Jeff Landry: All Options Are on the Table to Break Big Tech Monopolies

Breitbart ^ | March 19, 2019 | Robert Kraychik

[Yashcheritsiy]

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry told Breitbart News that attorneys general across America — both Democrat and Republican — are considering “all actions,” including the use of existing antitrust law, to curb the growing power held by technology firms such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Landry offered his remarks in a Tuesday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

“We have seen a tremendous amount of consolidation in regard to social platforms and the tech industry over the last decade, and the result of that has become a handful of companies that have amassed a tremendous amount of data and power over the U.S. and world economy,” said Landry.

Landry added, “Just the fact that they can censor any type of speech is problematic, on top of the fact that the monetization of people’s personal data is enriching these companies at the expense of the consumer.”

[Borges]

Platform utilities would not be allowed to transfer or share data with third parties.

This would seriously demonetize social media sites like Facebook. I'm not sure if they could continue as free services.

[Responsibility2nd]

This would seriously demonetize social media sites like Facebook. I'm not sure if they could continue as free services.

Good. I've got no problem with that. Whatever it takes to reign in these out of control monopolies.

[tsomer]

Remember “Net Neutrality”?
That was directed at ISPs ‘throttling’ transmissions by of the dominant content providers— Netflix, Amazon, Google etc. In effect, the law would have allowed the bigger entities exploit the ISPs, dominate the bandwidth, impeding access to smaller users. It was bass-ackwards.

It hasn’t gone away; they’ll reintroduce it at the first opportunity and the content monopolies will make sure that the campaign is well funded.

Here, perhaps, is an opportunity to drive a stake in it’s heart. Call this effort against the information monopolies by the same name: Net Neutrality II. It will at least oblige the opposition to explain the difference, thereby revealing their original intentions.

This regards the political battle. The legal and constitutional aspects are entirely another matter—a minefield of unintended consequences.

[wbarmy]

They broke up AT&T which was doing the job it was paid to do and doing it well. If the Fed can do it then, they can do it now to companies who have no competitor.

Google especially. Twitter will probably go down on its own as younger people feel that it is for old fogeys.

[Borges]

FB isn’t a monopoly. It’s a business of scale. They don’t control any limited resource that would prevent others from competing with them.

[Responsibility2nd]

FB isn’t a monopoly. It’s a business of scale. They don’t control any limited resource that would prevent others from competing with them.

Myspace would beg to differ.

[minnesota_bound]

Someone could start a website and build data centers but google and others would block searches, comments about new competitor, agreements with other sites not to use their search. The article below was longer earlier in the day but is now a snippet of what I saw.

Google had agreements blocking competitors
https://www.fastcompany.com/90322678/google-hit-with-another-eu-antitrust-fine-the-grand-total-now-comes-to-e8-2b

Google didn’t allow its AdSense customers to feature rival search engines on their sites.

Another article about fine
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/business/google-fine-european-union.html

[FLT-bird]

Good! This is long overdue.

[Borges]

Google is another story. I was strictly speaking about Facebook.

[Borges]

They were just better than MySpace. They didn’t block them from doing anything.

[_Jim]

Look to the past to see what was done to (1) Big Telephone, (2) Big Computer (both within most of our lifetimes even!) and (3) Big Oil (in its heyday).