SXSWarren: A day later, Elizabeth Warren defends her Big Tech breakup proposal
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Kroger doesn't have the ability to control what other retailers can sell.
Amazon, on the other hand controls what all the merchants in the Amazon Marketplace are allowed to do.
They also control what products show up in their websites search results for bandaid strips.
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Chemical Tribe
Ars Legatus Legionis
They can do ads, but they don't need an ad network for the entire web to do it.
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It's a pretty fine line though between selling to Amazon who then resells a product on Amazon.com and selling directly on Amazon.com.
Then we also have Walmart.com, which is apparently trying to copy the Marketplace idea. Will they also have to stop selling Great Value branded products because they opened up their domain to direct-sell vendors?
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She. Already. Is. A. Huge. NN. Supporter.
What she's describing also would apply to ISPs. You shit on her for not understanding tech, but you don't have a clue about how her policy would be applied, or that she's one of the country's leading anti-trust experts. You get caught up in pointless whataboutisms, as if each presidential canidate only gets one issue. Pull your head out of your ass and listen to what she's saying, because she has some very good ideas, and wants to take things in the right direction.
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How so? I'm trying to think of a charitable explanation for how being an employee might affect your vote, but I'm struggling. Here are the possibilities I see:
1. You vote after your own personal financial self-interest, and you think that Warren's move will hurt that. -- in this case, in blunt terms, why should anyone else care how you'll vote?
2. Your place of employment gives you special insight into the functioning of your company, an insight not available to the general public, and this is enough to make you think that Warren's move is so wrong-footed that the harm it will do here is enough to outweigh all the other benefits of how you might have voted. Really? In my mind it'd have to be really catastrophically and disastrously wrong-footed, wrong-footed enough to solidly harm America and the disadvantaged people in it who need our support. I'm having a really hard time seeing that.
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NPRs Planet Money recently had a mini-series focused on Antitrust in America and in the third and final episode they talk about Amazon among other things, starts at about the 5 minute mark:
Listen to: Antitrust 3: Big Tech - https://one.npr.org/i/697060225:697237624
TL
L: In the Episode they discuss the "problem" with Amazon Basic using a fictitious example of dog hats. If a 3rd party starts to sale dog hats at retail and it doesn't take off well then the risk is placed at the retailer and not the 3rd party. If the 3rd party sells on Amazon however the risk stays with the 3rd party. If the dog hats takes off then Amazon can see it in the data, make their own Amazon Basic Dog Hats and out compete the 3rd party.I am butchering the example a little bit. I recommend everyone to listen to all three episodes.
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Of course they have a right to opinion and they're free to object. Let me spell out in very plain terms what that objection amounts to:
"I have in the past voted democrat because it didn't hurt my personal self-interest too much. Now that it does, I maybe won't. I expect that some or all of the ~50k CA employees in a similar boat will follow suite."
To which my same response - who cares if a relatively small number of well-off people are disadvantaged by a regulatory change? Surely that's the single least important consideration when evaluating Warren's proposals?
Let me put it another way. I too am an employee of an affected company. If my moral evaluation of my company extended no further than my paycheck, I'd be a scoundrel. Sure I understand lots of people in low-paying jobs are financially precarious, and don't have the luxury to look beyond it, but that doesn't apply to people who'd be affected by this change and I kind of expect more of them (us).
I too disagree with Warren's proposals and think they're wrong-footed. But this opinion of mine isn't informed by any "as an employee" special perspective. It's just from my evaluation of what's public knowledge.
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I find her use of Teddy Roosevelt and his anti trust case against the railroads to be ironic, inasmuch as the prime case is the 1903 Northern Securities case where James J. Hill of the Great Northern formed that company to hold the stock of the GN, Northern Pacific, and Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (CB&Q). The company was dissolved via SCOTUS ruling (though there's a dissent by the great justice Oliver Wendell Holmes) in 1904. But in the end, in 1970, the Burger court OK'd the same merger, to include the Spokane, Portland, & Seattle to form the Burlington Northern. Today it's known as the BNSF when the ATSF merged in with them. So that 'big, monopolistic RR' of 1880/1900s that was so bad is now seen as all right. The Surface Transportation Board basically kept competition in the RR industry with the mergers of the 1980s onwards (to include Conrail and it's subsequent breakup to NS and CSX). The board basically has stated that the competition in the western US is between BNSF and Union Pacific. The competition aspect is what's keeping any of the seven remaining large RRs from merging any further. The test laid down by the late STB chairwoman Linda Morgan remains untested by any of the seven in the 20 some odd years it's been around.
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That's not how an appeal to authority fallacy works. I was worried this would be too subtle, but if you are arguing in good faith, stay with me. It is a fallacy when an appeal to authority is used to support a conclusion just on the basis of the authority. But if the claim is about the qualifications about someone, then mentioning their credentials obviously matter.
The claim, "Breaking up tech companies is right because Warren said so and she is an expert" is an appeal to authority.
But the claim, "Warren is not ignorant of basic economic policy because Warren is an expert" is obviously no fallacy.
Two responses to that now famous blog post:
(1) Yes yes, there are traditional defenders of the Borkian orthodoxy, and some use sneering condescending language. There are nevertheless serious people who defend the New Brandeis view, the most famous being the young rising star Lina Khan. Read the blog post again: it is railing against the growing popularity of the view *within academia* (as well as elsewhere). Again, the claim I'm making is that the view is within the mainstream debate—that the view is empirically viable and actively discussed—not that it is irrational to disagree. Your claim implies that all experts dismiss this view; this is misleading and false.
(2) There are grounds for arguing that some tech companies should be broken up on the traditional consumer welfare standard. The argument for breaking up Facebook that I cited makes obvious appeal to consumer welfare. Similar arguments have been made for breaking up Google. The view in the blog post you cite is compatible with these arguments.
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Why not google something, anything, before making bold statements on topics you know nothing about?
https://www.idealog.com/blog/changing-b ... ll-amazon/
This discusses the book scene. As of just over a year ago Amazon was closing in on selling half of all books in the USA. You know, printed books. For e-books the figure is 70% - 90% depending on if you include self published chaff.
I mean I guess they do not own 100% of the market, but B&N sees its sales shrinking by about 4% a year, and Amazon books keep growing, fast. There is even a trend where genres are going all digital (Romance 90%) and thus almost exclusively to Amazon. Sci-Fi is next.
This is just one market segment. But there is almost no reason why Amazon does not just become the one true place for all purchases. The competitive frenzy on the platform makes it hard to justify buying things anywhere else.
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Well, the super moderate/centrist option really carried the day in 2016, huh?
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I'm still trying to figure out how these people managed to spin things around in their heads to the point that Hillary Clinton of all people ended up being an ultra-leftist communist type.
Maybe I'm giving it too much thought. I shouldn't expect too much from a bunch who's entire political ideology is based around internet memes and talking heads on Youtube.
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Tech companies are some of the most functional and benevolent monopolists ever.
How about attacking the most evil ones first: The defence contractors who eat half of the nation’s budget. The hospital chains and big pharma companies, who eat the other.
I’ll bet the latter organizations have a lot more old-money political weight than the tech companies, and even Mrs Warren will not touch them.
How about attacking the most evil ones first: The defence contractors who eat half of the nation’s budget. The hospital chains and big pharma companies, who eat the other.
I’ll bet the latter organizations have a lot more old-money political weight than the tech companies, and even Mrs Warren will not touch them.
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She wasn’t communist. She was obviously corrupt, I mean “pragmatic.” People wanted and still want a radical. Trump was such a radical. He promised a lot of things, including battling defense contractors and big pharma companies, none of which came to be.
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He's fallen short on a lot of his campaign promises. Remember when he said he'd tax the rich, fight the banks, and provide us all with healthcare that'd be the envy of the world? I do. The only thing he's stuck to is his wall rhetoric, the lowest of the low hanging fruit, which is enough for the Trump faithful to loudly proclaim he's the only president in history to make good on his word to the American people.
I swear to god, the voting public can't seem to remember anything that extends farther than 3 weeks.
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completely agree - i am not from us and this seems fairly obvious .... i dont understand how come not everybody is supporting this
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Present.
More to the point, these companies can be hard to get away from for some people. When it comes to phones, the choice is pretty much Apple or Google (albeit in the latter case with hardware from many different manufacturers.) Or, take universities for instance - it is pretty hard to be a university employee/student these days without a Google account, or at the very least without using AWS for university websites/license servers etc. Whether you are a willing customer of these companies or not, an argument could certainly be made that vertical integration isn't always helpful to the consumer. So, from, one democratic socialist, at least, her proposal doesn't seem so outlandish.
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You're conflating deferring to an authority - an expert in the field - to appeal to authority.
An appeal to authority would be saying that because Warren said it, it must be true. The argument Squid made, from my reading, was that Warren's opinion on economics - a field in which she is an expert - carries more weight than someone who hasn't studied it. The context, which you seem to have ignored, was to refute the idea that Elizabeth Warren doesn't understand economics. This is a perfectly justified case where the exception to appeal to authority holds - it is directly relevant to the argument at hand.
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FWIW, Apple is also on Warren's hit list.
Specifically, she believes that Apple shouldn't be allowed to both develop iOS apps and control the App Store.
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If you haven't watched this you should. I'm not suggesting that either side is the "correct" side rather there's just a lot of good discussion and points made here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ
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Hillary is just straight up hated and has a colossal amount of baggage. If a moderate/centrist that wasn't universally hated was put forth, they probably would have won.
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It is possible for politicians to have more than one policy, but to discuss them one at a time.
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From a rest of world point of view, she had 3 million more votes than Trump and was defeated by not paying enough attention to blue collar Democrats in specific sections of the rust belt.
"Straight up hated" may be true of some people, but not a majority of voters.
Clinton is not President because she was defeated in detail tactically, not because she was overall less popular than Trump.
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Reading the posts here I realise that a lot of them probably weren't even born when Bell was broken up, they certainly missed the monopoly discussions over printer ink and car parts, and they have no idea just how far the US has moved to the corporatist Right (or, to give it its polsci name, fascism) since the Internet gave such power to corporations.
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Just not feeling this. Amazon has something like 5% of the us retail market; Walmart's share is around double that, but no word from Warren on reining in Walmart, which has arguably resulted in the loss of countless jobs as it puts smaller, local companies out of business. And Walmart is rapidly overtaking Amazon's online dominance as well with a series of aggressive acquisitions, and may well surpass Amazon's online sales in a couple of years.
I'm more tepid when it comes to Google. And Facebook, I'll admit, I'd be happy to see torn to shreds by wild dogs - but it's hard to see them as a monopoly of any sort.
This plank of Warren's seems poorly conceived and not well thought out. I'm pretty sure she just sank her own chances for a presidential run before it's even left the gate.
I'm more tepid when it comes to Google. And Facebook, I'll admit, I'd be happy to see torn to shreds by wild dogs - but it's hard to see them as a monopoly of any sort.
This plank of Warren's seems poorly conceived and not well thought out. I'm pretty sure she just sank her own chances for a presidential run before it's even left the gate.
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Possibly. But Clinton's support has never been fervent; it's always been very tepid. Yes, she won the popular vote by a decent margin, but 63 million against Trump's 66 million is not at all impressive when you factor in that she was running against...Donald Trump. This should have been a walkaway landslide for the Democrats. It's likely that sort of cockiness was a key factor in the loss, too; Clinton's camp figured there was no way they could lose, and just wasn't trying very hard to win.
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Thank you. Thank you for letting me know there are still sane people out there.
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Please stop using the word Left to refer to what you're describing. It is not Left is any meaningful sense because it has no serious socialist economic component. What you are describing is Liberal. Freedom of individual identity and freedom of individual economically. It's a failed project because what individual economic freedom means in practice is freedom for the most powerful in the market to dominate all others. And without the economic side of the equation the capacity for identity freedom is limited.
The result is seen in the destruction of working and middle America that you reference. Liberalism has replaced Leftism in the US political landscape because it is acceptable to the economic powers that have undue influence. Confusing Left and Liberal just plays into their hands.
Edit: to be clear this does not apply to all current Dems candidates (most obviously Sanders), but it does apply to the ideology you're describing.
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NPRs Planet Money recently had a mini-series focused on Antitrust in America and in the third and final episode they talk about Amazon among other things, starts at about the 5 minute mark:
Listen to: Antitrust 3: Big Tech - https://one.npr.org/i/697060225:697237624
TL
I am butchering the example a little bit. I recommend everyone to listen to all three episodes.
The perception that Amazon is somehow dodging risk is ludicrous.
Amazon's marketplace is literally just a platform for direct marketing. You can sell whatever you want as long as it is legal. If you believe there is a market, then you can put it out there and reap the reward. This is a good thing.
And yes, Amazon are able to follow market trends and put out their own versions of stuff. But so does everyone else. If dog hats become a big deal then the little guy will be drowned under a massive influx of knock off dog hats, regardless of whether he sells on Amazon, or if Amazon makes their own version. Analysing market trends and spotting opportunities is just entrepreneurship.
No small seller should be able to be the sole person in a market offering his product. That actually would be a monopoly. And no seller of any size should think that one product is enough to set him for life. You're supposed to always be looking for the next thing, or offering a product that stands out enough in the market that people will come to you and not to Amazon. Amazon's basics line is essentially "Economy Plus"; that is to say that they are more expensive than Chinese crap but still cheap enough that people want it, and presented nicely. That's a market niche.
All this anti-trust crap is about what people think is fair, instead of what is actually fair. It is actually fair for people to take risks if they want reward. It is actually fair for there to be competition for Dog Hats Inc. It is actually fair for the big, slow behemoth like Amazon to be able to come in late to the party and carve out their own niche; lower risk but lower reward.
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I think part of the calculus is: "What are they going to do, vote for Trump?"
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I've got to say that I'm rather disappointed at the comments here from Arsians, about how she's barking up the wrong tree. I would expect you all to know better.
Here's a small selection of the hundreds if not thousands of anti-competitive behaviours from large tech companies:
- Facebook runs or ran multiple VPN programs (Onavo, and the enterprise cert one) to essentially spy on their competitors. This one is pretty well-documented.
- Facebook also has a habit of having employees build "open-source" developer tools (Flow, Immutable.js, etc.), then heavily marketing them to startups in particular (ie. their competition)... and then after a while, they magically stop being maintained publicly with bug reports going ignored, and only Facebook-internal commits still land on the repository. Now their competitors are left with a broken foundation under their software.
- Apple disallows shipping any alternative browser engine on iOS. This means that all 'alternative browsers' can only be thin wrappers around the Safari engine and its limitations, with little room to meaningfully compete.
- Google closes off its integrated translation API to every browser except for Chromium/Chrome. This is why Chrome has a "Translate this page" option but other browsers do not, and why Google suggests that you install Chrome when you use Google Translate via the web interface.
- Of course, Google then uses your usage of Chrome to tie your browser usage to your Google account, via automatic login mechanisms. Apparently, some recent versions of Chrome don't even show you the search page URL anymore when you search on Google, but just the keywords - in an apparent step towards making Google be the web (as they've also been trying to do with their broader address bar changes).
- Amazon uses their private, internal sales data - which they have a ton of, given that they're virtually a monopoly in many markets - to produce Amazon Basics products and compete away those vendors selling through their platform. This is also pretty well-documented.
And if you want a more experiental description of just how much of everyday life these tech giants have monopolized, this is an excellent read of somebody trying to live their life for a while without using anything from said companies: https://gizmodo.com/life-without-the-te ... 1830258056
Here's a small selection of the hundreds if not thousands of anti-competitive behaviours from large tech companies:
- Facebook runs or ran multiple VPN programs (Onavo, and the enterprise cert one) to essentially spy on their competitors. This one is pretty well-documented.
- Facebook also has a habit of having employees build "open-source" developer tools (Flow, Immutable.js, etc.), then heavily marketing them to startups in particular (ie. their competition)... and then after a while, they magically stop being maintained publicly with bug reports going ignored, and only Facebook-internal commits still land on the repository. Now their competitors are left with a broken foundation under their software.
- Apple disallows shipping any alternative browser engine on iOS. This means that all 'alternative browsers' can only be thin wrappers around the Safari engine and its limitations, with little room to meaningfully compete.
- Google closes off its integrated translation API to every browser except for Chromium/Chrome. This is why Chrome has a "Translate this page" option but other browsers do not, and why Google suggests that you install Chrome when you use Google Translate via the web interface.
- Of course, Google then uses your usage of Chrome to tie your browser usage to your Google account, via automatic login mechanisms. Apparently, some recent versions of Chrome don't even show you the search page URL anymore when you search on Google, but just the keywords - in an apparent step towards making Google be the web (as they've also been trying to do with their broader address bar changes).
- Amazon uses their private, internal sales data - which they have a ton of, given that they're virtually a monopoly in many markets - to produce Amazon Basics products and compete away those vendors selling through their platform. This is also pretty well-documented.
And if you want a more experiental description of just how much of everyday life these tech giants have monopolized, this is an excellent read of somebody trying to live their life for a while without using anything from said companies: https://gizmodo.com/life-without-the-te ... 1830258056
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I still haven't seen a convincing explanation for Amazon Basics being any different from a big retail store brand.
What's unique about it, is Amazon more of a monopoly than Walmart in the US or something (I'm not American).
Maybe then you shouldn't have allowed it to buy Whole Foods or whatever it was? Preventing them from having an own brand like every other store seems silly.
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Try searching for flight to Chicago in Google, the search results will return Google Flights in the top header for any search term. Kayak or Skyscanner will come at the bottom of search results, after 4 ads and Google Flights offer. If you control 90% of total search market you should not be allowed to do that, meaning to offer search engine and your product at the top in front of everyone else. The search should be one company and Flights another company. That's the point of the whole story.
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