From https://www.opensecrets.org/news/issues/net_neutrality/
> Not only was Google the pro-net neutrality organization that spent the most on lobbying in 2014 — $16.8 million in 2014 — it was the 10th biggest spender on federal lobbying that year. Impressive as that sounds, however, it still ranked behind both Comcast and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.
And it seems like every dollar that Comcast spends lobbying is directed towards efforts that will have a negative impact on my life, and the lives of everyone not on Comcast's board of directors. At least with Google, sometimes our incentives align, so that's another point in favor of attempting to break up the Comcast monopoly before the Google one.
This isn't as uncontroversial of an opinion as it might appear to be in a place like HN. What you're admitting here basically is that you think Comcast should be broken up because they lobby for things you don't like, but FAANG is fine because they lobby for things you do.
> you think Comcast should be broken up
I think efforts to break up tech monopolies should first be focused on telecommunication companies.
> because they lobby for things you don't like,
Not just me, but are objectively harmful to 99% of the people they would affect
> but FAANG is fine because they lobby for things you do.
I'm mostly focusing on Google here, and yes, they at least occasionally lobby for things I like because sometimes their interests and the interests of the public in general happen to align.
With Comcast (and other ISPs), you have only one choice, and they spend tons of money and effort making sure you only have that one choice, and continue to have only that one choice. Comcast recently spent nearly $1M to prevent Fort Collins from creating a municipal ISP[1]. That is actively anti-competitive and monopolistic by definition.
[1]: https://muninetworks.org/content/totals-are-comcast-spends-9...
I'm sure if the U.S. government was proposing to sell public bonds to build a search engine or ride-sharing service, you'd see a lot of lobbying from Silicon Valley. It's not "actively anti-competitive and monopolistic by definition" to oppose government backed and funded competition in your industry.
There’s definitely an argument to be made here that their interests don’t align with the public, and that they should therefore be targeted first — public interests is a subjective phrase.
Perhaps outright defending FANG is going too far, but the parent definitely has a point that ISP's should be looked into when we're discussing "breaking up" companies.
Far from being a shocking "admission," it's the least surprising thing in the world that people support policy they like and oppose policy they don't. And ignore policy they're indifferent to.
(People may also at times support policy they don't like and oppose policy they do for various practical political reasons, but that's a different discussion.)
This might be more of an issue in areas where things people do/don't like are arbitrary matters of taste. I'm certainly not saddling up to lead a state-backed charge against the company that produces Peeps despite the fact that I think they're a terrible excuse for candy.
But net neutrality is not an arbitrary matter of taste.
Nor, really, are immigration, tax reform and antitrust issues.
The original point of anti-trust law was to make things better for the consumer. If Comcast is using their power to lobby for anti-consumer practices then they should be broken up. Naturally consumers are going to disagree with anti-consumer practices.
But the point is well made. We can't be breaking up companies that don't do what we want, if they're playing by the rules.
The real answer is to change the rules. Warren is running on some populist anger, and that's a dangerous thing to praise.
Additionally, and far more importantly: Comcast is a regional monopoly. They have a lot of power in some geographic areas of the United States. Google is a global monopoly that has power in nearly every home on the planet. You shouldn't be willing to strengthen a global monopoly to try to fight a regional one.
And Google is far more than just where you go to search or store your email. Somewhere around 90% of the web uses Google Analytics, Google Ads, or Google Fonts, so they can track you regardless of where you go online. And that's before you get into the fact that plenty of websites are on Google's cloud services, which you may not even know. (I left Google Docs for another service, for instance, but it's still hosted on Google's servers.) Even if you're not logged into a Google account, Google is tracking you and profiling your behavior across the web. (Google also collects credit card data, so they can track you in brick and mortar stores now too.)
Using Google's browser to access the web is also becoming increasingly inescapable, now that the company with the second largest market share in web browsers is switching to Chrome's codebase. Firefox is nearly the last remaining holdout against Chromium. In fact, the very protocol we use to talk to the web is constantly being revised primarily on Google's lead and direction. HTTP/3, QUIC, DNS-over-HTTPS, etc. is all about moving the web's standard to something more palatable to Google's business models, and making them harder to block or filter out.
It's incredibly naive to believe you can escape Google. I've spent years de-Googling, and there's plenty of data Google still has on me.
ISP monopolies are a big problem, but they won't follow you when you move. A high bar for escape, to be sure, but escaping Google likely requires an even higher bar: Entering the witness protection program and getting a new identity.
Without net neutrality, ISPs would be free to charge big players like Google and Netflix more money, and that would leave a lot more room for smaller players to get involved. Getting "the same terms" as Google and Netflix is not always, inherently, a good thing.
