I hope something comes of this, but other than a change in administration, what's new on this in the last decade? Hasn't Google essentially controlled most of online advertising for eons? In fact, perhaps more recently Facebook/Meta has chipped into that market more than how things were 8-10 years ago.
I was part of an acquisition that Google made in the ad-tech industry back in 2011 and there was a months long DOJ investigation before approving the purchase. The conclusion was it would not harm competition. Within less than two years our product was eliminated or folded into Google's and the staff scattered to the wind (inside and outside Google), and our customers became Google's customers. They've been doing this forever, back to DoubleClick, etc.
Is this timing connected in any way with layoff announcements? Or a general push by the Biden admin generally?
Not American, so not as informed about the ins and outs, and genuinely curious.
In 2017, Lina M. Khan, at the age of 27, published Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox. It said everyone was getting antitrust wrong, and there were other ways giant conglomerates were harming competition. Traditionally, unless the consumer was harmed through short term price fixing, just about anything was allowed to fly. The paper took the legal world by storm, and two years ago, she was nominated, confirmed, and appointed as chair of the Federal Trade Commission.
So largely, someone new, with new ideas, took over a regulatory body that has been coasting along on its lorals. The FTC will now behave non-traditionally, disregarding what has been a very consistent school of thought (defined by Yale Law School professor Robert Bork and University of Chicago Law School professors Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook) since the 1977 Continental Television v. GTE Sylvania Supreme Court Case redefined the Judicial Systems perspective on anti-trust, neutering the Sherman Act.
In 1978 Robert Bork wrote the book The Antitrust Paradox and Richard Posner wrote Antitrust Law, summarizing the previous decades shift in attitude towards government intervention in the marketplace. Khan believes the those three people influenced the government to become too lenient and hands-off, when it should have been doing more to protect the marketplace from harmful entities that threaten competitiveness.
Lina Khan may have written great papers but she isn't fit for the job. She harbors a hate for big tech and cannot be impartial in her dealings.
See her recent attempt to prevent Meta from acquiring Within. There is no sane, level-headed case that could possibly paint this acquisition as an antitrust violation. Even most legal experts will agree that Lina Khan's case is a stretch at best.
It's clear that this case is simply motivated by a hatred for Meta more than anything rational, and such decision making can harm the emergence of nascent technology such as AR/VR.
FTC commissioners wear many hats. They exercise executive power in a rulemaking capacity, but they also have both prosecutorial and quasi-judicial power. They can authorize complaints, and the commissioners sit as an appellate court to review the decisions of their in-house court.
I don't know anything about the acquisition, but speaking generally, appointees leave less lasting precedent when they spend their time chasing individual vendettas rather than establishing consistent ruts that the system can run down once they leave.
There is a point where changing the rules now appears to benefit incumbents, despite them being the targets here. Nobody new will be able to grow this way to compete with existing large players. If they cant acquire small things, they will just be forced to clone them, yet the smaller tier players wont be able to "just clone things."
Instagram falls into the same category. When Mark acquired it, it was tiny. He is who grew it. Facebook acquired a mobile camera app because it didn't have an app yet. Same how it acquired Beluga and turned it into messenger. Adobe acquiring Photoshop, then Macromedia. Mirosoft acquiring Powerpoint and then hotmail.com.
I don't think your analogy holds here; Instagram was already an active and popular social network before Facebook acquired it, not a "camera app." Did it grow? Certainly. While we don't know what would have happened to it had FB not bought it, it's quite possible FB bought it precisely because it was growing and becoming 'cool.'
Instagram was what, 19 month old when FB bought it? It has 13 employees. It had 0 revenue. It had 30 million people on it. (Facebook hit a billion people in 2012.)
It was tiny. It was the hip up-and-coming app. It had the limelight, and importantly to FB it was mobile first.
I think our memories like to kind of project back its success after acquisition onto what it was before, and get distorted by its billion dollar price. He paid a lot for a not a lot, because he was buying a fad while it was still hot, before Twitter or Google could. He then dumped gasoline on a matchstick. Would ANYBODY else have poured that much money into Instagram that quickly? I think we can all picture what would have happened to it if it had found its way into the Twitter portfolio. (I would surmise it may no longer even exist and have been folded into Twitter having a picture posting feature.)
In hindsight it was absolutely anti-competitive in some way, but I don't know how the law could act to block buying shiny things with potential.
Legal opinions vary. Certainly Robert Bork would agree with you. He would also probably agree with your vicious libel of Chair Khan.
Those who really care about the development of particular technologies typically don't welcome consolidation in related industries. It wouldn't have been good news for electric cars, if Tesla had been acquired by GM in say 2008. Why the unhinged invective against Khan?
It's neither libel or unhinged. I'm not the only one out there that finds the case around Within a stretch at best.
Plenty of mergers and acquisitions have driven technological progress, and so long as they aren't anticompetitive it's not problematic. See Meta and Oculus, for instance, or Apple's merger with Next.
Acquisitions and mergers fundamentally reduce duplication of work and allow you to combine building blocks to create something greater. Blindly blocking any and all of them as Khan is, is indicative that her bias against big tech has the potential to harm progress overall for no perceivable actual gain.
...she isn't fit for the job. She harbors a hate... There is no sane, level-headed case... simply motivated by a hatred for Meta more than anything rational...
...
It's neither libel or unhinged!
ITT you've claimed that she isn't sane, isn't rational, is motivated solely by hate, and is unfit for her job. You've given us no reason to believe any of this, and the source of it all seems merely to be a political disagreement. This is a respected professional who has been nominated by the president and approved by Congress. Please, find a hinge.
I'm not the only one out there that finds the case around Within a stretch at best.
Yes we've already established that you agree with Robert Bork. I'd say probably Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito are also on your side. Care to cite some less odious support?
Khan and FTC clearly don't have the resources to block all mergers and acquisitions. It's amusing that you complain this impossible thing is happening in the same thread in which your political bedfellows complain it isn't happening. [0]
Regulatory cases like this get launched to test the waters. I see the Within thing as tipping at toe in, to see what the judicial branch will allow them to get away with. They are probably reaching for an extreme on purpose to find the boundary.
Can you enlighten me as to why this is only a problem when somebody is not reflexively in favor of handing the keys to everything to large companies, and not when they are?
>Within was named[13] the #1 VR app for iOS by Apple Insider, featured[13] as "Best New App" on iTunes and is the most downloaded and highest rated[14] cinematic VR app for Google Cardboard.
This appears to be a clear-cut case of consolidation of key companies operating in a sector. Care to share why you think this isn't "sane"?
How does this hatred work? Does she keep a leaderboard? Does big tech include foreign companies? I don't know much about this person other than the usual media bio sketches. Where can I read more?
It works through frivolous lawsuits attempting to block everything Big Tech does regardless of reason, eg the acquisition of Within, which has no justifiable antitrust case whatsoever.
Within is an app developer whose apps compete with apps owned by Meta, run on hardware owned by Meta, and are sold in an app store owned by Meta. Why does this confuse you?
There is no viable anticompetitive case for VR as it is a nascent industry which barely exists. Furthermore, Meta is far from the only player in the VR space today - Valve, Pico, HTC, Samsung, and Microsoft amongst others all play a role in the VR ecosystem.
Said phrase was coined intentionally. It was a purposeful allusion of sorts to the idiom.
Resting to me meant inaction. Conversely, the FTC appears to still analyze things for antitrust, but was doing so through an outdated framework.
Lorals means "pertaining to lore." I meant it to mean that Bork and Co had created an unquestionable mythology around what anti-trust was. Blasphemists were ignored and discarded.
So, new idiom minted. Maybe someday it can make it into the dictionary, and cite this post.
Coasting on your lorals = on auto-pilot, not questioning what put you on your trajectory, complacent enough to keep the flight path and speed. Tangently related to: appeal to tradition, argumentum ad antiquitatem, argumentum ad antiquitam, appeal to antiquity, and appeal to common practice.
The FTC shares jurisdiction over federal civil antitrust enforcement with the Department of Justice Antitrust Division. In some consumer protection matters, the FTC appears with, or supports, the U.S. Department of Justice.
Biden's FTC appointments are redefining FTC perspective on anti-trust, and DOJ is following suit.
And the quality high. The name "standard" was a reference to standards of measure and control; the implication in the name was "We're the brand that won't blow up your house when you use it."
> Lina M. Khan, at the age of 27, published Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox
Is this a puff piece? She's just some government employee - she doesn't produce anything. It remains to be seen whether her aggressive interpretation of antitrust law will actually benefit consumers. We can split up Google into 100 companies and then we'll find out that the bales of cash advertising produces are no longer subsidizing the less profitable services. Maybe you'll have to pay to upload to YouTube or you won't get 15 GB of free gmail space or Hangouts will require an enterprise plan. But it'll all be worth it because some other adtech company who cares even less about your privacy than Google will now be able to sell search ads?
I was casually pointing out someone comparatively green was in charge now, as opposed to an experienced tenured dogmatic bureaucrat. I left it ambiguous whether inexperience would be a boon to free thinking and a new era or a hinderance and burden to the economy. Maybe things have been being done the way they were "always" done, for a reason.
Take it as a rorschach test.
I think your comment was valuable in that it suggested the work being done on antitrust by Lina Khan. For those who are interested, I would also recommend reading the excellent Matt Stoller on Substack [1] who does a weekly analysis on antitrust regulation, monopolies, and more.
He is talking about how the prevailing attitude towards antitrust in the executive branch has changed. Lina Khan is a symbol and motivator of that change. Not sure what you're talking about.
You’re summarizing the problem with trusts in capitalism here in your argument. Capitalism works to generate innovation and wealth because there’s competitive forces driving that. No one can compete with gmail and YouTube because they are being subsidized by another business segment. If you get rid of that competition it leads to stagnation
Who is competing with gmail? Please include market share and revenue in your analysis
>>and YouTube
Lots of companies operating in the video delivery space too.
This is more defensibile than the YouTube argument, there is Rumble and Vimeo for instance. But again,
What is the market share and revenue for YouTube vs these other “competitors”?
>Who is competing with gmail? Please include market share and revenue in your analysis
Outlook, Yahoo, (insert a long list of Chinese providers here), Yandex, Fastmail, Zoho Mail, Hey, Protonmail and so forth.
All of the above have actually managed to capture a decent share of the market, and there are many more.
>This is more defensibile than the YouTube argument, there is Rumble and Vimeo for instance. But again, What is the market share and revenue for YouTube vs these other “competitors”?
Instagram and Facebook are also huge in the same space. I'd guess that Akamai is even bigger.
As an American it may just be attitudes. The last two administrations didn’t do much to Google, Democrat or Republican.
But the idea of big tech being a wonder that unequivocally makes life better and doesn’t need oversight seems to be falling apart. Both for good (privacy) and bad (‘kill section 230!’) reasons.
When goods and services become commodities humans always take them for granted because they can be. We don’t ooh and ahh over high grade steel or steam engines anymore even though they would have been revolutionary 400 years ago. Big tech got past their novelty phase and now people want more improvements. It’s how our economic system works
This. And god forbid you suggest on HN that it's OK if Google and other tech megacaps are actually run for the collective benefit of their stockholders, which besides current and former employees, includes practically every American with a retirement account, including those not fortunate enough to win the FAANG lottery. Expect downvotes and flags, presumably from those who seriously believe Google should just keep paying people $300k a year indefinitely, despite perceived underperformance.
It's not entitled at all. How much of the world literally runs on technology developed by tech workers?
From being able to call your family from anywhere in the world to the most critical systems, tech workers are the reason that quality of life is so much better today than it was, say, pre-internet.
The affordances provided by the smartphone alone are an example of this. How is this not obvious proof that tech workers have fundamentally changed the world and improved QoL?
Tech is part of a web of industries that provide to each other. What phones without the rare Earth metals a traditional combustion machine digs up?
As far as you or I go specifically, reality does not need either of us to actually exist. Plenty of folks still around without the two of us.
For numerous health metrics a slower pre-internet life was healthier. All the technological churn has had long lived impact on environment that will make life worse in the future.
We've been burning hydrocarbons to keep warm and move around long before tech. But the future of energy (and thus of our civilization) will come from tech, not from looking back at burning wood and whale oil. See renewables, fusion and even nuclear.
Progress has been slow, but dealing with Google is a completely bipartisan issue. We've moved really far: A few years ago, the FTC was chaired by a guy who wrote Google-funded studies claiming Google's monopoly was good, and Google reps visited the White House some 400 times during the Obama administration. The revolving door between Google and the federal government didn't stop turning for several years straight.
Now both parties see the threat (albeit for differing reasons), but the federal government needs a lot of time to build a case like this, and Google is extremely adept at stalling for time.
During the EU investigation, Google waited every deadline to the final day, then asking for more time multiple times, and then finally on the last possible extension day tor respond would come back with a bull~~~~ one page "we don't think we broke this law" statement. They know the fine won't be nearly as big as the profits so they're running out the clock as long as possible. Every lawyer there knows they're crooks.
The administration change indeed has a lot to do with this. New chairs at the FCC (Rosenworcel) and FTC (Sohn) have a much more antitrust bent than in the past.
The layoff announcements are connected if you take it that M&A in big tech has been out of control for years, but it's tangential.
Update on my own comment here as a reply: I read the actual legal document, and it specifically calls out the aquisition of my former employer (AdMeld) by Google as one of the key anti-competitive moves Google made in the display ads space.
> I hope something comes of this, but other than a change in administration, what's new on this in the last decade? Hasn't Google essentially controlled most of online advertising for eons?
As the article points out, "preventing monopolies" is not the prima facie goal of antitrust law as traditionally interpreted. Monopolies are bad because of their effects on the market (e.g. they can raise prices higher than a competitive market would allow), not because of their "monopoliness".
There is a somewhat confusing quote in the article that implies that the DOJ is filing this suite in an attempt to get higher courts to revisit that standard. But then it finishes the paragraph with "put corporate America on notice", and I genuinely don't know whether that was the intent of the quoted prosecutor or not. This angle would be really big news if so, but... it seems poorly sourced.
(Full disclosure: I work at Google, but nowhere near advertising.)
The US has, for maybe 30 years or so, looked past the traditional trust busting intention of anti-trust (hey, it's in the name!) laws - preventing monopolies.
The more modern interpretation has basically been "monopolies are ok if it lowers consumer prices", which sort of never made sense. Once you finish strangling all your competition, wouldn't you then raise prices? And then what, the government lets them do that until some vague line in the sand is crossed and we then actually enforce the law?
There are issues on the other side too - monopsony, where a company is so big they are the only nature buyer. You get this with Walmart being able to disproportionately squeeze their suppliers. You have this problem in labor markets sometimes because who else are you going to work for if your employer is super sized?
Lina Khan's writings, and the fact that Biden admin appointed her, indicates these recent assumptions about allowance of monopolies can probably be thrown out the window.
> Lina Khan's writings, and the fact that Biden admin appointed her, indicates these recent assumptions about allowance of monopolies can probably be thrown out the window.
Right, that's what the article is trying to imply. But it doesn't have a quote that actually says it, so I'm saying this is pretty thin. There are a lot of people (clearly including you) who would like to see antitrust law revisited in the courts. I just don't see it from this article.
Yes, there is a general push by the Biden administration to beef up antitrust enforcement, including in tech.
That's why you see this lawsuit, which you are right wouldn't have happened under former administrations. "there was a months long DOJ investigation before approving the purchase. The conclusion was it would not harm competition." And they were wrong, right?
I am not a pro-Biden sort of person (I consider myself to the left of Biden, by a wide margin), but the antitrust direction is encouraging. And hopefully will get some things done before he is out of office... we'll see.
> In a July 2021 executive order, President Joe Biden articulated the administration’s broad antitrust policy. That order instructed the antitrust agencies to increase enforcement to prevent a rise in consumer prices and competitive harm in labor markets, and preserve nascent competition. Additionally, in what the order calls a “whole-of-government competition policy,” it charged more than a dozen other agencies to protect competition using their authority under a range of statutes.
That essay happens to be from from a corporate perspective that does not like that the administration has made mergers "less predictable"! I approve of making monopolistic mergers harder, but it's interesting to see it covered from the opposite bias. You can google for more, but another source, a brief American Bar Association update:
> Biden administration steps up antitrust enforcement: Antitrust enforcement in the Biden administration is about o change, according to Timothy Wu, who played a key role in the executive order President Joe Biden signed in July aimed at limiting corporate dominance and making American businesses more competitive...
> Wu serves as the Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy, National Economic Council. He is a key figure on the White House Competition Council, which was created in Biden’s executive order to bring a whole-of-the government enforcement effort to promote competition in the U.S. economy.
In addition to the July 2021 memo, it can see in who he has chosen as appointees to key roles -- various people who have been pushing for stronger antitrust enforcement and new legal theories:
I hope something comes of this, but other than a change in administration, what's new on this in the last decade? Hasn't Google essentially controlled most of online advertising for eons? In fact, perhaps more recently Facebook/Meta has chipped into that market more than how things were 8-10 years ago.
I was part of an acquisition that Google made in the ad-tech industry back in 2011 and there was a months long DOJ investigation before approving the purchase. The conclusion was it would not harm competition. Within less than two years our product was eliminated or folded into Google's and the staff scattered to the wind (inside and outside Google), and our customers became Google's customers. They've been doing this forever, back to DoubleClick, etc.
Is this timing connected in any way with layoff announcements? Or a general push by the Biden admin generally?
Not American, so not as informed about the ins and outs, and genuinely curious.