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Government United States

A Leading Critic of Big Tech Joins the White House (nytimes.com) 36

President Biden on Friday named Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor, to the National Economic Council on Friday as a special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, putting one of the most outspoken critics of Big Tech's power into the administration. From a report: The appointment of Mr. Wu, 48, who is widely supported by progressive Democrats and antimonopoly groups, suggests that the administration plans to take on the size and influence of companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, including working with Congress on legislation to strengthen antitrust laws. During his campaign, Mr. Biden said he would be open to breaking up tech companies. That confrontational approach toward the tech industry would be a continuation of the one taken by the Trump administration. Late last year, federal and state regulators sued Facebook and Google, accusing them of antitrust violations. The regulators continue to investigate claims that Amazon and Apple unfairly squash competition.

Mr. Biden has also expressed skepticism toward social media companies and the legal shield known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. He told The New York Times editorial board in January 2020 that Section 230 "should be revoked, immediately." The tech companies have fought vigorously against new antitrust laws and regulations, building out some of the most potent lobbying forces in Washington to push back. Mr. Wu has warned about the consequences of too much power in the hands of a few companies and said the nation's economy resembled the Gilded Age of the late 1800s. "Extreme economic concentration yields gross inequality and material suffering, feeding the appetite for nationalistic and extremist leadership," Mr. Wu wrote in his 2018 book, "The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age." "Most visible in our daily lives is the great power of the tech platforms, especially Google, Facebook and Amazon," he added.
Wu is best known for advocacy against powerful telecom companies and for coining the term "net neutrality," the regulatory philosophy that consumers should get equal access to all content on the internet.
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A Leading Critic of Big Tech Joins the White House

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  • by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Friday March 05, 2021 @10:00AM (#61126882)

    S230 isn't the root cause of anything here. It's not even a blocker. It's the ability to buy and sell without having woke corporations vetoing your ability to send money to people they find offensive.

    Don't like Twitter? Build your own. Ok, doable.
    Don't like AWS kicking you off? Build your own. Ok, expensive but doable and is being done by Gab (while Parler whines like a bitch).
    Don't like Visa fiatblocking you? Build your own... Ok now we're in a whole new realm of scaling up, fighting regulation and the whole nine yards.

    The further down the stack you go into payments and bandwidth, the more we need to force companies to do business with actors they find repugnant unless we want to have a society where a handful of entrenched companies already in heavily-regulated markets with enormous cost to enter as a competitor (especially as a little startup) can decide who buys and sells and gets to have an Internet presence.

    You can't just lay new fiber without local and state government approval. You can't just start a new payment system without deeply understanding the regulatory environment unless you want federal and NY regulators to light your ass on fire and dump you in the ocean. This is where ideology should crash on the rocks of reality.

    • ISPs and payment processors should be regulated as common carriers, like the basic utilities that they are. Ditto for domain registration, IP allocation, and any other low level services one is dependent upon for basic functionality.

      • by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Friday March 05, 2021 @11:04AM (#61127074) Homepage
        But how else were the upper-class journalists Sarah Jeong, Jason Koebler, and Vice Magazine able to punch down and destroy Shenzhen Tech Girl Naomi Wu? [medium.com] They removed her ability to take payments, which wrecked her career. Now she's been erased. With the common carrier idea, she'd still be out there.
        • It's sickening, frankly. Andrew Torba of Gab not only lost the ability to process payments for Gab, the processors also cut off his wife's unrelated business from being able to process payments. This needs to stop. If you can't process visa and mastercard payments you can't do business in the US. Yes, Gab is barely making it with people sending them checks, but that's not a reasonable way for most companies to do business.

        • by Whibla ( 210729 )

          But how else were the upper-class journalists Sarah Jeong, Jason Koebler, and Vice Magazine able to punch down and destroy Shenzhen Tech Girl Naomi Wu? [medium.com] They removed her ability to take payments, which wrecked her career. Now she's been erased. With the common carrier idea, she'd still be out there.

          Thanks for that link. That and the follow on article, are truly sickening.

          • They did it to her because she was thin, attractive, big tits, and had a white boyfriend. Immediate hatred, and they used their upper-class journalist privilege to attack and erase her. It worked, too. What makes it worse is that she is Chinese and naive, and blindly trusted the Western media because in China the media are trash. Boy did she get an education. She's gone now. Working in some nameless company somewhere. The bullies won.
      • people and wages should be regulated as they just provide menial labor. Water and Food should be rationed. School should be limited to teach only what is needed to do your menial labor, like pounding a keyboard or flipping burgers. Electricity should be limited too along with internet access. The less productive people should be weeded out and eliminated. And procreation should be regulated so that those with defects are restrained from further contaminating the gene pool. This is all good and for the co
        • We treat utilities differently from other businesses because when we don't, it causes problems. See: Texas.

          An ISP is a basic utility of the modern age. It should be treated as such.

          If you don't want to be regulated as a utility, don't act like a utility. Certainly no one wants to be that dependent on you.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      This isn't a new problem though. It's been hard to do stuff without a bank account for many decades already, and the bank will close your account if you don't like you. I remember it happening to a guy in the 80s who changed his middle name to "Lloyds Bank are Bastards", and for some reason Lloyds felt that was unreasonable.

      The issue always boils down to these services costing money to provide, which means anything which forces banks to provide them is seen as socialism, and rejected in the US.

    • Absolutey.. Not only ISPs have to regulated as common carriers, but hosting companies also.There is no reason to regulate content. That is called censorship and is most evil.

    • Don't like Twitter? Build your own. Ok, doable.

      american, i presume ?

    • by idji ( 984038 )
      And this is why Rockefeller's Standard Oil was broken up in 1911 because they were "guilty of monopolizing the petroleum industry through a series of abusive and anti-competitive actions" into 34 companies including ExxonMobil, Marathon Petroleum, Amoco, and Chevron - names we still know today. And we are in this place again 110 years later.
  • Yo (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) on Friday March 05, 2021 @11:03AM (#61127072) Journal

    Biden to Congress: How's it going now?

    Congress: Donations from big tech are skyrocketting, right on schedule!

    • âoeinitially studied biochemistry before switching his major to biophysics, graduating with a BSc. attended the Harvard Law Schoolâ next Biden admin should find a good Tech insider to complement Wu who is an academic contrarian. Tech cos will have their big sharks too.
    • by stikves ( 127823 )

      Microsoft learned this lesson that hard way.

      They were a monopoly, no need to dispute that. They also used that to intimidate smaller players, that is also well known. However they were taken to court because of Netscape vs Internet Explorer thing, which looking back, was bogus.

      Nevertheless it took them over a decade to fight off the charges. And required lots of lobbying in Washington (i.e.: greasing the politicians): https://www.opensecrets.org/or... [opensecrets.org]

      The rules are simple: you spend billions in lobby dollars

  • I find it interesting the same Big tech Monopolies that censored news stories, steered news content, blocked content, and spent every waking hour on the internet to thrust Biden into the Glass White House now are going to be investigated as 1984 Apple Commercial style monopolies? You are stoned if you think this is anything other than a shakedown. XiBiden now wants his administration to have totalitarian control over what is censored, propagandized and promoted on the internet. The same Big Tech that worke
    • a common behavior of revolutionaries. It's extremely common for revolutionaries (of ANY political type) to destroy the path THEY took to overthowing the old order, because they more than most others can see the danger that is posed to THEM by the existence of the path they used. History is FULL of examples -look to the communist takeover of Russia, the rise of an odd failed painter in 1930s Germany, even the revolutionaries in China and Iran... all used various mechanisms to stage a revolution and then mov

      • A brilliant historical perspective. Sad that those who have achieved so much failed to understand that History repeats itself. Thanks for that reminder. I had overlooked that aspect as well. The Phrase "Rode hard and put away wet" comes to mind.
  • How about going after big banks first ? To me they cause more issues than big tech. I can easily avoid tech companies but no avoiding the banking industry.

    Oh wait, banks have better bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H lobbing.

  • A law professor as advisor for technology and competition - sounds about right...
  • Oh, they will splash all over the media that they are going to "take down" the big tech monopolies, but after a ton of under the table money, a few loopholes, more regulation preventing any new startups to tackle the big tech, NOTHING will change.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. -- Henry David Thoreau

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