Re:FTC Restores Rigorous Enforcement of Law Banning Unfair M...
by geoelectric on Thursday November 10, 2022 @05:26PM
(#33554460)
Your last point is a really good one. We saw that kind of captive behavior with the FCC too, particularly during the last administration with that one yahoo that was running it for awhile.
The whole walled garden thing is mostly trivial nonsense. At worst Apple and Google will pay a small fine and a few thousand people will be able to more easily sideload some stuff. Maybe. Probably not though. If it gets to this these companies will simply modify the law so that it doesn't apply to them.
Unfair competition is an American virtue these days. Fair competition is seen as "being weak".
Even this policy statement wasn't approved 4-0. It was 3-1. You've got government bodies that are so politically divided that you literally can't even get FOUR people—WHO RUN THE FTC—to agree that on a simply policy statement that basically says, "Unfair Methods of Competition bad." The dissenting commissioner wrote a 20 page book why she doesn't support this.
And you know what? I mostly agree with the dissenting commissioner. Not wholly because of her views, but because in practice this will be used to harass small(er) business. It will have no material impact on Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Apple.