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U.S. Lawmakers Introduce Antitrust Legislation That Could Significantly Impact Apple and Other Tech Companies
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It depends, I used to work for ATT and did Uverse and Direct TV installs, Uverse of course was insanely expensive, but their 1 box basic plan averaged around 30 bucks, the most expensive plan was 120 bucks, but it all boiled down to 2 factors, satellite versus utilities, when you use the cable with an ISP you share their bandwidth and with that comes a ton of hidden fees that Cities ask for using utility poles or their underground infrastructure fee’s, where ultimately satellite just comes from you know, up ”there” and doesn’t need to up charge You for everything else cable did aside from the provider content’s asking price to be on their platform, hence why satellite usually can be extremely affordable. I get people are turned away from “losing line of sight” but you could change the resolution to 480p and still watch the tv show through the worst storm.
The way I see it that’s how cable was, every body wanting a piece of the pie, then they tried netflix for a bit, liked the customers and boom all these apps out of nowhere it’s a vicious circle.
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That has been my point from the beginning. If you are going to invalidate....if you will the product or services that these companies spent billions of dollars and years of work, why will any of them do it anymore. That kills the incentive to innovate. I think that there can/should be some form of rules, but. These that the things that made us..the US the great power that it became. The railroads, the steel mills, mining, etc. You can build your railroad infrastructure...but you have to let every other company use your tracks...oh and your trains can't take priority on YOUR tracks. I know that I am taking it far, but I think it's in the same vain.
Because it is..... It is a travesty against the American dream. You build a company from your garage. And how can they say Apple is a monopoly? Less than 10% of PC's are Apple. Microsoft is the monopoly. I think personally the Feds are pissed off at Apple refusing to open the shooters phone in CA and the privacy measures they are taking. This is revenge. This will get very ugly.
I would imagine data caps are built in, too. So, stream all you want, but you’ll see it on the bill later.
Oh you know it was on purpose, 1tb a month data cap that is usually “unlimited” unless you bundle with cable haha
When i was there they charged an extra 10 bucks for every 50gb you went over a month.
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that Obama signed into law was suppose to help regulate the financial industry. But a President in 2018 killed it after years and years of repeated calls by Republicans to repeal it.
One of the things the law did was create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. One of the bureau's core missions was to prevent predatory mortgage lending... you know the thing that lead to the subprime mortgage problem which was one of the causes of the 2008 recession.
Know what happened to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? In 2018, Mick Mulvaney, acting director of the CFPB and the guy who told financial industry executives and lobbyists, "If you are a lobbyist who never gave us money, I did not talk to you. If you are a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.", fired all the CFPB members and pretty much killed the bureau.
Another thing Dodd-Frank did was create the Volcker Rule which restricted the ways banks can invest, limited their speculative trading, and eliminated proprietary trading... again, things that contributed to the 2008 recession. Know what happened? Many provisions under the rule were rolled back in 2020.
Some people want to keep the big banks from getting bigger. But some people keep undoing the things designed to achieve that objective.
Well, dammit @sw1tcher : I was just going to post this exact same thing.
Last I remember, Big Tech, for all its failings, has never caused any sort of financial collapse.
Why are we focusing out efforts on this and not banking which is again running wild and will almost certainly cause another financial meltdown?
The “Platform Competition…Act” will be interesting. Would YouTube have the value and reach today if it had not been acquired? Would Instagram or WeChat still exist if they had not been acquired? It is easy to make assumptions after the fact; but for each of those acquisitions there is risk. (see Verizon acquiring Yahoo. See TimeWarner acquiring AOL)
Further, being acquired by someone is often a primary start-up exit strategy. An acquisition, limitation like this proposes, may have significant impact on the start-up community.
Further, being acquired by someone is often a primary start-up exit strategy. An acquisition, limitation like this proposes, may have significant impact on the start-up community.
If we really want to level the playing field, we need to:
1) eliminate the loopholes companies like Amazon and people like Bezos use to pay zero taxes.
2) make all political money transparent. If you support a 501c group put your identity where your money is. If you feel strongly enough to support an idea you should feel strongly enough to let people know who is behind it.
3) curb hedge funds that buy up companies, raid the employee pension funds to pay themselves 'management fees' and then bankrupt the company. The workers and creditors get crumbs
1) eliminate the loopholes companies like Amazon and people like Bezos use to pay zero taxes.
2) make all political money transparent. If you support a 501c group put your identity where your money is. If you feel strongly enough to support an idea you should feel strongly enough to let people know who is behind it.
3) curb hedge funds that buy up companies, raid the employee pension funds to pay themselves 'management fees' and then bankrupt the company. The workers and creditors get crumbs
It’s interesting how anti-trust is looking at market cap; did not know that market cap had anything to do with a business‘ market share. 🙄
Sometimes the bills we get to see, and especially high-profile legislation, are the result of numerous drafts, which can be written and updated in parallel, as the final proposed bill comes together. This means that toward the end of the process, there may be multiple bills ready to propose and one just needs to be selected. Given the bipartisan support behind these five bills, you can bet that there was extensive drafting for weeks if not months ahead of today’s announcement.
It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if they had at least one “gentler” draft which we’d have seen today — or perhaps we’d have even seen no App Store bill at all — if Apple had proactively addressed developer relations this week. Since Google and Apple form a duopoly for mobile software distribution, Google likely would’ve followed suit in relatively short order.
Also, these bills don’t total nearly 1,000 pages of legislation. Or even 100, for that matter: The five bills add up to 75 pages. The App Store bill itself is the second-shortest at 11 pages.
Sounds like you've been living under a rock since 2006. Internet as a utility, e-commerce, info tech, basic cybersecurity are all things that hurt millions of vulnerable consumers and citizens when not properly regulated in this century.
The one thing that is most toxic in this country is that one administration does all kinds of things to better life for citizens, and the next one comes in and tears it all down. Like Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House, and Reagan had them all removed. Other countries have far more consistency from one term/party having power and another one taking over. America wastes so much money time, and meaning, trashing things that Really Help People, Tax Payers, Families, Children, the Environment. It's pathetic, and stupid. Such incredible wasted time. And the next administration has to undo all of the damage from the previous unstable wreck...
But the worst part of all of that is that they are winning in the states. So many states are doing so much to eliminate protections for their citizens and are trashing voting, racial bias protections, and so so much more.
And, if enough state are taken over by one party, they can call a constitutional Convention, and then the tail really starts wagging the dog, and the real destruction is certified by a congress devoid of compassion, empathy, logic, sanity. But the people get the government they want, right?
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the gop
they came with the goal of taking over the govt so they could dismantle it, but in the process realized it was nice having all that power... then they became the exact corrruption they sought to eliminate...
the gop are basically modern day bolshiveks
they came with the goal of taking over the govt so they could dismantle it, but in the process realized it was nice having all that power... then they became the exact corrruption they sought to eliminate...
#3: A company was sold locally here a few years ago (EDIT: 6 to be exact). The new owners swore that they would keep the company intact, and not break it up. Within 3 months, all of the equipment was transferred to one of their facilities out of state. They changed that local office into a bunch of cubicles with lots of phones and 'sales people' working to sell the products not being made out of state. The employees that worked the tooling that was sent out of state rebelled, and started their own company, and bought their own tooling to fight the 'jackals' that betrayed them. Eventually, the local residents realized that the same people they depended on to do great work were still out there doing great things, and the local office that the new owners betrayed was closed down. I don't think it lasted more than 3 years.
But the problem with this story was that the original owners made out like kings for selling their company. They were set for life, and they showed little regard for the workers that built that company from the ground up and made the greedy owners a ton of money as they slipped the knives in their employees backs. Did they get tax breaks for selling out? How was it so easy to slash and burn the whole place to the ground. Of course they all lost their retirement accounts. They were raided as the previous owners left out the back door. It seems like that is the way it's supposed to work, and hundreds of people were out of work, and their futures trashed.
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This, all of this, this is what Big tech does on a bigger scale.
The proposals seem pretty broad in their language, so I don’t know what exactly would involve Apple.
Google search dominates the web and Android. Amazon dominates e-commerce. Facebook dominates social networking. Apple owns iOS, but this didn’t exist before they invented it — and they are clearly a minority in mobile market share.
Apple is lumped in with the others, but I don’t see where they’ve overtly abused their market power.
Hardware is less expensive, software is less expensive, services are less expensive — how has this harmed the consumer? And if you claim that small business has been harmed, you must also include how small business has been helped — I don’t buy the premise that market dominance leads only to harm.
Google search dominates the web and Android. Amazon dominates e-commerce. Facebook dominates social networking. Apple owns iOS, but this didn’t exist before they invented it — and they are clearly a minority in mobile market share.
Apple is lumped in with the others, but I don’t see where they’ve overtly abused their market power.
Hardware is less expensive, software is less expensive, services are less expensive — how has this harmed the consumer? And if you claim that small business has been harmed, you must also include how small business has been helped — I don’t buy the premise that market dominance leads only to harm.
The iTunes music store, iPod, iPhone, iOS, multitouch, the App Store, iPad, AppleWatch, HomeKit, CarPlay, etc…. Innovations one and all.
This tells me that the lawmakers who wrote these bills really aren’t paying attention.
It’s about time for Americans to wake up from all of the “free country” mindset. When you will be free? When you have discipline. Right now, these bills are attempting to discipline those tech giants so their power don’t go unchecked. Absolute free market DOES NOT exist and will NEVER exist in any country, including USA.
So if I make a great product I can no longer sell my company to Apple? Or Facebook? Dumb laws by dumb politicians.