? Feh.
And Uber isn’t a “good” company, unless I’m mistaken. Its only cheaper than Taxis cause of a bunch of investor dollars keeping it afloat, no?
In many cases what you think is a plus is actually a minus.
Too many choices leads to a problem of needing to learn too many things to get a job. I remember in the 90’s that you had to know both MS Word and Wordperfect to get a job doing word processings that was a significant task given their complexity. Now that Word is the de facto standard people only have to learn 1 word processor.
For simpler stuff like browsers, email etc there are already plenty of choices for consumers. For businesses, however there is pretty much just 1 de-facto standard because IT departments don’t want to have to learn tons of different products.
Disagree on the “plenty of choices for consumers” on Browsers. The world uses Chrome and Safari, inferior products, because they come pre-installed on the duopoly that controls Mobile OS: Google and Apple.
In my experience, IT departments would always prefer to choose that standard. No one is saying you have to be proficient in everything. Software has its ups and downs, but having the flexibility to go with different software for different reasons in paramount. Heck, its the entire purpose of my place of business.
Word ain’t perfect (hah!). TBH it makes me think of the Qwerty keyboard — the reason of its existence no longer really applies, but it was so dominant we don’t want to change our paradigm. Just cause you only learn one way doesn’t mean its the best.
Email is a great comparison — No one owns “email”, no one is exerting monopolistic control on the concept of email, just the features bundled with it. Gmail offers lots of bells and whistles — but not enough. It could be a much better product, but it has to all to benefit the monolith at the end of the day, which hobbles it.
Seems to me cancel culture is just something the republicans are using to rally their base.
Twitter and facebook are a free service. That means you me trump and whoever are the product. If say twitter does not like the quality of its product it can shape it (data) or discard it just like any other business. Our option as the product is not to use those free services.
Now if facebook was refusing to take republican advertising dollars. Well that would make the republicans hypocrites. Remember the whole bakery who refused to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple.
Big tech got to be “big tech” by providing services that people needed at a price they could afford. We, as people who like free stuff, gladly sign the “agreements” with these providers allowing them access to our information in exchange for the great services they provide to us. The exchange was voluntary. No one twisted our arms to agree that Amazon could analyze our choices and serve up to us more of the same. The government should stay out of this free exchange. Regulation can do nothing but make it worse. Competition will make it better. Amazon and Facebook will be in history’s rear view mirror in time. Leave them alone.
Sechel said “Seems to me the right and left are focused on different issues. Right worries about cancel culture, left monopoly power.”
If both sides compromise and reach agreement then that would hurt the monopolies so the rational strategy for the monopolies would be to keep both sides hating and distrusting each other. The funny thing is that they have ample means of doing so since they control communications between individuals which is something that has never occurred before since the beginning of civilization. Being the middleman between individuals means that they not only reap information which they sell but more importantly they can manage to their advantage whatever individuals say to each other. At this point it transcends from the merely economic aspect into the more important sphere which questions what type of society do we want to be. The purely economic view is too narrow in scope in this matter in my opinion. There are some things that are more important than just economic efficiency.
I don’t see a compromise. The issue is the right to spread lies.
The issue is who gets to spread lies and who doesn’t.
Am I the only person following wirecard? First time I’ve seen a financial website not reporting on big fraud news
‘Bring the Troops Home’ Is a Dream, Not a Strategy
A full withdrawal from Afghanistan is a costly blunder and failure of leadership. link to foreignpolicy.com
Nothing will happen. Amazon and google are part of the democrats platform. It will be a lot of talk about action with maybe a few token actions that do nothing and are met with huge fanfare by MSM.
I used to read about google filtering results. After using other search engines, it is absolutely happening. They filter out news that argue against their political beliefs. The Washington Post does the same thing.
Amazon is expensive when you compare prices. 50 pcs of belly balusters at amazon, wayfair, ebay range $600 to $750 and 6 week delivery. Home hardware $395 unbelivable, 2weeks I wasn’t ready but the product waiting for me. Zoom camera $650 + average onlinne got it for $575. and they showed me how it works, Local store are better at service. Kill the local bookstore if you like paying more and hate human contact.
Speaking of the FTC, and consumer pain, I have filed the info below as a complaint to the FTC some months back, where it has apparently languished since nothing has changed with the situation I describe. Perhaps this new FTC nominee will bring necessary change to this agency.
An example that currently bugs me is CNN/MSNBC and others taking on advertising for garbage companies like CarShield, which sells auto service contracts. Most companies will accept ads from anyone with no concern about whether the company has a good reputation or not and can/will deliver the services they promise. As such, companies act as enablers for scam companies to prey on clueless consumers.
CarShield for example, which has been saturating the advertising airtime for at least the past 6 months, has an “F” rating from the BBB. Providing a company with a reputation for scamming customers a place to advertise doesn’t seem like a positive decision for a company concerned about their customers experience. Doing so only allows more people to get snookered into their scam but in the USA under our capitalistic system, it’s buyer beware while for the companies accepting the ads, it’s only “about the Benjamin’s”.
Is offering an advertising platform for sham/scam companies any different than companies such as Twitter, FB & Google removing so-called Covid misinformation under the premise that people could be injured by this info?
The FTC should block companies with a BBB rating of ‘D’ or lower from being able to advertise. Failing that, they should at least require that a notice be placed on ads based on BBB reputation (I know BBB is not a government entity) or perhaps claims filed with the FTC. Or require that companies do some due diligence to vet the reputation of companies they accept as advertisers, again, in order to protect hapless/clueless consumers.
But of course, everyone would scream bloody murder that doing so blocks companies from their right to freedom of speech or being able to troll for more suckers, depending on your POV.
It’s too late. These companies already control the collective unconscious of billions. The range of things they can get their AI to get us to do grows every day. Nothing will come of this initiative, just like the ones before.
Kabuki theater at its best.
I tend to agree.
First Walmart destroyed all the small businesses on Main Street. Now Amazon is going to end up owning Walmart probably…..maybe doing to Walmart what Eddie Lampert did to Sears, for those of you who followed that little typical LBO story of mass destruction.
At some point I expect that we won’t find it so convenient for all our goods to come from far away….not when the JIT delivery stops working so well.
Seems typical, people lose trust in a company and so government decides to get involved and come up with anti-trust…probably just to confuse or claim a share of some profits somewhere.
Apart: Could not log in for a day, everything seems to work fine now. Good move, puts you more into an own orbit. Your own approach and views are quite distinct from the larger site, from most all other sites in fact.
We all can make choices. I will never buy online because I want to see the product, try it on if clothing etc before I pay. Seeing something on a computer is not the same as the real thing. The only thing I have ever bought at Amazon is used books if i cant find them at Strand bookstore. I find Amazon prices competitive and when I buy the books come on time. Nobody is forced to buy all the junk advertised or use Facebook or Instagram.
The issue I am having these days is that lots of retailers have reduced what is displayed to consumers at a particular store particularly for clothes retailers
Just reminded myself about Cambridge analytics, Facebook, Russia and 2016. Facebook abused its position of trust
I think that the big area that Amazon is vulnerable is using data obtained from third party sales to go into competition against the third party sellers. There probably is some way to mitigate that. They have a dominate position in online marketing and then they use the very sellers they contract with to establish a beachhead in the market and then they come behind them and offer the same or similar product for less.
Agreed, the consumer has benefited greatly from the effort of big tech. This consumer, however is concerned with big tech’s involvement the cloud, internet and other media with their bias and censorship.
There is an old saying that with power comes corruption, and with absolute power comes absolute corruption. In their early days, the tech powers were good, and trying to do good things. As they have become more and more powerful, it seems as if greed and corruption have set in. I used to shop a lot at Amazon, but I no longer will shop there.
That change is generally driven by Wall Street for companies that have gone public. If companies don’t want to be chained to quarterly growth, then they should stay private.
I pulled up Stoller’s piece. Should be a direct link and not hidden behind a tweet. Interesting example the ap store. There are two operating systems, Android and Apple. There will not be a 3rd. Apple can block 3rd party aps or make them very difficult to obtain. Pros and cons for sure. They do police their turf but the two are oligopolies when it comes to smart phones
HarmonyOS may come along just based on the size of the market.
Waze offered some nice enhancements over Google maps. Then Google bought Waze. Doesn’t feel like either product has improved much since
That’s how Google works. They have moved some of Waze functions into Maps and will likely kill Waze at some point.
That’s how corporations at the top work. Niche food labels picked up by Gen Mills, craft brews sucked up by InBev, local/regional broadcast radio assimilated into iheart (nee Clear Channel), Diznee and Viacom split the entertainment industry.
It’s a great way to remove the threat of competition or cost of innovation!
Question is would regulation inhibit new products and services or allow new entrants into the marketplace. There are arguments on both sides. But the power is there for Verizon to limit bandwidth to a competitor or company not playing ball. Google can promote its own services while hiding those of a competitor or use its position to snoop.
Congress passes the laws but it’s the regulator that interprets and enforces. The laws are rarely so explicit as to avoid the need for regulatory interpretation.
Seems to me the right and left are focused on different issues. Right worries about cancel culture, left monopoly power.
As consumers we have very little power. Often we’re product and not customer. Unlike Google, Facebook or Amazon we don’t hire lobbyists and can’t effectively negotiate contract terms. The relationship is asymmetric.
In addition to monopoly issues there are huge privacy issues around our data including Metadata. There’s also concerns about net neutrality etc.
I expect all three branches of government to play key roles. I do think there are monopoly issues and privacy issues that any libertarian should care about. Facebook has clearly abused the data of its users in ways not obvious to all.
“Seems to me the right and left are focused on different issues. Right worries about cancel culture, left monopoly power.”
Bingo
Both have problems with Big Tech but the core issues are often different
There are plenty of alternatives to Google and Amazon, and do you really need facebook?
I agree.
I’ve ditched chrome for FireFox, a significantly better browser. And when I found out google was tracking incognito mode, it was the last straw and I dumped them for DuckDuckGo. I’m meh about that decision but I’m furious about google’s overreach and their clearly crossing their “Don’t be evil” line (as if we ever thought they wouldn’t). I never liked facebook and finally dumped it with the idiocy got too much to bear.
As for Amazon, I use to use a price aggregator (now defunct and can’t remember it’s name). It was amazing for putting together PCs. The best deals were clearly available and rarely did any one retailer dominate my order. Extremely convenient. I miss those days.
I only buy in the Great White North now and it’s either newegg or amazon, and most often amazon. I know there are better deals out there, but it takes too long to find them for the few percentages I could save.
I should give google shopping a chance, but I feel that’s a step backwards :/
“What If?
If either Stoller or Khan set policy years ago, Amazon, Google, Uber, Lyft, and Microsoft would not even exist.”
The answer to that is easy:
ONE of the many companies – often with better ideas – that they bought would have replaced them. And if anti trust law was enforced the answer would change slightly to:
SEVERAL of the many companies – often with better ideas – they bought would have replaced them.
These companies got to where they thru gobbling up competition which sometimes had better ideas, that Amazon/Microsoft/FakeBood/Google basically stole.
What If?
If either Stoller or Khan set policy years ago, Amazon, Google, Uber, Lyft, and Microsoft would not even exist.
The to that is easy:
ONE of the many companies – often with better ideas – that they bought would have replaced them. And if anti trust law was enforced the answer would change slightly to:
SEVERAL of the many companies -often with better ideas – they bought would have replaced them.
These companies got to where they thru gobbling up competition which sometimes had better ideas, that Amazon/Microsoft/FakeBood/Googe stole.