Adversarial Intercompatibility is the existing tool the governments used that I like most. Facebook and Google both exist because they scraped the existing web (Myspace and all of the web, respectively), yet that capability is often a 'criminal violation of buissneas model' today, with harsh DMCA penalties.
Users shouldn't ever have to be locked into an app. Like they shouldn't have been locked into just Ma Bell telephones. Carterphone should apply here.
Web scraping is legal as long as the data is publicly available and you're not accidentally (or intentionally) DoSing the site. DMCA does not really come into it at all.
But social networks are almost all private by default. It's quite against term of service to scrape Twitter or Facebook. Using third party tools is liable to get one banned.
There doesn't seem to be much granting users the right or ability to either use their own clients, nor can they effectively switch away & keep their connections.
These networks are treating themselves like AT&T/MaBell, and have outlawed all the Carterphones. We're locked in, in a horrific way.
Anyone who wanted to opt out of Google's indexing could have edited their robots.txt file. They didn't do so because most people want their sites to be indexed on Google.
As someone who attended the event in person I thought Khan was very respectful and open in her demeanor and I appreciated the fact that she took the time to come out and speak (also shout out to YC for hosting this events).
I will say I was somewhat disappointed with the questions asked since many of them centered around AI and the recent Biden EO rather than actual examples of potential monopoly power such as the app store.
It's been disappointing to see Khan's FTC focus so much on big tech—and frequently fail to make their case—when so many other anti-competitive behavior in other sectors has gone unchecked. The consolidation of medical firms and hospitals comes to mind. Feels like they are picking their fights based more on ideology than on trying to minimize harms to American consumers from anti-competitive practices.
> they are picking their fights based more on ideology
Khan is fighting the best fight she can. The problem is she's woefully inexperienced in so many domains critical to the job.
I'm increasingly convinced her hire was a deceitful compromise to placate the base, because she says the right things, as well as corporate interests, because she can't follow through on them. I've seen two big law firms tell companies to pursue risky mergers; while there is a higher chance they'll be challenged, there is a much higher chance those challenges will fail.
It's more about saying they tried to do something (virtue signalling) than actually accomplishing anything. Think about it - would going after a bunch of tiny firms no one ever heard of make any headlines? No. But if the FTC goes after FAANG, even if it loses each one, they can blame the judiciary ("bad people") and signal they are trying to the part of the elite class that cares about this.
Hospital and medical firm consolidation was a predicted (and likely intentional) affect of the ACA. The head of the FTC wouldn't interrupt something seen as desirable by the administration.
I do not know why she gets so much fan fare for a single paper on Amazon. Her entire tenure was nothing consequential about Anti-trust. She was supposed to be queen of Trust-busting.
Just co-opt the lingo of a movement and forward your career. A walking talking self-promotion shop.
So I had no idea who she was and looked up her background....
She seems wildly inexperienced.... Clearly smart and motivated, but wildly out of her depth. No wonder they failed to prevent the Microsoft + Activision Blizzard merger. Lawyers with decades of experience on her ran around her in circles
How did she get that job? Who did she know? Was she set up to fail? What the actual hell is this?
I am incredibly disappointed in this corrupt bs. Like this can't be all just because she wrote that thesis on Amazon. No way that justifies her position.
I don't care about her ideological positions or wtv, but has she actually succeeded in any anti trust case? I have been rage clicking through her history, and while her academic record is impressive, I see nothing successful during her tenure at the ftc.
The real what the fuck moment, for me, was when Khan did "not even provide an estimated actual figure or range for Facebook's market share at any point over the past ten years" [1].
That's the judge! In his opinion! How do you claim monopoly without bothering to calculate market share!
She wrote a paper that provides a new legal basis for antitrust enforcement in the U.S. that allows for different theories from the currently prevailing "consumer harm" doctrine.
Who did she know?
Her paper on antitrust was a huge deal in the legal world. It would be more accurate to ask, "who knew her?" and the answer would be pretty much everybody in the legal community.
What the actual hell is this?
It was an attempt to block a merger. Which was slightly more successful than the last FTC action against Microsoft...which led to them unbundling IE for a few years. And that failure was back when the FTC was full of experienced lawyers coming off decades of actively pursuing antitrust cases.
Like I don't care about her ideological positions or wtv, but has she actually succeeded in any anti trust case? Cuz I have been rage clicking through her history, and while her academic record is impressive, I see nothing successful during her tenure at the ftc.
The FTC hasn't had a successful major antitrust case in decades...
> She seems wildly inexperienced.... Clearly smart and motivated, but wildly out of her depth. No wonder they failed to prevent the Microsoft + Activision Blizzard merger. Lawyers with decades of experience on her ran around her in circles
Or maybe because there wasn't actually a good case to block the merger? Neither Activision-Blizzard nor Microsoft are anywhere near monopolies in gaming. Believe it or not "big tech is bad" is not a sufficient case for blocking a merger, actual consumer harm or threat of it has to be demonstrated.
I'm less convinced this is an issue of Kahn and her team's inexperience, so much as that the FTC is being expected (or maybe directed by the executive) to take on cases that don't have any merit to placate public opinion. "Big tech bad" is a popular meme these days, and the FTC is pursuing cases accordingly even if those cases are on very shaky ground.
Can you be more specific? Otherwise this comes off as reactionary. Most of her term has been about laying the foundations to do antitrust again, since it has been declining since the 60s and dead since Bush settled the MSFT case. It might take a decade to get a big win on breaking up a giant, so it's good that she has already started.
She is overly obsessed with big tech when there are much more insidious anti-trust cases like banking, media, and broadband infrastructure. She only goes after what is hot and politically popular (exactly like a lot of founders). Big tech is now the easy punching bag because they made newspapers lose money and politicians blame them for the whole Biden/Trump/Clinton election issue. They are a good distraction from the more entrenched interests. If I were a lobbyist for Goldman/AT&T, there is no better candidate than her.
Her appointment in this case is politically charged. People don't usually go straight from academia to one of the highest seats in the executive unless they are put there by the incumbent administration to be an attack dog/push a very specific view of the world. She gives off opportunistic "during a gold rush, sell shovels" vibes, just on the regulatory side.
Readit News
Users shouldn't ever have to be locked into an app. Like they shouldn't have been locked into just Ma Bell telephones. Carterphone should apply here.
What tools that Lina listed did you like most? M&A (Mergers & acquisitions) was the main focus seemingly but she did go through other tools. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CWbc6pekd8#t=37m3s
There doesn't seem to be much granting users the right or ability to either use their own clients, nor can they effectively switch away & keep their connections.
These networks are treating themselves like AT&T/MaBell, and have outlawed all the Carterphones. We're locked in, in a horrific way.
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I will say I was somewhat disappointed with the questions asked since many of them centered around AI and the recent Biden EO rather than actual examples of potential monopoly power such as the app store.
Khan is fighting the best fight she can. The problem is she's woefully inexperienced in so many domains critical to the job.
I'm increasingly convinced her hire was a deceitful compromise to placate the base, because she says the right things, as well as corporate interests, because she can't follow through on them. I've seen two big law firms tell companies to pursue risky mergers; while there is a higher chance they'll be challenged, there is a much higher chance those challenges will fail.
Amazon, Meta and Alphabet are at the top of the list for lobbying spend
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders
The US has two anti-trust authorities. FTC and DOJ antitrust division. US vs Google is DOJ case.
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Just co-opt the lingo of a movement and forward your career. A walking talking self-promotion shop.
She seems wildly inexperienced.... Clearly smart and motivated, but wildly out of her depth. No wonder they failed to prevent the Microsoft + Activision Blizzard merger. Lawyers with decades of experience on her ran around her in circles
How did she get that job? Who did she know? Was she set up to fail? What the actual hell is this?
I am incredibly disappointed in this corrupt bs. Like this can't be all just because she wrote that thesis on Amazon. No way that justifies her position.
I don't care about her ideological positions or wtv, but has she actually succeeded in any anti trust case? I have been rage clicking through her history, and while her academic record is impressive, I see nothing successful during her tenure at the ftc.
The real what the fuck moment, for me, was when Khan did "not even provide an estimated actual figure or range for Facebook's market share at any point over the past ten years" [1].
That's the judge! In his opinion! How do you claim monopoly without bothering to calculate market share!
[1] https://casetext.com/case/fed-trade-commn-v-facebook-inc#p4
She wrote a paper that provides a new legal basis for antitrust enforcement in the U.S. that allows for different theories from the currently prevailing "consumer harm" doctrine.
Who did she know?
Her paper on antitrust was a huge deal in the legal world. It would be more accurate to ask, "who knew her?" and the answer would be pretty much everybody in the legal community.
What the actual hell is this?
It was an attempt to block a merger. Which was slightly more successful than the last FTC action against Microsoft...which led to them unbundling IE for a few years. And that failure was back when the FTC was full of experienced lawyers coming off decades of actively pursuing antitrust cases.
Like I don't care about her ideological positions or wtv, but has she actually succeeded in any anti trust case? Cuz I have been rage clicking through her history, and while her academic record is impressive, I see nothing successful during her tenure at the ftc.
The FTC hasn't had a successful major antitrust case in decades...
Or maybe because there wasn't actually a good case to block the merger? Neither Activision-Blizzard nor Microsoft are anywhere near monopolies in gaming. Believe it or not "big tech is bad" is not a sufficient case for blocking a merger, actual consumer harm or threat of it has to be demonstrated.
I'm less convinced this is an issue of Kahn and her team's inexperience, so much as that the FTC is being expected (or maybe directed by the executive) to take on cases that don't have any merit to placate public opinion. "Big tech bad" is a popular meme these days, and the FTC is pursuing cases accordingly even if those cases are on very shaky ground.
Her appointment in this case is politically charged. People don't usually go straight from academia to one of the highest seats in the executive unless they are put there by the incumbent administration to be an attack dog/push a very specific view of the world. She gives off opportunistic "during a gold rush, sell shovels" vibes, just on the regulatory side.
She talks big talk, and yet has zero results.
Her arguments in court are also bad.
The best example of her failure was the blizzard acquisition where she spent most of her time talking about Sony, and not consumer welfare.
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