yes, I’m saying the whole line of attack is dumb. whether facebook is a monopoly or not isn’t really relevant to the damage they are causing, which is what they should be concerned about, and the possible punishment in this case (breaking off whatsapp and insta) won’t prevent or fix any of those problems. It’s like “oh charles manson is a bad guy, we also noticed that he is parked illegally and we’re gonna ticket him, WEGOTHIMBANNER.GIF”
Lol Google just got another suit from 38 state AGs
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wtf
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FTC reviewed this email:
Among the revelations in the documents, which the FTC has never made public: A top Google executive bragged in an email to the CEO that Google could “own the U.S. market” with its exclusive contracts with major phonemakers and carriers. The contracts made Google the default search engine on 86 percent of U.S. smartphones. And the company acknowledged making “humongous” payments to carriers solely to keep rivals like Yahoo and Microsoft from getting prime access to people’s devices.
And then were all, OK bros, you’re good to go.
This is some interesting stuff. Has Politico posted the memos, or just articles about them?
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Everything they quoted seems to have those complete pages in document cloud but I can’t find the whole report, just fragments.
The expert, University of California-Berkeley economist Carl Shapiro, didn’t respond to multiple phone calls and an email asking the reasons for his departure. But he has criticized new FTC Chair Lina Khan’s aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement, and she in turn has faulted the agency’s traditional reliance on economists’ analyses in its fights against alleged monopolists.
The agency hired Shapiro, a former Obama-era antitrust official, to aid in its suit against Facebook in 2019. It has already paid out $5.7 million to the economics consulting firm where he is a senior consultant, according to a POLITICO analysis of federal contracting data. That is nearly double what the FTC has paid for any other expert services over the past two years at a time the agency has told Congress it is strapped for cash.
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The FTC is a total mess right now
Federal Trade Commission joining the fight against bad memes
Dems making some moves to staff the FTC
Republicans say that Mr. Bedoya’s comments, including characterizing former President Donald Trump as a racist, show him to be a Democratic partisan who would further polarize the FTC.
In one 2018 tweet, Mr. Bedoya wrote: “What ELSE does Trump have to say for the media to expressly call him a racist and white supremacist?”
He has also criticized immigration policy. In a February 2021 tweet, Mr. Bedoya called U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement “an out-of-control domestic surveillance agency that peers into all our lives.”
Quite a thread here. I have a take that the people who should and normally would be screaming about this stuff are so heavily invested in these companies as to have been effectively bribed, without any payment, into doing nothing.
https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1513941334666665986?s=21&t=u1YUUtzUcIwT88lcwPHA2g
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