ry_co
Whatever your opinion on the law, this statement by Zuckerberg says all you need to know about why he would take this position. Climb the ladder, and then kick it out from under you.
Zuckerberg realizes that it is significantly cheaper to adjust to more social media regulation than it is to compete against competitors (e.g. Tok Tik). Removing or significantly reforming section 230 would ensure Facebook's position for many years to come. To paraphrase Thompson: Facebook grew virally, and so can it decline virally. Reform of 230 precludes the latter.
Behind the customer service relationship with the broker, nearly every mortgage shop runs the same way. It's the perfect industry to consolidate and make more efficient with economies of scale.
Government's role is to make the ideologically agnostic machine of business align with our values. In the kind of competitive economy we have, it can only be this way. If we try to apply politics from within a business, we risk introducing instabilities and ineffeciencies, making the business less competitive–an existential threat to the values we incorporated into the business.
There's also the fact that many companies that are doing well right now are keeping quiet about it. I know from personal experience at the company I work for (fintech midsized startup) that executives are very careful not to be openly positive about benefiting from the pandemic. Publicly admitting that you profitted by a global pandemic and an economic recession is in poor taste, and companies are rightly tentative about doing so.
From my work I've seen anything adtech related explode. Publishers or aggregators whose primary revenue stream is online advertising income are growing at incredible rates. Assuming that everyone is hurting because physical businesses are hurting is a huge mistake.
Additionally, as many analysts have been saying, the pandemics primary effect so far has been to accelerate existing trends, not create new ones. We're seeing a fast-foward in economic transition. Companies that were well positioned before the pandemic for the economy of the future (automation, digital) are doing swimmingly.
I do not feel that the original claim is overstated. Creating any novel cheese is remarkably difficult–seriously, it's really damn hard–but recreating a cheese that no longer exists and was likely made in a different location under different circumstances is effectively impossible. There are so many hidden variables involved that, even if they had access to the model cheese, a talented cheesemaker could still take years to make a good approximation. And it would only be an approximation. Even with today's advanced cheese technology you cannot recreate terrior.
Since they don't have access to the model cheese, this difficulty is compounded many times.
Edit: I want to add that even though I was at the peak of my cheese game, I was only able to do this because I had effectively unlimited money to throw at the problem and very little oversight from my investors.
It's indirect, but it's a very real benefit.
Edit: Adding to this, the company's reinvestment of funds generated by issuing stock drives demand in other places of the economy. Investing in your own business means spending money on people, infrastructure, and other goods you need to offer your company's service. This necessarily drives demand for these goods. Additionally, this creates cascading demand through the keynesian multiplier effect.
Of course, there could be some hidden factor I'm missing, as biological systems are complex.
So maybe Jordan is actually the one who got ripped off. Still though, pretty cliché idea, but the formulation is too close to not be influenced one way or another.