
The bad new politics of big tech - bhouston
https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/theres-blood-in-the-water-in-silicon-valley
======
AnthonyMouse
There have traditionally been two types of monopoly, exemplified by Standard
Oil and AT&T. Standard Oil came about through mergers. This is the one where
antitrust fits -- you break them up, problem solved. AT&T is a natural
monopoly. Breaking them up doesn't fix it; the last mile has to be treated as
a public utility because a local monopoly is still a monopoly and it's not
practical to build fifteen independent last mile networks everywhere.

But Facebook, despite being a monopoly or nearly so, isn't either of these. It
makes no sense to speak of breaking Facebook up -- what does that even look
like? Each if the Baby Books gets 1/20th of the users?

But it's also not a natural monopoly because what makes Facebook a monopoly is
a lack of _interoperability_. If "Facebook" was a federated system where
anyone can set up their own social networking server and still communicate
with anyone else on any provider, there would be no monopoly. Some people
would use Google and some people would use Microsoft and some people would
have their own server in their basement and they could all still talk to each
other. Social networking is not a natural monopoly any more than email is --
unless you allow the largest player to refuse interoperability with
competitors.

~~~
alexandercrohde
I agree Facebook isn't a great example of a monopoly. But consider Google. As
it stands google is very much a monopoly in the sense that Microsoft was. The
power google has to do good/bad is tremendous.

Consider your reliance on google: \- search \- email \- maps/navigation \-
youtube, news, your browser \- possibly your phone OS, contacts, calendar

Google hasn't really done anything too overtly Orwellian (e.g. only promoting
news that shows it in a good light). It even hasn't been too restrictive on
interoperability (but neither was Microsoft, it just came pre-installed with
IE).

So I suppose the question becomes "Should power be broken up preemptively?"

Or, perhaps politicians are rightly scared as they understand that they are
losing political control to a technological system (they don't control) that
increasingly has the power to shift public opinion (now that TV is dead).

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Consider your reliance on google: - search - email - maps/navigation -
> youtube, news, your browser - possibly your phone OS, contacts, calendar

Owning lots of different properties that each have serious competitors is not
a monopoly.

The only market you can reasonably claim Google has a monopoly in is search.
There are fair arguments that search is a natural monopoly, but trying to
regulate search as a utility is a _very bad idea_ , because it's bare naked
government regulation of speech.

If you want more search competitors, a better approach might be government
grants to improve public domain search algorithms so that it becomes more
practical to create viable search competitors.

~~~
Retric
The problem is they use search and advertising to promote their other
properties. So, simply removing that connection by splitting the company into
2-3 parts would do a lot to minimize the harm.

I would suggest: Search, Addwords, Everything else.

PS: Picture how much a 24/7 worldwide ad on googles home page is worth. Except
the only customers for that are Google Properties.

------
Animats
Eric Schmidt demanding the firing of antitrust researchers at the New America
Foundation may go down in history as one of the worst decisions ever by a
corporate officer. Nobody was paying much attention to antitrust papers from
there. Now both Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon want Schmidt's head, and
antitrust is coming back.

The last time there was an unregulated industry with network effects this
strong was when railroads had enormous power and used it to force high rates
and favor companies they owned. This generated strong political opposition
from businesses that needed to ship goods by rail, which was most businesses.
Railroads were forced to become common carriers. Something like that might
happen in network infrastructure.

~~~
tiggybear
I mean Googlers tend to be highly socially conscious, independent-thinking,
and financially secure employees, right?

Seems like a perfect company to test some new tech collective bargaining
attempts. What happens if 80% of googlers organize through an app, stand up
and say we are all walking out the door if we don't start acting more socially
responsible through A, B, and C initiatives.

So many of them were ready to quit over a coworker with differing opinions, I
would think many more would be willing to quit over a company having evil
actions. After all, actions > opinions.

~~~
creaghpatr
I don't know if employees care enough to risk leaving a high-paying job with
great benefits, even if they agree in principle. I empathize with the
employees it's not like they have any control over Google's lobbying
strategies any more than other large companies.

------
djyaz1200
Why is anyone surprised these big tech companies become monopolies? They are
explicitly granted that power through patents. Amazon and Google have been
granted long monopolies by key patents they hold for things like one click
buying and bidding on search results respectively. 17 years is too long for a
patent in tech IMO. Something more like 6/7 years seems more appropriate. The
patent office (run until recently by a Google alum) basically stopped issuing
new meaningful software patents. The judicial system makes it very expensive
to enforce patents and the media has labeled rights holders trolls (in
fairness some are bad actors). The aggregate of these forces... making patents
last too long, making them expensive/difficult to enforce and rarely issuing
defensible/valuable new IP is DRAMATICALLY favoring the interests of big tech
giants. Therefore, a key step in limiting monopoly power is thoughtful patent
reform. Let small startups secure IP faster/easier and defend it without
labeling them trolls. Make patents expire faster so companies can have a head
start but not own a market for nearly a generation. Those changes would
provide a steady stream of new challengers the opportunity regularly try to
come "kill the kings". That's how to limit the otherwise inevitable
aggregation of money/power that comes with entrenched/unchallenged success.

~~~
talmand
To me it's not the length of the patents, but the granting of patents that
shouldn't have been done in the first place. Like the countless patents that
follow the "take Patent A and add 'with computer' on it to create Patent B"
formula.

~~~
djyaz1200
It's not binary. There are some questionable patents out there for sure, but
that doesn't mean that innovators shouldn't be able to get reasonable patents
to incentivize risk taking. It's a complicated problem.

~~~
talmand
I see a difference between reasonable and obvious.

------
scrumper
Article brings up an interesting angle on Mark Zuckerberg's baby kissing tour.
I just had it down, like most people I think, as a sort of warm up for a
political career. But it does make a lot of sense as a defensive move, an
image repair exercise. To some degree it doesn't matter what it was; the
establishment will see it as that and act all the more aggressively as a
result.

~~~
bbctol
I thought this tweet was interesting:
[https://twitter.com/libbycwatson/status/857943302599053314](https://twitter.com/libbycwatson/status/857943302599053314)
It sure looks like a political campaign, but maybe the more connected things
get, the more political everything becomes, and the more everything turns into
campaigning.

------
zebrafish
I do not like the idea of "public utilities." However, I also don't like the
size of the current players.

The market works best when anti-trust has power. I love the products that some
of these companies make. However, I believe that people should always have a
realistic choice. The power should be with the individual.

Because of the value of data & information today, I think that anti-trust
should be applied horizontally in addition to its traditional vertical use
cases. I get that horizontal integration reduces a lot of friction but at this
point it feels like I have to pick a team.

~~~
SkyMarshal
I didn't like the idea of public utilities either in my idealistically naive
youth. Then later I realized that natural monopoly public utilities work
amazingly well, so well in fact you almost don't even realize they're there
anymore and take them completely for granted - sewer, water, electricity,
garbage. All the complexity and effort of making them work is hidden from the
end user, it's the ultimate UI/UX accomplishment.

Then you look at what happens when the private sector gets a hold of them, be
it Enron in energy or for-profit banks in the money management business (which
is already a partial utility thanks to central banking), and it calls into
question the libertarian dogma that everything should be privatized.

~~~
zebrafish
My garbage is privatized and my ISP is as well (an advocate for net
neutrality) and both of those work just as well as my utilities do. I don't
think providing two examples is a sufficient counterpoint to rebuke free-
market principles.

Either way, are we calling Google, Facebook, & Amazon natural monopolies now?

~~~
SkyMarshal
I suspect that natural monopolies subject to securitization, market
manipulation and bubble-nomics are the ones that should remain public, as
there's strong incentive for private entities to mismanage them for short term
profits. I'm not sure anyone's figured out how to do that with garbage and
internet access yet, hopefully never.

Fwiw I'm uncomfortable with the recent push for anti-trust enforcement against
the Big 5. I was around for the OS and Browser wars and thus far none of them
have been as deliberately abusive as Microsoft was, who in my opinion at the
time soundly deserved the threat of being split up.

Interestingly though, it led to a strong open source ecosystem of
alternatives, and now Linux dominates most of the server world, which is
probably a far better outcome than anything the anti-trust suit could have
achieved. Similar outcomes may happen to the Big 5, like the emerging
decentralized/federated social networks (Mastadon) and secure email like
ProtonMail and Tutanota, and privacy-respecting search like DuckDuckGo. I
think it's best to hold off on any kind of legal action a while longer until
we can see what happens in that respect.

------
pascalxus
The real villians are the ISPs: Comcast and At&t. This is what we should be
going after. They spend billions to corrupt politicians and prevent
competition. And use government to set up legislation that prevents
competition.

~~~
ShabbosGoy
"Villain" as a word evokes the image of a silent film tycoon malevolently
twirling their moustache over bags of money.

Rational might be the word you're after. AT&T and Comcast are acting as
corporations to maximize shareholder returns.

But it is true that money often corrupts. A completely unregulated market
leads to negative externalities that the taxpayer is ultimately responsible
for. A completely regulated market stifles innovation and kills growth.

I'm not sure if regulation is a viable option at this point, mainly due to the
sheer incompetence of regulatory bodies and government bureaucrats.

~~~
pascalxus
It's true, they're just fulfilling their duties to shareholders. But, when
corporations start using the government to stifle competition: this is a line
that should not be crossed and deserves precisely the reaction that this
article has mentioned. Google and Facebook have not crossed this line, at
least not yet.

They're actions are rational, only if they succeed. If there's enough
political reaction that results in the breaking up of these monopolies, it may
not be so rational afterall.

~~~
JBlue42
Like in my neighborhood where Spectrum and AT&T are the only choices, w/
Spectrum being majority. I called to see if they had any packages cheaper than
what I was grandfathered in under after the Time Warner merger. They said no,
Spectrum has set the floor at $60/mo for 100 Mps and did away with Time
Warner's cheaper tiers.

------
danblick
For those interested in this topic I might recommend Tim Wu's books "The
Master Switch" or "The Attention Merchants". "The Master Switch" in particular
is about the history of communications industries in the US and how the
organization of those industries affected free speech. (Of particular
interest: Bell had a government-supported monopoly for about 70 years, in part
because people thought of monopoly differently in 1900 than in 1970.)

I read that Tim is also responsible for coining the term "net neutrality".

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
He also wrote this article which helped me put a finger on the difference
between "monopoly" and "concentration."

[https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-oligopoly-
proble...](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-oligopoly-problem)

------
italophil
'Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders both want big tech treated as, in Bannon’s
words in Hong Kong this week, “public utilities.”'

This is bizarre to me. Especially considering that ISP are not considered
"public utilities" and net neutrality might be revoked.

~~~
ufmace
That's about the stage this kind of stuff is at. Nothing's firm enough for any
action to actually happen... yet. But it's interesting that there are
significant forces on both the Left and Right starting to call for this. Don't
expect any concrete, coherent policy proposals yet, this is just a sign that
this is more likely to happen in the future. Do expect wild proclamations and
contradictory, nonsensical policies proposed. That's the seeds from which new
political movements are born and their platforms are built from.

------
ChuckMcM
As I see it, the Yelp comment in the video is not wrong, Google needs to find
ways to increase the monetization to compensate for falling CPCs. They do that
by putting more and more sponsored content on the first page and pushing
people to their own sites as much as they can.

One of the things I find interesting are the 'one boxes'. These are insets in
the search page which has extracted what Google thinks is the answer you are
looking for, from some other web page. If they guess right, they get a non-
obvious benefit, you don't click over to a non-google page that has ads on it.
If those ads are from some other supplier, its a big win for Google, if they
are from Google they now have to share revenue with the site owner. We know
that 'facts' are not copyrightable and "fair use" doctrine allows for some
limited copying to identify context, which means it is unclear if you can even
stop them from doing this to your pages.

Some subtle, some not so subtle, but when the choice is to start using your
monopoly power to shore up the bottom line, or not. I have never seen a
company that hasn't started taking "just a few" shots from that trough. The
challenge, and I don't know if it will damage Google or not, is that path can
lead to some really egregious behaviors. And big companies, IBM, Microsoft,
Intel, Proctor and Gamble, who have gone before have always paid a higher
price for taking that road than the benefit they received.

~~~
MarkMc
Well if I search "height eiffel tower" on Google I see the 'one box' but I
don't see any ads. At least in this case Google seems to be placing user
experience over (short term) bottom line.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Good example. You won't click the top organic link (Wikipedia) because the
answer is right there, and you'll miss the pop down banner ad from Wikipedia
where they are asking for donations. Just below it, you see a bunch of
questions related to the Eiffel tower that generally jump to ad filled pages,
but only pages where the ads come from Google. And on the right you'll see a
link to Google maps for the Eiffel tower where, if you click on the map link,
you can find places that advertise on Google where you can eat or visit and
some reviews of them, if you click on the Eiffel tower link you'll go to a web
site that sets up tours. (and pays Google to be there)

What you won't see are any Yelp recommendations or links for the Eiffel tour
(you would if you searched 'height eiffel tower yelp' and got
[https://www.yelp.com/biz/la-tour-eiffel-paris-4](https://www.yelp.com/biz/la-
tour-eiffel-paris-4) as the first link).

Google has effectively wrapped your 'factoid' type search with pretty much any
sort of commercial intent query you might have, around their content, so that
if you were a restaurant you would much rather have a lot of Google reviews
because you would rank higher in that map link, and if you were a tour
operator you would want to bid on the link under the 'keyword'. And if you
were a content site you would want to have your links up at the top of the
page under likely queries you may not have thought of yet, but once you read
them you go "There are two? Really? Lets check that out."

Having operated a web search engine and seeing all the ways the product guys
and gals could, and did, "tweak" things I look at that sort of page much more
critically than the typical user.

------
toss1
The smart ones will start building significant large offices and headquarters
outside of SV & Seattle. Amazon is already starting to location-shop for a
second headquarters.

They'll need to get more senators on their side than just the 4 from CA and
WA.

------
Glyptodon
I think the intractable problem is that it does very much make sense to have a
unified marketplace for everything, but that it is also very much not ideal
for it to be run by either a private for-profit monopoly or the government for
different reasons. I think the same is true of a basket full of internet-based
services.

For example, I'm completely convinced that if Facebook is declared a Monopoly
and taken apart it would only pave the way for a successor to become the new
"Facebook Replacement"/"Monopoly." I think the same thing is roughly true for
parts of Amazon. And of Google.

~~~
pc2g4d
Peer to peer commerce could take over???

------
ufmace
> This isn’t to say that the end is near for these new giants — or even for
> Uber, whose business is, it says, still growing. Just that the golden age is
> over. The new era for them will be normal politics, normal regulation, with
> California senators deep in their pockets who fight for them as hard as
> Texans fight for oil, but with a deep bipartisan current flowing against
> them.

What might happen if there's a strong bipartisan movement to regulate the new
tech world?

~~~
tomjen3
I don't buy the idea that they can't starve this of with money - what are the
politicians going to do when images of their extra marital affairs ends up on
every billboard in their districts? Images that were taken by private
detectives and paid for by google and the other tech companies?

Sure they might play the game like everybody else do, and just bribe the
congress people. That would be stupid, but they can outspend most companies
because they make so much money.

~~~
throwaway2048
If you think publicly threatening officials with information you are
purloining off their accounts is going to end well for you...

------
duderific
I dunno, this makes for an interesting article, and clicks for Buzzfeed, but
the reality is that unless the money is gotten out of politics at a large
scale, money and lobbyists will continue to largely direct what happens in
Washington. This is the same for the tech industry as any other large sectors
of the economy. Additionally, with the current administration, they are
looking to deregulate much more so than go the other direction.

The only thing that could get the wind blowing the other way would be some
kind of large scale scandal at Google/Facebook etc. that would make big
headlines. But probably Congress would make some noise and nothing substantial
in terms of policy or law would come of it.

------
gbacon
When companies fall short in the marketplace, they seek to outmaneuver their
competitors in courtrooms and legislative lobbies.

------
squozzer
It's an apt metaphor, comparing politics to a shark (or pirahna) feeding
frenzy.

And while we congratulate ourselves for finally coming to our senses about
"the SV", I offer the following counterpoint -- when people who normally
disagree with each other are in sync on a topic, it's either an issue of
mortal danger or a tawdry bit of extortion.

And by my reckoning, the Four Horsemen aren't The Axis Powers or even The Axis
of Evil. Which leaves extortion.

To steal a meme: Gee, nice company you have there. It would be a shame if
someone regulated it. BTW, I'm up for re-election.

------
robg
Can someone explain to me how any of these companies could ever be considered
monopolies?

Competitive products are available at the same or lower costs and widely so.

~~~
face_mcgace
Let's say I own a railroad and you own a soap company. For years to get your
product to consumers you pay me money and I transport it to stores to be sold.
Now, I see how lucrative your soap company is, so I decide to get into the
soap making business. However, I raise prices on how much it costs to ship
your soap while lowering my prices. I also ship all my soap first, cause
delays in shipping your soap, etc. People can buy my lower quality soap
cheaper and stores make bigger profits so I ship continually more soap than
you. Keep in mind your soap is what consumers want but they can't access it
anymore (since stores stock less / supply is always limited / etc) so they
have to by my lower quality soap.

Now replace "railroad" with "search engine" and "soap company" with "reviews"
and you have the same situation with Google vs. Yelp or Google Shopping or
Google Maps.

Essentially you're just stifling competition at this point and preventing the
market from choosing products.

~~~
tomjen3
In that scenario would your railroad company not make even more money but just
charging higher freight rates?

------
darepublic
Too many nods to Yelp in this article

------
jondubois
Yes. These big tech companies have to be nationalized. I hate what they've
done to society.

------
guelo
As a leftist I'm inclined to be pro-antitrust but Steve Bannon's interest has
me reconsidering. Bannon is a powerful propagandist who uses deception and
fraud. Since the government has given up on all responsibility to police
political campaigns Bannon rightly sees tech companies as some of the last
power centers that can slow down the spread of misinformation.

~~~
mnglkhn2
> Bannon is a powerful propagandist who uses deception and fraud.

Care to put some more meat on this statement? Do you think Bannon forced
Charlie Rose to interview him? Or that he forced which questions to be asked?

Out of curiosity, which points from Bannon's recent 60 Minutes sit-down, in
your view, where inappropriate?

Otherwise, please allow me to say that your statement is too broad and lacks
enough specificity to make sense.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>Do you think Bannon forced Charlie Rose to interview him

Those two really went at it. Whenever the topic turned to the media Charlie's
(conscious or otherwise) bias was so glaringly obvious.

It was like watching a debate between the president of a police union and and
a the director of an inner city drug treatment program or an oil company exec
and a university professor who researches climate change. Neither side could
comprehend that their biases reinforced by the people they surround themselves
with throughout their careers causes them to greatly over-estimate the
validity of their side of the issue.

It was some damn good TV.

