#Capitalism#Monopolies#Antitrust#Competition: "Capitalism's theory proceeds from the idea that we are driven by our self-interest, and that competition turns self-interest into communal sentiment. Take away the competition, and all that's left is the self-interest.
I think this is broadly true, even though it's not the main reason I oppose monopolies (I oppose monopolies because they corrupt our democracy and pauperize workers). But even if capitalism's ability to turn greed into public benefit isn't the principle that's uppermost in my mind, it's what capitalists claim to believe – and treasure.
I think that most of the right's defense of monopolies stems from cynical, bad-faith rationalizations – but there are people who've absorbed these rationalizations and find them superficially plausible. It's worth developing these critiques, for their sake."
Seen in that light, it’s no surprise that Big Tech is refusing to comply with the rules. If the EU successfully forces tech to play fair, it will serve as a starting gun for a global race to the top, in which tech’s ill-gotten gains - of data, power and money - will be returned to the users and workers from whom that treasure came.
The architects of the DMA and DSA foresaw this, of course. They’ve announced investigations into Apple, Google and Meta, threatening fines of 10 percent of the companies’ global income, which will double to 20 percent if the companies don’t toe the line.
It’s not just Big Tech that’s playing for all the marbles - it’s also the systems of democratic control and accountability. If Apple can sabotage the DMA’s insistence on taking away its veto over its customers’ software choices, that will spill over into the US Department of Justice’s case over the same issue, as well as the cases in Japan and South Korea, and the pending enforcement action in the UK."
According to three people with knowledge of the move, the European Commission is pressing ahead with a formal charge sheet against the world’s most valuable listed tech company over concerns it is restricting competition in the sector.
Microsoft last month offered concessions as it sought to avoid regulatory action, including extending a plan to unbundle Teams from other software such as Office, not just in Europe but across the world.
However, people familiar with their thinking said EU officials were still concerned that the company did not go far enough to facilitate fairness in the market."
#BigTech#SiliconValley#Antitrust#Competition#DigitalPlatforms: "Treating platform corporations as surrogate states leads to multiple interesting follow-up insights. Lehdonvirta criticizes competition policy-based solutions to the problem of platform power. If the digital platforms’ core source of value is the provision of governance services, how exactly would increasing competitive pressures or government-enforced deconcentration benefit societies? Among the most fascinating follow-up insights is Lehdonvirta’s take on the political power of platforms. The literature on platform power has—rightly—been focused on the extremely successful ways in which these businesses were able to enlist consumers and users into political-economic alliances against public regulators and incumbents (Culpepper and Thelen, 2020; Adler, 2021). Lehdonvirta’s take is not incompatible, but slightly different. In important ways platforms have become the institutional infrastructure of core swaths of the economy. While the book does not engage with the recent literature on financial systems, its account takes the recent debate about the infrastructural power of business to a new field. Even more striking than in financial markets, however, cloud empires are not just providing the ‘fuel’ to govern markets effectively but have themselves become essential components of the institutional fabric of commercial life today. It is this infrastructural role that helps to explain why there is very little public surprise when platforms feel entitled to maintain embassies in ‘foreign nations’."
I’ll speak about theory and practice of Digital Markets act. And implications for cybersecurity, privacy, competition. Bonus points: information about one actual case in which I was involved. It considers something that all of you use each and every day :-)
#Amazon#BigTech#Antitrust#Competition: "The Everything War makes a compelling case that no company should be this powerful. For many sellers, Amazon is now their main route to market. Khan’s lawsuit argues that the company has leveraged this to force them to buy other services such as advertising and fulfilment (in 2022, Amazon surpassed UPS to become America’s biggest non-governmental delivery service). Swelled by this influx, its take of sellers’ revenues rose from 19 per cent in 2014 to 45 per cent in 2023, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an anti-monopoly group, which adds that prices had to go up to offset these fees. A Borkian might argue that Amazon’s success is the reward for being efficient and raising consumer welfare. But with less and less competition providing a benchmark, these notions of welfare become very hard to gauge."
#Books#BookPublishing#BookPublishers#Antitrust#Competition: "The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).
But let’s dig into everything they said in detail."
I don't think people realize how antithetical #science is to the very concept of #competition. You know how your parents were always telling you to be a good sport and congratulate the other team? Fuck that. You're a scientist. You don't want to win. You could lose completely and utterly, and you would still be victorious, because the experiment is to see who would win.
That's not to say you want to lose either. If you let the other side win in a contest, you've just spoiled your own experiment, and you'll never know who would win, if both sides were trying. So you still have to fight as fiercely as the most victory fixated competitor, otherwise the experiment would be ruined. But if you fight true, and give it your all, then one of two things happens:
You win. The experiment is successful.
You lose. The experiment is successful!
There is no way to be unvictorious as a scientist. The experiment is what matters, not our petty ego contests. And that is one of science's greatest strengths. This isn't a game, or a competition. It's life, existence and truth, and your entire measure of victory is how well you live. How true you stay to your grand experiment.
#TheMetalDogArticleList #MetalInjection
US Department Of Justice Reportedly Preparing To Sue Live Nation Over Breaking Antitrust Laws
Not exactly surprising, given how things have gone.
'Big business in Australia faces less competition than almost anywhere in the world and likes it that way. The era of privatisation and “light-handed” regulation has only made matters worse. Turning the situation around will require a full set of policy tools, including conduct measures, divestiture and, in some cases, a return to public ownership.'
#EU#EC#Neoliberalism#Antitrust#Competition#BigTech: "In 2019, a year after the GDPR came into force, Johnny Ryan appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and told them that “things I think are looking very bleak for our colleagues at Google and at Facebook … it is highly likely that they will be forced to change how they do business.” At the time, he was working for Brave, a privacy-focused web browser founded by the author of the Javascript programming language.
I asked Ryan what happened. “I was a naïve young man,” he chuckled. In fairness, at the time he added the caveat that the Europeans had yet to enforce their own policy. The Commission shipped out enforcement to member states’ data protection authorities, without much pressure to apply the law as written. Tech platforms quickly realized that if they headquartered in one EU country, they could funnel all GDPR regulatory enforcement there. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta set up shop in Ireland, and Amazon in Luxembourg; both are notorious tax havens with incentives to be friendly to Big Tech. Ryan made a public records request asking how many Irish investigators were working on GDPR, and was told the agency didn’t even have records to find out who was investigating.
“If you have free movement within the EU but strong national state authorities in their territories, it’s obvious that corporates will play them against each other,” said Repasi, and that’s what happened. A parallel problem is that the GDPR didn’t focus enforcement toward the biggest purveyors of data, meaning that the smallest website operators—“local sports clubs and dentists,” Ryan said—felt the biggest relative impact.
“When a member state doesn’t enforce European law,” Ryan added, “the European Commission is the guardian of the treaties of the EU and they should take that state to court … [but] 10 to 15 years ago the Commission stopped taking cases against member states. It’s love instead of power.”" https://prospect.org/world/2024-04-03-eurocrats-on-the-brink/
One of the world's richest companies is now under fire from the #UnitedStates govt. #Justice & 16 states filed a #lawsuit against the Silicon Valley giant on Thurs, accusing the company of abusing its #power as a #monopoly to edge out rivals & ensure customers keep using its products.
It's on from today until 24.03., & features different tasks the rover has to perform everyday. The winning team is chosen by points & announced on the last day. This is a competition from the Australian Space Agency (ASA).
I'm sitting in the @EU_Commission#DMA compliance workshop for #Apple right now and as much as I appreciate the format, it's frustrating to see that Apple is the only party on the panel and in addition has its proxies like #CCIA and the #AppAssociation#ACT in the audience that are allowed to ask convenient questions and steer the discussion in Apple's interest.