Dozens of Companies, Small Business Groups Back US Bill To Rein in Big Tech (reuters.com) 93
Dozens of companies and business organizations are sending a letter to U.S. senators on Monday to urge them to support a bill aimed at reining in the biggest tech companies, such as Amazon.com and Alphabet's Google. From a report: Democratic U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar and lawmakers from both parties said last week they had the Senate votes needed to pass legislation that would prevent the tech platforms, including Apple and Facebook, from favoring their own businesses on their platforms. The companies supporting the measure, which include Yelp, Sonos, DuckDuckGo and Spotify, called it a "moderate and sensible bill aimed squarely at well-documented abuses by the very largest online platforms."
For a more persuasive viewpoint (Score:3)
Feel free to watch last night's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver's segment [youtube.com] on the subject.
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And as soon as you ignorant cheerleaders can stop assuming any side is "good", we'll get somewhere.
In the meantime, fire ALL of the fucking entertainers. They're delivering "facts" about as good as a 5-year old.
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And as soon as you ignorant cheerleaders can stop assuming any side is "good", we'll get somewhere.
What do you think was inaccurate in John Oliver's piece on these issues?
In the meantime, fire ALL of the fucking entertainers. They're delivering "facts" about as good
*well
as a 5-year old.
Or maybe you meant a really good five year old, who always cleans his plate, and cleans up his toys?
Re:For a more persuasive viewpoint (Score:4, Insightful)
you ignorant cheerleaders
Now that we're done with the name calling, can we actually have an intelligent conversation? I was cordial in my response.
I despise Tucker Carlson, Rachel Maddow, and their ilk because they promote their show as a "news program" when it's not actual news. They are both entertainment that "No reasonable viewer could conclude ... an assertion of objective fact". You will get absolutely zero argument from me that either of those two, or anyone like them, should be on the air. Honestly, you could shut down MSNBC and Fox News entirely and the world would be a better place.
Now, where I feel Oliver is different. It takes about 30 seconds of watching for anybody with a brain to figure out it's not to be taken as a news show. Further, it is incredibly obvious which sections are meant to be taken factually and what's intended as satire or opinion. Yes, it's based around the news. Yes, it has an obvious left bent. There is nothing inherently wrong with either of those. You may not agree with his opinion, or what topics he chooses to cover, but I would challenge you to find something that was construed as fact that is not factually correct.
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While I agree with your overall point, I think you'll find Maddow is several orders of magnitude more correct about facts that she presents. We can certainly agree or disagree with the level of concern we should have about some of the things she blows out of proportion. Tucker Carlson however is on a whole other level literally getting people killed. I don't think you could point to a single story Maddow has done that has caused anywhere near the level of anger and vitriol that Carlson produces on the daily
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To be perfectly honest I don't know fuck-all about Maddow's show, I'm generally not a consumer of her or Carlson's content. I was basing my opinion merely on the arguments her legal team made in her defamation suit against OAN, and the fact that her show airs on a supposed news channel. The quote I posted, “No reasonable viewer could conclude that Maddow implied an assertion of objective fact" was from her court case, not Carlson's. He just re-used it in one of his defamation cases. The only content
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Yes of course, because threatening a Capitalistic society with actually paying for services, is somehow "wrong" according to Mass Ignorance.
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Politicians and the Government (Score:2)
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So the alternative answer is "fuck it, do nothing". Amazing plan.
Incremental progress is still progress, why not actually put the slightest bit of effort in and point out what you don't actually like in the bill.
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This isn't progress. Progress would be a technique known as "structural separation." Any business larger than a threshold size would be forbidden from both running a retail sales platform and selling its own goods on the platform. They could do one or the other, and a different company would have to do the task they don't.
It worked well in telecom decades ago but the politicians caved to the lobbyists.
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either this bill is an improvement over the status quo or it's worse than the status quo.
It's worse. It allows the behemoths to claim fairness by creating a regulatory labyrinth that small companies haven't the manpower to navigate, largely immunizing them from suit.
Can you, an individual, set up a DSL line between yourself and your neighbor down the street? Under the FCC's regulatory framework it's supposed to cost about $20/month for a dry copper pair. But you, as an individual, can't navigate the tariffs. Not even now that you know they exist.
Structural separation works because it leverages
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You don't touch utility poles. A dry copper pair means they deliver wires to your house just like phone wires but don't put a phone signal on them. You're free to put whatever signal on it you want.
You can also rent an "attachment" on a utility pole but that's something different.
Re:Politicians and the Government (Score:5, Informative)
Grocery, drug, and department store chains have sold their own store brands alongside others since forever. For all the whinging that goes on about "Amazon Basics" and whatnot, no one's been complaining about the existence of "Equate," Walmart's store brand. And for all of the whinging... again... about Amazon's supposed retail dominance; Walmart is the still the largest, beating Amazon twice over and then some. [oberlo.com]. Or, are we playing the "but on a computer" game here to justify the difference in outlook, legislation, and treatment?
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Grocery, drug, and department store chains have sold their own store brands alongside others since forever. For all the whinging that goes on about "Amazon Basics" and whatnot, no one's been complaining about the existence of "Equate," Walmart's store brand. And for all of the whinging... again... about Amazon's supposed retail dominance; Walmart is the still the largest, beating Amazon twice over and then some. [oberlo.com]. Or, are we playing the "but on a computer" game here to justify the difference in outlook, legislation, and treatment?
Tesco has it's own brand... however when I'm at Tesco and pick up a loaf of Hovis a man from Tesco doesn't pick up the loaf out of my trolley and say "wouldn't you prefer a loaf of Tesco's Finest bread? Amazon et al. are surreptitiously directing us towards their products or the ones that make them the most money.
Also there is a metric shitload wrong with the way supermarkets behave and that should be investigated as well (See the Gruen Transfer, both the concept and the Australian documentary series).
The "car companies can't sell direct" model (Score:4, Interesting)
> Any business larger than a threshold size would be forbidden from both running a retail sales platform and selling its own goods on the platform. They could do one or the other, and a different company would have to do the task they don't.
The retailer can't be the same company as the manufacturer/importer. That idea would probably be popular here on Slashdot.
It was also popular in the 1930s - 1970s, and laws did get passed. During that time it was the car companies that were the "giant corporations". That's why still today most states have laws saying car companies can't sell direct. Consumer MUST pay a dealer markup. That idea is rather UNpopular on Slashdot, when you point out it's actually been done.
Personally, I've noticed that the store-branded products in any store, the Simple Truth / Equate / Hill Country Fare / Great Value products are almost always a better deal for us, the consumers. I'm sure that Kellog's, Tide, and other name brands don't like competing with Great Value. They can't charge as much when they have to compete with store brands. I don't know that I want to make store brands illegal. I think better prices for the consumer might even be a good thing.
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This isn't progress. Progress would be a technique known as "structural separation." Any business larger than a threshold size would be forbidden from both running a retail sales platform and selling its own goods on the platform. They could do one or the other, and a different company would have to do the task they don't.
It worked well in telecom decades ago but the politicians caved to the lobbyists.
So Walmart shouldn't be able to sell Great Value-brand products?
Right, Comrade!
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So Walmart shouldn't be able to sell Great Value-brand products?
No, Walmart shouldn't be able to -own- Great Value-brand products. If they want to buy and resell value-brand products, that's fine.
For the most part Walmart buys Great Value products from third parties anyway. The only thing that would directly change is they wouldn't be able to call them the Walmart brand; they'd take on the brands of whoever the myriad suppliers are.
The important thing is what happens indirectly. With no ownership of the brand, Walmart has no incentive to build the brand, so they don't.
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So Walmart shouldn't be able to sell Great Value-brand products?
No, Walmart shouldn't be able to -own- Great Value-brand products. If they want to buy and resell value-brand products, that's fine.
For the most part Walmart buys Great Value products from third parties anyway. The only thing that would directly change is they wouldn't be able to call them the Walmart brand; they'd take on the brands of whoever the myriad suppliers are.
The important thing is what happens indirectly. With no ownership of the brand, Walmart has no incentive to build the brand, so they don't. And because they don't, they aren't faced with situations where an anti-competitive option to push the house brand exists.
"Private Labeling", where a Company creates goods (or services?) and then sells them under someone else's Brand Name, under Contract, has existed for decades, and is a generally-accepted business practice, up and down the scale, and in virtually every market and every product whatsoever.
At one point, I worked as an embedded designer for a company that built industrial controls for electric motors. In addition to our own-branded products, we also Private Labeled some products that were then either sold throu
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I'm saying that a retailer having a greater financial stake in the success of one product over another pulls the retailer's presentation to the consumer away from the consumer's natural preference, contrary to what should happen in free competition. The stronger the retailer's incentive, the worse the corruption of the free market, all the way up to classic monopoly where the retailer chooses what the consumer buys and the consumer only chooses how much.
If the retailer is small enough, the corruption self-h
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I'm saying that a retailer having a greater financial stake in the success of one product over another pulls the retailer's presentation to the consumer away from the consumer's natural preference, contrary to what should happen in free competition. The stronger the retailer's incentive, the worse the corruption of the free market, all the way up to classic monopoly where the retailer chooses what the consumer buys and the consumer only chooses how much.
If the retailer is small enough, the corruption self-heals by dissatisfied consumers shopping elsewhere. When the retailer is a monopoly or part of an oligarchy, that can't happen. It's then the government's responsibility to intervene.
The most effective government intervention doesn't just ban behavior that companies are still strongly incentivized to do. That just causes them to find ways to cheat. Effective intervention alters the incentives instead so that companies are more likely to make money behaving the desired way.
Give it a rest!
There is simply absolutely no possible way to spin this that doesn't sound like anti-capitalistic, anti-free-market, Outrageous Government Intervention.
In the decades that I have shopped at Walmart, never once did I have the feeling that their House Brands were being pushed on me; or that I was being manipulated with placement or packaging. All brands carried were given fairly-equal shelf-space and placement, and it was clearly up to me what I bought. In fact, Walmart's House Brands seem to g
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Frankly, it's disgusting to be treated as some sort of brain-damaged imbecile.
Is it?
Do you ever notice how when Walmart has a "roll back" on a popular brand item, they run out of stock almost immediately?
You ever notice how they have plenty of stock of the comparable Great Value brand and it's at the same or a lower price than the popular brand that's out of stock?
Next time it happens, give this a try: go to the customer service counter and ask for a "rain check," so that when the product comes back into stock you can buy it at the "roll back" price. You won't get one.
Now, by law whe
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For clarity: the reason the law requires rain checks is that otherwise the out-of-stock sale is a bait and switch.
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The "fucking answer" is: remove all the decades of excessive loopholes you dumb fuck voters supported.
I'm not saying "deregulate" because that just means regulate for a new loophole crony. I'm saying destroy the bureaucratic loopholes by REMOVING THEM.
I want to opt-out of paying for all this shit you moron voters support every day.
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"Deregulation" has never happened in America. Ever. When you voters support it, it really means "take 10,000 pages of regulation, and add 2000 pages more on top of it, and call it deregulation."
When I say shred pages of law, I mean SHRED THEM. Just evacuate them completely. Yes, it can be done.
It's never the lack of regulations that makes markets suffer, it's the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of pages of law that force only powerful folks with powerful lobbyists to enter a market.
The most corrupt can circlejerk
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Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall act, which many argue helped cause the 2008 crisis in the US. Either way it was a regulatory act that was repealed.
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Are usually a day late and dollar(today Trillions) short. And wrong more often than they are right. And that does not even take "unexpected consequences" into consideration.
Speaking of unexpected consequences, do you find it merely coincidental that every politician leaves Washington far richer, or is it just blind luck that enables them to convince the ignorant masses that they're actually a day late and a dollar (yours, soon to be theirs) short on anything?
Funny how they're never shorting themselves with all of these "whoops"...
Re:Politicians and the Government (Score:5, Insightful)
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A well-established Donor Class controlling and manipulating everything, doesn't exactly cure corruption. It merely keeps the money in their pockets, while keeping the blood off their hands.
And I doubt you feel any better about that reality.
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don't ignore the possible solution provided or feel free to provide an alternate solution
Humans are literally too stupid to avoid repeating the absolute worst of human history. Because of that, the "possible" solution, is the probable one. We humans either jettison enough actual intelligence off this rock to survive, or we die here with it, forever infected by the Disease of Greed.
Stop pretending we have an answer otherwise. I grow tired of ignorant salespeople.
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Nah, everything and everybody sucks.
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"merely coincidental that every politician leaves Washington far richer" they are corrupt to begin with. Who would spend millions to get a job that pays what 174K. It is the under the table Graft/Insider Stock Trading/Privileged Info they are all after. Public servants my A#$ they are nothing but Self-Servants and Criminals.
I just saw a Poll on TV yesterday that said that just North of 2/3 of those Polled believed that politicians got into Politics for Private Gain, rather than a desire to Serve the Public.
The sentiment was curiously almost evenly split between Democrats (68%) and Republicans (63%) for the "Personal Gain" motive.
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If the government does nothing, then infrastructure rots, and a lot of problems insue. If the government does too much then people freak out with all the rules and changes.
The government is like a babysitter sitting a toddler. You more or less let them have a run of the house, but make sure the dangerous stuff is out of reach and be ready to jump into action stopping them from getting into danger or breaking property.
The babysitter isn't the parents or even a nanny they are supposed to keep the kid and the
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When government does something, infrastructure rots.
I own a few small homes, some as small as trailer park size, 100% of them are on private streets. None of my streets have potholes. NONE.
The neighboring streets are city streets. 100%. All of them have massive potholes.
The whole point of government is to tax the stupid so the rich can make off with it.
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I've seen streets in the US. Private as well as public roads. They all look like they belong into some third world country.
Why does it work over here with our near 100% public roads? Are our politicians less corrupt than the ones in the US? Hard to imagine since hardly a day goes by when another one of them is standing in court for something like that.
But maybe the difference is exactly that ours actually get tried...
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"twitter and facebook a public utility" a public utility has a purpose. I've never used Twitter or Facebook and never will, so who cares. If it is on the internet and is not technical documentation, it is a lie.
Just try to get a decent job without a social media presence. In the first place they favour candidates about whom they can quickly find corroborative info regarding the attitudes, conduct, habits, and other info in your resume. In the second place they figure that if you're not on social media you're anti-social, or a Luddite, or have something to hide. So it's into the round file with your resume.
Facebook and Google - and probably others as well - are effectively infrastructure. GP is correct - the way t
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Some are tortured by their perceptions and require themselves to jump through others hoops. And yet, are close minded to opportunities that are right there.
I create tech. but don't have
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Well, Twitter and Facebook are quite useful tools to advertise your business and get into contact with your customers. Not having it means that your business lacks a way of advertising and getting into touch with it.
I'm fairly sure that there are people who have no use for phones either. But I hope we can agree that a business is pretty much dead in the water without it.
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Best way would be make likes of twitter and facebook a public utility like they did with Phone service.
Phone service isn't a public utility anywhere that I'm aware of, it's all provided by private corporations. It is regulated in a variety of ways to force them to do business with you under relatively egalitarian terms, but you have to pay for it. Sometimes it's provided at reduced cost, in which case government pays for part of it. Do you want government to pay for Facebook? Because in making it a utility you're saying it's a necessary service, and now you're going to have to make a tax contribution to make
Survival of the Fattest (Score:1)
Sorry, but the smallbies can't bribe and collude like the fat cats can.
Journalism is broken (Score:5, Informative)
Nowhere in the article are the bill or the letter references so you could view their contents. I appreciate that the article is not an opinion piece but god please link to the subject's being references.
What this bill actually is (Score:5, Informative)
If enacted, the bill would give federal antitrust agencies the authority to issue civil penalties and injunctions against so-called “covered platforms,” [bipartisanpolicy.org]
The bill would create the following violations:
“Unfairly” preferencing a platform operator’s products, services, or lines of business
“Unfairly” limiting another’s products to compete against the platform’s operator and discrimination in the enforcement of these regulations
Discrimination in the application of enforcement of the covered platform’s terms of service among similarly situated business users in a matter that may harm competition on the platform
Restricting the capacity of business owners to operate with different platforms’ operating systems, hardware, or software features that are available to the platform operator’s products
Condition access to the covered platform or preferred status or placement on the platform on the purchase or use of other products offered by the covered platform operator that is not unique to the covered platform itself
Use of non-public data that are obtained from or generated on the covered platform by the activities of a business user or by the interaction of a covered platform user with the products of a business user to offer or support the offering of the covered platform’s own products
Restriction or impediment of covered platform users from uninstalling software applications that have been preinstalled on the platform or changing default settings on the platform that steered users towards products offered by the covered platform
Retaliation against users who report concerns
Full Actual Text [congress.gov]
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nice, but would greatly appreciate if you(and others that claim these bullet points) point to the verbiage in the bill that causes the bullet point? some of them I'm not sure if I see or understand where they get that idea from.
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It's in section 3. [congress.gov] Frankly I'm surprised you couldn't find it.
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Some of these rules already exist in Europe. We have seen EU regulators require Google to stop favouring its own products, and become more inter-operable. The latest updates to the rules are looking to require interoperability in more services, including things like chat apps.
What the US version seems to be missing is copyright reform. In the EU the proposal is that users will be able to declare that their uploads contain copyrighted material but are covered by fair use, and the copyright holder would need
Mice voted to abolish cats (Score:2)
What else is new.
The bill (Score:3)
I believe this is the bill in question. S.2992 - American Innovation and Choice Online Act https://www.congress.gov/bill/... [congress.gov]
Yelp! (Score:1)
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It just doesn't seem that way right now because so few are willing to invest in their own ideas, or venture capital won't invest, for various reasons, but it will happen.
Or they start to gain momentum and are bought by the incumbent before superseding them.
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Your post loudly screams 'I have no idea what the issues are' and is incredibly naive. The line 'any one with a better idea can easily destroy an established tech giant' is a real howler. The problem isn't that the 'tech giants' do something that a 'better idea' can't replace, it is that they do EVERYTHING so it is practically impossible for anyone else to get a foothold in ANYTHING. All of your examples are of companies that did one thing and someone beat them at that game. That happens all the time, a
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So they "have the votes" to pass the Senate (Score:3)
This is just the Party's reminder to their corporate owners that the Midterm elections are coming up and that their "campaign contributions" are coming due.
Once the deposits are verified this bill will quietly die.
If you don't like this, don't downmod me...prove me wrong.
Things Democrats and Republicans Agree On: (Score:1)
2. Clamp down on "big tech".
I'm sure neither of these will have any unintended side effects.
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I'm equally sure either of them will happen.
It starts by breaking them up, like ATT was (Score:2)
All of them: Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Disney, Apple and Microsoft
They need to be treated like the drug cartels.
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Great, just like the war on terror, the war on poverty and war on crime.
Given their success, we should declare a war on education, maybe then we get more of that, too.
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Amazing. (Score:2)
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You mean a bunch of whiny competitors want the government to go after their competition? What will they think of next?!
That was exactly my feeling when I read TFS.
Good idea, not great execution (Score:2)
So, the bill in question is the American Innovation and Choice Online Act. https://www.congress.gov/bill/... [congress.gov]
It basically defines a new thing called a "Covered Platform." There's some nuance to what is and isn't a covered platform which you can read in the bill, but the 10,000ft overview is that it's targeting anything that is owned by a business with many tens of millions of ordinary users, or hundreds of thousands of business users, AND is either worth a bunch of money or has at least a billion users world
be careful what you ask for (Score:2)
Small businesses need to be careful what they ask for. The way laws are written by ignorant lawmakers, it could also affect them
Rein in big government instead (Score:2)
Once again, it's government gatekeepers trying to justify their existence. They never rein themselves in though, do they? Take a look in the mirror, Congress, you are the problem.
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Spotify (Score:2)
In what way is Spotify a small company that requires protection? They lead all online music streaming companies by percentage of users, with 32% market share. Apple 16%, Amazon 13%, and Google 8% are trailing by so much that they're the companies who need protection.
https://producerhive.com/music... [producerhive.com].
Sad when a big discussion ends without a Funny (Score:2)
'Nuff said?