Yep, the path for this official recognition was cleared by the executive order two years ago that allowed for hearing aids to be sold over the counter!
At the very least, spinning off individual businesses prevents self-preferencing. Google can right now leverage its dominance in one area to increase market share in another. For example, if I load my GMail account in a browser other than Chrome, Google will "helpfully" suggest that I change my default browser to the "recommended" Chrome. This behavior makes it harder for upstarts to get a foot in the door across a wide range of products — by removing these synergies we reduce the grip Google has across all its lines of business.
I suspect the AT&T example may be more similar to the current situation than you're thinking. AT&T wasn't just the network, they also manufactured the phones themselves through subsidiary Western Electric. They leveraged their monopoly in phone service to drive customers toward leasing their phones, similarly (if more aggressively) to how Google drives customers from one product to another. Whether this remedy will be so far-reaching beyond search I don't know, but in the abstract there would be benefits to splitting up the conglomerate.
People don't realize, you couldn't just buy a phone - you had to use the one provided by your monopoly phone company.
It was only after breakup that there could exist an ecosystem of phone peripherals like answerphones, direct-attach modems (this is why acoustic couplers were a thing), cordless phones, etc.
I’m frankly shocked that Google continues to think the juice on that annoying, constant Chrome-in-Gmail popup is worth even a marginal additional anti-trust attention squeeze.
It's worth a lot. People regularly fall out of Google's funnel and they must get them back. You think every user that switches to Firefox is a user Google's willing to walk away from?
> Whenever I want to buy anything, I check Amazon first. 9 times out of 10 it's the same price as every other retailer with the added benefit of free shipping and free returns.
That's the problem! The issue is that Amazon forces sellers to raise their prices elsewhere, so that Amazon is the best deal for a shopper. But if Amazon didn't have the power to do that (if it didn't have a monopoly as the gateway to online shopping) then other retailers would be able to lower their prices.
That's the "tax" referred to in the article. By inflating prices across the board, but still ensuring that they're the least expensive option, Amazon retains customers and increases profits. Individual consumers choose it because it's the best deal, but the system as a whole loses out because prices are higher than they "should" be.
> No surprises here. Come what may, Amazon has always strived to lower costs
Maybe it's just a goal to reduce costs, but it seems likely that this is a response to Google's introduction of AlloyDB, a Postgres-compatible database competing with Aurora that is advertised as having "no...opaque I/O charges". I doubt Amazon was feeling generous.
I think you missed why I am failing to understand this one. The full context there is:
> If I earn a dollar and don't spend it, it results in a lower GDP than if I spent it. Thus income can not be treated as equivalent to GDP.
It's the second part that I don't understand. Those two sentences read to me like: "Spending decisions impact GDP, therefore income is not equivalent to GDP."
I don't think anyone is claiming that spending would fail to increase GDP. But I still don't see how income is disconnected from GDP, since that spending would be someone else's income.
> The similar sequence that chooses the largest instead of smallest prime that divides 1 plus the product of the previous terms avoids an infinite number of primes.
as saying that it avoids having an infinite number of primes in the sequence (i.e. that the sequence itself contained a finite number of distinct primes), but it's actually that there's an infinite number of primes not present in the sequence.
I think that timeline is backwards -- before 2015 there were net neutrality rules in place but then were struck down in the courts because ISPs were not subject to Title 2. So in 2015 they were reclassified as Title 2 in order to make net neutrality rules enforceable.
The key about the 2010 rules is that they did not reclassify ISPs. These rules were similar (actually much weaker) to the 2015 rules, but they were issued under the authority the FCC claimed to have over Title I services. As most here know, from 2005(ish?)-2015, cable/fiber ISPs were regulated under Title I.
ISPs sued and argued that since they were Title I services, the FCC's 2010 regulations were illegal. The judicial system agreed (Verizon v. FCC 2014). The solution to this problem -- the court explicitly told them this -- was to reclassify ISPs as Title II services; FCC would then have the proper legal authority to re-issue their NN regulations. Wheeler's FCC did this in 2015.
Specifically Verizon (ironically enough) sued to get a court order to say that the FCC couldn't enforce net neutrality without reclassifying ISPs as Title II.
I don't think the rebuttal makes a fair characterization of Stewart's article. Slate's argument comes down to "Stewart is taking his eyes off the prize, asking us to focus on the 9.9% when the 1% are really the problem" but I didn't interpret the Atlantic piece as implying that those at the very top are innocent in all this. It was more saying that the upper class (9.9%) have been complicit as the top 0.1% have garnered an increasingly vast portion of wealth.
Stewart is asking those in the 9.9% to be more cognizant of those below them, to stop looking up at the 0.1% and realize that the actions they take to improve the outcomes for their children are reducing income mobility.
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