White House Reportedly Plans To Name Amazon Foe Lina Khan To FTC (arstechnica.com) 153
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: US President Joe Biden is reportedly planning to nominate antitrust scholar Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, a move that would indicate his administration is open to aggressive antitrust regulation not only generally but specifically against Amazon and other Big Tech firms. At present, Khan is an associate law professor at Columbia Law School. Khan vaulted directly to antitrust superstardom in 2017 while she was still a law student, when she published her blockbuster paper "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" in the Yale Law Journal.
In "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," Khan argued that using consumer pricing as the key benchmark for determining whether a company or a merger is anticompetitive is not sufficient and that Amazon's size and scale make it anticompetitive. "Specifically," she wrote in the abstract, "current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive." Her work made an enormous splash. FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra, a Democrat, sought her as an advisor in 2018, when the commission was kicking off an antitrust enforcement review. "It's rare to come across a legal prodigy like Lina Khan," Chopra told The New York Times in 2018. "Nothing about her career is typical. You don't see many law students publish groundbreaking legal research, or research that had such a deep impact so quickly." Critics, on the other hand, dubbed her theories "hipster antitrust."
During 2019 and 2020, Khan served as one of the House subcommittee staffers who compiled a massive, blockbuster report digging into the antitrust implications of Big Tech. After 16 months of hearings, research, and analysis, the committee determined last fall that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google were all in some way breaking competition law and needed to be reined in. The news comes only a few days after the Biden administration announced it was bringing on Tim Wu as special advisor on technology and competition policy. Wu is one of the most outspoken critics of Big Tech, arguing in his most recent book, 2018's The Curse of Bigness, that unchecked market concentration was leading to a new Gilded Age and all the problems that come with it.
In "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," Khan argued that using consumer pricing as the key benchmark for determining whether a company or a merger is anticompetitive is not sufficient and that Amazon's size and scale make it anticompetitive. "Specifically," she wrote in the abstract, "current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive." Her work made an enormous splash. FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra, a Democrat, sought her as an advisor in 2018, when the commission was kicking off an antitrust enforcement review. "It's rare to come across a legal prodigy like Lina Khan," Chopra told The New York Times in 2018. "Nothing about her career is typical. You don't see many law students publish groundbreaking legal research, or research that had such a deep impact so quickly." Critics, on the other hand, dubbed her theories "hipster antitrust."
During 2019 and 2020, Khan served as one of the House subcommittee staffers who compiled a massive, blockbuster report digging into the antitrust implications of Big Tech. After 16 months of hearings, research, and analysis, the committee determined last fall that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google were all in some way breaking competition law and needed to be reined in. The news comes only a few days after the Biden administration announced it was bringing on Tim Wu as special advisor on technology and competition policy. Wu is one of the most outspoken critics of Big Tech, arguing in his most recent book, 2018's The Curse of Bigness, that unchecked market concentration was leading to a new Gilded Age and all the problems that come with it.
Big tech hate is bipartisan (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting. Wondering if anti-big-tech sentiment will foster bipartisan cooperation.
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If something good happens, both sides will try to take credit.
If something bad happens, both sides will try to blame the other.
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Re:Big tech hate is bipartisan (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting. Wondering if anti-big-tech sentiment will foster bipartisan cooperation.
I wish we wouldn't even need new law to fix our courts' reluctance to follow the laws we already have in place. The Chicago School of Antitrust Analysis on 1979 is often cited as the basis for our courts' current doctrine regarding antitrust cases. It is mentioned often in Khan's paper linked to in the summary. With Khan in place at the FTC, the burden would shift to the courts to determine if this 40 year old analysis still holds true.
Congress could make things easier by clarifying the law with new bills, but it shouldn't be unnecessary. Lawyers and the Supreme Court got us into this mess in the first place. Overturning the precedent of previous cases, especially Brooke Group Ltd. v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. [wikipedia.org], is the ultimate goal.
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...more likely since a Democrat is doing it ...
So you're implying that when Trump thought anti-trust was good when applied to big tech, especially big tech that reduced his media footprint or offered opposing viewpoints, Congressional Republicans jumped on the train to save their asses in future elections? But when Biden thinks big-tech anti-trust is good, those same Republicans will hail it as typical Democratic EOTWAWKI anti-business? Why? The Republicans would just be painting themselves as cheap cunts.
Re: Big tech hate is bipartisan (Score:2)
just be painting themselves as cheap cunts. That's your take on it. Of course, the Republicans will spin it differently. I wonder which narrative the media will follow? Hunch: not yours.
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In order, yes. yes. Because that is what usually happens. As to your conclusion, yes they would.
Kinda like Republicans pushed for no excuses absentee voting in Georgia and now that the Democrats have whole heartedly embraced it they are clamoring to put an end to it.
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Is that all you've got?
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Says the guy that can't even come up with a single line of critique.
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Considering my deceased mother received absentee ballots for two elections, I'm not really sold on the whole "the elections are free from fraud" claims. Especially as she still got these when my family went out of their way to inform the local registrar multiple times that she had passed, and pretty much had to emphatically prove she was dead. What a fun thing to do, that was.
I'm convinced had we shut up, we'd still be getting her ballots.
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At least in my state, where I personally know an election judge who meticulously documented the whole process, when the absentee ballot gets sent out it is just a piece of paper with some ink on it. When it gets signed and sent back, it is transformed into a powerful legal document. As such, all of the anti-fraud measures that keep our elections safe and secure occur on the return side. That is why the fearmongering idea of individuals getting sent hundreds of absentee ballots is meaningless. It doesn't mat
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I'm convinced had we shut up, we'd still be getting her ballots.
And then what? The real question is has your deceased mother's registration been purged (which may be distinct from the mailing list used to send ballots out). If so, no problem. If not, the problem is much larger. But if you're going to eliminate absentee ballots, you also deprive active members of the military serving away from home.
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Care TO add anything useful to the conversation, or are you GOING to simply STAND on your "nuh-uh!" with random capitalisations?
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There is no such thing as absentee voting in PA. Read their constitution, idiot
So, you're arguing that the Republicans in PA that passed absentee voting changes can't read their own constitution?
And the PA supreme court also can't read their own constitution?
It's almost like they're not the idiots...
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Also, the PA supreme court deciding it is within the constitution pretty much by definition means that it is.
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Why? The Republicans would just be painting themselves as cheap cunts.
Is there any part of the GOP that's not already been painted over with that brush?
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I really cannot tell if you are being sarcastic or not. Your comment is a textbook example of Poe's law [wikipedia.org].
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I don't think Trump ever thought anti-trust was a good idea because of consumer protection; I think he thought it was a useful tool to get what he personally wanted out of them.
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Essentially yes. The reality is that it's all for show.
If a "Democrat" supports something, then the "Republicans" automatically oppose it. Likewise, if a "Republican" is for something (even if it's the exact same thing they previously opposed), then the "Democrats" line up in opposition.
BOTH SIDES of the Party need to be removed. Unfortunately, they've been so successful in their "bickering spouses" act that most people still assume that they're two separate entities.
I refer you to my signature.
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IF you want to see a politician supporting a violent, armed insurrection, look no further than Kamala "I'll bail you out so you can light more fires" Harris.
Only in America is a random Denny's considered part of the government.
Learn what insurrection is, dumbass.
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Wow...you got whole of the extra strength Kool Aid and shotgunned it....lots of them!
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Not sure what you are talking about.
Big tech donations where largely sent to Democrats.
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One was being done on the state level, the other on the federal level.
The scope alone makes the two incomparable.
Her paper (Score:3, Insightful)
I find her ideas (that Amazon is anti-competitive by being big) interesting, but I find her reasoning unconvincing. Her point is that breaking up large companies, merely because they are big, into smaller companies would improve the economy. She says:
"the economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded. "
She is upset because companies pursue growth over profits. I'm not sure I see this as a bad thing. Even if it were a bad thing, it's not something that only large companies pursue, it is probably more common among small companies.
Her second argument addresses AWS:
"integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend."
This is the argument Parler brought against Amazon. It turns out there are many options for hosting, and Amazon rivals don't depend on AWS.
Re:Her paper (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Her paper (Score:4, Interesting)
Small companies can't lose billions in order to destroy a single competitor,
Just an FYI that is how Amazon started: as a small company that lost billions. So yes, it is possible.
Re:Her paper (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon was a bit of a unicorn. They are one of the very few success stories to come out of the dot-bomb era out of many thousand attempts.
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Kozmo.com will rise again!
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There are many unicorns these days.
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Not really, no. I haven't seen a lot of startups become multi-billion dollar near monopolies.
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Amazon isn't a near monopoly in any category.
The original point was that a small company can prioritize growth until it's wasted billions of dollars and be successful. I think you don't disagree that's true.
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I do however believe that most will burn out before they get that far, kinda like pets.com [wikipedia.org] whose mascot lived a year longer than they did. They too prioritized growth over profit, then couldn't turn enough profit to exist.
I'll grant that it's not impossible (Amazon did it so it can obviously be done) but it is a long shot.
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And importantly, they weren't trying to do retail in an environment where there was an Amazon-like company already present. In book sales, the market was fragmented, and lots of players were barely on the Internet. There was competition for the fledgling Amazon for sure, but it wasn't national (let alone International), well organised and specifically targeting small players. Whatever Amazon lost in getting to "own" the online book sales market, you can bet it would take 10 times that much now.
As Amazon gre
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Agreed, at this point "the market" such as it is is unlikely to produce a competitor to Amazon.
Many in the U.S. profess to be Capitalists but show only a grade school understanding of it and have never read "The Wealth of Nations". Many don't understand that Smith was talking about dozens of competitors in a small area and further that the individual sellers and buyers were within an order of magnitude or two in economic power. It just doesn't work as well when the seller has a million times more net worth
Re:Her paper (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, so to be a little more specific then: Small companies without a huge credit line can't lose billions in order to destroy a single competitor.
As many good econ writers have pointed out, lenders and investors pick winners in today's economy, making a lot like a planned economy. It's not that you as an investor think WeWork or Uber or whatever necessarily have a good business model. You just think they have enough credit to lose money year after year until all competitors have given up and they have all the market power. And because so many moneyed interests think like that, it largely becomes true.
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Break it up into what categories?
Shopping/video/AWS?
How will that help in any of these categories?
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Can Amazon retail compete on a level playing field without the profit from AWS? I'm sure it'd be harder.
Can Video compete without the fact it's a free add on for people wanting Prime Delivery? (probably not without funding, since all video is basically losing money I suspect).
Breaking it apart along those lines gives other retailers an even footing at least.
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Can Amazon retail compete on a level playing field without the profit from AWS? I'm sure it'd be harder.
Yes it can. Amazon was already a retail king before AWS became centerpiece. Two distinct entities (Amazon retail/content and AWS) can still strike deals. What they cannot do legally now (as separate entities) is for one to use the other's cash flow or operational support to drive competition to extinction.
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Just an FYI that is how Amazon started: as a small company that lost billions. So yes, it is possible.
No it didn't. The Small Business Administration caps a small business at $7.5 million in annual receipts. While the definition of a small business isn't solely determined by the US government, you are severely contorting the definition by considering a company losing (and therefore spending) billions per year as a small company.
Re: Her paper (Score:2)
The SBA does no such thing, and anyone even vaguely familiar with it would make no such claim. I suggest you go browse the table of size standards. A brewery, for instance, can have 1250 employees before it no longer qualifies. Although I guess revenue of $6k/employee is exactly the kind of extreme losses we're talking about here.
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The Small Business Administration caps a small business at $7.5 million in annual receipts.
The SBA does no such thing, and anyone even vaguely familiar with it would make no such claim. I suggest you go browse the table of size standards. A brewery, for instance, can have 1250 employees before it no longer qualifies. Although I guess revenue of $6k/employee is exactly the kind of extreme losses we're talking about here.
I did misrepresent the situation when I said they put a $7.5 million cap (a result of brevity in a short comment). $7.5 million is merely an initial guideline the SBA uses when beginning their analysis of whether a company qualifies as a small business. Manufacturing is usually an exception to this threshold, which I assume breweries qualify as.
To be more precise, The SBA announced that it would begin its analysis of its size standards by assuming that “$6.5 million [later increased to $7.5 million] i [fas.org]
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Amazon also started just as the Internet boom started and rode the wave through the dot-com boom. Used that money to ride out the dot-bomb and survive.
Many companies did ther same - the dot-com boom was one where the more money you lost, the higher your stock went.
Business can get lucky - Apple rode the tidal wave that was MP3 by releasing the iPod just as MP3s took off, then rode it again by offering what
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The stock pumping kept them floating, it was like 15-20 years before they turn a profit on paper.
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Small companies can't lose billions in order to destroy a single competitor,
Just an FYI that is how Amazon started: as a small company that lost billions. So yes, it is possible.
I'm sorry, and perhaps my memory of things is rusty, but when did Amazon lost billions as a small company? The best I can remember is that it did aggressive reinvesting on itself, keeping shareholders at bay who were demanding unicorn-level dividends and fuming at Bezos plans for long-term operations.
It was after a while that it started running some operations "on the red" to either facilitate customer engagement (by selling kindle at a loss) or to drive a competitor to the ground.
But even then, the com
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> Small companies can't lose billions in order to destroy a single competitor, and then recover it by jacking up prices when they're gone.
That's pretty much econ 101. Free market economies ONLY functions when there is a large numbers of players competing. Sometimes government intervention is required to maintain a "free market". This is where people with low IQs and sub standard education hyperventilate and have a brain aneurism in confusion.
A Free Market governments role is to provide macro services
Harm? We don't need no stinkin' harms! (Score:2)
Why was that modded funny?
But anyway, the reality is more complicated. First of all, Amazon is more of a monopsonist than monopolist, though the company is moving in both directions now.
Second, monopoly laws have been Borked. As long as Amazon can sustain the pretense of lower prices to the consumers, they're going to file it as "No harm, no foul." Or as the lawyers would plead it: "Externalities? We don't need no stinkin' externalities." The gamesters have won that round and the rules need a page-one rewri
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In practice this almost never works.
Yes, they can run at a loss for a long while. However, as soon as they adjust the prices, the competition comes back.
This even happened to Amazon. They had the greatest return and price match policies. However then they changed those, I started going back to Best Buy. Being able to return stuff for free at the counter beats paying $7 postage for a small item.
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However, as soon as they adjust the prices, the competition comes back. This even happened to Amazon. They had the greatest return and price match policies. However then they changed those, I started going back to Best Buy. Being able to return stuff for free at the counter beats paying $7 postage for a small item.
Your buying behavior is not an indicator of how well Amazon has performed after changing their return and price match policies. They are currently making record profits so I doubt your behavior is common enough to damage Amazon's pricing strategy.
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They are making record profits because for a lot of the year, online shopping was the safest way to shop
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But people learn quickly, and so do the competition. And you can burn so many billions before you have to stop.
Amazon is no longer the cheapest option. People know this. They no longer price match. People know this, too.
Yes they made record profits. So did Walmart [https://www.forbes.com/sites/shelleykohan/2021/02/18/walmart-revenue-hits-559-billion-for-fiscal-year-2020/?sh=21a3dfb63358], or any other online outlet. When local stores are artificially removed from competition, of course national online retai
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There are many cases now where amazon does not have the best prices on items. In fact half the shit on there is from people buying hard to find items in stores and marking the price up a few bucks. Its a flea market.
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You can't have an economy based on competition acting as a regulatory mechanism if there is no effective competition. When there is no B, A dictates the terms.
On the tech front, when you only have A and B, they are strongly incentivised to make their technology idiosyncratic and incompatible, if there's a couple dozen, they are driven to at least an informal industry standard and often a more formal one complete with bake offs to assure compatibility. That accomplished, the players are obligated to compete
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The argument is not strictly that prioritizing growth is a bad thing, but that the current antitrust laws can't account for it as potentially anti-competitive. The framework for evaluating competitive practices simply needs to change to include these tactics that frankly haven't been seen before, but which are becoming more common. If they don't then those laws aren't going to be effective. We can also argue about the need for antitrust laws, but so long as they exist and there is some rational behind them
Re:Her paper (Score:4, Interesting)
She is upset because companies pursue growth over profits. I'm not sure I see this as a bad thing.
Khan is not upset about companies pursuing growth over profits. She believes this phenomenon now makes the Brooke Group recoupment test inadequate to fight predatory pricing. The current doctrine of the court is that predatory pricing must result in higher profits for the accused. If the plaintiff cannot show the predatory pricing led to higher profit, they are very unlikely to win in court. Khan's position is companies are not only driven by profit, and Amazon has been a pioneer in focusing on growth with a near disregard for profit. This is why she thinks the courts need to change their doctrine on how they determine if predatory pricing has occurred. Which in this case means including a growth motivate along with the profit motive.
I guess the only thing she is upset about is the court's reluctance to keep up with the times.
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It's not really about "keeping up with the times". This is the way monopoly power has been abused since the 19th century. It's the courts that have regressed in their ability to see the bare basics of how monopolies operate.
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It's not really about "keeping up with the times". This is the way monopoly power has been abused since the 19th century. It's the courts that have regressed in their ability to see the bare basics of how monopolies operate.
I am not aware of 19th century monopolists spending decades operating with little to no profit in order to grow their market share. I am under the impression they were making significant profit throughout their monopolistic practices. I'm not a historian though, so I could be wrong. If I'm right, though, things really are different today. At least they are different when it comes to how laws are applied and how liability is determined. I do agree that to a layman it certainly doesn't feel very different.
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Some of the railroads may have operated that way, borrowing to build their railroad to have a monopoly in transport, perhaps even canal builders before that. In the railroads case, eventually the fix was common carrier status to stop them from leveraging their monopolies.
The big difference back then was there just wasn't the cash floating around with the owners having nothing better to do with it then gamble by investing in the Amazon's and Uber's of the time. Banks couldn't loan out much more then they had
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Strategy introduced by Japanese companies about 40 years ago.
I am unaware of Japanese companies taking a similar approach, at least not on a large scale. For all I know this was common throughout the world before Amazon, just not nearly on the same scale. I tried finding examples among Japan's largest companies, but their automotive companies, Hitachi, Sony, Post Holdings, AEON, etc. are all 70+ year old companies so they don't line up with your timeline. I would be interested to learn more though.
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Standard oil grew by leveraging their monopoly, lowering prices where there was competition and raising prices where there wasn't to cover the loses. IIRC, they also made deals with the railroads for preferential treatment.
Ma Bell leveraged their patents, first in phone tech and then in vacuum tube technology, as well as refusing to inter-operate to grow their monopoly. It's a good example of one problem with patents, sometimes it is just time for a technology to happen and whoever shows up at the patent of
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It's not sad. It's to be expected.
For the editors, it's a job to them. After a couple of months, I bet this job becomes mind-numbingly boring.
It's all bullshit... (Score:5, Insightful)
... given the real issues are the out of control IP laws that benefit big business to begin with, most of our culture is being sucked up and monopolized by big businesses and we're being criminalized for daring to want to own our own stuff. Software being licensed not owned is being used as a back door to charge outrageous sums of money and steal software on industrial level scales.
I had to watch PC gaming decline has client-server back ended AAA games took over and that's how we ended up with in game gambling and the ridiculous idea of games being shut down. You can't shut down quake 2/3 or Unreal 2004 because they are legit complete local applicaitons with full ability to host your own multiplayer servers. The fact they took that shit away after the dumb kids bought into the mmo scam of the late 90's is disturbing enough on it's own.
Either way Microsoft and the rest have acquired state like quasi state powers since the internet is one giant world mainframe and whoever programs the network owns it.
For those who don't know what I mean -- two or more computers in a network form and become a single device, so that means any piece of software that is split into client server means you are no longer the owner of your machine and they have absolute control over your machine and you got no security. Steam is by definition a massive security risk so is windows 10 tragically.
As MS tried to lock down the PC and slowly suffocate it and turn it into a locked down mobile device, Valve has been hedging their bets with linux and proton should the worst come to pass.
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What about the PC multiplayer game "Ark: Survival Evolved", which is deep and rich and has 1000's of hours of game-play, and you can run your own server and it has an open API to support plugins. That game will last far longer than the support of the developers.
You don't grasp the overall trend is toward lockdown in the big budget space, Microsoft and the rest are in a full scale assault against honest compiled c++ binaries.
https://tifca.com/wp-content/u... [tifca.com]
Go see that denuvo didn't used to exist pre 2014, and so we went from mmo's (client server back ended rpg's in 1997), to steam in 2004, to origin and uplay in 2010's. AKA more and more lockdown over time, not less.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Crack... [reddit.com]
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It appears you stopped looking at PC gaming about 10 years ago.
Also, you have a bizarre idea of "single device". Apparently Slashdot is the owner of your machine, since you're using a client to connect to their servers to make your post.
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It appears you stopped looking at PC gaming about 10 years ago.
Also, you have a bizarre idea of "single device". Apparently Slashdot is the owner of your machine, since you're using a client to connect to their servers to make your post.
No you idiot, before idiots like you got internet we got complete AAA PC games, needing zero connection to another computer, if any game needs a remote computer in order to function you are 100% being robbed. Ultima 9 was cancelled to work on UO, that changed the entire direction of PC gaming for the negative we were expecting for us to own AAA PC RPG's not for the game industry to steal them by using mmo mythology and invent an entire fake genre as cover to steal games from the public.
Everyone playing qu
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No you idiot, before idiots like you got internet we got complete AAA PC games
When you're on a site as old as Slashdot, it pays to use the helpful hints about the age of a particular poster. Like their Slashdot ID. Sonny.
if any game needs a remote computer in order to function you are 100% being robbed
Because downloadable patches are horrific. Or maybe you should actually apply a little nuance here.
that changed the entire direction of PC gaming for the negative
And here's where that "10 years ago" comment came in. MMOs aren't that popular these days.
Everyone playing quake 2 in 1997 was expecting role playing games to eventually get dedicated servers the same level of modding and level editors
Based on what? No one was promising a server for an RPG at that time. Your personal expectations are not "everyone", and setting those expectations based on what you want ins
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Again, your rant is from 10 years ago, and things have moved on in the intervening decade.
Man you are a fucking dumbass, no it isn't, since DOTA 2, league of legends, and tonnes of games are now completely back ended. You don't grasp diablo 3 , dota 2, league of legends, warframe and Destiny were the end game for the game industry which began in 97 with UO, every single big budget game has been back ended to some extent. You mentioned games that have server back ends like GTA and RDR for their multiplayer, which you don't seem to grasp used to come inside game EXE's as standard features for e
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That's because of piracy, unfortunately. With PC games being pirated to the tune of 90+%, well, eventually game studios starting watching what applications did - online services was pretty much the only way to do DRM without fear of getting cracked.
You don't seem to grasp service based games is them literally stealing the game from you, why would any gamer go from having quake 2 + dedicated servers + level editors to not having quake? Having to pay for mtx in something like quake champions and not get the game? You don't seem to get you are the fraudulent idiot here. Service based software is an oxymoron for skeevy developers and publishers to steal local C++ game applications from the public. If I'm paying, I get the game completely. This idea I
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So you agree piracy was rampant, I copied my share of floppies back in the day too. But just because games kept getting made doesn't mean the companies making them wouldn't try to make even more money by cracking down on piracy (whether that's effective or not is another topic).
If you mess with Amazon (Score:2)
I hope you don't forget to screw Microsoft, Oracle and of course Apple and Google.
I'm sure there is some blah blah blah Bookface and Twatter in there too.
observations (Score:5, Interesting)
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The late and eponymous Robert Bork, legal scholar and borking victim, asserted that consumers were the rightful beneficiaries of anti-trust law and that law should be interpreted using the current best economic understanding. That is, judicial ruling should adapt and change as economic understanding improved. Accepting both assertions, there is nothing wrong, in principle, with re-interpreting anti-trust law through the lens of Khan's new theories, if those theories are correct.
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In his book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman describes three sources of monopoly: (1) "technical considerations" (i.e. natural monopolies), (2) "direct and indirect government assistance", and (3) "private collusion".
Friedman also writes, "There is unfortunately no good solution for technical monopoly. There is only a choice among three evils: private unregulated monopoly, private monopoly regulated by the state, and government operations. It seems impossible as a general proposition that one of these evils is uniformly preferable to another."
Choose you poison.
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Compared to the brick-and-mortar world, the web seems far more prone to natural monopoly.
As an online customer, the best place to shop is the one with the most sellers, because competition among sellers lowers prices and increases options. As an online seller, the best place to sell is the one with the most customers, because competition among buyers raises prices and larger numbers of buyers increases the volume of sales. That reciprocity results in natural monopolies. Inferring from his business decisions throughout Amazon's growth and also what it has become, seems like Bezos understood that explicitly early on.
In the brick-and-mortar world, the best place to shop is not the one with the most sellers; Shopping malls have practical physical limits on their size and consumers have other concerns, such as proximity and not getting lost in the Mall of America. As a seller, buyers are geographically dispersed.
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Hypothetically, if a natural monopoly provides the best value to customers because of economies of scale, are we opposed?
Insofar as social media corporations have leveraged their business monopolies to control electoral outcomes, we should be.
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Surprised to find any mention of the Borking of monopoly law around these parts.
But the answer to your closing question is "Yes, freedom is more important than economies of scale". In other words, the price of freedom includes a bit of inefficiency.
In solution terms, I've frequently advocated for progressive taxation for market domination. The primary objective is to encourage the monopolist to reproduce the good ideas into more companies, but one of the secondary objectives is to pay for careful regulation
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As an online seller, the best place to sell is the one with the most customers, because competition among buyers raises prices and larger numbers of buyers increases the volume of sales.
Mostly true.
As an online customer, the best place to shop is the one with the most sellers, because competition among sellers lowers prices and increases options.
Not true at all. The best place to shop is the one most likely to have what I want and least likely to be full of scams. Amazon is severely losing out in the scam department, and it's more than possible to compete with them on discoverability and specialist products. NewEgg remains a far better option for computer parts than Amazon, and Wayfair's investment in discoverability of furniture has made them competitive against Amazon despite having markedly higher prices.
Online sellers fell into t
Breakup America (Score:3)
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Clarity and Scepticism (Score:3)
"When {Party A} opposed Big Tech, you thought it was a bad idea. But when {Party B} expresses the same position, you think it is a good idea!"
Aside from the obvious, there are a couple of things that should concern us about this observation...
First, the fact that we're trying to discuss something where the fundamental principles in play (in this case I would offer that this would be "what constitutes an anti-competitive situation?") The exchanges of posts in this thread help illustrate the fact that we're all exchanging "opinions" on what makes a certain company "anti-competitive" as opposed to "merely successful".
Is it a dominant market position? If so, then 1) how do we define "market"?; and 2) how do we establish what level of market share constitutes dominance? (90%? 75%? 51%?). It isn't clear that we're all viewing this in the same way.
But suppose it's not merely market size, but also includes actual behaviors? If so, then what behaviors constitute anti-competitive behavior? Offering inconsistent terms to different trading partners? Acting in a way that subverts the actions of a competitor? Who gets to decide whether an action that subverts a competitor is accidental or malicious? Who gets to draw the lines? Where should they be drawn?
So the first observation I would offer would be that before we can look at any potential case of anti-trust behavior, maybe it would be a good idea to set down a set of clear, transparent, easy-to-understand and easy-to-measure principles that define what we mean by anti-competitive behavior. If we can do this, then we help to remove accusations of partisan bias, because we're all discussing a universal "set of rules".
The second thing that should concern us would be the exchanges expressed in this thread along the lines of "If the Democrats approve this, its bad, but if the Republicans approve it, then its good", or the inverse. If you read the comments, you can't help but come away with the view that, for some of the contributors to this discussion, the actual subject matter under debate is, actually, not up for debate. They have already made a decision based on their party political affiliation.
This is a significant, dangerous trap for us as citizens, for a simple reason. If you find a political leader who comes to power inheriting or creating a support base of such intensity that the leader can say or do anything and their base will continue to support them, significant danger follows. [Observation - given recent history, it will be easy for people to read that last statement and jump to a conclusion that I am expressing a party political view and being critical of former President Trump. That is not the case. We have to step back from the moment to get perspective on this.
Our democracy functions at its best when we participate as sceptical, critical citizens. In the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union adopted the expression "Trust, but verify" with respect to monitoring of the others nuclear stockpiles. We need to have sufficient independence of thought, sufficient critical questioning of facts - regardless of who utters them, to ensure that we are being told the truth.
If any of us are willing to accept unverified claims like this as "gospel truth", then we are allowing the potential for tyranny to emerge. A tyrant cannot function in a society built on a sceptical public. The moment anyone is willing to adopt the position that "my side is right no matter what" they are undermining that society.
And even if we're right, we need to be able to show that to a sceptical audience, to have the confidence that a position is indeed the right one.
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Lots of very partisan comments in this thread,
If any of us are willing to accept unverified claims like this as "gospel truth", then we are allowing the potential for tyranny to emerge. A tyrant cannot function in a society built on a sceptical public. The moment anyone is willing to adopt the position that "my side is right no matter what" they are undermining that society.
And even if we're right, we need to be able to show that to a sceptical audience, to have the confidence that a position is indeed the right one.
Dude your whole post is somewhat comical, it's very simple, pre internet we got completed compiled binaries, after the internet we didn't. Most modern AAA games are stolen software, aka mmo's were literally just the game industry stealing networking code dumping it into a seperate exe and selling the game back to the public. If in doubt go pickup a copy of guild wars 1, it's obvious they just backended an RPG to prevent piracy and steal the game. It's pretty cut and dried.
That's why as you get back close
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If any of us are willing to accept unverified claims like this as "gospel truth", then we are allowing the potential for tyranny to emerge. A tyrant cannot function in a society built on a sceptical public. The moment anyone is willing to adopt the position that "my side is right no matter what" they are undermining that society.
If tyranny didn't already exist, thousands of people wouldn't have been kicked out of their homes while Too Big To Fail guaranteed bailouts.
If tyranny didn't already exist, yet unborn Americans wouldn't inherit a staggering financial debt, a massive portion of which resulted from wars against any country that dared to challenge the financial hegemony that is the US petrodollar.
Now this faceless pervasive tyranny upvotes every comment on this board that suggests the majority of online communications should b
Or, "Kid who wrote paper nominated for FTC" (Score:3)
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You could have two individuals, one with 5 years of experience and one with 10. But if the 10 years of experience are off-topic or narrow in scope, then they are not worth as much as 5 years of broad, topical experience.
More interestingly, if we were
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Yeah. Also, young people are prone to falsely believing to know how the world works and how to fix its many problems. Give someone like that a lot of power and they can cause great harm
Only young people. Haven't we seen enough in the last 20 years to disabuse ourselves from the notion that age and "years of work" do not necessarily produce the best of professionals or government officials.
Just like in the software and IT industries, there's a lot of people out there with their 20 years of experience being 1-year repeated 20 times.
The moment we delve into ageism (or generalizations of any kind), that's the moment we lose the argument. At least, that's my rule.
this is subjective (Score:2)
She was still a student five years ago, and has no experience outside of academia and politics. I don't care if she wrote a great paper, she's barely out of school and has no real-world experience. I don't want the people regulating trade to be the sort who teach others about what they cannot or do not do. I'd like them to have direct practical experience in interstate commerce, not just good grades at a law school.
This is not enough to mount valid criticism since (and all of us who work in tech knows) "X years of experience" doesn't necessarily mean "quality of experience" (or the inverse, that "mostly academic experience" is not quality, applicable experience.)
You are literally asking to use lines of code as proof of quality of work.
Angelo Dundee never won a single belt, yet he produced champions (Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, etc.) Capability is more than just "years" of experience, or exposure. It is also a function
Learn (Score:2)
Ha ha, Amazon. You bent over backwards to appease politicians by helping shut down their political enemies, and this is the reward.
I feel like Matthew Broderick at the end of Wargames talking to W.O.P.R. : "Learn, damn you! Learn!"
...and Jeff Bezos cries out... (Score:3)
KHAN!! [youtube.com]
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Not exactly punished. I assure you neither Amazon nor Bezos are going to be impoverished here.
When you sit down to dinner with your family, you are expected to NOT grab the whole roast beef and cram it down your gullet. This is not a punishment for having large hands and a big mouth.
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Gotta agree with you, I’m not saying Amazon is all positive vibes and goodness, but they are literally the definition of how good e-commerce should be run. You buy, pay, and you get it in = 48 hours on your door step. Parts that you’d spend a day hunting for in a dozen shops, one click on Amazon. Their selection and logistics capabilities is second to none, and that’s why they’re worth a trillion. Not because people don’t want alternatives, but because the alternatives are vast
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Are you an Amazon press release because you sure sound like one. The internet enabled those things, not Amazon.
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No Amazon nailed logistics so it won't cost $30 per package for two/day overnight. Try to see what UPS or FedEx charges for overnight delivery of a package.
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Amazon does nothing wrong
What?
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He's not only giving vast sums to Democrat campaign coffers, he's even keeping the WaPo from going tits-up, and this is the thanks he gets?
Sounds like he should consider reallocating all of his political contributions into a litigation fund.
Considering new anti-trust focus coming from both parties, Bezos is likely using his donations to support a functioning democracy instead of just as an attempt to increase his wealth. It is becoming likely Bezos is beginning a transition similar to Gates where he will be gradually stepping down from focusing on Amazon. He is likely more interested in which party will support his efforts with Blue Origin and other initiatives than the anti-trust activity his successors will be mostly dealing with.