#Capitalism#PoliticalEconomy#Competition#Neoliberalism#Antitrust: "40 years later, nearly every industry is dominated by a handful of companies, and these companies price-gouge us with abandon. Worse, they use their gigantic ripoff winnings to fill war-chests that fund the corruption of democracy, capturing regulators so that they can rip us off even more, while ignoring labor, privacy and environmental law and ducking taxes.
It turns out that keeping gigantic, opaque, complex corporations honest is really hard. They have so many ways to shuffle money around that it's nearly impossible to figure out what they're doing. Digitalization makes things a million times worse, because computers allow businesses to alter their processes so they operate differently for every customer, and even for every interaction.
This is Dieselgate times a billion: VW rigged its cars to detect when they were undergoing emissions testing and switch to a less polluting, more compliant mode. But when they were on the open road, they spewed lethal quantities of toxic gas, killing people by the thousands. Computers don't make corporate leaders more evil, but they let evil corporate leaders execute far more complex and nefarious plans. Digitalization is a corporate moral hazard, making it just too easy and tempting to rig the game."
BREAKING NEWS - NYTImes - Wednesday, June 5, 2024 11:53 PM ET
Federal regulators made a deal allowing them to proceed with antitrust investigations into Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia in the artificial intelligence industry.
The agreement signals intensifying scrutiny by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Comission into A.I., a rapidly advancing technology that has the potential to upend jobs, information and people’s lives. #AI#OpenAI#Microsoft#Nvidia#ArtificialIntelligence#labor#jobs#Antitrust#law
Republicans must be voted out bc #antitrust enforcement is key to a fairer future:
The top antitrust enforcer will look “with urgency” at the #AI sector, following concerns that power over the transformative #tech is being concentrated among a few deep-pocketed players.
Kanter: examining “monopoly choke points & the competitive landscape” in AI, encompassing: computing power & the data used to train LLMs, to cloud service providers, engineering talent & access to ess-. https://www.ft.com/content/97b45759-36e0-4f5b-9c6a-ae0580f9a29b
The FTC is investigating whether Microsoft structured one of its latest deals with an #AI startup to avoid a government antitrust review of the transaction.
"Despite being a raving commie loon, Smith's observation was so undeniably true that regulators, policymakers, and economists couldn't help but acknowledge that it was true. The trustbusting era was defined by this idea: if we let the number of companies in a sector get too small, or if we let one or a few companies get too big, they'll eventually start to rig prices."
Suing Apple is a necessary step in challenging our perception of Big Tech… https://somegadgetguy.com/b/468
We can't take our eyes off this target. We need to build more momentum. Our legal system has been too slow to adapt to consumer tech trends, and we need to keep the pressure on if we're to course correct for YEARS of bad policy.
"Think for a moment about the fact that the USG is -at this very moment -trying to break up Google -largest #tech co in the history of the world, & there's been virtually no press about it. This is a gigantic story -literally the biggest bus story ever. It's practically a secret.
The U.S. Justice Department and a group of state attorneys general are expected to announce an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation as soon as Thursday, ABC reports. Details of the suit are unclear but it follows a two-year investigation into whether the company created a monopoly over the concert ticket market. Here's more.
Update: The DOJ has filed this suit. “We allege that Live Nation relies on unlawful, anticompetitive conduct to exercise its monopolistic control over the live events industry in the United States at the cost of fans, artists, smaller promoters, and venue operators,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “The result is that fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to play concerts, smaller promoters get squeezed out, and venues have fewer real choices for ticketing services. It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.”
"A bill submitted by the administration of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida would compel the dominant platforms to allow third parties to launch their own app markets and to offer more payment options, while banning the technology giants from giving preferential treatment to their own products."
#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."
Last wk, #Meta revealed (in a motion tried to dismiss: FTC anti-mon. lawsuit) that IG made $32.4B in 2021 ad rev. -shocking -consider #Google's YouTube made $28.8B -same period. App made ~30% of Meta's entire rev. in the early part of 2022. 96% of Meta's $40.1B Q4 2023 rev. came from ads +made >$100B since 2021 -likely to continue -only thing these platforms care about is rev.⬆️. In America, 83% of adults use YouTube, 68%: IG: 47%." #AI#Antitrusthttps://www.wheresyoured.at/the-great-looting-of-the-internet/
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."