Back in September, a Congressional committee investigating anticompetitive conduct by America’s tech giants sent a letter to Apple (among other Big Tech firms) asking it for details of business practices that seem nakedly anticompetitive; Apple’s response seeks to justify much of that conduct by saying that it is essential to protecting its users’ privacy.
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Tag: monopoly
Without right to repair, the military can’t fix its own battlefield equipment
Captain Elle Ekman is a US Marine Corps logistics officer; in a New York Times op-ed, she describes how the onerous conditions imposed by manufacturers on the US armed forces mean that overseas troops are not permitted to fix their own mission-critical gear, leaving them stranded and disadvantaged.
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After the passage of the EU Copyright Directive, Google nukes Google News France
The passage of the EU’s Copyright Directive last March marked the most controversial rulemaking process in EU history, with lawmakers squeaking a narrow victory that relied on confused MEPs pushing the wrong button.
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New Sanders bill: If a bank is too big to fail, it’s too big to exist
In 2008, the Bush and Obama administrations both argued that they had a duty to transfer more than $700,000,000,000 of American taxpayers’ money to the largest banks in the country, because these banks were “too big to fail” and allowing them to collapse would do much more harm than a mere $0.7 trillion subsidy.
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Between Trump, Ajit Pai and a GOP Congress, there’s never been a better time for a terrible Sprint/T-Mobile merger
One of the factors that makes the Net Neutrality fight so urgent is how little competition there is in the telcoms sector; it — like the whole modern economy is dominated by a few giant, top-heavy firms that are gobbling one another at speed.
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The catastrophic consequences of the non-Neutral Net will be very hard to spot, until it’s too late
Stanford’s Futurity interviews Stanford Law expert Ryan Singel and International Studies expert Didi Kuo about the meaning of a non-Neutral internet, and the pair make an excellent and chilling point about the subtle, profound ways that Ajit Pai’s rollback of Net Neutrality rules to pre-2005 levels will distort and hobble the future internet.
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Net Neutrality is just for starters: municipal networks are the path to paradise
We just bought a house here in Burbank and I was delighted to learn that my new home office — part of a business incorporated in the state of California — would be sitting directly on one of the scorching-fast fiber optic lines that the city of Burbank maintains to wire up Disney, Warners and the other major businesses in town. Finally, an end to my long nightmare of slow, balky internet from Charter/Spectrum, my local cable monopolist!
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At anti-monopoly event, Al Franken blasts big tech
Al Franken’s speech on big tech and its surveillance, influence, opacity and high-handedness sometimes lacked coherence (you can’t call for “Net Neutrality principles” for Amazon, Google, and Facebook and ask them to police bad speech, propaganda, etc), but the important thing is where he gave that speech.
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Amazon is the poster child for everything wrong with post-Reagan anti-trust enforcement
Last January, a 28-year-old law student named Lina Khan published a 24,000-word article in the Yale Law Journal unpicking a half-century’s shifts in anti-trust law in America, using Amazon as a poster child for how something had gone very, very wrong — and, unexpectedly, this law student’s longread on one of the most technical and abstract areas of law has become the centerpiece of a raging debate in law and economics circles.
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Trump wants to kill the FAA and hand air safety to the big four airlines
The US aviation industry is highly concentrated, with only four major airlines left in the country; for years, they’ve been lobbying to get rid of the FAA and take over their own safety oversight.
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