But no, because Comcast has -bribed- donated to way more congresspeople than Google, because they’re better at playing that game.
Lobbying is tracked and google spent over 33% more than Comcast - in your own words - bribing members of Congress.
The bulk of Google’s lobbying expenditure was for immigration, tax reform and antitrust. I’d say Google’s far better “at playing the game” after all no one is randomly sticking up for Comcast.
To be fair, I think there is some argument that some of the larger tech giants would benefit consumer welfare by being broken up. Facebook probably less so since people already have choice.
Warren does herself no favors by using $25 billion as the threshold of a monopoly. What a real monopoly is is when there is no consumer choice at all, leading to large corporate profits that hurt consumers at the pricing level.
By not using consumer choice or harm as the standard (which is what the court uses), Warren comes across (and perhaps actually intends) to be against large companies, regardless of welfare.
Instead of focusing on consumer welfare, antitrust law should focus on 'anticompetitive behavior'. In this argument, amazon is the platform through which all other online sellers go to market, like railroads in the late 19th century. Behaving as both a platform and participant is anticompetitive, regardless of whether programs like 'amazon basics' make consumers happy.
NYT article about the author of the original law paper https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/technology/monopoly-antit...
I don't have strong feelings on the issue, but this may help explain warren's stance, which isn't directly related to consumer choice.
Well, sure, 100% national market share is obviously a monopoly. But you're also a monopoly if you distort a market (generally markets with less than 3 major players) or have control or distortion over individual markets (you can have a monopoly in NYC but not the US, for example).
I think this obviously applies to telecoms, which often have monopolies over certain areas (and often granted by local government! thanks a lot Philly city council).
I think there's a whole host of bad behavior that's non-monopolistic. That's what I think needs to be cracked down on. Some of these do relate to market share, but I don't think it's as simple as a boolean monopoly / not-monopoly. It's a gradient, and much of the behavior in that gradient should be dealt with. There's often collusion between companies on pricing, or agreements not to compete, etc...
It's only kinda choice. They have such a dominance over the social graph, most people who "leave" them don't actually completely leave. Most of them keep Facebook around as an address-book+messaging. People who "leave" by actually deleting their account then turn around and create obvious dummy accounts.
It was the political appointees (from both parties) who shut the investigation down.
>The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday faced renewed questions about its handling of its antitrust investigation into Google, after documents revealed that an internal report had recommended stronger action.
The 2012 report, from the agency’s bureau of competition, said that the agency should sue the Internet search company for anticompetitive practices…
In early 2013, the agency unanimously voted not to bring charges after an investigation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/technology/take-google-to...
Google's lobbying investment levels appear to have been quite adequate.
However, I would agree that the telecomm companies are also ripe for antitrust action.
God knows I’d trust her to break up ISPs before pretty much any other candidate.
Is this true? It depends on your use of the internet and definitions of “worse”, but I know that both Google and Facebook have been strong opponents of state-level Internet privacy legislation. They also spend huge amounts on lobbying, SV outspending Wall Street about 2:1 for the last few years. Do telcos spend more?
I also think that Warren is dead wrong. The internet/FB/GOOGL allow smaller businesses to flourish. 15 years ago, only major brands could afford to advertise or reach an audience, now niche companies can exist with a national or international presence.
If anything, these tech monopolies hurt the previously established, Coke/Kraft/Sears and they hurt VC's who can't find a way to scale a niche brand with smaller TAM's or compete directly with Amazon, etc.
Is that true? [1] indicates Google spent more than Comcast in lobbying in q1 2015. I have no idea how this varies quarter by quarter and since 2015, but Google spends a lot lobbying.
I would not be surprised if that extends to campaign contributions as well. Google donates a ton of money to a ton of politicians.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/21/google-co...
Paying $110/month for a business line with 50 down / 10 up, while recently i was offered then refused a promotion upgrade to $140/month with 150 down / 25 up for 3 years. After three years, the pricing goes close $300. Unbelievable deceiving offerings for reduction in current pricing. Totally stuck... :(
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/how-block-big-tech-kas...
We had 27 large banks in the early 90's. These have merged into four enormous ones today [0].
We had 50 media corporations in the early 80's. They have merged into six today [1].
[0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-banking-oligopoly-in-on...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control...
Haha, the actual "but no, because" is that Comcast and Verizon said "why not the platforms first" in response to net neutrality.
Regulating one of these industries isn't at all in any way whatsoever in a first-second relationship with doing the same to the other industry.
I recall Google having the highest expenditure on lobbying for one of the last few years.
The point about Comcast's anticompetitive practices still holds, but not as a "they do this worse than them" IMO.
The best solution is probably to accept the national monopoly and socialise the infrastructure, but like that will ever happen...
The average person will have an easier time understanding the concept that his favorite pundit is less discoverable on Google properties than his political opponent than the concept that Comcast owns Sky, MSNBC, Rotten Tomatoes, Universal Pictures, Telemundo, E!, Vox, The Verge and has all manners of pervasive influence in your thought.
In tech, the trend has been in the other direction. If you don’t consider Sprint a viable competitor to AT&T, what does that say about Bing and the search market? If cellular isn’t competitive, what about mobile, where there is just Android and iOS?
Sure, Google has the search monopoly, but they don't actively squash (or try to get laws made against) any other company trying to build an alternative search engine. I use DDG for most things, but occasionally have to repeat the search on Google because its just better.
Also, my point isn't that FAANG are perfect citizens and don't need any regulation at all, its that the Telecom companies are far worse If we're gearing up enough citizenry outrage to do some monopoly busting, lets start with them instead.
She doesn't really care about the underlying cause. If that was so then your points would be valid.
But look at how many news articles got published and how many people are getting excited about the thought. Being against successful technology companies is currently what liberals want and she's feeding her party.
Even if Comcast et al. get broken up, we'll probably just end up with poor customer service from the resultant components until they merge.
That's like asking the government to break up the react framework because more sites are using it and you have no jquery option.
Paying $110/month for a business line with 50 down / 10 up, while recently i was offered then refused a promotion upgrade to $140/month with 150 down / 25 up for 3 years. After three years, the pricing goes close $300.
Quite deceiving pushy sales people and their offerings with reduction in current pricing. I am considered a loyal grandfathered customer, yet i am totally stuck... :(
An antitrust breakup of Comcast would be one or both of:
1. splitting off different lines of business, such as the content production parts from the physical cable service part, or
2. splitting them into different companies geographically.
Neither of these would do much to increase your ISP options.
These monolithic companies are sucking up all of the power in our economy and have destroyed the competitive markets. As the Economist recently said "Profits are too high. America needs a giant dose of competition." https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/03/26/too-much-of-a-...
Capitalism without competition isn't really capitalism, but feudalism.
They should be broken up.
Those companies are Boeing Aircraft (153k employees, $244B market value), United Technologies (202k employees, $148B market value), and United Airlines (88k employees, $33B market value).[0]
What most people perceive as a threat to the market is when one company takes over an entire single market. And that is a problem, no doubt. But in the case of Boeing, the problem was that one company had such an advantage vertically- lose money on planes in order to make money on shipping, or vice versa, as needed. It meant it could win in whichever market it wanted to and slowly come to dominate all of those markets. The synergies of doing it all internally meant it could win at everything.
If one uses that situation as a precedent, one can start to see the parallels in many of the FAANG companies today.
[0] "The Air Mail Act of 1934 prohibited airlines and manufacturers from being under the same corporate umbrella, so the company split into three smaller companies – Boeing Airplane Company, United Airlines, and United Aircraft Corporation, the precursor to United Technologies." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing
The problem of Amazon is that it is effectively the only online shopping place, and thus can act as a Monopsony in hiring it's workers for warehouses, splitting AWS out of that doesn't fix that problem. Maybe you could require that distribution centers be owned by separate companies. This might work but locally each Center would still be a Monopsony and thus cause the same problem. Maybe if you capped the size of distribution center you could force lots of smaller ones to be built, but at this point I worry that you are going to end up making shipping slower and more expensive.
The problem of Google is they are very dominate in the Ads space splitting out the Ads portion into another company would not solve that. Facebook's problems is everyone has put their data in Facebook has friends in Facebook and feel compelled to keep using it. I don't see how splitting up the company into, Instagram, What's App, and Facebook solves the network effects of those apps.
Splitting up tech companies is not a punishment to make the CEO feel bad or change their ways. It is a technique to change how we need the market works to benefit the large population. As such we need to think about how to split them, the effects, and most importantly if the effect achieves the intended result.
https://i.imgur.com/rMFqmbt.jpg
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/03/att-time-warner...
I'm not critical to the idea nor supportive - I'm just curious to learn more.
https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...
It also doesn't help that there seems to be academic corruption or at least conflicts of interest driving the new interpretation. https://www.propublica.org/article/these-professors-make-mor...
https://promarket.org/stigler-monopolies-competition-tough-w...
It was back in 2001 that I remember reading a newspaper article on this
However as long as the companies are well regulated and publicly traded, I think the concern diminishes over time. Each manager has an incentive to look out for their own shareholders, their own bonuses. And if activist shareholders suspect one company is subsidizing another, they can happily buy the undervalued company, raise a ruckus (and maybe some lawsuits), and profit when the subsidies end.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Mail_scandal#Effects_on_th...
Facebook, Google and Amazon really do have an unprecedented amount of data on us. And keep vacuuming up more and more of it. Facebook should never have been allowed to buy WhatsApp (and maybe not Instagram though I'm less concerned about that one). Google should never have been allowed to buy DoubleClick.
Question is how you'd effectively roll that back now. I'm concerned that the government doesn't have enough people with the technical knowledge to really tackle the data question, but I'm still glad Warren is starting the conversation. And she's got some interesting ideas:
> Companies with an annual global revenue of $25 billion or more and that offer to the public an online marketplace, an exchange, or a platform for connecting third parties would be designated as “platform utilities.”
> These companies would be prohibited from owning both the platform utility and any participants on that platform. Platform utilities would be required to meet a standard of fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory dealing with users. Platform utilities would not be allowed to transfer or share data with third parties.
https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...
Perhaps the platform utility designation will let us enforce a kind of "content neutrality" instead.
I don't see how this could be implemented to the best interest of the USA without "censorship" being involved at some point.
Hiding revenue is something multi-national corporations do really well.
If I ran a company that had a platform as described, and we were approaching the 25bn mark, I'd find ways to make sure we never crossed that line.
Losing IP to what would become a 'public utility' would discourage me from ever trying to develop beyond the 24.9bn mark.
Sure, some of your IP moves to a new company that is more restricted in how it can operate. But at least your marketplace doesn't hold back everything else your company is doing.
I feel like shareholders wouldn't be very happy with this
I thought it was profits that were easily hidden. Hiding revenue seems like it would be very difficult.
(it wouldn't be a public utility but) I feel like that's kind of the point? Encourage dozens of smaller (if multi-billion counts as "small") businesses to thrive rather than one 25bn+ business. And if you do want to go big, you have to do it in a way that lifts up significantly smaller businesses.
It should always be something that's a better true absolute measure, for example market penetration.
She is inferring that Google/Amazon/Facebook are committing anti-trust crimes? What proof does she have?
>Companies would be barred from transferring or sharing users’ data with third parties.
That can be done without breaking them up. I don't think she realizes that splitting up amazon and amazon basics will do little to nothing.
There are other things that can be done. You could require freedom of speech apply to industry leaders for example. However I suspect the democrats would never propose that because it would be bad for them.
I think amazon : amazon basics is a great example of antitrust/unfair monopoly the same as google search : almost all consumer facing google products.
Both amazon and google search are the dominate online market leaders in their respective categories. In amazons case they unfairly use their market position to begin offering amazon private label products on their platform. They know what users are looking for, spend the most on, and they can give their own products dominate positions in the UI. In the case of google they too unfairly use their position as a market leader against their own customers (advertisers), so say you are a hotel booking platform and spend $x with google, google knows the market (searches, clicks, etc...) so google launches their own hotel booking, gives their in-house service priority in search results over existing market incumbents and self bids on google search advertising for key industry terms to drive up costs of advertisers to keep in business.
It’s kind of like standard oil buying up the railroads so they owned the supply chain and no other oil could be moved. It’s unfairly using your market position, not to compete, but to be anti competitive to the detriment of consumers.
I’d like to see the tech giants prevented from unfairly using their market dominance to stifle competition. As we saw with the break up of standard oil...competition is good for consumers.
1) How is that different than a department store? If you go into housewares at Macy's you'll see their own branded stuff along with other brands. So at issue is not the practice itself, but rather that the digital marketplace makes it easier and more efficient.
2) The consumer (along with Amazon) is a beneficiary here. The losers are brands trying to sell commodity items at a markup. The play is not to undercut all the power strip sellers (to take an example) and once they are out of business, jack up the price. The play is to take the margin due to marketing and brand equity from the sellers and split it between the consumer and Jeff Bezos, so rather than being harmed, the consumer benefits from this.
Store brands have been around *forever."
> They know what users are looking for, spend the most on, and they can give their own products dominate positions in the UI.
If you own a grocery store, you have every right to place the store brand products wherever you think they will sell best. You could (gasp) not sell any name brands at all! And if your grocery store becomes successful, you're allowed to sell advertising inside it however you want.
> It’s kind of like standard oil buying up the railroads so they owned the supply chain and no other oil could be moved.
Railroads are to some extent natural monopolies, and they have a massive barrier to entry. E-commerce websites do not. Many businesses of all sizes still sell products directly from their website and do fine. Now if Amazon bought UPS and FedEx and refused to ship any other packages, that would be different. But all they're doing is running their "department store" the way they want to. If consumers want a competitor, they're free to start one with next to no initial cost.
kind of, but not really at all. Google and Amazon aren't preventing anybody else from using their services - getting other people to use their services is kind of their whole business model. If you want to compare Google or Amazon to transporting oil on railroads, it'd be like if the company that owned nearly all the railroads owned a couple of oil wells (but not all of them) and still transported everybody else's oil for a fair price.
Any grocery store can do the same thing amazon is doing, use data about sales to push clones and store brands of popular products. What percent of products at Target are store brand now? Target is like an Ikea with 3rd party products sprinkled in it, which is what Amazon wants to become.
It would help if the competition in hotel booking, Expedia, Orbitz, ETC weren't all literally owned by a single fucking company now. The sites are entirely rigged against the user.
Amazon is not a Standard Oil by any measure as they have ample competition when it comes to online sales. Facebook is still an opt in environment. If you don't want to join facebook you don't have to and no retailer is dumb enough (well that might not be true but I haven't found one) to require you to be a facebook member to purchase products or services. Google is, well google. I don't have to use their search engine if I don't want to.
When threads like this come up I always wonder how the engineers who worked on Bing must feel. I'd feel pretty disheartened if people had such a low opinion of my product that my competitor was considered a monopoly.
I don't have a problem with the dominance of their search engine. I have problems with them using their search engine and other platforms to prompt you to use Chrome, or how they use their quasi-monopoly on Android app marketplaces to force manufacturers to preload just about every Google App in existance on Android phones. Then there's various Google services (some of them near monopolies) performing much worse on anything but Chrome.
If Google would be just search I wouldn't have anything against them, but they are notorious for using the market position of one of their products to push another.
The point of anti-trust laws is to break up monopolies because they represent a massive and dangerous concentration of market and political power in the hands of the few. You don't need evidence of any specific crime to do it.
You can say you'd prefer it not be that way. But it's a provision of existing law, with precedents. To really argue for your preference you'd need to show how those applications didn't turn out well.
Not actually true. To break up an existing company, you need to be taken to court by the United States under the one of the anti-trust acts, and prove a violation of the law.
To be clear the FTC can prevent mergers with no evidence of wrongdoing, based solely on market share, but breaking up an existing company is a rarely used remedy in antitrust cases.
What does this mean? Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, et al already have their constitutionally protected speech, except for where their roles as executives at public companies restrict them. If they find those restrictions onerous they can leave their roles.
The government however could come in and simply make it that you have freedom of speech on social media. So if Twitter bans someone for saying "a man cannot be a woman" that person can sue them.
The democrats will NOT do this however, the current censorship on social media is benefiting the left-wing.
It doesn't have to be illegal to undermine competition. Luxottica owns a vertical of 80% of the brands, the factories, the retail stores, AND the largest insurance company concerning eyeglasses in America. It isn't illegal, but the rents they are extracting from our society by keeping prices artificially high sure as hell SHOULD be.
As a Googler, speaking for myself, this seems like an interesting idea that could positively impact the tech scene.
No, it wouldn't make sense for Warren to wait if she wants progress. She should introduce the idea to the public as soon as possible, move the overton window, and if the idea has merit it'll be easier for someone in the future to carry it forward.
Have we seen tech company lobbyists really push a lot of weight around? Companies that seemed to genuinely support net neutrality didn't seem to have much of any impact / participate all that much.
Why not? I think there are wings of both the major parties that feel that there is an "us vs the big bad corporations". Both sides feel there are inherent flaws with the current economics, but would solve it in very different ways.
Employment and how multinationals run themselves are things many people care about. They just can't agree on how to fix it.
That said, I don't disagree that pissing off a group of megacorps this early in the race seems like it's just begging for powerful enemies. But it also seems like it's possible this becomes a point that many of the primary candidates pick up. In that case, it basically becomes a moot point since there's no candidate for the pro-FAANG lobby to back in the field that will align closer with their goals. And when it the game becomes <Democrat> Vs. Trump, everything changes.
edit: not sure why I'm getting downvoted, since I basically stated the truth: the parent poster doesn't speak for the average American.
You could argue that the emergence of Firefox and Chrome was only made possible by the ability to assign a "default" non-IE browser in Windows, but that ability pre-dated any of the anti-trust stuff anyway; all you got out of that was a mandatory pop-up when you installed Windows asking you if you wanted to use a different browser.
The emergence of Firefox was by itself a huge shift, and Chrome another one, against Microsoft's browser monopoly. Its OS monopoly got broken (insofar as it is broken) by a combination of the rise of mobile and Apples re-emergence as a viable platform. Its office application monopoly got broken (insofar as it is broken) by a combination of online email systems (especially gmail) and the increased availability of online alternatives.
All the justice department did was waste their time; they could have just sat by the river and waited for the body of their enemy to float by instead.
Having the government essentially watching their every move caused them to moderate their actions, and make sure they were on the right side of the law.
They were much more conservative than they otherwise would have been. It was described as a large cultural shift in the company and their way of thinking.
So if that's the line you draw, it extends further than just tech giants.
Batteries, clothes (lots of clothes), backpacks, these are all products that are cheap to produce and where brand loyalty plays a large role. People generally trust the name Amazon. It's not rocket science to realize people want cheap clothes and batteries.
Though many of them choose brand that are not as obviously connected with the house. Like half the stuff at Walmart is actually a house brand.
[1] https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...
This is one reason I use Google. I can view all Google review w/out downloading an app. I'd classify Yelp reviews in browser search as nothing more than an ad.
Whatever that means.
These companies have more revenue and cash on hand than many countries. Looking at the Bay Area, Google and Facebook are taking the lead on repairing and improving infrastructure because the government can't do it alone anymore.
So there's a reason to believe that you cannot have corporations serve the public interest without either breaking them up to limit their power or fundamentally redefining what it means to be a corporation, but you can have government serve the public interest while remaining big and powerful. If the federal government followed the views of the American public to the detriment of career politicians, we'd say, "Great, you're actually doing your job." If Amazon followed the views of the American public to the detriment of career managers, we'd be very confused.
(That said, breaking up the government sounds like a fine plan too, I just don't think it needs to be first)
Watching the fanboys defend their favorite tech giant is incredible. These companies are not behaving in the markets or people's best interest and they are way too big, at a scale that dwarfs most of the worlds organizations.
It's not illegal to be big, it's illegal to use your influence to prevent competition in a way that's illegal. There's zero evidence of that, which is why she's talking about a new law.
And please refrain from calling those that disagree with you "fanboys". It diminishes every single point you're attempting to make, because you sound like a jaded teenager rather than an adult that wants to have a conversation.
I never said that it was.
If a person doesn't break any pre-existing laws, then they must not suffer any legal consequences, sure. And nobody is suggesting that Page and Brin should spend a minute in court or pay a cent in fines.
But a corporation isn't a person, it's a business instrument, and if the United States were to judge that the existence of that instrument is detrimental to the greater security / stability / welfare of the nation as a whole, they would have every right to write a new law to ban usage of that instrument, i.e. ban the existence of Google in its current form, as they once wrote a new law to ban the existence of the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation.
In the past we've taken a harder stance on giants like this and as a matter of precedence we can do it again.
> "unwind tech mergers that illegally undermine competition"
> "I want a government that makes sure everybody — even the biggest and most powerful companies in America — plays by the rules"
The word "illegally" in the first quote really set off my alarm bells. What have large companies like Amazon, Google, FB, etc. done that is considered illegal in this regard?
The "by the rules" in the second quote is confusing too. What does that mean? Which rules are being broken?
The way I see it: Isn't it the goal of entrepreneurs to be as successful as possible? Let's say I found a way to grow a business to that of the size of some of the bigger ones (which would be awesome). To grow a business that big, consumers obviously like what I'm selling/producing. I get the impression that Warren is saying she doesn't like big businesses because they snuff out the little ones. And maybe that's true, but why is that a concern of the government? There's nothing stopping a smaller company (or even an individual) from coming up with a really good idea and trying that idea out in something like his garage, and then reshaping the next generation... kinda like Amazon did in comparison to Sears. Or Microsoft did with IBM.
I'm sure there's going to be plenty of disagreements on my stance, but I guess I'm just not seeing this problem in the same light as Warren.
The answer to the first is a certain yes. There are laws against businesses forming monopolies in the United States. You can read up on the Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts from the 1890s and 1910s to start with. There is also considerable case law stemming from this legislation.
The answer to "should there be laws against monopolies" is a little more open. One theoretical justification for breaking up monopolies, is that in some cases monopolies cause economic inefficiencies. Look up "deadweight loss from monopoly pricing".
It's very complicated to measure any efficiencies or inefficiencies from tech monopolies, so I don't think there's a clear answer.
It's also not generally agreed upon that economic efficiency should be the goal of government, so there is a lot of room for debate on that question.
Hell, you can't even sell a product on Amazon without a good chance that Amazon will just slap their Amazon Basics logo on it and undercut you to death.
Similar to Wal-Mart many of their competitors are dead because they optimized their supply chain. No one gets that kind of access out of their garage.
because Amazon uses their non-retail business profits to identify high selling items, produce them themselves, sell them at a lower price (because they have all the data also), and finally steer customers to those products. They're the market place and a player. This new idea isn't well defined in law, but using your profits from one company to undercut another area is illegal.
> "by the rules"
is the same idea as "illegal", and even if they're not, the point she's trying to make is the fact they are not breaking rules should be setting off alarm bells because...
> "but why is that a concern of the government?"
because America loves the free market, and big business is the enemy of it.
I can't think of a single market segment where Google and Amazon lack effective competition. Facebook is already bleeding users, and how would you break up a social media company in an impactful way anyhow? Facebook's ventures outside of social media aren't even close to being monopolies.
Google would be fairly easy to break up among Alphabet subsidiaries, and Amazon could be split among Amazon.com, AWS, and Whole Foods.
She actually gets fairly specific about what she her plan is if you actually read the medium article linked in the first paragraph of the OP.
While i agree with you wholeheartedly i don't know anyone who has ever got elected by attacking the media and big business.
But there are issues:
+ Amazon uses profits from AWS to dump in other sectors, selling goods and services below market value. The weird situation could mean Amazon pumps many billion dollars a year into pushing major grocers (who operate on thin margins) out of business. This is not good for anyone - but it's not a case of 'monopoly' so much.
+ Google is dumping in adjacent areas of tech - giving away Android for free, for example.
There should be some regulatory tweaks here, but it's going to be tricky.
As you point out - a much easier win would be to break up value chain consolidation over all.
Carriers, tech providers, content creators, content distributors - might benefit from being separate entities.
I don't think there are any net benefits to society from these entities being consolidated. There are no economies of scale, no proper synergies. There are however, huge incentives for investors to have AT&T own content creation and distribution obviously, so they can subsidize their own assets and not others. There's no long win for consumers so it makes sense to keep them separate.
Finally - there might be an opportunity on platforms. I think that the Apple store may be an anti-competitive issue - the notion that you don't control/own the $1K device you just bought is getting ridiculous. I would require platform makers to at allow open access to the platform. Same would apply to mobile phones being 'locked' onto a network - that should just not happen.
There is big competition in cloud computing so AWS is priced according to market rates. I seriously doubt AWS profit is significant enough to influence the rest of Amazon in way that would be considered monopoly abuse. Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods did not result in WF reducing prices (as was expected) to uncut other grocers in that market.
> Google is dumping in adjacent areas of tech - giving away Android for free, for example.
That ship has sailed; Google effectively eliminated the market for mobile operating systems and Microsoft could basically no longer sell Windows Mobile. But the open-sourcing of Android has led to direct competition as well -- Amazon runs a completely Google-free version of Android on their products.
The way to look at the 1996 boondoggle is ask ourselves if FCC could have ever been expected to provide even a token enforcement of its terms. The answer is of course not, because FCC was created to protect Bell Telephone and that's most of what it has ever done. Given that, of course all the investments in competing telcos would fail and be gobbled by the incumbents, enriching execs and bankers in the process. Given that, what we've seen was only ever exactly what was planned. The 1996 Act has allowed Bell to shed money-losing rural exchanges, do away entirely with common carriage, pay for wireless infrastructure with money stolen from wireline investors, rearrange assets in ways that would have violated previous consent decrees, pretend that we ever tried competition in telecom, and burrow in even more tightly to its vampire-bite on the neck of USA residents. That was a pretty good con, that Bell execs ran on us, with the assistance of the corrupt in government and the credulous in media.
> ... Google’s ad exchange and businesses on the exchange would be split apart. Google Search would have to be spun off as well.
I think maybe her team needs to do a little more research on what Google's business is. Splitting off Android/Play or GCP at least creates potentially viable businesses. Splitting up search and ads creates two non-viable businesses.
1. Search company earns money by selling ad spots to ads company.
2. Ads company earns money by selling ads to merchants.
To put it differently, how does GSearch decide what and whether to show ads for a given search? Well, they could sell keywords by auction to parties interested in placing ads, and then use clicks and other user feedback to decide how relevant they are (that is, how much UX is lost by placing ads nobody clicks on top of results that users want). Whether they're selling to GAd or directly to merchants, or to SEM companies that act as middlemen in the current world does not seem like the important issue.
You could in theory separate search engine ads from site ads, but I don't think anyone is really complaining about the fact that Google owns so much of that business.
> “The government’s antitrust case against Microsoft helped clear a path for Internet companies like Google and Facebook to emerge,” Warren writes.
In what way was Microsoft 'broken up'? The outcome[1] from that antitrust case seems to be that Microsoft had to publicly expose all of Windows' APIs to developers (no secret APIs).
If anything, the outcome of the Microsoft case seems to support non-intervention as AppGoogBook all flourished despite no serious breakup of Microsoft.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
Even without the breakup, Microsoft was under heavy scrutiny and regulation as a result of the court case, which insiders say dramatically changed the company culture (for good or ill.)
* https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/15/695131832/anti...
* https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/20/696342011/anti...
* https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/anti...
> Google couldn’t smother competitors by demoting their products on Google Search.
Isn’t this already illegal?
From my experience, the engineers in search are very aware they could do monopolistic things, and really try their hardest not to.
If you don't like the economic result, redistribute some of the growth. Walmart doesn't deserve to be saved by splitting up Amazon if they can't compete.
It's dishonest to suggest that the outcome of the US vs Microsoft somehow paved the way for Google. I would argue it was pretty non-consequential but looms in the public conscious.
From wikipedia:
> On November 2, 2001, the DOJ reached an agreement with Microsoft to settle the case. The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel of three people who would have full access to Microsoft's systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure compliance.[29] However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future ... > Law professor Eben Moglen noted that the way Microsoft was required to disclose its APIs and protocols was useful only for “interoperating with a Windows Operating System Product”, not for implementing support of those APIs and protocols in any competing operating system.
> As the government sued, Microsoft executives became so anxious and gun-shy that they essentially undermined their own monopoly out of terror they might be pilloried again. It wasn’t the consent decrees or court decisions that made the difference, according to multiple current and former Microsoft employees. It was “the constant scrutiny and being in the newspaper all the time,” said Gene Burrus, a former Microsoft lawyer. “People started second-guessing themselves. No one wanted to test the regulators anymore.”
> There had been informal conjectures about reprogramming Microsoft’s web browser, the popular Internet Explorer, so that anytime people typed in “Google,” they would be redirected to MSN Search, according to company insiders.
> Microsoft was so powerful, and Google so new, that the young search engine could have been killed off, some insiders at both companies believe. “But there was a new culture of compliance, and we didn’t want to get in trouble again, so nothing happened,” Burrus said. The myth that Google humbled Microsoft on its own is wrong. The government’s antitrust lawsuit is one reason that Google was eventually able to break Microsoft’s monopoly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against...
And that dependence was both created artificially and then abused.
Why can't YouTube switch to, say, Azure? Or Oracle Cloud? or whatever other magic exists?
Infrastructure exists outside of Google - as did the ability to decouple Internet Explorer from Windows.
In this context, how do Elizabeth Warren’s comments mesh out?
That being said, Warren directly states something tech companies should be competing on: Privacy. An issue with direct consumer impact, that due to monopoly status, these companies have largely not set as a priority.
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
Warren has my vote.
The fossil fuel industry continues to run rampant. As does the Military Industrial Complex. The former is a key player in the degradation of the planet; the latter is a money sucking Hover that is sucking the life out of infrastructure, education, etc.
The environment and peace are much bigger issues than taking down and busting up the tech giants.
Editorial: I want to like Liz Warren. I can related to some of her ideals. Unfortunately, as a politician she too often comes off as inexperienced, out of touch and/or naive. This is another one of those times.
Oh, lots and lots.
> If people are that concerned, why do so many people I know have Prime?
The reason so many of the people you know have Prime is because of Amazon's dominant market position.
> The fossil fuel industry continues to run rampant. As does the Military Industrial Complex. The former is a key player in the degradation of the planet; the latter is a money sucking Hover that is sucking the life out of infrastructure, education, etc.
> The environment and peace are much bigger issues than taking down and busting up the tech giants.
Good points, but can we not do all three of these things? (1) Shrink the Defense budget and (2) Invest in renewables including nuclear tech, (3) Tackle Facebook and Google's dominance of net advertising and search and social media and Amazon's of e-commerce and so on …
> Editorial: I want to like Liz Warren. I can related to some of her ideals. Unfortunately, as a politician she too often comes off as inexperienced, out of touch and/or naive. This is another one of those times.
?
“Elizabeth Ann Warren (née Herring; born June 22, 1949) is an American politician and academic serving as the senior United States Senator from Massachusetts since 2013. Warren was formerly a prominent scholar specializing in bankruptcy law. A noted progressive leader, Warren has focused on consumer protection, economic opportunity, and the social safety net while in the Senate. Some commentators describe her position as left-wing populism.[2][3][4]
Warren is a graduate of the University of Houston and Rutgers Law School. She taught law at several universities, including the University of Houston, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University.
Warren's initial foray into public policy began in 1995 when she worked to oppose what eventually became a 2005 act restricting bankruptcy access for individuals. Her profile rose due to her forceful stances in favor of more stringent banking regulations following the 2007–2008 financial crisis. She served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel of the Troubled Asset Relief Program and was instrumental in the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for which she served as the first Special Advisor.”
Interesting platform for a US presidential candidate to promote regulations against US companies to promote world corperate “fairness”.
Google is really the issue. They are dominant in search, browser, and maps, and they're half the mobile duopoly. It's very difficult to avoid using their products entirely and even if you did, their dominance allows them to dictate how the internet works, to a certain extent.
I prefer breaking up monopolies if the end result will be a healthier, consumer-focused and competition driven market.
Given that this is an Elizabeth Warren idea, I'm suspicious that the motives are anything having to do with creating a vibrant market... :)
Genuine question, can someone explain how they are bad? I might give pushback to help get to understanding other people, but I’m not trying to start a war on here:)
> Amazon has so much market share that its sheer size distorts the market.
> We should not allow a company to have a share over around 10% of any market. If in a certain field a single dominant company is beneficial for society, that means it is a natural monopoly, and should be served by a regulated utility.
And it will do nothing to help the millions of American retail workers who are going to be out of a job, nor the logistics workers who are going to be automated out of jobs.
This is populist demagoguery and scapegoating and not looking at real solutions, like strengthening the social safety net by increasing taxes on these businesses. At least Medical for All, Free College, or UBI have tangible, immediate benefits to people suffering.
Or writing laws on Data Privacy can directly address that issue.
But simply busting up companies? It won't address the underlying economic disruption happening, and if anything, it is likely to simply increase the amount of entities tracking you and risk of hacks.
> Here's how to explain to people the distinction between fighting poverty and fighting economic inequality. If you're fighting poverty, you might say "Let's have universal health care." If you're fighting economic inequality, you have to say "Let's have universal health care. And Larry, please don't start Google." Otherwise Larry's going to mess up your numbers big time.
Since reading that, I've realized that a major part of my political beliefs is that future Larrys should be unable to start future Googles in their current form, and in particular that I don't believe it's a just use of the powers of government to enable the creation of future Googles.
That's fucking idiocy. Or more accurately, propaganda from a billionaire with extreme vested interest in this topic.
It's pretty straightforward to say "Go ahead and start Google, and if it succeeds we're going to have some basic rules about worker's rights and compensation you'll have to follow, and we're going to tax a much larger percentage of your personal gains, but you'll still be very, very rich". At which point you're also fighting economic inequality.
There is a stark difference between socialism rooted in the above idea and socialism rooted in jealousy and vindictiveness toward the wealthy just because they're wealthy. We're not trying to punish the wealthy and we can still allow them to be very wealthy. But as the US currently stands, the wealthy could contribute much more while still having far greater quality of life than almost everyone else.
But even still: relative wealth distribution getting too extremely unequal has negative ramifications for any society, regardless of the absolute wealth. But again: that is NOT the issue in this case.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/anti... for more perspective, a bunch of discussion about antitrust issues in big tech and NONE, ZERO, NADA of it is about wealth and money in itself.
The alternative to what you suggest is not zero growth of wealth. It can be even larger growth of wealth when the markets work better.
The type of anti-markets and pro business approach where big corporations are shielded from the markets and monopoly powers are allowed as long as antitrust felony crimes don't happen is perversion of capitalism. The ideological foundation for this tinking was laid out in Robert Bork's book 'The Antitrust Paradox' (1978) that Reagan administration used as their bible.
I'm good at what I do and I work for a hedge fund because they'll compensate me well for it. I increase the productivity of other people at my company, without them doing anything, by giving them better platforms for their work. Chasing salary is the obvious locally rational action for me, but it's inefficient for the world. I could be making life better for the world if I could be funded to work on, say, Debian instead of our in-house build system. And I probably could be funded at about 1/20 of my current salary to do it, and provide 2x productivity benefits for you personally, but the incentives of a capitalist society mean that isn't the right decision for me.
However - you say "using the power of the state to prevent." I am not in favor of that. I am in favor of ceasing using the power of the state to enable. The government could stop recognizing the right of corporations to property and to the labor of individuals at any time.
Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple innovated at their own in the beginning, but once the cash from network externalities started to pour in, they stared to buy market share and buy into the markets. Google did not invent Gmail (Postini), Android Inc, YouTube, AdSense (Adscape), Google Analytics (Trendalyzer), Google Maps (Endoxon).
There is a place in the world for massive technologically focused organizations.
BTW I agree with him in the sense that indices like Gini coefficients etc. are not comprehensive enough, and optimizing for simple numbers leads to distorted outcomes. I also agree with you in the sense that top heavy players in the economy are harmful to the extent that they seek rent and prevent competition.
Sounds like Paul Graham was saying that stopping founders is some unstated but believed goal, and is a poor one.
That some people made a few $100B on it is nothing compared to the value it's given humanity.
Given recently how AOC and her cohorts were flat out embarrassed by the NY state budget director and given a lesson in basic financial literacy and economics, I think the freshman and sophomore democrats should probably lay low for a while and learn a thing or two from the adults in the room.
Lots of tech "monopoly" power comes from network effects. Once you're Google or Amazon you don't necessarily need to buy up all the other search engines or ecommerce platforms. They can't even get off the ground.
Also interesting: she doesn't mention Apple at all. Yet they run one of the biggest platforms, and their cut (which they call "service revenue") is one of the highest growth categories for them.
[1] https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...
Why do we need government’s help to break up these monopolies? When AOL literally was the place everyone went to just be ONLINE, it semed unstoppable. Then came the Web, with its permissionless nature, and over time it completely took over, and led to trillions of dollars of new value. The Web is the plarform on which Google, Amazon, Facebook, built their businesses, companies that would never get permission do that on top of AOL.
Now we need something similar to disrupt Google, Facebook, Amazon. I believe Wordpress was an early start, and indeed powers 30% of all websites today. But you need four things:
1) Open source and permissionless platform
2) A unified Social Operating System with well designed components for user accounts, permissions, realtime notifications, payments etc. like the graphical OSes had windows, menus and so on. A well-designed cathedral architecture like BSD.
3) A permissionless plugin system and marketplace where anyone could develop their own components and package them into plugins and apps, and sell them to communities.
4) A layer where you could go between many different domains and have a seamless social experience. This is key.
I am really passionate about this. I have put my money where my mouth is - my company Qbix has reinvested half a million dollars over the last seven years to build a platform to do just that.
What I said is just the surface. Please watch this video to understand in depthwhat I mean:
Would love to hear your thoughts.
If the goal of antitrust action is to keep the free market competitive, I think a better way to achieve this than enforcing a breakup of big companies is by legally requiring standards for open protocols that allow for competitors to interface with each other and compete on their service quality rather than their network size.
How this would be done is a hard question without an easy answer. But breaking apart Facebook from Whatsapp isn't going to make it any easier for a new social network or a new messaging app to break into the space. Typically new social products can only enter a saturated market by targeting a niche and then expanding (e.g. Signal on a privacy/security focus or Discord on a gaming focus). Enforcing some level of open protocol makes it possible to try a new product without customers giving up because "oh but my friends aren't on here"
Not only do I think the particular policy is ill-conceived, but the preference for legislation when the entire premise is an assessment that existing law is unenforced rather than defective is even more worrying. And I say that as someone who has up to this point seen Warren as probably the strongest 2020 candidate.
Amazon's core competency is logistics. They would not exist at anything like their current scale if they couldn't do 2-day delivery. That's what really gives them a leg up vs doing a Google search, finding a small e-commerce ship that sells what you want, and getting the product.
Breaking that into an independent service-- if it's possible at all-- would have far more impact, and possibly more positive impact, than anything involving house brands or an ec2 split.
Very difficult to not interact with Google...
I choose not to use Verizon... however COMCAST is TERRRIBLE and along with Verizon, they have shut down every mom-and-pop ISP and are responsible for the wholesale elimination of robust, in-place copper from the consumer and business markets.
Senator Warren, please add Comcast\Verizon to this list. That would get my vote... either that or slapping Ajit Pai for me next time you see him. Thanks.
As long as this culture remains in place, breaking big tech companies won't work. New ones will crop up and everything will continue.
She's also very self-serving and has no sense of loyalty to other left-leaning politicians - else she might've backed Bernie from day one in 2016, instead of play things 'safe'. Her playing safe hurt her career more than anything else ever will in my opinion.
That aside, I don't think breaking up google, fb, amazon will do much...if I were to break them up, I think the only thing I'd do is perhaps have them split their cloud services from their other offerings, and maybe media services -- youtube | amazon prime video, but it's small potatoes.
I think a MUCH bigger issue is media consolodation -- when 1-2 CEO's control 80% of the media and thus the 'message' that people see, that's a much scarier proposition.
For example Sinclair Broadcasting I think owns something like 90% of local broadcasting stations now - and they send talking points and control what newscasters say in order to get political messages out - it's basically propaganda that they control, and it's very powerful esp in the wrong hands.
Comcast/nbc/hulu, att/time warner, disney/fox/espn/etc are all companies that probably are more dangerous than google/fb/amazon (w/ the exception that FB really needs to get it's privacy shit together or just die...), and if you're going after big tech why not Apple/Microsoft, Microsoft is as big if not bigger than it was when they had their antitrust case, Apple is the biggest company in the world ? Maybe we should also have a 25BN = auto-breakup for banks, since banks caused the last great recession, and are obviously dangerous when they get too big to fail.
Or maybe instead of breaking up companies we just figure out ways to tax them better -- esp. on speculation and at the investment layer, so that the money they make that 'you - the politician' feel they shouldn't be making is used for the benefit of society as well as enrichment of the CEO and their ilk.
As a progressive, I really want to support Warren but her policies need to solid. I am concerned the left is running off the rails with anti-vaxx, anti-GMO, anti-technology, extreme feminist wackadoodle ideas.
Can't just Bernie just dye his hair and wear a proper suit that fits?
NOTE: I'm not dissing the monopolies act and understand the dangers. This is just a thought pointing out different yardsticks for corporations and countries.
Erm. Should we tell her that Google came before Bing?
I know this proposal is just for tech companies, but it seems like it will create as many problems as it solves.
That makes me think that Amazon might have to give up Twitch too
This I think is one of the understated values of primaries and presidential elections. Even if Warren is elected and unable to get legislation passed, she has moved this particular conversation forward.
https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...
The only way to stop monopolies from forming is by getting rid of legislation that heavily benefits large businesses.
If you're talking about the United States of America, it is already broken apart. By design we have three distinct branches, due process, and free speech/press.
True. On the other hand, big tech companies are the only agencies that are taking on big problems, social and technical. Break up big tech and many things won't get done. No ubiquitous high speed networks, no practical general purpose artificial intelligence, no indexed access to the world's knowledge, no voice interface minions, and so forth. Government seems unable and unwilling to do the sort of things Big Tech does.
Breaking up big tech seems to be the wrong approach and is likely to be more difficult and more destructive than it would appear at first glance. Better to enlist big tech to cooperate and make the world a better place.
"Venture capitalists are now hesitant to fund new startups to compete with these big tech companies because it’s so easy for the big companies to either snap up growing competitors or drive them out of business."
The possibility of being "snapped up" is very good money for venture capitalists instead of waiting a decade for an IPO. So regulating acquisitions by the big players may have a chilling effect on capital and, thereby, tech innovation.
In addition, the first mover effect is very powerful and should not be discounted. For example, the competition between Snapchat and Facebook was not as skewed as the outcome would have you believe. Snapchat had and has a large userbase, and is losing because of mistakes (including not agreeing to very good acquisition offers). I can't personally think of too many other examples of megatitans successfully squashing innovative smaller companies with an equivalent product.
> He (Szabo) added that he also felt Ms. Warren is “wrong in her assertion that tech markets lack competition.”
That’s got to be one of those jokes that go viral. Most of the consumer facing services are heavily concentrated among less than a handful (considering specific areas, and not in general).
It’s time at least some of what she calls for gets done!
There are urgent issues with Google and monopoly, search, chrome, amp, android and youtube and once you combine that with Facebook a toxic predatory surveillance capitalism model based on harvesting and collating private data to build dossiers that is ominous for any free society.
But for the tech community on the frontlines of this project the old issues of Comcast and Verizon unresolved inspite of decades of heated debate are more urgent. If anyone doubted Upton Sinclars famous insight here is the evidence.
This sounds very fair to me, India has passed a similar law recently - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/technology/india-amazon-w...
Saying "What about these other things?" isn't particularly constructive to the discussion of this proposal.
There's nothing in it which precludes changes to the tax structure as a separate proposal.
Break yours and let others do it.
Is this really a left/liberal/progressive/dem position and if so why?
I'm mainly on the right and so I don't have a lot of insight into why Sen. Warren would be taking this position. To be frank I kinda would have expected something like this from Trump, not from her. Tech companies like Amazon seem to be left leaning (just looking at Bezos and his investment in WaPo). Wouldn't Warren want strong left leaning tech companies? Why would she want to go up against them?
Again I'm not trying to trigger anyone or make any political assertions. I generally don't understand and would love the input of others for familiar with Sen. Warren's platform.
[0]: http://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-crony-capitalism/
Democrats lost the centrist vote in 2016, not the left, and if they don't take a hard right turn after the nomination we'll have 4 more years of Trump.
They lost huge numbers of working class manufacturing industry workers in the Midwest, who perceived HC as a tool of Wall Street, and rightly or wrongly, instrumental in the secular economic decline of their jobs and communities. This was literally reflected in a schism of working class vs professional class counties in the midwest, with the former going for DJT and the latter going to HC [1]
Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin didn't swing to DJT because centrist's didn't have a candidate that spoke to their concerns - that candidate was definitely HC. Even many centrist Republicans who couldn't bring themselves to vote for DJT voted for her.
Those states swung because DJT at least spoke to the working class' economic concerns in a way that at the time seemed authentic, while also invoking their repressed cultural anxieties about demographic and social changes.
Democrats should stay the heck away from the racism and xenophobia that motivated part of his coalition, but they would be fools to ignore the economically-left sentiment that put him in office.
And since DJT's actual economic policy has turned out to be the same Republican trickle down, tax cuts for the wealthy approach, the Democrats have an opportunity to expose that and run against it.
[1] https://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/2016/11/macomb_county_cou... https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/elections/20...
Funny how that election turned out.
I don't think we need to break up any of these companies. Particularly when an industry like Cable/ISP's exist, which are allowed to have an actual regional monopoly and artificially inflate prices in order to force you to use their other services.
None of these three do anything of the sort. And Amazon, really?
EDIT> Aspirational fiction, perhaps.
It’s hard to argue when the same side benefitting from big govt wants to print money to “solve” all their problems and shut down opposing virwpoints with such vitrol. One side is actively extatic by shutting down tens of thousands of prospective jobs while not getting that funding and revenue of their projects comes from those jobs.
Once we've broken up the federal government, we can start worrying about these much smaller and less powerful entities!
Early stage startups can't compete for talent in the Bay Area. If breaking up giants creates more competition for talent, then I'm supportive.
For example, Spotify would have to pay 15-30% of its monthly subscription fee if user paid it through the IAP (which is why Spotify doesn't offer that option), whereas Apple music can do so without the 15-30% fee. Also, Spotify is not allowed to include a link to its website to pay for subscription, because it's against the Apple app store rules. The same applies to Netflix and other digital content/service providers. Apple either gets the 15-30% price advantage, or it gets the added convenience of In-App purchase for the service.
Too often it's government intervention which creates the very "problems" that they then turn around and claim to be trying to solve.
I think the big three are way too powerful and need to be broken up, but doing so intelligently is a tricky problem that I don't have much faith in government tackling.
Zuckerberg integrating all the services yesterday seems to be a transparent attempt to short circuit splitting the company along these service lines, he knows this is coming. I'll bet $100 he'll soon be talking about how it's impossible to split out insta from facebook because of database keys and integrated AI or whatever.
I think that's very unlikely. Maybe in the far future, but unless there is some significant campaign finance reform first, the big tech companies have more than enough cash to prevent the "worst" possible outcome (from their perspective).
I wont speak for social media and search, but Amazon has a complete stranglehold on retail in the United States. People keep saying 'retail is dead', thats bullshit, Amazon has a monopolistic stranglehold on the selling of all goods. If that weren't the case, small shop brick and mortar shopping would still be a thing.
One way they’ve grown is by allowing small companies to easily add their products to their stores. Good luck getting Macy’s to sell your custom line of trollface shirts. Shelf space is live or die for small brands. Amazon has a lower barrier to entry without the strong arm tactics big retailers have used for years.
Retail is often a middleman operation with exclusivity deals and price fixing. Brick and mortar is failing for so many reasons. It’s not that there are restrictions preventing fair competition, it’s that the old guard is slow and incompetent and likely won’t survive the old model of exclusivity on goods.
While I believe that Amazon probably would have won regardless of sales taxes, emphasizing "fairly" seems a bit strong.
If I'd bought it on Amazon, I could have had it within hours. But I wasn't really in a hurry and thought I'd support a local business. I'd probably do the same again, but I can see why many people don't want to put up with this.
If Amazon was shut down tomorrow, I'm not going to start going to bricks and mortar stores again. I'd find new online suppliers.
2. Amazon has literally thousands of online competitors, many of whom also have physical stores that get tons of traffic: Walmart, Target, BBB, Costco, Home Depot, Lowes, Pharmacies, etc., etc., etc.
But I don't think it's impossible to split up search, either. I'm sure that Google doesn't just have 1000s of people working together in one big room with no structure. Their current organizational lines could tell us a lot about useful ways to break it up. Historically, for example, there were search infrastructure providers like Inktomi that sold services to consumer-facing search engines. Maybe a crawling-and-archiving group is separable; there are times I sure would have paid Google to use their crawl rather than doing my own. Parts of search were previously separate companies that perhaps could be spun out again. E.g., a lot of the structured-data stuff was once Metaweb.
Similarly, you could divide Amazon into a platform company that does fulfillment for others and a separate company that sells their own products, as well as splitting off things like AWS into their own companies.
Keep search intact but mandate that it must offer equal access to 3rd parties to match any access it has internally.
(How you do this without a privacy disaster I'm not so sure about)
I'm thinking along the lines of privately held public infrastructure like local loop unbundling in telecoms.
