Do it! Then, do every single major conglomerate they’ve allowed to form over the last 30 years
Antitrust comes in waves in the US. First, it’s a free for all to let the tech develop freely…then you see the horrors and a time of antitrust kicks in. This would be the 4th wave since the Sherman Act. Let’s hope it’s a good one.
That’s all I had, I’m not an expert, but I hope they go after FB and microsoft too (in case that makes you feel randy like that other guy in the comments) :P
invest in Sherman Antitrust Act memes now
Unless Savannah is some girl he knows, not sure this lands. Savannah, GA wasn’t really ever ravaged in the Civil War or anything.
Atlanta’s the one that got leveled.
Like that is what you point out, and not the fact they got the wrong Sherman pictured lol. John Sherman ≠ William Tecumseh Sherman
Yeah. I just remembered from history class that he had given them a message saying basically “Surrender or I lay unholy seige apon the city and you either die by being blown up or starve to death.” and the name sounded good, lol. He did end up with the key to the city! Good old Sherman. Liked to laugh, sing, set fire to homes, sometimes with people in them, good old total war guy.
How about we start restricting how many businesses a company is allowed to buy out in a year. Maybe allow like 1-2 mergers a year. There no reason we should allow one company to buy everyone and then kill their products and services leaving the consumers holding the bag that will no longer function because the server is gone.
I would say even one a year would be too much.
That unless the business has failed and is no longer operating, for a merger and acquisition to occur they would have to petition the courts for permission first.
Imagine the shit that Microsoft and Google and Adobe and Amazon would be doing if they had to start their companies from scratch and compete against the already extant players in the field?
It would create so many jobs, and create an excess of consumer choice opportunity, lowering prices and fighting against inflation far more than a couple of percentage points on the interest rate index ever would.
I’m tired of only being offered incredibly overpriced very shitty low quality options in every single category.
We don’t need $100,000 cars. We need $5,000 cars.
We don’t need $1,000,000 homes, we need $25,000 homes that anyone in America who works a full-time job regardless of if they’re slinging fries at McDonald’s or digging ditches can afford.
We don’t need $100 a week grocery bills. We need $5 a week grocery bills.
We don’t need $100,000 cars. We need $5,000 cars
A lot of this cost is in materials, quality control and safety testing, plus requirements by trade agreements for where components are allowed to be manufactured and assembled
We don’t need $1,000,000 homes, we need $25,000 homes
Most of this cost is land. A tiny home can be self built for a few thousand, and starts at ~20k professionally built, and a small, say 800 sq foot house that someone might actually want to live in can generally be built for under 100k.
Most houses aren’t worth that much but the land under them is. So more townhouses, duplexes and smaller lots, smaller lawns and a lot more apartments and condos will help
One thing that I’ve always found interesting is that silicon valley has a common start up strategy that is basically: do well enough to get bought buy your bigger competition. Basically, be a threat so your VCs can cash in when a Google, Facebook, etc buys you.
I’m other words, Silicon Valley has a start up culture that feeds an anticompetitive/anti-trust ecosystem. No one complains because they are all making money. It’s the users who slowly suffer and we end up were we are not with 5 companies running the modern web and Internet infrastructure.
Buyouts shouldn’t be allowed by default. The only cases where it should be allowed are when the business being bought out is struggling to the point where a buyout is really the only way to prevent bankruptcy. It should never be a good deal for the selling company and only a last resort to stop closing doors completely.
Maybe if all their shadiness hadn’t been allowed in the first place they wouldn’t have been able to become a monopoly.
But please, I beg of you, do Adobe next.
Any brands protected by American law must be independently-owned, with full transfer of all branding, patents, trade secrets, intellectual assets and physical assets.
So, for example, for even a single bottle of Perrier to be sold in America, it needs to have been made by a company registered with the brand name of Perrier, with exclusive use of that name within the country, independently owned and under zero control by Nestle, being manufactured using the exact same process with the exact same ingredients, and having control of the exact same patents and American-side infrastructure.
America is such a large marketplace that it would be impossible to split a company like this. Patents alone would prevent this, forcing Nestle to divest themselves of each individual subsidiary.
I remember the days of google being a cool startup that had just made news releasing gmail with a whopping 1GB of storage making everyone go crazy for the invites. It’s a strange feeling.
I worry what a broken up Adobe would do to workflows. One of the reasons I can do what I do is because Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Premiere all work with each other.
Now if we want to save Behance and Frame.io, substance, Mixamo, etc, I am all for that.
I don’t know how deeply their different programs integrate with each other (I don’t do video or illustration seriously) but one would hope that it might encourage them to adopt more open standards and formats. For example, in my photography workflow I can import and catalogue a RAW image with Shotwell, which passes it through to my RAW developer (Rawtherapee), which in turn passes it through to my raster editor (GIMP). These programs are all developed separately from each other by people with much less resources than Adobe, so I think it’s a matter of choice rather than a technical limitation.
It would depend on the actual file formats. For example I can import a live after effects file into premiere and all the updates I make will apear on premiere’s timeline, without needing to render out. The same goes for bringing photoshop or illustrator files into After Effects. I guess we’d just have to rely more on third party plugins that connect these programs like Overlord
God I hope it ends up splitting off Chrome. I think Google has done a great job with Chrome. But the recent Manifest v3 makes it clear they’re going to greatly degrade their users’ experience for Google’s bottom line. And they’re using their market dominance to do it.
What does that even look like as a business model, though? There’s an expectation now that you don’t pay for web browsers. What would a standalone Chrome, Inc. look like?
Something very close to Mozilla in my opinion. They’d have the browser as their core product, a few more apps as a logical extension of that (maybe a mail client like Thubderbird), perhaps Chrome Inc would inherit google’s office suite? That would be a breath of fresh air. Maybe revive a few of Google’s killed ventures that seemed more than promising.
Mozilla basically gets all its money from Google
Chrome on its own does not make Google money, in fact the only reason they care about chrome is because it helps Google search engine. I can’t find the article, but there was an email from a google exec saying something along those lines
Isn’t Manifest 3 about 3rd party tracking cookies?
Everyones going ape about UBlock, but that’s an unintended consequence.
I’m very happy to have 3 party cookies more limited. FB already tracks me everywhere everywhen.
(But I will be very very sad when UBlock doesn’t work anymore)
That’s what they want to focus on. And hey, that’s great. But there’s no reason they need to limit how a user installed plugin can filter API requests. Ad blockers and the like were tools to help with the ads and tracking issue. So it’s great Google’s trying to help. But it mostly just seems like PR at this point.
