Posted on 03/20/2019 6:04:07 AM PDT by Yashcheritsiy
Good. I've got no problem with that. Whatever it takes to reign in these out of control monopolies.
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.
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.
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.
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
Good! This is long overdue.
Google is another story. I was strictly speaking about Facebook.
They were just better than MySpace. They didn’t block them from doing anything.
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).
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