So largely, someone new, with new ideas, took over a regulatory body that has been coasting along on its lorals. The FTC will now behave non-traditionally, disregarding what has been a very consistent school of thought (defined by Yale Law School professor Robert Bork and University of Chicago Law School professors Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook) since the 1977 Continental Television v. GTE Sylvania Supreme Court Case redefined the Judicial Systems perspective on anti-trust, neutering the Sherman Act.
In 1978 Robert Bork wrote the book The Antitrust Paradox and Richard Posner wrote Antitrust Law, summarizing the previous decades shift in attitude towards government intervention in the marketplace. Khan believes the those three people influenced the government to become too lenient and hands-off, when it should have been doing more to protect the marketplace from harmful entities that threaten competitiveness.
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...
For more context. A long but good read on the current FTC chairman.
See her recent attempt to prevent Meta from acquiring Within. There is no sane, level-headed case that could possibly paint this acquisition as an antitrust violation. Even most legal experts will agree that Lina Khan's case is a stretch at best.
It's clear that this case is simply motivated by a hatred for Meta more than anything rational, and such decision making can harm the emergence of nascent technology such as AR/VR.
Instagram falls into the same category. When Mark acquired it, it was tiny. He is who grew it. Facebook acquired a mobile camera app because it didn't have an app yet. Same how it acquired Beluga and turned it into messenger. Adobe acquiring Photoshop, then Macromedia. Mirosoft acquiring Powerpoint and then hotmail.com.
It was tiny. It was the hip up-and-coming app. It had the limelight, and importantly to FB it was mobile first.
I think our memories like to kind of project back its success after acquisition onto what it was before, and get distorted by its billion dollar price. He paid a lot for a not a lot, because he was buying a fad while it was still hot, before Twitter or Google could. He then dumped gasoline on a matchstick. Would ANYBODY else have poured that much money into Instagram that quickly? I think we can all picture what would have happened to it if it had found its way into the Twitter portfolio. (I would surmise it may no longer even exist and have been folded into Twitter having a picture posting feature.)
In hindsight it was absolutely anti-competitive in some way, but I don't know how the law could act to block buying shiny things with potential.
Those who really care about the development of particular technologies typically don't welcome consolidation in related industries. It wouldn't have been good news for electric cars, if Tesla had been acquired by GM in say 2008. Why the unhinged invective against Khan?
Plenty of mergers and acquisitions have driven technological progress, and so long as they aren't anticompetitive it's not problematic. See Meta and Oculus, for instance, or Apple's merger with Next.
Acquisitions and mergers fundamentally reduce duplication of work and allow you to combine building blocks to create something greater. Blindly blocking any and all of them as Khan is, is indicative that her bias against big tech has the potential to harm progress overall for no perceivable actual gain.
...
It's neither libel or unhinged!
ITT you've claimed that she isn't sane, isn't rational, is motivated solely by hate, and is unfit for her job. You've given us no reason to believe any of this, and the source of it all seems merely to be a political disagreement. This is a respected professional who has been nominated by the president and approved by Congress. Please, find a hinge.
I'm not the only one out there that finds the case around Within a stretch at best.
Yes we've already established that you agree with Robert Bork. I'd say probably Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito are also on your side. Care to cite some less odious support?
Khan and FTC clearly don't have the resources to block all mergers and acquisitions. It's amusing that you complain this impossible thing is happening in the same thread in which your political bedfellows complain it isn't happening. [0]
Oh no, how the big tech has suffered since she took up the post, their profits have... Tripled? This cant be right!
Is Big tech a cult and anyone not worshipping them is the enemy?
You do realise her job is to police big tech, not to do their bidding. She should like them no more than a prison guatdrd likes prisoners.
>Within was named[13] the #1 VR app for iOS by Apple Insider, featured[13] as "Best New App" on iTunes and is the most downloaded and highest rated[14] cinematic VR app for Google Cardboard.
This appears to be a clear-cut case of consolidation of key companies operating in a sector. Care to share why you think this isn't "sane"?
Resting to me meant inaction. Conversely, the FTC appears to still analyze things for antitrust, but was doing so through an outdated framework.
Lorals means "pertaining to lore." I meant it to mean that Bork and Co had created an unquestionable mythology around what anti-trust was. Blasphemists were ignored and discarded.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/lora...
So, new idiom minted. Maybe someday it can make it into the dictionary, and cite this post.
Coasting on your lorals = on auto-pilot, not questioning what put you on your trajectory, complacent enough to keep the flight path and speed. Tangently related to: appeal to tradition, argumentum ad antiquitatem, argumentum ad antiquitam, appeal to antiquity, and appeal to common practice.
The FTC shares jurisdiction over federal civil antitrust enforcement with the Department of Justice Antitrust Division. In some consumer protection matters, the FTC appears with, or supports, the U.S. Department of Justice.
Biden's FTC appointments are redefining FTC perspective on anti-trust, and DOJ is following suit.
The lead plaintiff attorney is Jonathan Kanter, his bio has his collaboration and alignment with Khan mentioned twice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Kanter
Is this a puff piece? She's just some government employee - she doesn't produce anything. It remains to be seen whether her aggressive interpretation of antitrust law will actually benefit consumers. We can split up Google into 100 companies and then we'll find out that the bales of cash advertising produces are no longer subsidizing the less profitable services. Maybe you'll have to pay to upload to YouTube or you won't get 15 GB of free gmail space or Hangouts will require an enterprise plan. But it'll all be worth it because some other adtech company who cares even less about your privacy than Google will now be able to sell search ads?
This is kind of very obviously not true.
>and YouTube
Lots of companies operating in the video delivery space too.
Who is competing with gmail? Please include market share and revenue in your analysis
>>and YouTube Lots of companies operating in the video delivery space too.
This is more defensibile than the YouTube argument, there is Rumble and Vimeo for instance. But again, What is the market share and revenue for YouTube vs these other “competitors”?
Outlook, Yahoo, (insert a long list of Chinese providers here), Yandex, Fastmail, Zoho Mail, Hey, Protonmail and so forth.
All of the above have actually managed to capture a decent share of the market, and there are many more.
>This is more defensibile than the YouTube argument, there is Rumble and Vimeo for instance. But again, What is the market share and revenue for YouTube vs these other “competitors”?
Instagram and Facebook are also huge in the same space. I'd guess that Akamai is even bigger.
But the idea of big tech being a wonder that unequivocally makes life better and doesn’t need oversight seems to be falling apart. Both for good (privacy) and bad (‘kill section 230!’) reasons.
Now they take it for granted and are trying to kill the very hand that feeds. It's simply absurd. Techno-pessimism is trendy now because it helps people feel superior when they crap on the achievements that their life is built upon.
We’ve done plenty to shoot ourselves in the foot broadcasting how cushy things are for us to people who had family die on oil rigs, and in other messy industries that provide social media companies the real resources they need.
Your comments are the epitome of entitled first world tech worker gibberish.
From being able to call your family from anywhere in the world to the most critical systems, tech workers are the reason that quality of life is so much better today than it was, say, pre-internet.
The affordances provided by the smartphone alone are an example of this. How is this not obvious proof that tech workers have fundamentally changed the world and improved QoL?
As far as you or I go specifically, reality does not need either of us to actually exist. Plenty of folks still around without the two of us.
For numerous health metrics a slower pre-internet life was healthier. All the technological churn has had long lived impact on environment that will make life worse in the future.
Keep cherry picking.
We've been burning hydrocarbons to keep warm and move around long before tech. But the future of energy (and thus of our civilization) will come from tech, not from looking back at burning wood and whale oil. See renewables, fusion and even nuclear.
Muricans are obsessed with being “happy” in a fake, saccharine way all the time. Philosophical babble does not wave off the reality all tech work has created a huge mess for all the benefits it also brings.
About a year ago I had an email thread going with sama, debating what intelligence even means, why copying the brain is the goal. Eventually it veered off topic, he agreed with my assessment many in tech are unimaginative self promoters not engaged net new output generation. That a whole lot of this is just “government jobs programs”, as I put it, wrapped in happy semantics and hype.
As the article points out, "preventing monopolies" is not the prima facie goal of antitrust law as traditionally interpreted. Monopolies are bad because of their effects on the market (e.g. they can raise prices higher than a competitive market would allow), not because of their "monopoliness".
There is a somewhat confusing quote in the article that implies that the DOJ is filing this suite in an attempt to get higher courts to revisit that standard. But then it finishes the paragraph with "put corporate America on notice", and I genuinely don't know whether that was the intent of the quoted prosecutor or not. This angle would be really big news if so, but... it seems poorly sourced.
(Full disclosure: I work at Google, but nowhere near advertising.)
The more modern interpretation has basically been "monopolies are ok if it lowers consumer prices", which sort of never made sense. Once you finish strangling all your competition, wouldn't you then raise prices? And then what, the government lets them do that until some vague line in the sand is crossed and we then actually enforce the law?
There are issues on the other side too - monopsony, where a company is so big they are the only nature buyer. You get this with Walmart being able to disproportionately squeeze their suppliers. You have this problem in labor markets sometimes because who else are you going to work for if your employer is super sized?
Lina Khan's writings, and the fact that Biden admin appointed her, indicates these recent assumptions about allowance of monopolies can probably be thrown out the window.
Right, that's what the article is trying to imply. But it doesn't have a quote that actually says it, so I'm saying this is pretty thin. There are a lot of people (clearly including you) who would like to see antitrust law revisited in the courts. I just don't see it from this article.
You will see some high-profile acquisitions fail this year.
That is absolutely what they are doing. The FTC has made it very clear they are taking a new approach.
Now both parties see the threat (albeit for differing reasons), but the federal government needs a lot of time to build a case like this, and Google is extremely adept at stalling for time.
During the EU investigation, Google waited every deadline to the final day, then asking for more time multiple times, and then finally on the last possible extension day tor respond would come back with a bull~~~~ one page "we don't think we broke this law" statement. They know the fine won't be nearly as big as the profits so they're running out the clock as long as possible. Every lawyer there knows they're crooks.
That's why you see this lawsuit, which you are right wouldn't have happened under former administrations. "there was a months long DOJ investigation before approving the purchase. The conclusion was it would not harm competition." And they were wrong, right?
I am not a pro-Biden sort of person (I consider myself to the left of Biden, by a wide margin), but the antitrust direction is encouraging. And hopefully will get some things done before he is out of office... we'll see.
> In a July 2021 executive order, President Joe Biden articulated the administration’s broad antitrust policy. That order instructed the antitrust agencies to increase enforcement to prevent a rise in consumer prices and competitive harm in labor markets, and preserve nascent competition. Additionally, in what the order calls a “whole-of-government competition policy,” it charged more than a dozen other agencies to protect competition using their authority under a range of statutes.
— "Biden’s Broad Mandate Has Altered the Antitrust Landscape, Making Merger Clearance Process Less Predictable" https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2022/01/2022-i...
That essay happens to be from from a corporate perspective that does not like that the administration has made mergers "less predictable"! I approve of making monopolistic mergers harder, but it's interesting to see it covered from the opposite bias. You can google for more, but another source, a brief American Bar Association update:
> Biden administration steps up antitrust enforcement: Antitrust enforcement in the Biden administration is about o change, according to Timothy Wu, who played a key role in the executive order President Joe Biden signed in July aimed at limiting corporate dominance and making American businesses more competitive...
> Wu serves as the Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy, National Economic Council. He is a key figure on the White House Competition Council, which was created in Biden’s executive order to bring a whole-of-the government enforcement effort to promote competition in the U.S. economy.
https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2...
In addition to the July 2021 memo, it can see in who he has chosen as appointees to key roles -- various people who have been pushing for stronger antitrust enforcement and new legal theories:
"Biden’s Antitrust Team Signals a Big Swing at Corporate Titans" https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/24/business/biden-antitrust-...
So that's interesting.
I hope something comes of this, but other than a change in administration, what's new on this in the last decade? Hasn't Google essentially controlled most of online advertising for eons? In fact, perhaps more recently Facebook/Meta has chipped into that market more than how things were 8-10 years ago.
I was part of an acquisition that Google made in the ad-tech industry back in 2011 and there was a months long DOJ investigation before approving the purchase. The conclusion was it would not harm competition. Within less than two years our product was eliminated or folded into Google's and the staff scattered to the wind (inside and outside Google), and our customers became Google's customers. They've been doing this forever, back to DoubleClick, etc.
Is this timing connected in any way with layoff announcements? Or a general push by the Biden admin generally?
Not American, so not as informed about the ins and outs, and genuinely curious.