• Trump planning antitrust cases against Google and Facebook... for political bias
    30 replies, posted
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/22/white-house-prepares-order-directing-antitrust-probe-of-tech-companies-report.html
Watching the POTUS get laughed out of court will be extremely entertaining. I can hardly wait.
isn't it bad form for a president to sue anything during their term? is there even a precedent for this?
Would we really be better off if facebook disappeared? Wouldn't something worse just take it's place?
Well something significantly worse took its place in China and Russia. I'd definitely be worried if Trump tried to do the same.
Ah yes. Using government power to hurt compqnies that dont support you and your power. Totally ok right?
a good thing for a bad reason, facebook google and amazon are monopolies, in fact amazon has had calls to split their IT and data service businesses from their consumer services, but to justify this based on political bias is ridiculous and just more red meat for his base.
Why would the president shut down legitimate news organizations? /s
honestly, Trump taking antitrust action against internet companies could be a net positive result of his blind swinging it is incredible how lax we have been in the establishment of these new monopolies who have just been let to flourish
To be honest, progressives may want to consider that they have a broad alignment with populists here, because whatever precedent is set by the repression of the latter creates the means to handle any threats from the left (especially when you consider the logic for repression, Russian support for a political margin in order to destabilize democracy, applies to the left in the form of everyone from Sanders/Stein to SYRIZA). Both are struggling against the heights of political and economic power in a capitalist society, but for different reasons.
but populists are rebelling against the heights of our liberal capitalist society by calling for more liberal capitalism.
For now and in their infancy in America especially (it's different in Europe), yes. In particular, they call for abandoning Obamacare and lowering taxes, but believe it or not this is a funny way of struggling against the top without causing a split in a party they captured. They hope private alternatives, because the market rewards niche, will prevent dependence on (as Hillary stated to explain her archipelago) the dynamic parts of the country that are the future of the country's economy. These parts of the country, who would be paying more of the share for state-funded programs, are very politically and culturally different from them. So, populists oppose integration here because it will weaken them in relation to a dominant intersection of federal government, cities, corporations that they believe is detached from the national body politic, which is correct. While in reaction to the Trump era the (center-)left may praise the resistance to populism this height of society fosters, the universalism and reformism of neoliberals is nothing like that of progressives, socialists, etc. Just because this part of society is blue rather than red, which is more a cultural rather than ideological division, doesn't mean it's actually where a resurgent left will be based. Instead, I'd argue the future of the left depends on a mix of elements in cultural red and blue states. There's some basis for all of this. In reference to the liberal-capitalism of populists, Jackson (who Trump deeply admires) was viciously opposed to central banks and much less in favor of protectionism than typical for politicians in the North. Back in those pre-globalization times, though, the national 'elites' were protectionist. They were a nascent class that was vulnerable to competition from Europe. Meanwhile tariffs only hurt America's poor, especially in the countryside. In reference to what the future left depends on, I point to the American People's Party that successfully combined some parts of the two parties, crossed racial barriers to some extent, intersected with the labor movement, then went on to be an inspiration for early 20th century progressivism and the New Deal, the latter's coalition being the last time in recent history that the white lower classes were bonded to the left. Basically, as populists increasingly realize their main problem is not just with 'liberal cultural elites' and the federal government, but the projected direction of 'neoliberal' capitalism itself, they will lose their Ron Paul/Tea Party populism. They will cease to be 'embarrassed millionaire' populists. From there, they may either look to fulfill Trump's promise to make the GOP a 'workers' party' and become national conservatives like we see in the Euroskeptic right, or they can become fodder for a left-wing split that works to reverse the retreat from socialism after the death of the Old Left and Keynesianism.
They aren't monopolies by any definition. You could argue that they're trusts, but that's it. They aren't monopolies.
No one here is sighting a textbook definition of a monopoly. What they mean is these companies have become so big they essentially act like a monopoly because they have the power to essentially dictate how the market is going to work in their perspective fields. You can't own an online marketplace without recognising Amazon, you can't start a video upload and streaming service without recognising YouTube (Google), you can't run a social networking site without recognising Facebook. All of these companies are so big that you are literally forced to either try and directly compete or indirectly compete with some niche thing against what they have to offer, something that is very difficult if you do not have a lot of money or a name to ride on. As such they have basically created non-competitive markets, and continue to either buy companies or drive them into financial ruin to keep things the way they are. Teddy would have whipped out his big stick a long time ago on these companies.
The reality is that society will always trend towards using a single social media platform. It's impossible not to have a "monopoly" in the sense of total ownership of the market. People want to use the thing everyone else uses. If you want to remain above water as a social media company, you need to buy new platforms as they gain popularity to not sink. If you aren't Facebook, you're Myspace. If you aren't Youtube, you're Blip. If you aren't Reddit, you're Facepunch. wait
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/242634/bcbd4712-2620-4832-89aa-d0892ece1427/image.png hey that's not a real word look to your leader trump for your english lessons dummy
How the fuck are you supposed to break any of these companies up though, without completely destroying any reason people would want to use them in the first place. Digital monopolies are an entirely different beast than monopolies on a physical product like oil or cable tv.
All of these companies are more than just their websites; they encompass things such as hardware manufacture, advertising, infrastructure, software development, etc. There are plenty of subdivisions that could be broken up and physical assets that could be decentralized without decentralizing the web service themselves. Things such as google owning you tube, amazon owning twitch, facebook owning oculus, are all things that could be broken up as stand alone companies again. That is just a VERY basic example however. The whole point isn't to break facebook/amazon/google etc. up into 5 separate websites, the point is to break their hold on the means of creating a successful alternative service. There are plenty of IP's, patents, service, and other tangible goods that can be separated from these companies to promote better competition.
While I agree that you could easily separate youtube from google (and I bet it would be better off in the end), how would divesting some of facebooks physical assets allow other companies to more easily compete with facebook.com? On its own, the website itself is too big to compete with, even if facebook inc. reverted back to being solely the owner of facebook.com.
Well the whole Idea of competing directly with facebook is somewhat out of the question, as people have pointed out folks tend to gravitate towards centralized social platforms. However you can break them of things such as data collection, advertising, meta data, etc. with the point being to remove their ability to sell and use such data that gives them an unfair advantage in things such as advertising and sales. This would be especially important if facebooks portfolio were to expand, if they were to buy say a hardware manufacturer they would have a significant advantage in metadata and advertising.
But if you break facebook's ability to collect data and advertise, you break facebook itself. The entire reason the site is free is because they make their money off of harvesting your data and selling it. They would go fucking bankrupt if they lost the ability to do the one thing that keeps them afloat.
There's a difference between owning the advertising portion and receiving payment for running ads from an ad firm on your website. When you own the ad firm that funds your own website you kind of have a distinct advantage.
The problem is that if you attempt to compete in the VR space you aren't competing against Oculus, you're competing against Facebook and Facebook can divert whatever resources necessary to crush you. Same thing goes for trying to compete against AWS. Alphabet in particular is the worst offender, as they're branching into AI and biotech.
With the sheer size facebook.com is at this point, I'm not certain if traditional third party advertising alone would be enough to pay to keep the site afloat, even if they sold off their other assets like Occulus. Especially since advlockers are becoming more and more common. And again, so much of their profit is made from selling data to other companies, not just using it to promote sponsored products on their website.
That's entirely dependent on the notion that even though facebook itself is broken up it still has the operating costs of the entire company. Assuming we trimmed Facebook down to its core social media content you're still talking about 2.2 Billion (https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/) users here. With ad revenue somewhere between 1-5 cents per view you're still taking in millions of dollars, and with only employee (all encompassing here) and server maintenance/additions that leaves a good chunk of meat on the bone in terms of surplus. This also opens up advertising to multiple ad firms on the platform, meaning a more competitive ad market.
Ad revenue is nowhere near 1-5 cents a view.
Ok, lets say its a fraction of a cent. For arguments sake we'll say 1/100 (.001) of a cent. Assuming that all 2.2 billion log on and look at their facebook at least once a day you're talking over 2 million dollars in a day. That's for 1 ad, one view per person. Comparatively speaking the average income from a youtube video is about $7.60 per 1000 views, or .0076 cents per view. How Youtube Ad Revenue Works | Investopedia Of course not everyone looks at their facebook every day, and some people look at facebook multiple times per day. Most of the time more than 1 ad is present. One could say youtube ads probably pay out more as they're videos and not still images. My point is there's still TONS of people who look at facebook every day and see more than just one ad.
1/100 is 0.01
I eat paste for a living and I have no idea how to math. It should be marked as 1/10th and placed as what I have it as.
.76 cents meaning 76 hundredths of a cent
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