For some weird reason, outlinks are to be avoided, because it's seen as "leaving your site". In a store front, I can see that making sense. In a site to provide information... not so much.
No, not in my experience. They usually have less external ads but a lot of other cruft is still there.
Enshittification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) is getting so bad, I'd be willing to pay for sites that actually work. So far, paywall offers are just to remove external ads and that's only part of what I want. The rest of what I want is for the fucking site to actually work. For example, both Google and Amazon search have been seriously degraded and de-featured in recent years and it's been done very intentionally and systematically to optimize for their ad or sales revenue.
I suspect this degradation has crept deeper into their stacks than just at the top layer where it could be easily turned off with a flag and sold as a paywall upgrade.
If You leave the website, your eyes won't catch a headline that's on the side that you might also click, spending more time on your website. Which translates to more money.
I find this to be the case with most primary sources, not just for court cases. A couple days ago, an American WWII bomb exploded at a Japanese airport and the article linked on HN didn't even show or link the video.
Many popular podcasts would show the video, or pull up fact-checking in real time. If that's what you mean by "newer media" I would say it's 10x better.
Reuters is legacy media, hence why I mentioned legacy media.
Linking the publishing source is needed too. So many videos get reposted and mislabeled.
Like basically any rocket attack I assume happened in like 2006 and between completely different belligerents than whatever a post claims at this point
Video podcasts have been around a long time. RSS has video containers, and there were a growing number of video-based shows delivered that way before YouTube took over.
Well nobody asked me before changing the meaning! And by the way, a “selfie” can only have one person in it, and a “video” is something on MTV. Don’t get me started on “hack.”
I happened to come across her on 60 Minutes a couple of weeks ago, and that interview seemed awkward and sound-bitey to me. Thinking that she just might not be great at short-form segments I dug a little deeper and found an awesome long-form interview that she did with the Council on Foreign Relations. I highly recommend this to get a feel for what she is actually like as a policy person. She really impressed me.
I don't know if I accept Khan's framing of, even though I haven't won any cases I have scared off potential mergers and that is a win. I think the US already leans too heavily on tying everything up in courts forever.
Yes, Khan has been a disaster for the FTC. Grossly overreaching, media grandstanding and then quickly losing in court in not-even-close rulings is not some kind of win.
Don't fall for the Silicon Valley propaganda that things are on the downswing because the FTC is not allowing mergers or acquisitions. Plenty of both of those have happened this year. DirectTV is in the process of acquiring Dish Network and SlingTV which is one of the largest acquisitions of the year and should alone perish the thought that mergers aren't happening.
The claim that there are less mergers happening is from Khan not Silcon Valley.
“Sometimes, you know, the companies decide that they’re going to abandon the merger,” Khan said. Stahl asked if abandoning a merger amid the FTC’s scrutiny was a win, to which Khan said, “That’s right.”
https://legal-mag.com/ftcs-lina-khan-defends-merger-and-acqu...
The FTC has succeeded at a lot of things that just aren't very interesting to report on. I'd recommend reading through FTC press releases. They generally release a statement whenever a major action is started and resolved. By my count in the past year or so the FTC was involved in at least 12 successful anti-monopoly actions (I counted modified mergers, killed mergers, and divestments).
The most consequential merger win was probably the NVIDIA/ARM merger that died under FTC litigation.
Not GP. I would say that her effectiveness is both in Fire and Motion [1], while one wants more Fire, before the status quo was not only no fire, but also no motion. Even the motion is a good starting point that businesses are having management adapt their strategies and plans to account for the motion, just out self-interested risk mitigation in case there is more fire than there currently is today, and that fire gets trained on them.
A good analogy, but I think you swapped the meaning of fire and motion in your usage of it.
In this case, her cases even if lost would be the equivalent of cover fire. Businesses need to re-act to the cover fire and cannot advance (perform their own motion) while she is firing.
The second part is that you would hope/expect her to be able to gain territory in the near future via the "motion" part of the strategy.
So I agree in your framing, just from my perspective you flipped the terminology.
That seems really bad for the government to be doing this. If she is losing, then using the resources of the government to harass businesses that are acting lawfully seems like fascism.
> didn't fail or get shot down as political overreach?
Progress requires testing the system and seeing where the failure points are. It's significantly better than the relative nothing we've gotten from past admins.
Also with the current judicial and congressional makeup it's a wonder anything gets done.
Monopolistic behavior helped these companies mint thousands of millionaires, including regular employees enjoying stock options. Some of those people are bound to be in this thread.
Amazon currently does not honor its prime shipping agreement with all domestic customers and has no customer service path to get the issue resolved. In some places USPS is unreliable and Amazon insists on using it repeatedly, violating its own promise to customers. This suggests to me that Amazon faces no competitive pressure to deliver good customer service.
> Amazon’s practice of coercing sellers who want their products to be Prime eligible into using Fulfillment by Amazon, which makes it more difficult and more expensive for rivals to offer increased product selection.
How would this even work? It's on Amazon to deliver your stuff in 2 days but they also have to allow 3rd party shipping they have no control over? Are they allowed to require such a seller to fulfill the order by a specific date?
Because to me a lowly customer Prime === Item Shipped by Amazon. That's the whole value.
All of the federal counts move forward, some of the counts relating to specific states who joined the lawsuit are dismissed.
> Last week, before the order was unsealed, some of the initial coverage called it a “partial victory” for Amazon, but as it turns out, the portion of the ruling in which the company was victorious was relatively slim.
> The areas where the judge granted Amazon’s motion to dismiss were related to specific aspects of state claims, including elements of allegations brought by Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Maryland. Eighteen states and one territory, Puerto Rico, joined the FTC in the lawsuit against Amazon.
The ruling is linked in another thread. The last two pages outline what all is dismissed. My naive read is that a lot of the claims were dismissed already. I have no idea if that is normal or not. I also assume nobody really expected the entire case to get dismissed?
Competition is the core tenant that makes capitalism beneficial to broader society.
Consolidation over the past few decades has limited the capacity for firms to compete in many sectors.
So I appreciate the sentiment of what the FTC is trying to do, but they really come across as amateurs bringing far too many lawsuits and often with weak legal reasoning/argumentation.
In many of the cases they've brought there exists alternative, yet stronger arguments that could have been made.
I'd support congress legislating towards more competition (e.g. forcing open standards for things like APIs/chat clients/smart watches etc), or a more active FTC.
But the current approach is far too disorganized and weak.
I hope they include Amazon's practice of taking popular products on their storefront, making generic "Amazon Basics" versions, and selling them to undercut the popular options. Simultaneously owning a marketplace, approving who can and can't sell products on it, and then putting your own products on it to undercut other sellers is so scummy and muck rake-y.
I hope they also include Amazon allowing thousands of Chinese retailers to stock Amazon's warehouses with counterfeit, faulty products, and potentially dangerous out-of-spec parts - with no way to meaningfully report or bring the offending product to Amazon's attention.
You mean you don't like having the choice between ZOSLRD-branded stuff and TUMACO-branded stuff, both of which have descriptions that look like someone put Mandarin Chinese through an LLM, because that's probably what they did?
Selling on Amazon requires a registered trademark. If you're a random factory in Shenzhen you don't care about branding, you just want to be able to sell your stuff on Amazon, so you just put together random letters in the hope that your registration won't conflict with anything else. You don't want to have to deal with back-and-forth with USPTO, you don't care about having a meaningful, memorable, or interesting name, you just want an Amazon listing.
Coincidentally the majority of USPTO trademark submissions are literally just random strings of letters now for this reason.
> I hope they include Amazon's practice of taking popular products on their storefront, making generic "Amazon Basics" versions, and selling them to undercut the popular options.
I don't think it's part of an antitrust case, but I am tired of seeing every item being sold from 200 chinese companies with randomly generated names and fake/bought reviews. Walmart has started to do something similar with their online store. I'll use their words.
> It's easy to sell online with Walmart.com. Partner with the largest multi-channel retailer and put your products in front of millions of Walmart shoppers.
Americans are used to American storefronts going through American regulations, but now you're essentially being dropshipped hazardous unregulated products. I generally try to buy from companies directly but this hasn't stopped my family from buying chinesium children toys for me that go straight into the trash.
Because Amazons wiped a lot of them out, and the ones that remain are either doing the same thing, or stand zero chance of comign out of it anything less than bankrupt.
Amazon for all its convenience has decimated likely close to if not more than a million businesses at this point across the world.
I dont think anyone's arguing against generic alternatives of name brand items. The issue here is Amazon using up-and-coming and popular products as fodder for them to generic-ize and push to the top of results, essentially knee capping the original seller.
All retailers do that. It's called private labels. None of the products are made by the retailer either. As unfortunate to those who might genuinely believe Trader Joes products are unique to them, or that Great Value was Walmart using its massive distribution systems to quickly scale core products like Milk out. It's all private labelling.
Those original sellers mainly just look like drop-shippers to me. So Amazon just going straight to the source and selling at lower margin is better for me as a buyer.
Reminder that a mere 15 years ago, Walmart was the unfair monopolist whose market position rendered competition infeasible.
Also unclear to me why "ecommerce" is a market unto itself that we should be concerned with level of concentration in, as opposed to simply a slice of the broader "retail" market (which is much less concentrated)
Amazon's "favoured nation" policy stipulates that vendors can't sell an item anywhere else for a lower price. This policy seems designed by them to put a moat between them and retail.
Yes, but we don't know when the next technology shift will happen. Amazon might be able to abuse their position for decades if a disruption doesn't come.
Aa for E-commerce, it can have a larger inventory than physical retail. You're not going to find many solar charge controllers or mechanical keyboard parts at Walmart, but Amazon will have tons of options deliverable within 48 hours. Few sites can have comparable shipping cost/speed and you have to research each one, whereas Amazon enjoys the position of being the default.
A decade ago, I helped a small Amazon seller with his inventory, and it was eye opening to see all the fees and risks compared to eBay. But he couldn't sell on eBay without losing a massive portion of his customer base, despite their better shopping/buying UX in my experience.
The original complaint has a number of pages starting at 39 (43 in pdf) dedicated to defining the relevant markets and why they feel brick and mortar isn't part of the relevant market.
This is why pinning anti-trust to monopolies is a mistake. Anti-trust is about competition and creating more of it... and if it's about increasing competition then they both need attention. They are both very big and abuse their dominance in ways that stifles competition. That is, in the last 15 years we added another company that needs anti-trust attention, nothing was replaced.
Yeah, there's no corruption, graft, or abuse of power in any place without capitalism.
Breaking rules definitely isn't an innate part of human nature at scale.
Edit: more seriously, it doesn't help that the laws are entirely subjective. You're not a monopoly until after the fact. Monopolistic behavior is sometimes rewarded, and sometimes punished. Look at court cases involving Apple and Google. The only real difference between them is scale. You're allowed to be big, up until someone decides that you're actually too big. It's only a question of "too big to fail" or "too big to exist".
More and more, antitrust is a means for people who dislike big, successful companies for no particular reason to attack them. On some level, the government is just throwing its weight around. The message is "don't forget who's really in charge."
Consider all the "Lina Khan fans" you see on HN and elsewhere. They rarely articulate why the government should be suing these companies, which laws that company broke, or if those laws make sense. They just don't like big companies and want them taken down a peg.
The Google suit was particularly egregious. There was no alternative to Google search because no one had built a better product for reasons that have nothing to do with anticompetitive behavior. And the real irony here is that Google appears to be behind on LLMs, which have finally given us an alternative to typing things into Google. So the government picked the exact moment when Google's search market share is seriously threatened to sue!
Point taken about the level of discourse on the internet and the mainstream media, no argument there. It is painful, but just because the discourse around the topic is smooth brained doesn't mean that the position is wrong. This is something that I struggle with. Sometimes the discourse is so unimaginably stupid that it pushes you to default to the other side's point of view, but that doesn't actually mean you got to that point of view through any reasoning, you got there from emotion.
There are the standard points around consumer protection. Ticketmaster, Adobe, Amazon, really do engage in anti competitive practices and then burn the consumer once they've consolidated power. People feel that, but to your point, can't articulate all the moving pieces, and that's fine, use the mute button. God help us if Kroger and Safeway get their way and merge.
To your point about "don't forget who's really in charge." - it might feel like there's no upside here, but in reality you do end up with companies that have more power than the government, and that's a dangerous road to go down in a democracy, since there's no real way to hold them accountable. Obviously the government is deeply flawed in a million different ways, but ultimately there are elected officials, which cannot be said of private companies.
Also Lina Khan talks a lot about resiliency. Too much efficiency can make things worse [1]. With mass consolidation, black swan events lead to and outsized impact compared to what they would in an economy where there aren't monopolies everywhere. Climate change, pandemics, instability in Europe and the middle east, etc mean that it's worth trading extreme efficiency for robustness.
On the charge of just wanting to break up big companies because they're big, I plead not guilty on the virtue of this not being a crime. The whole point of breaking up large companies is because their size renders them unaccountable quazi-governments. To properly regulate them requires making the government even bigger with ever-more-complicated regulatory apparatus, compliance departments, administrative rulemaking, and "special understandings" (read: giving up) for the largest players.
I'll put it to you another way: if you want smaller government, you need smaller corporations, too.
> There was no alternative to Google search because no one had built a better product for reasons that have nothing to do with anticompetitive behavior.
I would first argue that Google's unparalleled superiority in search is overblown. For one, there's ads in it. As Google's founders themselves stated, ads are a perverse incentive to ruin the search experience in favor of advertisers and I can point to several examples[0] in which this happened.
There are paid search engines that do not have advertising (e.g. Kagi) but they themselves have complained about the struggle that is competing with Google. For example, on iOS, there's only five default search engine options, there's no way to add a different search engine as default, and Google pays $$$ to Apple to be set to the default and for that search engine option to be buried in Settings. I don't see how that isn't anticompetitive.
On a technical level, Google has a supracompetitive advantage, too. A lot of websites have restrictive policies that forbid scraping except for Google and Bing. This means only those search engines can actually return results for those sites.
[0] Product ads in web search, every programming search query giving you four or five ads before the actual StackOverflow answer you're interested in, image search becoming a glorified product search with actual functionality being removed, Gemini
* The government should be suing many of the companies FTC is going after because their behavior yields bad outcomes for consumers, such as worse health outcomes after a private equity group captures an entire geography then drives up prices while reducing quality.
* They tend to have broken laws around creating and abusing monopoly positions, usually with various illegal details like kickback arrangements and self-dealing.
* These laws make sense.
* I don't mind big companies and many of the companies FTC goes after are not particularly big.
* Companies that utilize edge cases in market dynamics to produce bad outcomes for consumers should be taken down a peg.
The entire conceit of capitalism is that competition is good, and that competition forces companies to better address their customers needs. If they're not doing this, then someone can come in and undercut them.
But what happens in the scenario where the person comes in, undercuts them, and then sells to the bigger company? How does this force the larger company to change? This is like antitrust 101.
I don't understand people who claim to be proponents of capitalism and are opposed to antitrust. If you want the free market to determine anything with fewer regulations, then we need antitrust. Otherwise we need a lot more regulations. Which one would you prefer?
I have a feeling you wouldn't recognize anticompetitive behavior despite it hitting you in the face for the past 10 years.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.32...
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