Do you think that antitrust laws…
…should be used against tech giants?
See also this.
[NOTE: The first link is to the Economist, which allows a limited number of free articles. The second is to the WSJ, which is behind a paywall that has become increasingly difficult to get around.]
Yes.
I used to lean libertarian on such issues.
But I have come to the conclusion that policy-libertarianism, on this topic, is a lot like unilateral disarmament.
I am entirely willing to not use force against my political foes, right up until the time they start using force against me.
But the reason the use of force is bad is that it treats people like things by depriving them of the option of making free choices on the basis of the best available information.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter have politically-slanted policies which deprive non-leftist persons of any practical capacity to share “the best available information.” They turn the “Marketplace Of Ideas” into a walled garden of leftist babbling silently witnessed by conservatives with duct-taped mouths.
This is another, albeit less-direct, manner of treating people like things: By denying them a free flow of competing ideas, they prevent individuals from reaching their own conclusions fairly.
If there were a conservative-walled-garden alternative platform, there might be parity. (Even then we would need a third area where opinions could clash and compete for “market share.”)
But there is no such alternative platform, and no practical hope that one can be created in the current climate without it being either destroyed or gobbled up into the left-leaning Borg Collective.
Consequently, we ought to break up Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Each needs to be at least 3 competing entities; and to the degree that their utility depends on unification, then that portion of their business should be a leased-access public asset, similar to natural gas lines in your yard (in areas where there are competing providers).
BTW, I have no particular beef against Amazon, inasmuch as they don’t give me the impression of having willfully squelched political discourse.
The fact that they have such a successful business model is, to me, not quite enough to override my libertarian inclinations.
For anyone who truly believes in small government, the answer must be “Yes.”
All companies start as small companies which exist and grow in spite of regulation.
As they become large companies, they favor government regulation and encourage more of it because they now have the fiscal wherewithal to hire attorneys, accountants, and employees to address those regulations. This stifles competition and gives the giants the advantage over small companies who must labor under those same regulations because that have not the funds or staffing to deal with them.
I’ve been in technology for 30 years.
Here is the sad case. 99% of communication devices either need Apple’s sanction or Google.
1) Google – To use ANY android device you essentially need to have a gmail account which logs and or provides your access. YouTube should be separated from that as a platform simply needs access separation from content. Who decides? It isn’t just 1’s and 0’s – it is content that provokes thought and is guaranteed yet routinely demonitized or banned simply for expressing a Christian belief or a conservative belief.
2) Apple – Similar but for iPhones. Less similar because Apple doesn’t provide a platform like YouTube however there are apple streaming services, logging and access issues for “Apps”.
Hardware/Software/Content needs to be independent of one another. If to have a phone means you need to have all activity logged and that was the default – nobody in the 50’s and 60’s would’ve bought into that idea.
I’m libertarian leaning except I truly am a centrist conservative who believes in personal responsibility, free markets, and national security but the balance has shifted to a ruling tech monopoly that goes BEYOND just money. Imagine the monopoly of railroads. It was about money and movement. People might not have liked to pay a monopoly just to move around but this is about freedom of expression, thought and access to communicate.
It is about life itself.
And for anyone who denies that you need a gmail account to have an android – you are smoking something.
You cannot update your apps, backup your contacts, get an app, uhhhhh hmmmm really do anything meaningful on your smartphone without the permission, access and logging and tracking.
And for anyone who denies that you need a gmail account to have an android — you are smoking something.
I do happen to have a second moto X, and it’s running a third party ROM via LinageOS, and it isn’t connected to google. I have it connected to f-droid https://f-droid.org/en/ for apps. But that’s a special case, and I’m that a-hole who will do something like that with tech because I can.
But that isn’t for 99+% of the market. So…if Google wants to be treated as a common carrier, they best start acting like one.
And you know I know that stuff is out there IRA. And I’m glad you recognized that not even 2% of the population will run those operating systems….
BTW, I am pleased to know you 🙂
For me, this has become a practical question. How can these monopolists be broken up to accomplish the legitimate antitrust goal of an apolitical communications platform? Should we? On that, I passed “yes” a long time ago.
I haven’t done much research on the issue, but at first glance, there’s no easy approach. For example, breaking Google up into regional entities sounds silly. Separating YouTube from Google doesn’t sound like enough.
I read the article in “The Economist” but couldn’t reach the one in “The Wall Street Journal.” The Economist provides a list of all the relevant antitrust issues. I think it’s telling that suppression of free speech by conservatives isn’t even on the list. Their reporter does, however, raise the possibility of regulating Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc as utilities. For conservatives, couldn’t this kind of political capture, by the federal government, make things even worse?
I remain confused about what to do.
I remain confused about what to do also but at the very least, content platforms need to have clear and unambiguous rules. There are leftists who incite violence using these platforms and yet aren’t censored. There are republican candidates running for office who are censored by facebook and this is an a very bad situation – was that republican candidate inciting violence? No.
Aayan Hirsi Ali (bad spelling probably) gets shut down and yet she is trying to SAVE girls and women. To me – it is clear but to leftists running the show there is some idiot test you must pass to be heard.
You may be able to access WSJ articles by visiting archive.is and putting the URL of the page you want into the box marked “I want to search the archive for saved snapshots.” It has worked for me once or twice.
I saw over at reddit that Facebook banned a conservative senate candidate from facebook for 30 days because he did a gun raffle.
They sad the ban was in error, but they’ve just done it again. I feel that is intuitively wrong. Facebook is a monopoly. If they ban him, they’re really making it difficult for him to campaign. A company, I think, shouldn’t be able to have that sort of power.
So maybe they should be busted up.
Something like this came up in the late 1990s, when the Internet was still relatively new, and Microsoft was viewed as a monopoly that should be broken up, because it bundled a web browser with its operating system. Ultimately, Microsoft prevailed upon appeal in 2001.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp._(2001)
Since that time, Microsoft has remained a tech giant by reinventing itself and branching out into other areas, where it would not have had the same growth if it had just stuck with operating systems. And Apple is the bigger tech company now by market cap, thanks to its development of smartphones and tablets, even going so far as to use the tag-line “What’s a computer?” in its latest ad. As for Netscape, it lives on only as open-source software with Mozilla (which I like and use).
If a company that gives significant non-cash support* to a candidate can be fined or otherwise punished for it, should companies that evidence significantly detrimental actions be likewise punished for giving “negative support” to that candidate, or “positive support” to the other side?
That is part of the issue of Russia-gate: did actions taken ostensibly in behalf of Trump also include the ones taken against Clinton?
(*free or discounted ad time is often cited, but some people are tending toward adding traditional “journalism” to that list — it gets murky)
I couldn’t read either article, but this isn’t the first time the idea has been floated.
How much blatant bias do the companies have to show to get attention from the Law?
And when does the Left realize that supporting it when it works in their favor includes putting up with it when the tables turn (they don’t have a good track record there, but neither does the Right).
Obviously, a lot can change in the technology and Internet fields quickly, but right now, I am not liking what I see with Amazon. The problem is that profit margins for retail have always been small, yet Amazon is a company that does not need to show a profit (unlike every other competitor). It makes its money in other ways, and can use its size and pricing powers to affect other companies.
I find it hard to trust Jeff Bezos, especially after he engaged in virtue-signalling by giving free college scholarships to illegal aliens (the so-called “Dreamers”). And what is the point of this so-called convenience and ever-lower prices if you spend your life walking around with your nose buried in a smartphone, with every other building that you pass by boarded and shuttered up? What good is that for the community? Is this really a good way to live?
Yankee,
A bundled browser with an operating system was the weakest argument ever. It became a spectacle with many states joining the lawsuit against Microsoft.
Content control and access are two different things especially when coupled with logging and monitoring.
When Microsoft came out with the new version of internet explorer with windows 98, I dumped Netscape navigator and switched to internet explorer. The reason was because the world wide web consortium had revised the HTML specification (in 1996 if I recall correctly) and the updated IE was practically compliant with the HTML specification. Netscape did not update their browser so I switched.
I access WSJ articles with a (Washington state) King County Library System login through KCLS’s online Magazines and Newspapers benefit. Worth checking to see if other public library systems have an option like this as well.
And what is the point of this so-called convenience and ever-lower prices if you spend your life walking around with your nose buried in a smartphone, with every other building that you pass by boarded and shuttered up?
Check the research on how the cell phone towers emitting microwave radiation was never tested for long term human health safety parameters before being built and operated.
People are going to love that when they read the research.
Humans are already reporting massive health problems due to wifi, cell phone, and 4g (soon to be 5g) wireless databandwidth.
Bees and birds are also dying off because their magnetic perception has been disrupted by even weak em fields.
The Divine Counsel might have to drop another Sodom level weapon to make sure people can live outside of the ever present unnatural EM fields.
As for what the speculated point of 5g wireless eternal world wide net is… probably mind control or the Beast system.
I can’t seem to post on this blog right now. It’s very very disturbing.
In the meantime I’m putting this message on all my newer posts to alert people that for now I’ll be posting at the new site. So follow this link for further updates.
I sincerely hope this problem will be fixed soon, but I have no idea whether it will be possible. At any rate, the new blog is still operating very well (for now), and I can always post there. So for now, consider that the place to go to read my work.
Amazon has their own mad Lefty censors too, apparently.
Amazon Deletes Reviews of Conservative Authors
Fascists can figure out a way to corrupt anything.
It’s just what they do.