I would vote Amazon, then grocery chains & food production.
Tech companies need broken up too, but things that affect food supply and distribution have such a disproportionately large impact on those with lower incomes, and would result in much larger, immediate quality of life improvements for the majority of Americans.
Like Walmart which is way worse than Amazon.
I like to call them "Openly More Evil Amazon"
Walmart = offline Amazon
What about 73 billion dollars in online sales in 2022 says "offline" to you?
I agree. The fact that chicken eggs tripled in price with seemingly little cause crosses the line. I know there was the bird flu that swept through farms but there were several articles that talked about how that event shouldn’t have caused such a steep increase. It’s criminal, that’s our food!
that’s true! amazon has a disproportionate impact on lower income people, but i’d consider the wider effect on society: google/facebook/etc controls access to information, which is more and more dangerous every year that they remain with that relatively unfettered control
amazon will remain similarly problematic, but that problem will likely be just as fixable while information access allows the FTC to act with a way to counter disinformation campaigns
Also Microsoft
Amazon will settle for no admission of guilt for 0.000000001% of their profit. The FTC chair will then join the board of Amazon after declaring success.
Everyone has a price
Most people have a price. Some people have principles and values, even if they get offered $1b (or some other crazy number). Those people are very rare, though, and usually aren't in positions of power.
And they tend to commit suicide with two bullets to the back of the head, for some odd reason...
Yes. The FTC and other government agencies will lose all important cases against big businesses. Or they will be stripped of any power that matters. Our completely legitimate supreme court will be happy to rule their powers unconstitutional. (M*** is gunning for the SEC now.) Or we find ourselves with a president that instantly installs stooges with no intent on doing their job (like T****'s dog Mulvaney and CFPB).
I'm still proud that we have people like Khan willing to spend their (life)time fighting against obvious wrongs, or even just trying to enforce our laws against oligarchs. I just think any wins are temporary miracles until the cancer is obliterated. (At the polls!?)
vanontom's reply is great. I'm just going to add that every government agency fighting against the merger has lost, because money is power. You just can't blame the FCC on this one, only the Republicans that love to strip its power, because they're anti regulation except when those regulations benefit them.
Companies this large never get their appropriate comeuppance since we’re essentially a corporatocracy.
Well specifically the FTC has a track record with fining several companies a few nickels everytime.
Has to do with who was in charge lately though, so I'm hopeful but not expecting.
I'll save my enthusiasm for actual action. There's a lot of "look! This giant corporation is about to get theirs!" lately.
None seems to ever materialize.
Whoa buddy, slow your roll. 15 whole minutes of profit? Are you trying to bankrupt one of these poor defenseless corporations, who signed a document that said “we did nothing wrong but unrelated we are going to pay you some money just because”?
On a more serious and somber note, until the fine wipes away all the profit gained and then some for the period they were breaking the law nothing will change.
I'll believe it when I see Amazon actually broken up.
Never gonna happen. Neither the democrats or republicans would let something like that come to pass, it would set a precedent their donors wouldn't like.
I mean I'm glad they're trying but considering they couldn't even fight off the shitty, monopolization of Microsoft and Activision/Blizzard/King (fuck Bobby Kotick, btw), I don't have any hopes of this happening.
They did somehow stop Comcast and Time Warner Cable from merging - which was extra weird because they were already effective merged at that point.
Spectrum/Time Warner employee here. They are just moving forward anyway in many ways. We're about to release a streaming TV box that is a collaborative project of Spectrum and Comcast.
I used to work as a contractor at the Comcast Center and Time Warner had a whole suite of offices right in the building. This was shortly before the merger attempt.
Same advice I can give for those who are planning to break up Meta.
To be fair, I definitely would have doubted Standard Oil or AT&T getting broken up if I were alive then.
Guess a lobbying payment was late.
FTC trying to stay relevant, lol. They can't win shit these days.
Jokes on you, im a weirdo who buys CDs still.
I wemt back to ripping cds
A commendable lawsuit and goal, but I can't help feeling like it's not going to happen. The current FTC has their heart in the right place when it comes to resisting corporate monopolies, but also has a pretty bad track record of actually winning these lawsuits. (See: the recent loss against Microsoft.)
Just remember one thing- and I'm saying this as someone who thinks Amazon should be broken up- when the feds broke up Ma Bell, what ended up happening until the cell phone era was that there were just a bunch of regional monopolies instead of one national one.
So this may not be all that effective overall even if it happens. If the Amazon retail arm is spun off from, AWS, both of them will still have such huge market shares that things won't change all that much.
Oh yeah, I get that, but they will still essentially be monopolies in their own fields, at least for the foreseeable future.
A big difference is that Telephone/Internet providers are natural monopolies. Competing requires building duplicate infrastructure to every client and so that naturally results in local monopolies. This isn't the case for Amazon.
If I had retirement funds I'd bet them all on this not happening. Would probably be the only way I'd get a good amount.
Quite a lot of these "break up big tech" articles just don't make any sense.
Reading through the list of complaints, it seems to be mostly based on amazon.com being anti-competitive, and I get that, but how does breaking up Amazon address amazon.com being anti-competitive?
What would a break up even look like? amazon.com, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Prime, Twitch, Ring, Amazon Prime Video, Alexa, all now become separate entities? Great, again, how does that make amazon.com less anti-competitive?
Everything listed there is vertical integration meaning amazon can provide lower than market rate prices. Twitch needs to pay a webservice and hosting provider. Who do they pay? Oh.. Amazon, so now their cost of running is lower than any competitor. So much so no one can compete with them. Since subs and ad revenue is so competitive. Twitch can offer(can not do of course) better rates for streamers and also higher quality streams than over competitions.
The same is true for prime video.
Amazon.coms retail isn't the biggest issue here, it's the web service that is dominating and fronting pretty much all the costs for amazon.com to even exist.
thanks for using Leebra!
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