I think the reason Warren could lose ground talking about Big Tech is pretty straightforward - it's a way less generally compelling, personally-broadly-relevant message than her other key issues, and so a distraction. Less a pure negative, but an opportunity-cost net negative.
That said, Tulsi is right, most of the party are a bunch of neocons (aside from Sanders and maybe Warren).
Yes, there is a problem with google and Facebook controlling what people see (algorithmic rather than organic) as well as soft and hard censorship, but I’m not sure the hammer of breakup is necessarily the first tool to go for in addressing the issue.
Joe is more pragmatic, but he’s also just skating. Tulsi is more of what Washington needs. No more foreign interventions. Let them fight it out. We’re always in the middle and always get flak and everyone else just sits there and does nothing. Only get in if it’s meaningful to us.
Any data here? I would have thought compared to other industries, tech hasn’t spend nearly enough! Few people occasionally tweet our Google or Facebook having donated $2700 to one republican superpact or another. This has to be peanuts compared to any real money involved.
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders
There is no database of PR spending, but it’s telling that a study conducted by Edelman, the worlds largest PR firm, found Tech to be the most trustworthy sector. A cynic might say they are pandering to an important client base.
Survey showing that people trust tech is evidence that tech is corrupting our politics. Jeez, talk about confirmation bias. A PR firm could also use a negative trust score to sell a firm on how they need more PR.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/23/facebook-and-amazon-lead-tec...
Maybe for liberals, but a lot of people on the right don’t care much for government intervention in industries without a compelling reason.
Besides this the reasons for regulation are pretty damn compelling. Clear cut case of market failure. You cannot take your business elsewhere to deal with the failings of big tech. It is an industry with a long run decreasing average total cost curve and has network externalities. (Hence why there aren't 27 similar magnitude businesses competiung in the facebook space, for example).
Indeed even if you have no facebook account and have taken your business elsewhere they have a shadow profile of you from your firends and from web trackers and so on. Google have your mail and analyze it even if you run your own server and have no google account. The list goes on from there. The case for regulation is overwhelming, what many of those of us of a libertarian bent want is /sensible/ regulation rather than the idiotic variety that is so prevalent. There aren't many on the right who think you should be able to poison the water or, switch off the taps and increase prices by a factor of 100. There aren't many on the right who think national defence payment should be "opt in"
Anyway these are also esoteric arguments just as their counterarguments are and unlikely to get a groundswell of support either way without a splashy push. The election of Donald Trump was that push for a large number of people on all sides of politics. The counter to that push? Where is that?
That's not market failure, it's normal market functioning today. It used to be that the limits of scaling kept companies in most industries from becoming monopolies. The industries with really strong network effects, railroads, communications, and banking, were highly regulated.
Now, more industries have strong network effects. The negative effects of scale, big companies unable to get out of their own way, seem to have been conquered. Planetary-scale companies such as Walmart and McDonalds work quite well, and they're not even "tech" companies. And US antitrust enforcement has been out to lunch for 30 years now.
The European Union has a study, which I've cited before, that price competition seems to require, in practice, at least four major players. There's an implicit collusion effect that makes it more profitable to not compete on price where the number of players is small.
This /is/ market failure by the normal definition of market failure in the academic discipline of economics. It's not poetry. National Defence is an example of market failure. Any monopoly, eg, drinking water distribution, is an example of market failure. There is no economy anywhere on earth at any time through history up until now that has not had market failure as a feature of that economy. Not the only feature. I would say not even the major feature of the well functioning ones at least but everyone has it and tries to deal with. Is the cure worse than the disease? Is there a better cure, maybe even no cure. Most actual policy discussion in any newspaper is a discussion of just that.
Market failure is a very normal thing. What /I/ don't want is intervention where there is no market failure. What I don't want is regulation for the sake of regulation (or the sake of regulatory capture by the incumbant(s), or the sake of empire building by some public servant(s) or some witch hunt to win politcal favor at the ballot or whatever else on those lines). Regulation is the only sane response to market failure and has been since literally forever. See national defence.
If you take a look at something like disinformation campaigns, that’s something that big tech companies can handle MUCH better than smaller ones.
And if we did break up FB, network effects will just lead us back to the same situation in a few more years anyways.
"trusts have made products cheaper, have reduced prices; but if the price of oil, for instance, were reduced to one cent a barrel, it would not right the wrong done to people of this country by the trusts which have destroyed legitimate competition and driven honest men from legitimate business enterprise"
— 51st congress
Every single ad on facebook (and every single other social media business) should be in a searchable database along with the targeting purchased and all the statistics on the number of times seen and all demographic information available to aid the targeting.
It's a regulation. Is it a good one? The idea behind it is so that lies cannot be /broadcast/ in secret. That the Nazi party could broadcast inflamitory lies targeted at the mentally infirm by paying social media companies, ie facebook, to do it, in secret, while remaining anonymous is a problem.
Facebook's own policies as the dominant player are offering zero part of any solution other than to increase their share of the advertising spend. Really. Total focus of all their policy is just that. At the expense of, well who exactly?
Television is regulated. Newspapers are regulated. Radio is regulated. Secret facebook broadcasts are not. This is better because it makes facebook more money and worse in every other way we can imagine and some we haven't yet.
Good to see everybody declaring their interests in this thread though!
It seems to me like most people support Warren's anti-big-tech stance in principle or they don't much care. Not many outside of the bubble seem to be genuinely opposed to it and it's a quite esoteric argument as to why it would make things worse (maybe a true, valid and legitimate argument, - but not the sort of thing that takes on support organically without a bit of push - can we see that push?).
Then there's the obscenely large amounts spent by big tech on lobbying in washington and PR in the media and in places like right here.
Do any of us really believe big tech isn't paying for PR here at hacker news? Whether the PR is working is a different question. Whether there is a lot of pro-big tech opinion, much of which I share, here organically is a different question - and yes there is. The only thing that would prevent paid PR here is if hacker news has no impact and paid PR could not influence and this was known, as far as I can see.
Separate to the venture capitalist owners interests being served by mods, which of course happens and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it, either.