
Have the Tech Giants Grown Too Powerful? - clumsysmurf
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/magazine/facebook-google-uber-tech-giants-power.html
======
white-flame
The "tech giants" are creating and controlling core forms of communication,
both interpersonal and broadcast/public. That's too important and fundamental
to the health of society to allow it to be arbitrarily engineered, filtered,
and slanted for maximizing profit.

If they were acting like common carriers, it would be a completely different
issue. But they're not; they have business models that necessitate the
manipulation of communication.

~~~
nine_k
I don't buy this argument.

The internet providers are de facto pretty close to the common carrier status
(except maybe in cases of huge scale, like Netflix or google, where explicit
net neutrality might be desirable). There are no huge technical or financial
barriers to entry if you want to build a platform for communication over the
internet, nothing comparable to e.g. telecom networks (either in 1950s or
now).

The cost of acquiring a millions-strong audience, operating at that scale, and
becoming essential for large swaths of society can be pretty low, both in
financing and manpower; if Instagram is not a good example for you, take more
extreme examples of Wikipedia or SciHub.

Would you like newspapers (e.g. that very NYT) be governmentally regulated
because they are "too important for society"? It's dangerously close to the
late Soviet Union. How effective NYT would be e.g. in uncovering the Watergate
case were they regulated "for the common good"?

There's a particular fallacy that makes people think that some centralized
regulation would be more efficient and lead to better outcomes than self-
regulation on a level playing field. The efficiency is there in very few
cases, mostly those that seriously defy common sense (e.g. control over
antibiotics), or set safety guidelines against mass illness (e.g. food safety
control). In most other cases, a bureaucratic body has as skewed incentives as
a for-profit corporation, but much fewer reasons to improve anything.

~~~
Confiks
> Would you like newspapers (e.g. that very NYT) be governmentally regulated
> because they are "too important for society"? It's dangerously close to the
> late Soviet Union.

I can agree with the first part of your argument, but you're going overboard
here by declaring any form of regulation to be totalitarian in nature.
Considerations on the interests of companies versus the interests of society
as a whole can be made (and are made) in well-functioning democracies. It's
continually difficult to strike a balance, and overzealous mistakes may be
made or the process might be corrupted. Still, you can't wholly dismiss
governmental regulation as the modern world simply functions on it.

~~~
Nasrudith
Well it is more the regulation of their constraints on power that is
inherently totalitarian exploitable as a power consolidating move - even if
the passers don't do it with bad intentions it /will/ be exploited for all it
is worth later. Operating under the assumption that every bill should be
evaluated as if it will be done in bad faith is wise for the same reason the
first rule of networking security is never trust the client.

It would be like ammending the constitution to allow punishing the supreme
court for making bad decisions - technically it holds others accountable but
that is not what it will be used for.

------
super-serial
The ISPs and mobile carriers are too powerful. At least Google/Facebook have
to innovate, or buy companies like Instagram or Whatsapp that innovate. ISPs
get their billions in revenue from monopoly. All they have to do is buy off
politicans and put people like Ajit Pai in power. Now that they've started to
acquire tech companies like Yahoo, no one can stop them from giving
preferential treatment to their content and streaming services eventually
threatening the ability for tech startups to compete through innovation.

~~~
Bartweiss
I'm still baffled by the focus on FANG as too powerful and inescapable,
especially from generally left/liberal writers. They're not always friendly or
easy to avoid, certainly, but they're far more escapable and far less
legislatively malicious than Comcast, AT&T, and their ilk.

Obviously lots of people are mad at those companies too, but it's frustrating
to see "hit Google with antitrust suits!" getting high-profile NYT billing
while "hit Comcast with antitrust suits!" doesn't.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Google and Facebook are allowed to maintain data about me and my life, sell
that data to others, and I have no recourse. My broadband and mobile providers
see a much slimmer cross section of my life, and are far less capable as data
aggregation and warehousing systems comparatively speaking.

Google and Facebook (and Amazon, to a lesser extent) are for-profit
surveillance systems at their core. How could you _not_ demand oversight and
regulation of such systems in a democracy?

~~~
r00fus
Why aren't you complaining about Equifax instead then? Now there's a company
who absolutely deserves scorn.

~~~
blub
That's just a red herring you're dangling in front of our noses to distract
us.

There's no law of the universe saying one has to address bad actors in a
specific order or sequentially.

Furthermore, Equifax is a problem that the US needs to solve by themselves.
Google & Facebook are a global problem.

~~~
r00fus
Equifax (and Facebook) actually had an exfiltrated event. And they didn't get
punished.

Don't lump Google in there.

------
jeffreyrogers
I'm probably in the minority, but the negatives don't seem that bad when
compared to the benefits we get from the tech companies: free email, free or
cheap access to information on almost anything you could be interested in,
junk entertainment that people seem to enjoy. The negatives are less tangible:
giving up your personal data (this is complicated by the fact that the data
didn't exist until you used their services), targeted advertising, I'm not
sure what else there is.

It's easy to criticize things, but it's harder to come up with an alternative
system that would provide many of the same benefits. I'm not defending the
current legal and regulatory system that large corporations operate in. I
think they receive large amounts of corporate welfare from the government that
are harmful overall, but that's an economy wide problem, not one confined to
the tech industry. It also has more straightforward solutions: begin
eliminating some of the subsidies these businesses receive.

~~~
ModernMech
It's interesting that you've done the calculus on these same issues, and come
up with a completely different answer than me. I weighed free email etc.
against giving up personal data etc. and I came down decidedly on the side
that it's _not_ worth it. And because there aren't alternatives, I just don't
don't do some things anymore, wherever I can. That means no facebook. No
smartphone. No twitter. Not IG. No googling as much as I can. Sometimes I just
have to be fine with not knowing things that I could easily look up.

Maybe it's age? How old are you? Not to be that old guy (I'm not even old) but
I'm old enough to remember a time when I didn't have the internet, and I
didn't have a smart phone, and I didn't even have a computer. And life was...
well actually okay. It was fine. I got by day to day and I lived. Today,
anyone under 25, all they know is life with the Internet and smartphones. I
can't even begin to comprehend that worldview.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Mid 20s. The only social media I have is IG but I only follow people I know in
real life. I don't find FB worthwhile because it made me dislike many people I
know after seeing how they express some of their political opinions (on both
the left and right). The other ones just seem like wastes of time.

I still use Google regularly and I have a smartphone, but I would give up a
smartphone if there were a decent phone with email and google maps as built in
applications.

I agree that giving up personal data can be concerning for many people, but at
the same time, people don't want to pay for the services, so it's a catch-22.

------
paxys
Corporations have been "too powerful" in this country since its inception.
Public policy, culture, politics, style and all other aspects of daily life
have all been constantly influenced or outright driven by conglomerates in
media, banking, big oil, defense etc.

The only difference is that now tech, which had till recently been on the very
fringe of this, is starting to upset the established order.

~~~
viridian
American corporations have only been powerhouses capable of dominating the
policy aspect of public life for 95-110 years.

I know it seems pedantic, but it's annoying to watch people rewrite history.
The industrial revolution weakened the power base of a strong American
aristocracy, the majority of which had already been crippled after a brutal
civil war. These were the ashes upon which corporate America was built.

~~~
ameister14
America didn't really have an aristocracy. It had something that if left
unchecked would probably become an aristocracy, but it didn't exist in that
form yet.

~~~
tnecniv
Depends on your definition of aristocracy. Remember, you used to have land to
be able to vote.

~~~
ameister14
You're right, that did limit enfranchisement. That was gone well before the
Civil War, though. That would be an unusual definition of aristocracy, but I
get it. By the same token, we currently limit the vote to people over 18 that
are citizens. Are we currently aristocrats?

------
ronnier
I'm OK with giant tech companies. America isn't the only place in the world
and doesn't hold a monopoly on tech. If it's not American tech giants, it'll
be Chinese or some other countries tech giants.

~~~
dingo_bat
> America ... doesn't hold a monopoly on tech

Certainly seems that way.

~~~
mattlondon
Perhaps it only seems that way for household names like apple, Facebook and
google.

There are a lot of less well known technology giants elsewhere in the world.
E.g. ARM from the UK (now owned by Japanese giant SoftBank) has pretty much
total domination on the smartphone CPU market (licensing anyway - lots of
manufacturing is done by e.g. Samsung of Korea)

My mum will have heard of Facebook and Google, but I guarantee that she and
probably most other people's mother's have never ever heard of ARM.

Just one example - countless others.

~~~
wilsonnb2
What's another example? This one strikes me as unique because ARM just sells
their IP.

Sure, our mothers probably haven't heard of ARM but that's more like saying
they haven't heard of x86. Our mothers have almost definitely heard of Samsung
and Apple, both of whom manufacture a large number of ARM chips.

There's even a decent chance they've heard of a company like Qualcomm that's
not as well known as Apple or Samsung.

~~~
andy_boot
Foxconn, SAP ? These are good examples aren't they.

Edit: Not nvidia. Realised OP was asking for None-US companies

------
hexadecimal7e
The problems with tech companies are not that they are big, but people follow
them blindly.

These companies only work for making money and are not around to help people.

This other day a journalist asked a big computer game producing company why
they are selling in-game stuff to kids (like Overwatch). They refused to
answer. They are not around to help people.

A hospital in Tanzania was in dire need for an upgrade of there IT-system
connecting a X-ray machine to doctors for image analysis. They had no budget.
2 helpful guys from Europe searched the Webb for free software. On there free
time they built a system which they installed themselves. The big companies
are not around to help people.

~~~
wilsonnb2
In 2016, Google donated $167 million in cash and $1 billion in their own
products to charitable causes.

Microsoft - $135 million in cash, $922 million in product

Cisco - $41 million in cash, $245 million in product

AT&T - $112 million in cash, $7 million in product

Verizon - $56 million in cash, $32 million in product

While these companies are around primarily to make a profit, I'm sure that
their $460 million dollars in cash donations sure helped a lot of people. Not
to mention all the jobs they create (also helping people), the wealth they
generate for their shareholders (also helping people), and the individual
charitable donations of those shareholders.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/most-generous-companies-in-
am...](http://www.businessinsider.com/most-generous-companies-in-
america-2015-2016-6#23-verizon-communications-3)

~~~
fredley
A viewpoint: charity is power. These companies have control over where this
money goes, and are likely to spend more on things that make them look good,
or provide long term benefit to the company over things that don't.

Another approach might be to take the charity money away from the companies,
and have those funds distributed to worthy causes by a democratically
appointed body instead: giving the money to causes that benefit everyone, not
just the company's PR department. You could call this system 'taxation'.

A case study: Flint water. Nobody's done anything about it for _years_. Now
there's a PR opportunity so Elon's going to fix it. The people of Flint will
get drinkable water (hopefully) and Elon will get another PR lift. This
problem could have been fixed years ago (and perhaps should never even have
happened), but the people who decide when these big social problems get fixed
is no longer the people (almost all of whom think it's an unacceptable
travesty, especially in a rich, developed nation), but the billionaire class,
who require something back in return.

~~~
wilsonnb2
> A viewpoint: charity is power. These companies have control over where this
> money goes, and are likely to spend more on things that make them look good,
> or provide long term benefit to the company over things that don't.

They are more likely to spend it on things that make them look good, which has
absolutely nothing to do with my point that _these companies are helping
people_ , even if their primary goal is not to help people.

> Another approach might be to take the charity money away from the companies,
> and have those funds distributed to worthy causes by a democratically
> appointed body instead: giving the money to causes that benefit everyone,
> not just the company's PR department. You could call this system 'taxation'.

All of these companies are taxed, according to the rules set by the
democratically appointed body you mention. I don't understand why you included
this part of your comment.

> This problem could have been fixed years ago (and perhaps should never even
> have happened), but the people who decide when these big social problems get
> fixed is no longer the people (almost all of whom think it's an unacceptable
> travesty, especially in a rich, developed nation), but the billionaire
> class, who require something back in return.

Just so I have this straight - you're saying the reason that the people of
Flint haven't had their water problems fixed yet is because the billionaire
class only cares about getting something in return from such an action?

I'd like you to tell me what exactly you think should have been done in Flint
and how the billionaire class subverted the will of the American people by not
doing it.

~~~
Caillebotte
Yes, I agree they are helping people. But who are they helping? They don't
seem to be helping the little people like that Tanzanian hospital the way the
developers did who found a free software solution. It seems we weaponize
situations of desperate need in order to accomplish our own means. If these
companies truly cared for the people they are helping, they wouldn't even
bother with the PR side of it at all. Their help certainly makes a huge
difference, I agree, but intention is everything, and if they intend to aid
their own purposes, that is what will see the most benefit from their efforts.

~~~
wilsonnb2
> intention is everything

I'm sure the people that received Google's millions of dollars would disagree
with that statement.

> If these companies truly cared for the people they are helping, they
> wouldn't even bother with the PR side of it at all.

Why? Does getting good PR from helping someone diminish the help that said
person receives?

> if they intend to aid their own purposes, that is what will see the most
> benefit from their efforts.

I have not once disagreed with this statement - companies _primary_ goal is to
make a profit. However, they also provide a tremendous amount of help to those
who need it and I don't think people should dismiss that so easily.

> They don't seem to be helping the little people like that Tanzanian hospital
> the way the developers did who found a free software solution.

It's easier for us to grasp a situation in which a few developers help out a
few people who need it. It's not easy for us to parse "$150 million in
charitable donations" in the same way, but I assure you there are thousands of
"helping the little guy" stories you can craft out of $150 million.

------
paidleaf
They are powerful for sure, but I wouldn't say they are too powerful. When the
media or politicians can brow-beat tech giants into submitting to their
demands, you really can't say tech giants are too powerful. I'd say "too big
to [f|j]ail" banks or "too big to [f|j]ail" oil companies are too powerful
right now.

But tech giants have the potential of becoming too powerful as they
"collude/merge" with media and government. It's worrisome that giant techs are
now moving into news media and working so much government.

------
ascendantlogic
As someone old enough to remember when IBM seemed too huge to ever lose in the
market, along came Microsoft. Then when Microsoft felt like it was
unstoppable, along came Google and Amazon. Now those companies are reaching
the same terminal velocity and a new breed of companies will rise up and
dethrone them.

~~~
fjsolwmv
AT&T still dominates telephone service. Most phone companies are renamed Baby
Bells.

Facebook has the analytics information and wealth to buy any competitor.

IBM gave itself away to Microsoft when an exec handed Bill Gates a sweetheart
deal for DOS.

Microsoft is still the dominant force in its original industry (desktop
computing) which is still significant.

The Internet disrupted companies that weren't ready for it. Do you think
something new is coming alomg to replace the Internet?

Even so, when one giant replaces another, so what? What problem does that
solve? "When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers."

~~~
ascendantlogic
> The Internet disrupted companies that weren't ready for it. Do you think
> something new is coming alomg to replace the Internet?

Yes, this is the way of technology and it's happening faster and faster. One
of the biggest reasons Microsoft ended up on its back foot in the 2000's was
because it disregarded the threat of Linux, and woke up too late to the mobile
revolution. In all these cases there's hubris mixed with inertia and when the
landscape shifts these giants aren't paying attention.

------
aalleavitch
The problem isn’t that they’ve grown too powerful, it’s that they either
haven’t recognized their own power or have willfully rejected the
responsibility attached to it.

~~~
flukus
> or have willfully rejected the responsibility attached to it.

There is no responsibility attached to it, at least not legal responsibility.
Even that isn't enough for anyone that gets to powerful and beyond
enforcement.

The truly sad thing is that you expect them to act responsibly. Companies will
(and have) work children to death if it helps maximize output, if you expect
them to act benevolently then prepare for disappointment.

~~~
Y_Y
This is one of the central questions of our age.

In an ideal capitalist free market companies are almost necessarily amoral
(Friedmann doctrine ), they can only make choices based on profit. In real
life you have barriers to entry and PR concerns that let companies at least
pretend to waste some profit-making opportunities on doing good.

I don't know if the right answer is consumer unions, or benevolent government
regulation, or giving up and making do with what we have, but this discuss I
see on this issue seems so polarised (not unique) that progress will be hard
to come by.

~~~
annabellish
> This is one of the central questions of our age.

I think the question is what to do about it, not whether it's happening. We
have reams of evidence that it's happening, and "doing good" for PR reasons is
just more of the same - it's more important to look good than to be good, and
looking good without being good is more profitable and thus more desirable.

Unfortunately, because so much of our media runs in the same system, it can be
difficult to have a clear conversation on the topic.

~~~
daharmattan
You're right, the central question we are facing is how to structure our
society, what values, incentives we should use as its foundation.

The current (capitalist) system uses self interest and profit as an incentive,
and we see where that got us. We can mitigate some issues with tweaks like
regulation, but it's also valuable to ask more fundamental questions. Is there
a different incentive other than profit we can use? What are the effects on
society of the incentives we use? What values do we want to promote? How can
we do that?

The difficulty of having this complex and nuanced discussion shouldn't
discourage us from having it. We must find our way together.

------
ChuckMcM
Am I surprised that the New York times doesn't ask "Have the banking giants
grown too powerful?" No I am not. I am also not sure why the NYT feels
compelled to bash the Bay Area from time to time but whatever.

Do I think there should be more privacy reform? Yes. Do I think there should
be more banking reform? Yes. Do I think for a minute that the current state of
the world will persist for a decade? Not really.

~~~
neuromantik8086
> "Have the banking giants grown too powerful?"

The New York Times never asks this question because it doesn't make for news
and the answer has basically been the same since the emergence of banking
giants. Asking if banking is too powerful will always yield an affirmative,
and the discerning NYTimes reader will react with a justified, "No shit
Sherlock".

> I am also not sure why the NYT feels compelled to bash the Bay Area

The issue is cultural. Folks from the Bay Area tend to couch their money-
making schemes with nonsense about making the world a better place. Finance
workers in NYC have no need to sugarcoat what they do and are unabashedly
trying to make ludicrous amounts of money. In New York, calling people out on
their bullshit is deeply culturally ingrained, and the Bay Area is clearly
full of it. :. The NY Times gives its primary demographic what it wants.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Fair enough.

------
benologist
The tech giants have grown too profitable, at the expense of stuff they should
be doing like paying taxes, or hiring enough people to oversee click fraud, or
hire enough people to oversee counterfeit fraud, or hire enough people to
oversee how companies use highly personal data. They hire just enough people
to dodge taxes and somehow not be complicit in anything they directly profit
from.

------
dalbasal
This article is a bit meandering. Most of these are not really scale-specific
issues, or are but in a roundabout way.

Here's (imo) the most obvious reasons.

Political Power- We used to complain about Rupert Murdoch's power. Media and
journalism are a leg of democracy, so having a corporate oligopoly controlling
it was worrying. Zuck's influence is way bigger. There have already been a
handful of revolutions that started on FB, a dozen attempts at revolutions,
full scale coups and thousands of elections where fb played a bigger role than
any past media company. They didn't even notice this until it was Trump and/or
stuff FB-ers cared about personally.

(1) This is too much power. (2) FB are pretending this has nothing to do with
them. They don't care about journalistic integrity, or feel it applies to
them. They let anyone with a credit card sign up and run political ads.
extremely irresponsible, at best.

Monopoly - Thiel put it best, startups are about monopoly-or-bust. Uber wants
to be the only ride app. YouTube the only free video site. FB the only
networking app.

The pattern is often: Innovate. Win. Then milk it with ads and spying and/or
stop innovating. YouTube for example, it's nowhere near as good as it could
be, but why bother.

Data - data gets different qualities as it grows. A lot of the creepiness of
targeted ads have more to do with how many people's data they have, not how
much data they have about you. It locks in monopolies. It's also the newest
category of "IP," which is (imo, but not gonna support it here) a current and
future driver of wealth disparity.

We're now (definitely in Europe) in a period where the public/legislators are
very keen on regulating. This will likely lock these monopolies further into
place. 4 out of 5 times, regulation is incumbent friendly.

------
bla2
The nytimes publishes an article like this every few months. It's not like
they're impartial in this area -- tech took news's audience. Don't give this
attention it doesn't deserve.

------
olliej
Collectively all large corps in America have too much power, so i’ll assume we
mean “more power than the other corporations”

I’m that case I’ll believe that they’re “too powerful” when a tech company
mismanages itself to bankruptcy and gets a bail out from tax payer funds. Or
when other companies are forced by the government to use (and pay more for)
software and tech from a specific company or group of companies (maybe
software from “defense” contractors counts?).

Until then i’ll continue to believe that banks, coal, and oil companies have
too much power.

------
RestlessMind
It is a particularly dangerous moment for American Tech giants.

In the US, liberals / Democrats hate them because: Tech is the biggest reason
behind the decline of existing publishing business model and people in those
industries lean liberal, Tech's contribution to rising inequality (due to
automation etc), very apparent gentrification by Tech workers in places like
SF / NYC.

Conservatives / Republicans hate Tech because of its perceived liberal bias -
see Facebook controversy in 2016 about suppression of Conservative topics, or
Eric Schmidt campaigning for Hillary, or overwhelming majority of left-leaning
people in these companies.

Apart from US, other countries (eg. EU) hates Tech because they are foreign
companies who are blind to local cultural sensitivities (eg. privacy, right to
be forgotten, free speech to a near-absolute degree), and also the reasons why
US left hates Tech (see above).

Countries like China hate US Tech co's maybe because geopolitical reasons and
CCP wants to nurture local Tech giants instead of rolling out a red carpet to
American Tech.

American Tech giants should really be nervous.

------
CM30
They certainly have from the perspective of a website creator or business
owner. If you're running a business (or hell, any service in general), then
you have to either play by Google and Facebook's rules or risk being rendered
totally irrelevant and inaccessible to large portions of the population.

If your company's website is banned from Google, that can effectively be game
over for the company, especially if you can't get reconsidered. Same if they
move into your industry in many cases.

------
darepublic
OP should include the full NYT title that answers it's own question

------
Gigablah
Have the news media giants grown too powerful?

~~~
slipkorts
Oh yeah, sure. Most of them are owned by the same people.

------
confounded
Unless you work for one, or have founded a company purpose-built for
acquisition, I don’t see how the answer can be ‘No’.

For entrepreneurs, the monopolistic stranglehold these companies have, make
them impossible to beat with a better product. The best possible outcome is
acquisition. You may join, but never beat them.

For Free Software hackers, the giants turning away from open standards, and
towards DRM and abuse of the CFAA, is chilling.

For a free society, surveillance capitalism needs to die.

If you have ambitions in life beyond RSUs and a regular massage, yes they are
too powerful.

~~~
wilsonnb2
> For entrepreneurs, the monopolistic stranglehold these companies have, make
> them impossible to beat with a better product. The best possible outcome is
> acquisition. You may join, but never beat them.

Isn't this exactly what everyone said about IBM until Microsoft came along,
and then what everyone said about Microsoft until Google/Apple/Facebook/Amazon
came along?

Why is this time different?

~~~
dralley
Microsoft only stopped being a destructive force of nature after the
Department of Justice gave them a kick to the face.

------
segmondy
There's always someone that's powerful. If it's not tech, it's media or
finance or someone else.

------
keevie
Fun exception to Betteridge's law of headlines
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

------
fipple
LOL. What's next. "Have opioids been overprescribed?"

------
HumanDrivenDev
Looks like old media is feeling threatened.

~~~
Kurtz79
You are being downvoted but, regardless of whether the argument has merit (it
does IMHO), it is a fact that traditional media companies have been negatively
affected by the rise of the new tech giants, and can be scarcely objective in
the matter.

Some of the biggest support to the recent copyright law rejected by the EU,
came from traditional news outlets.

~~~
HumanDrivenDev
I'll charitably assume I'm being down-voted more because of how short and
dismissive my remark was than anything else. Truth be told that's all I think
the likes of the NYT deserves. Even the POTUS calls it "Failing New York
Times".

------
sqdbps
I really don't understand the self destructive desire to domestically pile on
our tech firms while they are being shutout of the Chinese market by the
government there which apparently appreciates the importance of these firms so
much as to support their local companies financially, politically, and
intellectually and on the other front the EU is using every tool at its
disposal to hamstring US tech firms.

Some comments here and elsewhere indicate that some pitchforks wielding folks
are conflating this issue with the outcomes of recent political contests, the
source of this confusion is poor-old media companies that keep feigning
powerlessness while conveniently pointing the finger at business rivals.

~~~
s73v3r_
I don't believe it's self-destructive to hold our companies accountable for
what they do. Many of us also agree with what the EU is doing, and wish our
government would get up off it's ass and do the same thing.

~~~
sqdbps
The EU is targeting US firms as a protectionist measure, you can read
transcripts of their politicians' grandstanding and parroting local lobbyist
to get the picture, they're not shy about it.

~~~
s73v3r_
They're targeting those firms because they're the ones running roughshod over
users.

------
s2g
Yes, far too powerful. Both in society and within the tech sector.

Break 'em up!

------
ionised
That's a question we should have been asking a few years ago.

------
wpdev_63
It's interesting google maps came out with a new pricing model as mapbox
gained popularity. It became more expensive and made the market easier for
mapbox. Usually google would offer a cheaper, more competitive product but
this wasn't the case.

------
JustSomeNobody
Yes. But we have to be careful here. Investors want every quarter of every
company they invest in to be better than the previous quarter. They don't care
about your 5 year goals or your 10 year goals. They want returns now.
Companies do what they can to make that happen. If we say this is just a Tech
problem, we're wrong. Tech is just where most of the money has flown because,
dare I say, it's relatively easy money.

------
kodablah
Yet more pointless anti-tech drivel. I wish HN had a downvote option for
articles (though I know some use the flagging feature for that). The cycle:
news domain hosts newsless anti-tech article, people here and elsewhere say
"yeah!", site gets clicks, narrative steered as intended, repeat tomorrow. We
get it, many here and mass media are against big tech, can we just wait for
news or at least unique perspectives before upvoting?

~~~
sctb
> _Please don 't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is
> spam or off-topic, flag it. ... If you flag something, please don't also
> comment that you did._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
kodablah
To clarify my point, I don't believe it is spam, off-topic, or flaggable. I
just disagree with the frequency across the spectrum. Not specific to HN so,
granted, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned HN in my comment.

