▲ 70 points
back
89 comments
Big tech? How about big information, 6 companies control almost all media in the U.S.
The U.S. keeps consolidating, the "spin" is that it's all about lower costs to the consumer by allowing "scale", when it reality it's just about monopoly power and the ultra rich getting richer and more powerful.
A two party government.
It's all an illusion of choice.
> The U.S. keeps consolidating, the "spin" is that it's all about lower costs to the consumer by allowing "scale", when it reality it's just about monopoly power and the ultra rich getting richer and more powerful.
This is happen all over the world, it's not an American thing.
> A two party government.
Doesn't matter if the number of parties is 2 or 20. The problem is: the government doesn't have limits.
Two things we urgently need, IMO: - An improved and very aggressive antitrust law. - Dramatically reduce what a government can or can't do.
Without those two things, I don't hold too much hope of living in a free world.
> An improved and very aggressive antitrust law. - Dramatically reduce what a government can or can't do.
Those two things are sort of incompatible?
so we have not 1 monopoly, but 3. Should that prevent anyone from working on one of them?
It's the feature of the system, at least that's how I view OP's comment. And I agree with that. There's not much to do (unless you think regulations is a good idea or you want to overthrow the current system).
Is it really due to a particular media corporate hub/gang ? not to sound victim blaming, but I think humans on average likes to babble in front of medias / rumors or similar too much. The medias are born in it and simply reinforce the bubble.. using our own validation bias.
It's hard to be aware, hard to criticize, hard to know and integrate all..
Big tech? How about big information
Why not both?
Two parties are both controlled by the same establishment elite cabal. They also control Big Business, Big Labor, Big Media, Big Tech, etc. It’s all in the open and there’s no question about it anymore.
Calling fees taxes is just bullshit. This is just dishonest politics.
By this logic, there is a Grocery ‘tax’, and a haircutting ‘tax’.
Spotify ‘Taxes’ you. Netflix ‘Taxes’ you. The New York Times ‘taxes’ you.
It’s also a lie to say that Apple charges 30%.
It’s 15% for almost all developers except for a tiny percentage of themselves extremely wealthy corporations.
Perhaps these are the people who are behind these moves. They are the only ones who will gain.
The the idea that paying, 10% less to small app developers will do anything to make Arizonans better off is utterly stupid.
There may be good reasons for tech legislation - e.g. forcing Boot Camp style installation of alternate operating systems on hardware.
But it’s fairly obvious that all this talk about the App Store is just the result of other middlemen lobbying for a part of the action.
> It’s also a lie to say that Apple charges 30%.
> It’s 15% for almost all developers except for a tiny percentage of themselves extremely wealthy corporations.
Remember dealing with distributors and middlemen before the App Store?
I recall high schoolers getting their app on the App Store (and making money out of it) not that long after the Store launched. That was unthinkable a few years before that.
> Calling fees taxes is just bullshit.
General “fees”, probably; there's a sense in which monopoly rents are tax-like, though.
No, actually - in pure economic terms, 'Tax' is actually a reasonable term to use.
Fees which can be perceived as arbitrary capture of a piece of economic activity (and monopoly pricing could be considered that in part) acts just like a tax.
You can actually demonstrated the 'economic loss' (deadweight) from a tax with the supply and demand curve. The loss is usually more than that, but at least the direct math is there. [1]
And this: "talk about the App Store is just the result of other middlemen lobbying for a part of the action." is just completely false. There are no 'middle men' to lobby.
[1] https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microec...
high cost of food or a high cost of a hair cut is absolutely a tax on life costs.
it might not be a tax that goes straight to the government but what are you going to do, not eat? how will people treat you if you stop maintaining your hygiene and look like a caveperson? its a tax because it is a necessity.
This accusation of dishonesty is bullshit - we know exactly what is being talked about, no-one is confused or deceived that Apple is a government organisation collecting 'traditional' taxes.
For the same reason if I sell 'magic makeup' it's not dishonesty because anyone with a brain knows it's not literal.
Capitalism needs competition, yet capitalists hate it. There is an ongoing shift to more and more resources being dedicated to protecting the returns on existing assets instead of creating new assets. When there is no longer a realistic choice of whether or not to pay a fee, it starts to look very similar to a tax.
The value of the word tax is not limited to government obligations. Not colloquially anyway; a tax is a burden.
From a mathematical perspective alone, these companies have soaked up immense wealth.
There’s little to go around for infrastructure projects while it’s locked up in private vaults.
Many communities did not have much say in how decimated the local economy would become by the last few decades of neoliberalism. It’s placed a heavy burden on many lives.
This is just arguing semantics. Whether you call it a tax or a fee, or whatever else, the fact remains that it's a form rent-seeking, which is clearly the point of the piece.
"Big Tech" has become an umbrella term which can mean any of the following:
* Big Tech monopolies controlling news and information: Twitter, Facebook, Google
* Big Tech monopolies on Advertising/Marketing: Facebook and Google
* Big Tech monopolies on Multimedia content: Netflix and Spotify
* Big Tech monopolies on Cloud Technology Infrastructure: Amazon, Google, Microsoft
* Big Tech monopolies on Mobile: Apple and Google
* Big Tech monopolies on eCommerce: Amazon
We could be talking about "Breaking up Big Tech" for 50 years trying to break all of these up. It's kind of insane.
> Big Tech monopolies controlling news and information: Twitter, Facebook, Google
I think you mean NYT, Wapo, Fox, CBS, Zeit, Asahi "control" the news...except there sure are a lot of them.
> * Big Tech monopolies controlling news and information: Twitter, Facebook, Google
If it's a traditional news article or op-ed, it's almost always a complaint about this iteration.
Disclaimer: Technically these are all oligopolies, but I'll stick to using the original term.
Don't forget the soon to come:
* Big Tech monopoly on space travel/mining: SpaceX, Blue Origin
* Big Tech monopoly in the car/taxi industry: Tesla, Boring Company, Apple, Google
* Big Tech monopoly over wearables/implants: Apple, Neuralink, Amazon, Google
* Big Tech monopoly over VR: FB, Apple, Valve
* Big Tech monopoly over restaurants: Uber, Apple, ???
* Big Tech monopoly over banking: Chase, Apple, Intuit, Amazon
This is logical and nothing new. As a country we faced the same issue in the start of the 1900s when the railroads abused their monopoly access power and created the concept of the "common carrier" to level the playing field. Let's stop pretending tech monopolies are something new or unique. We have dealt with them before (AT&T) and should use the same tools. These companies are now utilities, should be subject to FTC and other rules on common carriers and have their returns subject to regulatory oversight. Just like 90% of the rest of the economy. Time to level the playing field, and be fair to all. Tech companies wanting special exemption from rules is not right.
Remind me again how well the judge driven breakup of AT&T worked.
You would also have to remove the ability any state or city to carve out exceptions
This appears to be the bill in question, if anyone would like to read it.
https://legiscan.com/AZ/amendment/HB2005/id/89532
I'm not sure why it was introduced as an amendment for a bill about distributing federal education funds, but I'm sure there's some justification in the legislative process.
Anyway, this is very clearly tailored towards the current Epic vs Apple/Google fight, right down to disallowing "retaliation" from platform providers.
I have to ask why "Big Tech" is a monopoly worth freeing ourselves from now, if we didn't free ourselves from Microsoft circa 2000. Microsoft had way more monopoly power back then (maybe even does now), and barriers to entry into the OS market are much higher. It's relatively easy to switch to duckduckgo.com for example.
Isn't this just grandstanding, based on letting Microsoft keep it's monopoly?
Microsoft didn't compete with news media for ad money. Nor do telcos/ISPs where consumers in many places actually have no choice.
I love this, but they don't really call it what it really is.
This is the Midwest aiming to break apart coastal software ecosystems and distribute them more evenly across the nation. Big tech firms don't just use their might to unfairly fight smaller competitors, they also use their might to recruit talent to certain geological regions. This causes salaries, cost of goods, among other things to stagnate and hurt their own economies. The real word for it is pushing back against state to state income inequality by attacking the powers and structures that reinforce them, which in this case is technological conglomerates. If you've ever wondered why you get paid $80k to be a software engineer in Oklahoma while someone doing the exact same job with the exact same requirements in Silicon Valley makes $200k+, state to state income inequality is most of the reason, while cost of living attributes a very small sliver of that calculation.
7 references in this article to Google.
0 references to Microsoft.
Stupid.
I have a Microsoft operating system on one computer (my desktop) and a Google operating system on another computer (my phone). One of those lets me install any bit of software I want (even make my own! Try that on a machine running android), the other has a monopoly on all software installation and charges a fee for any sales.
Im not even sure why you mention Microsoft? In what way are they a monopoly in any way? All of their products have alternatives, and they charge no extra fee when I install software on my Microsoft computer.
Or the concentration of traditional media in the hands of a small number of individuals.
why should it mention microsoft
The article is about app store fees and how there are no real alternatives to them, how would that apply to Microsoft?
> The legislation would allow web developers to accept payments for their apps without going through Apple or Google’s app stores
Is the word "web" there instead of "app" just a mistake? Because web developers can accept payments for their apps without going through Apple or Google, even on mobile. It's one of the things I love most about the web.
Im not going to try to stop you, but if it was up to me setting priorities I'd focus on big consulting like EY, PWC, Capgemini, these companies employ each more then 100K engineers and I wouldn't know what they do with their billions.
two points: phones can be jailbroken, you don't have to go through the app store. Also, bashing dc just lowers the tone of the article. By doing so, the article automatically has to work harder to persuade me. I have not been successfully convinced that their proposals are a good idea.
"two points: phones can be jailbroken"
that's like arguing that housing market is not a problem because you can live in a cave or a tent.
Most people aren't going to do that, bank apps refuse to work on jailbroken phones, etc.
Maybe not giving big anything tax breaks or funding would help solve some of the problems.
Am I right in thinking this is a Democratic party website thinly disguised as a genuine news site?
It would be surprising, considering the opinion's authors are both Republican members of the Arizona House of Representatives.
You would do well to state up front why you think that. If it's because two AZ representatives wrote an opinion piece, I would suggest researching the difference between news and the editorial section of a newspaper. I know that's probably a bit condescending, but I have to make a lot of assumptions about how one would reach the conclusion that you did.
They're pretty unbiased according to Media Bias Fact Check. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/arizona-capitol-times/
However, it's worth noting that this article is under the Opinion section.
No, the parent organization is not the Democratic Party.