
If 'Big Tech' Is an Antitrust Problem, Why Are We Ignoring Telecom? - fyoving
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190603/11293142321/if-big-tech-is-huge-antitrust-problem-why-are-we-ignoring-telecom.shtml
======
rayiner
By any measure, telecom is a fairy concentrated market that creates antitrust
concerns, relative to many other industries. But the comparison to telecom
only highlights the market concentration in tech. There are four major
wireless carriers, none with more than about a third of the market. Google has
90% of the search market. There are just two viable mobile OS competitors, and
Android has 75% market share (50% in the US). Even within a given market,
there is more competition in telecom. The big four cellular companies are
nationwide. Verizon is just the sixth largest wireline carrier, has less than
40% market share across its FiOS footprint. That does not mean that telecom
(or day health insurance) is a highly competitive market. It’s not. But at
least search and mobile is even less competitive.

It also matters what is happening going forward. Even in areas with no wired
competition, wireless (cellular and satellite) exerts competitive pressure.
15% of high income households have abandoned wired internet for cellular only,
and that number is growing. (There are more cellular-only households by a
large margin than ones that use something other than Google search.)
Meanwhile, there is no viable competition in sight for Google Search or
Android.

~~~
orthecreedence
> There are four major wireless carriers, none with more than about a third of
> the market.

Can that be said for wired internet carriers? And can that be said at the
municipal level and not just the national level? My point is that in many
areas, people generally don't have a choice in who their internet provider is.
So if you look nationally, yes, the coverage is split between several
companies, but at the local levels the areas serviced are often carved up such
that there are local monopolies.

~~~
rayiner
Obviously there is more market concentration in telecom than say in frozen
yogurt. But telecoms face competition (from DSL, cellular, and satellite) in
almost every market. Comcast, for example, has 47% broadband market share even
in its own footprint:
[https://www.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/news/2019/04/24/wha...](https://www.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/news/2019/04/24/what-
to-expect-for-comcast-s-q1-2019-earnings.html). They also face competition
across local markets. Verizon followed Google Fiber to the $70-80 for gigabit
price point, even though it competed in no markets with Google.

~~~
esoterae
I have comcast service in one of the most dense urban environments in the US.

I have no alternative. I am being bled dry because there is no competition of
similar service.

Please, if you're going to compare things at least stick to fruit. This is
apples and basketballs.

~~~
rayiner
50% of folks in Comcast’s footprint don’t subscribe. Those folks aren’t going
without Internet access. For a significant portion of the market, those other
alternatives are viable. That creates competition, though obviously less
competition than an equivalent competitor. (I’ve been lucky to mostly live in
FiOS territory, and now I’ve got two fiber lines to my house. But back when I
lived in Wilmington, I had just Comcast. Instead of subscribing, we used a
T-Mobile hotspot the whole time. It was fine. With 5G, that phenomenon is only
going to increase.)

~~~
esoterae
And what % of people that actually _have_ alternatives like FiOS (unlike me)
don't subscribe to comcast? Saying 50% of subscribers in Comcast's footprint
is prevaricating about the bush AF. Why, you ask? If 50% of potential Comcast
subscribers have an alternative to Comcast, that would mean 100% of people
with an alternative are taking advantage of the free market. Which would mean
that 100% of the people remaining are likely forced to subscribe through a
lack of access to alternatives.

I don't even have working voice cell coverage at my house, much less data.
Again, almost certainly due to a an entrenched monopoly limiting the market
outreach of competition, and thereby obviating the requirement that they
themselves perform adequately enough to retain customers.

Q.E.D.

~~~
rayiner
For your hypothetical to hold, you’d expect to see some providers with near
100% market share. (You’d also have to assume Comcast builds and maintains
infrastructure to millions of households in areas where it has no market
share.) Who are they? FiOS’s market share is 40% in its footprint. AT&T’s
fiber is around 25% now, hoping to reach 50% by 2023.

The only other way to get your math to work out is to assume that only a very
small portion of Comcast’s footprint has no other cable/fiber competitor.

As to your cell situation—what mechanism do you think creates this
competition-limiting monopoly? And why doesn’t that same mechanism apply to
say my house (in the DC exurbs), where all of the big 4 have a decent signal?
(Or the majority of the country, where at least three providers have
coverage?)

------
_bxg1
I would say the strongest example is wired telecom, which may not be a
national monopoly but is certainly a local monopoly across nearly the whole
country. The way the companies divvy up territory to avoid competition is
probably what keeps U.S. prices so much higher than, say, Europe. I wonder if
a case could be made for it being a cartel.

But yes, cellular and satellite providers have started to provide a saving
grace of disruption in that market. We'll see if it ends up being enough.

~~~
treis
Look at profit margins though. Apple and Facebook are consistently 30%+ and
Google is 20%+. Verizon, Comcast, and the rest of the telecoms are in the low
to mid teens or worse. That's pretty close to the S&P 500 average margin.

So while it appears that wired telecom is a monopoly they don't make money
like monopolies. Compare Google Fiber with Google Plus. Google had people
literally begging them to put Fiber in but backed off because they couldn't
make (enough) money. Plus was a hugely important project for them but they
canceled it because they couldn't beat Facebook.

We've seen major tech companies take aim at the monopoly/duopoly product of a
rival and they've all failed:

Microsoft poured billions into Bing, Maps and mobile for little market share

Google couldn't dent Facebook with Plus

Amazon and Facebook's phones fell flat

~~~
creato
> Verizon, Comcast, and the rest of the telecoms are in the low to mid teens
> or worse. That's pretty close to the S&P 500 average margin.

I would want to see the margins for just operating high speed internet
service. I suspect their overall margins are lower because their financial
picture is clouded by things like cable TV and content costs. A big reason why
telecoms suck is precisely because if you just want high speed internet, they
force you to buy all their bullshit content as well (for me, it's cheaper to
buy internet + cable TV than just internet!), _and_ they make it hard to buy
that content any other way. The main action I'd like to see taken against
telecoms is to force them to spin off their content businesses (and they never
should have been allowed to buy them in the first place).

~~~
rayiner
The opposite is true. Video service enables companies to charge enough to
justify broadband deployment. That’s why Google and Verizon offer video over
their fiber service even though they don’t really have their own content.
Verizon won’t expand FiOS into Baltimore because it can’t get a television
franchise from the city without agreeing to onerous build-out requirements.
Without video revenues FiOS isn’t really viable.

~~~
creato
Google Fiber charged $70/mo for internet, and $130/mo for cable TV [1].
Standalone TV streaming services are also around $50/mo (e.g. hulu [2],
youtube live TV packages [3]).

Something doesn't add up. If it costs $50/mo to get cable TV content, why does
it cost me $-10/mo with comcast?

1\.
[https://www.tennessean.com/story/money/tech/2016/04/11/googl...](https://www.tennessean.com/story/money/tech/2016/04/11/google-
fiber-move-signals-higher-prices-plans/82917614/)

2\. [https://www.hulu.com/live-tv](https://www.hulu.com/live-tv)

3\. [https://tv.youtube.com](https://tv.youtube.com)

------
moosey
The regulatory systems in the US since Reagan have been anemic, and if we
believe in effective business competition there are probably very few
industries that would have a good time if a new regulatory environment were
put in place that is more... effective? I can't find the right word because
I'm biased - I strongly believe in collectivism and strong regulatory
environments.

When I look at major industries: social media (sadly, IMO), telecom, health
care, transportation, military, and more; what I see are industries that need
regulation in order to meet the needs of society, but that is based on my
point of view of the world. My guess is that the folks with capital and data,
and thus power, view the situation very differently, and are more focused on
their own needs than those of a more nebulous society that has needs. I
believe that this can be seen in the practices of businesses throughout the
United States.

So, are "we" ignoring telecom? No, that headline is aggravating. Why isn't it
"Antitrust issues in Telecom"? Because society has been trained to be enraged.
Why? Because it serves those who already have power, and they disagree with me
about how regulation should work.

~~~
Loughla
It's the same across all government. You hollow out the function of actual,
substantive work through 'necessary' budget cuts - like actual funding for IRS
audits, any form of environmental regulation, or just education in general.

Then when the low-hanging fruit is all those agencies can pick, which happen
to have the largest impact on middle- to low-income families, it gives more
fodder to cut and gut the agencies.

~~~
moosey
Under the current regime (post-Reagan is what I mean), there are government
bodies that still receive lots of money, and those, as you say, that are
getting hollowed. The main thing that I can point to that says that it is
corrupt is the fact that white collar crime is largely ignored in the interest
of much smaller fish.

There are government agencies that I'd like to see gutted, though, like the
prison system, the support of the weapons manufacturing industry by our
military which I calculate as grotesquely unecessary, etc. There are others
that disagree with me strongly on this issue. I'm not right, just opinionated.

------
Mountain_Skies
I've yet to see a telecom company tell anyone who they are allowed to
communicate with or deny anyone service because they don't approve of their
ideological views. That might only be tangential to antitrust issues but
engaging in overreach is a good way to get the public against you which in
turn makes it much easier for the government to come after you.

~~~
fzeroracer
And yet I've had to deal with telecom companies placing incredibly low data
caps, overcharging for bullshit reasons, throttling consumer bandwidth when
visiting certain sites or using certain protocols and more.

If Facebook decided to ban me tomorrow for whatever reason, I still have
access to the rest of the internet. If my ISP decided to charge another $100 a
month to access the internet, there would be nothing I could do to fight it.

You'd have to make an argument that site access is a right, which throws out
moderating a platform for abuse or spam entirely.

------
w8rbt
You should have seen it when it was just AT&T.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System)

------
schnable
Not a full defense, but telecom is already heavily regulated while tech
companies are not regulated at all.

~~~
fatjokes
That's a pretty strong argument against regulation then, given what a terrible
consumer experience it is.

~~~
ripdog
It's just bad regulation, performed by incompetent or corrupt governments.
Down here in NZ we have excellent telecoms regulation performed by competent
government.

Specifically, copper/fibre last mile lines are owned by companies which are
prevented by law from acting as ISPs, and similarly required to wholesale
lease access to their lines to any ISP which wants to use them, at a regulated
price (or lower).

The result is a hyper-competitive ISP market where I can choose from dozens of
ISPs (almost) anywhere in the country. Combined with a few hundred million in
government investment, and I can get gigabit fibre almost everywhere in the
country from a world-class ISP.

I have basically no complaints about my ISP, and it's all thanks to government
regulation.

------
lokimedes
Economics 101 states that wasteful duplication of infrastructure is one of the
few acceptable exceptions from the free market thesis. Natural monopolies
should nevertheless be regulated to avoid suboptimal services.

What’s more interesting is the recent suggestions of seeing industries with a
monopolistic business model such as social media as natural monopolies.
Perhaps we should regulate Facebook rather than argue for breaking up
telecoms?

~~~
Can_Not
My street literally has a minimum of 6 companies that provide garbage
collection services to me and my neighbors.

------
thrower123
I don't think anybody ignores that telecoms is a big monopoly problem; people
know intimately that they have one or if they are lucky, two real options in
any given market.

We busted up Ma Bell once long ago, and it has just coalesced back together.
The capital costs and infrastructure tend towards it being a natural monopoly,
so I don't think that we'll reasonably see a million telecom flowers bloom
without putting the finger on the scale heavily.

Software is so much more ephemeral, and we have a much healthier oligopoly of
big players. Even the sick old man of computing, IBM, is doing better than
Time Warner did trying to compete in cable.

~~~
C1sc0cat
No the local monopoly was never busted - just use LLU

------
gerdesj
ENUM anyone?
[https://www.nominet.uk/search/enum](https://www.nominet.uk/search/enum) \-
ha! (There used to be a page on the Nominet site about ENUM but now the ITU
doc:
[https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/inr/enum/Documents/ENUM/ENUM%20...](https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/inr/enum/Documents/ENUM/ENUM%20Approvals-2018-12-01.pdf)
can't even spell Nominet correctly)

I should explain: In simple terms, ENUM allows you to turn a phone number into
a SRV record that points at a PBX via a DNS lookup. The ITU allocates the
zones to registrars, the zones neatly map to country codes - its a great idea.

However, as you can imagine this is not very popular with big telecoms who are
used to charging by the second/minute and location by distance which is
obviously bollocks when you turn a circuit switched network into a packet
switched one that no longer routes calls via satellites to cross the Atlantic
(eg). OK pricing and tech for "POTS" has come a long way since I were a lad
but it is still a nice little earner over letting us lot do our own thing.

You can also imagine that Google, Facebook int al would also suffer a
collective coronary should us lot be able to do our own comms without them.

I'm fairly sure that you (for a given value of you) can't remember the last
time you used a "landline" but if ENUM was available it might have been a few
minutes ago and not logged externally and charged as though it was 1970 _sigh_

------
barbecue_sauce
Telecom is probably one of the industry groups lobbying for antitrust
legislation/investigation against Google and its ilk.

------
Reedx
In one sentence: It's not as much of a threat to traditional media, therefore
we don't hear about it as much.

------
40acres
I think this is a poor take. Since Bork, anti-trust regulation has been an
afterthought in Washington. The fact that DOJ, the same agency that bloodied
Microsoft, is looking in another big tech company is very big news. DOJ
lawyers aren't dumb, digging into BigTech will bring a lot of bodies to the
surface and the culture of anti-trust regulation will change, eventually
BigTeleco and BigAg will be next.

------
untog
Who is "we", exactly? No-one is ignoring telecom monopolies, it's something
people complain about all the damn time. Spoiler alert: it's because the
telecom industry has spent decades embedding itself at the top levels of
organizations like the FCC, and it's gotten worse since the arrival of the
Trump administration. Is that good? No. Should we change it? Yes. Does any of
this have anything to do with regulating big tech? No.

This stuff just feels like whataboutism to me. There's no reason we can't
tackle both big tech _and_ telecom. If wait turns then the telecom industry
will just say "what about other utilities!". Those utilities will say "what
about the defense industry!" or whatever the hell.

"What about these bad guys!!" just feels like an attempt to deflect attention
away from tech.

~~~
stvswn
It's not really, because the two (telecom and big tech) are in a fight for
dominance and focusing on one will benefit the other. It's natural to wonder
about the influence of telecom when the Attorney General, under whom the DOJ's
investigation is being conducted, was the general counsel of GTE/Verizon for
14 years and then served on Time Warner's board until last year, helping them
to merge with AT&T. If you assume the antitrust division of the DOJ has
limited resources, and that they were until recently focused on telecom, it's
not "whataboutism" to wonder what's driving the abrupt shift to tech.

~~~
stvswn
and to be explicit, the "we" is the FTC and the antitrust division of the DOJ.

------
zadkey
Because "Regulatory Capture" (google it) and because they have better
lobbyists and have been greasing politicians for a much longer time.

------
jjn2009
I was forced this morning to have Comcast charge me $40 to install a cable to
set up internet at my new place by an authorized technician. I hate Comcast SO
much, and from what I can tell I don't seem to have another option, supposedly
AT&T but the speeds are slow and their website says my apartment is not in
service area.

~~~
criddell
The quality of AT&T's service is going to vary depending on where you are.

I have a gigabit connection from them that I pay $60 / month for (they lowered
the price when I tried to leave). It's the fastest internet connection I've
ever had.

~~~
pixelbath
It's a moot point if where you live does not allow anybody but a single
exclusive provider for internet, which is nearly every apartment in the US.

------
airstrike
Comparing software businesses with traditionally asset-heavy business such as
wired telecom is disingenuous.

I hate Telecom monopolies as much as the next guy, but the comparison is so
inaccurate to the point of being useless. What's next? Comparing 'Big Tech' to
Utilities?

------
grellas
'Big Tech', unlike Telecom, has made itself friendless, having alienated
pretty much everybody along the political spectrum, and that is a dangerous
place to me with a field subject to such legal vagaries as antitrust law is. I
am not talking here about lobbyists or about legal technicalities but rather
about the visceral reaction we all can have as human beings to the basic
question: do I sympathize or even relate to these people? At inception,
Google, FB, et al. were seen as innovative, dynamic, helpful to average people
and the like. Sadly, those days are long past and all too many people are
instead inclined to reach for the nearest garlic clove in hopes of warding
them off.

------
yeahitslikethat
Because telecom companies' monopolies are easy to understand. Google doesn't
have to run wires to _everyone 's_ house. In fact, they tried and failed. It's
a lot harder than building a website.

~~~
wvenable
They are easy to understand and the harm that they do to consumers is very
real and easy to measure.

~~~
yeahitslikethat
Internet should be classed as a utility and regulated as such. Infrastructure
and bits should be separate.

------
rolltiide
In the book "The Chickenshit Club"

There is some psychology amongst the regulators that results in them not
fining or sanctioning large players because they don't want to make them go
bankrupt and further consolidate the market.

You can have a monopoly in America, as long as you don't do anticompetitive
things to get there, and don't do anticompetitive things while you are there
from within your company. (protip: the trick is to change the laws and
regulations to favor advantages you have and make it impossible for new
entrants)

------
fiatjaf
Checkout [https://althea.org/](https://althea.org/) if you're interested in
decentralized internet structure.

This is NOT vaporware. The theory behind it is simple and solid. It works and
is happening right now. The fact that is uses shitcoins doesn't make it a
scandal or get-rich-quick scheme.

------
fatjokes
Because Big Tech siphons ad dollars from traditional media? I'm being glib, of
course, but I can't help but wonder if that isn't one big reason.

------
chantelles
Because there is not antitrust investigation there is only making the 4
pillars come to heal and become part of the NSA.

------
pjc50
What happened to local loop unbundling? Is the problem that it didn't also
apply to "cable"?

~~~
jessaustin
The "problem" was that ILECs never followed the rules and regulators never
punished them for that. If a CLEC wanted to add a customer, they got a
schedule for 3 weeks, even though the ILEC would do it in less than a week if
the customer were signing up with them. Anyway, the schedule was also a
fiction, because the ILEC would come up with half a dozen reasons to delay it
to 5 weeks. We're not talking about a technician visiting a customer's house.
We're talking about a couple of switches thrown in a central office, an
operation that would take less than a minute. How could anyone attract new
customers in such a situation? That is why all CLECs went bust or were
acquired for pennies on the dollar.

In other nations, with functioning regulation, unbundling was considered
unworkable so they required that a separate entity would own the local loop.

------
jtmb
If I were more cynical, I would say that the antitrust concerns are being
focused on in big tech in part due to the perception of anti-conservative bias
or de-platforming, and the telecoms, other than in the case of owning CNN,
have no such perception associated with them.

------
drawkbox
Telcos and ISPs are the bigger threat by far in a fixed local monopoly
physical market that is hard to enter.

Telecom/ISPs are afraid of antitrust, being labeled a utility and competition,
they work overtime to throw the blame onto Big Tech starting way back with net
neutrality and Netflix share of the market. It wasn't Netflix using the data
it was the users. Since then ISPs have been funding mud slinging against Big
Tech so they can compete with them on ads by removing privacy protections and
content so they removed net neutrality against the will of everyone [1].

Maybe 5G will shake up the telcos and ISPs controls they have bribed to put in
place using regulatory capture. The attack on Big Tech is partially funded by
them just like oil companies pushed anti-nuclear energy along with opposition
to green tech. Big Oil funded many of the anti-nuclear campaigns, probably
even had some sabotage involved [2].

ISPs aren't even using the market to get ahead with good products like Big
Tech, they are using bribes and regulations that keep them in their false
monopolies and fixed markets.

ISPs share fixed local monopoly markets by putting one good ISP and a bunch of
smaller ones that don't compete like a Game of Thrones.

FCC reports find almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds, even at
25Mbps, 43 percent of the US had zero ISPs or just one [3]. For a modern
broadband innovative market this is unacceptable, there are industries of the
future that rely on fast network we can't even get going due to the feet
dragging and rent-seeking local monopolies of the ISPs/telcos.

The one time innovators, the ISPs/telcos, have become local monopolies
directly harming innovation and network growth, they now have data caps, net
neutrality add-ons (like Cox Elite Gamer), content options and privacy
protections removed to discourage and reward broadband providers for NOT
growing but nickel and diming people [1].

I remember in the 90s when broadband, cable, ISPs, telcos were innovative and
the leaps from landline to other sources was amazing. They were innovative
then, run by engineers and product people. Now they are rent seekers, holding
back innovation, run by HBS style MBAs where everything is a resource and
every dime extracted with minimal reasons to innovate or expand without rent-
seeking controls in place.

Imagine if water, electricity or other utilities were this toll road like,
we'd live in less quality of life.

The network is a utility and platform to innovate and build on, not extract
the value and slow innovation

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/fcc-announces-plan-
aba...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/fcc-announces-plan-abandon-net-
neutrality-and-isp-privacy)

[2]
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-
fossil-fuel-interests-bankrolling-the-anti-nuclear-energy-
movement/#7bf1c5587453)

[3] [https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2018/02/fcc-r...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2018/02/fcc-report-finds-almost-no-broadband-competition-
at-100mbps-speeds/)

------
kakkksaknmdm
I can invest some money right now and become a local ISP. Unless I'm ready to
sink $500 billion, I cannot be Google.

This is how big of a problem it is. I would recommend any founder to delay
startups and let anti trust probes and hopefully splits happen. Otherwise what
happened to Snap, will happen to you.

------
pnw_hazor
Telecoms are not ignored, compared to Big Tech they are highly regulated.

------
bryanrasmussen
Well to most people the internet is Big Tech. And the big tech internet is
arguably corrosive. The only thing Telecom does is hinder people from getting
more internet cheaper, faster.

Conclusion: Big Telecom is a net good.

------
bryanrasmussen
actually though, if you break up Big Tech who will have the money to pay
Telecom for preferential broadband access?

------
tzs
Telecom is a different kind of problem, and it is not clear that antitrust can
effectively address it. From a comment of mine a couple days ago when someone
here raised a similar question:

> Wouldn't it make more sense to break up broadband ISP monopolies first?

Probably not for the Department of Justice. Some problems with that approach:

1\. If you are trying to address the issue of limited choice in ISPs, I don't
see how breaking them up addresses that. If you split an ISP that has a
monopoly in a state, say, into separate ISPs for, say, each county...you've
just gone from having one monopoly to having several monopolies. The limited
choice is because there is only one cable coming into my house, and splitting
up the company that owns that cable doesn't change that.

Addressing that probably requires something like making the last mile data
transport a regulated utility that ISPs operate on top of. That would probably
require Congressional action and a new President to do nationwide or to allow
states to do individually.

2\. Competition among ISPs in a region can vary dramatically city to city, and
even neighborhood to neighborhood. I've not extensively researched this so
maybe this is wrong, but the impression I've gotten is that an ISP's prices in
a region tend to be pretty similar between those places within the region
where they are the only choice, and those places within the region where there
are alternatives with similar performing alternatives. That could make it hard
to show that the ISP is abusing its monopoly in those parts of its territory
where it does not have competition.

3\. Aside from rural areas that only have DSL via the phone company, in most
places there are multiple ISPs available. It's pretty common to have both
cable and DSL, and in many cities there is also a fiber option. There's also
wireless options, ranging from the regular consumer service of AT&T, Sprint,
T-Mobile, Verizon, and the various MVNOs that are built on those networks, and
many places also have wireless available that is not based on the cellular
networks.

You might argue that, say, cellular wireless is not really a viable option to
Comcast or Charter or whoever the cable company is in a given area, due to the
vast difference in speed. But you will have to actually make the argument. You
won't be able to just say that they speed difference makes them different
markets. You'll have to actually look at how people are using these various
services and show that they really are not comparable.

I think that the factors in #2 and #3 make it almost impossible to win an
antitrust case against a major ISP as a whole. The DoJ would have to bring
smaller cases alleging monopolization in specific regions, tailored to the
specific way the factors in #2 and #3 play out in that region.

Having to do this region by region, or even city by city in some regions,
would make this a very long, expensive pursuit. (And where they win, there is
still the question of whether or not there is an effective remedy they can
apply).

Thus, it is probably better for the DoJ to leave this issue to Congress to
deal with via legislation.

~~~
pessimizer
Getting individual Congressmen on your side is no cheaper than lawsuits by
region. I fear there's no hope with the weakness of our current institutions -
"reform" has been synonymous with cutting the scope and budget of regulatory
agencies since Carter.

------
ixtli
Spoilers: it's because our regulatory, legislative, and judicial
infrastructure exists to defend monied interests. We're incapable of taking
collective action that reduces private property accumulation, so no monopoly
busting.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Google has been the largest spender in DC for a couple years now, I believe.

~~~
jonas21
I don't think that's true.

[https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2019&inde...](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2019&indexType=s)

[https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2018&inde...](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2018&indexType=s)

[https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2017&inde...](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2017&indexType=s)

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ocdtrekkie
2019 is far from a complete year.

In both 2017 and 2018, Alphabet is the first listed corporation[0], which is
probably the reason I see the claim made, most of the rest are associations.

[0]If you ignore BC/BS, which is a "federation of 36 independent companies",
though that is largely a way to deal with the law requiring health insurance
be in-state. If you want to, I'd accept saying Alphabet is the second
corporation on the list, if we're being real.

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diveanon
I don't think whataboutism is a valid argument against antitrust regulations
for big tech.

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microdrum
Because even Comcast, the most evil of the telecom companies, doesn't put out
a web browser that seeks to permanently entrench its ad business. In fact, it
lets me use any browser I want.

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Rooster61
> In fact, it lets me use any browser I want

...to connect to the gateway they specify, and pull reams of data from with
nary a bat of an eye from Washington.

~~~
microdrum
But, again, they don't seem to use Comcast Business Layer A to entrench
Comcast Business Layer B. They could put a tax on every call to Stripe API if
they wanted. They don't. The worst thing they've done is throttle Netflix
(very bad) and the market spoke and they were shamed publicly.

