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Originally Posted by 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIKlEUOjsmE |
Every source of media is 'fake news' except for reuters and the associated press which just about the facts and have almost zero "spin".
I don't follow politics because America is an Oligarchy not a Democracy :
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journ...D4893B382B992B
Since America is an Oligarchy is not hard for companies to cross over to straight monopolies since there is only a thin line between Oligarchy and Monopoly.
Therefore, in my opinion is not easy to dismiss Mnuchin as wrong due to political bias because of the above ^
Also, a case of feedback which stabilizes tyranny in 'democratic' countries is what, for lack of better terminology, may be called a 'non- proportional-representation election system'. By this I mean any system in which there are just two (or occasionally three) major political parties or candidates, and where the only voting option is to vote for just one. The effect of such a system is to marginalize the competition by inducing voters to vote for one of the two or three major parties or candidates on the theory that a vote for a minor party or candidate will constitute 'wasting one's vote'. The dynamic here is that, by convincing each voter that the competition 'can't win', this forecloses that very possibility, ie, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in which belief of impossibility causes the impossibility.
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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.
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Well in IMHO you can't really make your case for things like Facebook, Google, and Amazon not being monopolies without using Alexa ratings and google page rankings. How does duckduckgo and yahoo, for instance, rank in comparison ?
I opted out of Facebook because it is effectively mining people and fleecing them like sheep. Windows 10 and Linux Ubuntu are both spyware as well. So is google , yahoo and facebook. Also, Edward Snowden told use google, yahoo, and facebook are spy tools for the NSA.
People think us hackers are going to save them but that is not the case we are going to save ourselves. It is getting harder and harder to be anonymous online and only us true hackers can do it now. Back in 1997 it was pretty easy. For instance, stumble upon a socks proxy from Papua New Guinea or somewhere like that and point your browser cookies file to /dev/null etc.. etc.. but it is for more complex now. For more information on it I recommend "The Art of Invisibility" by Kevin Mitnick and "Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet" by Julian Assange , Jacob Appelbaum.
I don't agree with everything said in Mitnick's book but to tell you how to be 100% anonymous my way would be off topic.
Both books are available on Amazon maybe ironically so.
P.S. I don't have anymore time to argue this tonight I have to get back to making progress on a book I am reading.