[tomsem]

IMO Mnuchin’s statements and the recent DoJ’s launch of an anti-trust review of Amazon, Facebook, and Google are nearly entirely politically motivated, on a mostly baseless conspiracy theory that they are politically biased against a certain political party. The DoJ is on a fishing expedition, but I think it is unlikely to be successful.

President Trump himself has publicly called for these things to happen, and in particular seems to have a personal vendetta against Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, who also happens to own the Washington Post, which he routinely calls ‘fake news’ in an attempt to deflect reporting he regards as unfavorable.

(Disclosure: I never bought books at B&N, and Amazon has gotten about 99% of my book-related purchases for the last 20+ years.)

Leaving politics aside, I don’t think Amazon (or Google or Facebook for that matter) is in fact in violation of the current anti-trust laws, or anywhere close to it. Microsoft’s run in with DoJ was a cautionary tale, was a huge setback for them, and was a boon for Google. Such large tech companies have regular training for their employees and teams of lawyers who review everything to make sure that they don’t repeat Microsoft’s error.

Google dominates in Search, and therefore ad revenue. Why? Is it ‘better’? I don’t know. But it is not a monopoly. Virtually all web browsers offer a choice of search engines, but most people never change the default (and Google pays Apple to make Google the default in Safari, for example). I use DuckDuckGo, and it is just fine.

Facebook dominates in social networking (in the USA especially), mostly because it was better than what preceded it and they have made strategic acquisitions since then. But they are running into headwinds in China, India and elsewhere and it is becoming fashionable to delete one’s Facebook account. Nobody is forced to have one or use one, apart from relatively mild social pressure. It’s unclear what societal or economic or whatever benefit there would be in ‘breaking up Facebook’ or how you would go about doing it.

Amazon has dominant share of book and ebook sales, but far from a monopoly in that segment. There are plenty of people who are determined not to ever buy books from Amazon, independent booksellers are thriving, and ‘nobody reads anymore’ so what does it matter. And it is not where they make money: AWS generates about half of their operating income, though only 13% of their total revenue, and it is growing much faster than the rest of Amazon. They are far from a monopoly in retail, or internet retail for that matter, nor is it clear they are on any path to become one (if they buy Walmart or vice versa that is a different story). Well over half of the retail revenue is through third party sellers.

Returning to politics, Elizabeth Warren wants to break these companies up too, and has a plan for doing so, but it does not make any sense to me. Undo Amazon’s Zappo’s acquisition? How does that change anything?

Or you’d have to convince a court that Facebook (Google, Amazon) is a public utility/platform covered by some interstate commerce laws or something, and I don’t think that’s possible.

What these companies have in common is they want to mine our personal data and make money off of it. That’s a problem, but we need some new laws to address that.

In the meantime, whatever trouble Big Tech is causing, it is mostly on us to understand it and make choices accordingly.