Why Did Congress Just Vote to Break Up Big Tech?

Notably absent of is any recognition that we live today in a very global marketplace. FAANG companies are all American. If they are broken into pieces by the US government, what if that just provides opportunity for non-US companies to now fill those ecological niches?<p>The end result will be the US anti-trust action accomplished nothing but enabling foreign replacements.

This is clearly needed, even if late, considering that antitrust laws are not a new thing.<p>There is hope, we tend to forget after only a few generations, but if politicians are moving now this is because the collective opinions about big tech progressively shifted during the last decade.<p>I might be naïve, but I think that HN played a role.<p>And of course this is not over yet.

&gt; <i>The ACCESS Act mandates that big tech firms have to make their systems open to competitors and business rivals, in the same way that AT&amp;T customers can talk to T-Mobile customers, or users of different email systems can communicate with one another.</i><p>Okay, this is plausible, but it can turn into all kinds of mess as federated systems aren&#x27;t simpler to design, build, or operate. For example, how would Signal inter-communicate with e2ee intact with say, Facebook Messenger? They&#x27;d have to do a matrix.org style bridges, which is going to be super tricky to maintain, at their scale. Hardware is doomed: USB-C for all inter-connects...<p>&gt; <i>The merger bill makes it harder for big tech firms to buy rivals.</i><p>Well, the race to $2T market cap just got harder. Can get behind this. I can do without Zuck in my WhatsApp, or Satya in my GitHub. Such a restriction may, instead, result in a marked increase in venture investments from BigTech, which may not be as bad a thing, after all?<p>&gt; <i>The nondiscrimination bill is intended to ban the ability to big tech firms to preference their own products, the way Google substitutes its own reviews for Yelp reviews, even if Yelp’s reviews are better.</i><p>Much needed. Looking at you &quot;Amazon&#x27;s choice&quot;.<p>&gt; <i>The break-up bill is supposed to split apart big tech firms by prohibiting platforms from owning any line of business that uses that platform.</i><p>Affects tech companies ranging from AWS and Stripe to platforms like Android and iOS? This bill can be the straw that breaks the camel&#x27;s back, imo, if they get the details right. Either the incumbents remain entrenched because of the loopholes, or they no longer wield undue advantage, leaving some breathing room for upstarts. Unsure if this is good or bad for software engineers. They&#x27;ve enjoyed higher salaries for a while on the back of some of the most ridiculous growth ever seen, driven in no part by unabated monopolistic practices.<p>&gt; <i>And that is truly stunning.</i><p>Indeed.

Targeting the FANGs and not the banking system and telecoms is super annoying.<p>The amount of damage the banking system can do to the economy is orders of magnitude greater than FANGs can, as we recently witnessed.<p>And the telecom regional monopolies that suppress competition and block municipal broadband have much stronger competitive moats than the FANGs do.<p>The government needs to address those first, but they seem better at lobbying than the FANGs are.

I don&#x27;t understand this movement at all. It seems very, very short sighted and also misdirected. The most toxic marketplace and social elements of some of these companies is their business model, not their scale&#x2F;size.<p>Breaking them up into pieces doesn&#x27;t fix their deleterious business models and only opens the door for non-US entities who remain scaled&#x2F;vertically-integrated to become the dominant forces in the market. Either that or this will necessitate passing future protectionist legislation to keep out foreign competition, which I&#x27;m both skeptical is actually a good idea in general or that the US has the actual resolve to do so.<p>What problem is supposed to be solved by breaking these companies up? It doesn&#x27;t make any sense to me, and I say this as someone who is generally deeply disturbed by much of what is enabled by some of these firms, so this isn&#x27;t an endorsement of these companies. It&#x27;s an indictment of the approach.

Just imagine what the internet would be like if we hadn&#x27;t broken up the AOL&#x2F;CompuServe monopoly on online services!<p>As they said in 1997, “The reality is that AOL is cyberspace.&quot;[1]<p>This is an interesting perspective btw on how the Microsoft settlement set the stage for the rise of Google, etc.:<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;9&#x2F;6&#x2F;17827042&#x2F;antitrust-1990s-microsoft-google-aol-monopoly-lawsuits-history" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;9&#x2F;6&#x2F;17827042&#x2F;antitrust-1990s-m...</a>

How will breaking up the biggest U.S. tech firms not make them more vulnerable to Chinese influence -- where, notably, the biggest firms like ZTE and Huawei have already since at least 2012 (i.e. based on E.U. agencies reports at the time) been receiving tens of billions (in USD) of funding, specifically for the purpose of outcompeting foreign (i.e. primarily western) contenders? Notably, at the time (I believe around 2012) it was found that Huawei and ZTE were backed by $30 billion and $15 billion in government financing (via central bank), respectively.

This all sounds nice, but it still has to make it through the rest of congress

Clearly needed and a positive, but I see zero impact on stock prices of those companies. Does that mean the expert consensus is that this will simply not pass the next levels, or that it is all ineffective?

They weren&#x27;t tithing enough money to the right people?

Stoller makes the excellent point that Congress will also need to rein in the judiciary and notably the Chicago School &quot;interpretation&quot; (neutering, really) of antitrust law perpetrated by Judge Robert Bork (he of Nixon&#x27;s infamous Saturday Night Massacre) in a stunning act of judicial activism and caprice:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theamericanconservative.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;robert-borks-america&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theamericanconservative.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;robert-bork...</a><p>(this is a conservative publication, by the way, hardly one you&#x27;d expect to be unfavorably biased against Bork).

Wish these bills would kill clauses like &quot;most favored nation&quot; as far as pricing goes, anti-steering laws and forcing side loading. Making the pricing premium for using a platform naked would give a direct financial &amp; choice to consumers to go towards the most price efficient venue.

If FAANG is required to allow more competition, it will inherently also allow more international competition as well.<p>It’s going to be a lot of lost tax dollars, and USA incomes.<p>But I hope it’s for the best.

I wonder how the &quot;break-up bill&quot; would be applied in practice for specific companies.<p>Does that mean that e.g. Apple Music would now have to become a separate entity?

One of the things that I would love to see would be the ban of all those acquisitions that those large firms do. Yet alone the 9bn USD MGM takeover by Amazon was not understandable.<p>Amazon is already too huge. Why are those aqcuisitions allowed?

Perhaps they saw how the big national monopolies, like Siemens and BASF and Samsung, and Sanyo and . became stultifying nepotistic monopolies in various fields, and when faster and quicker more innovative US companies came along that ran past them - and seeing this, decided to have a way to limit these monopolies. Look up Standard oil monopoly for some aspects, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Standard_Oil" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Standard_Oil</a> That is the wiki and here.... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.investopedia.com&#x2F;insights&#x2F;history-of-us-monopolies&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.investopedia.com&#x2F;insights&#x2F;history-of-us-monopoli...</a>