Antitrust
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Epic got some of what it was hoping for — but not all of it
The following is a selection from Big Technology, a newsletter by Alex Kantrowitz. To get it in your inbox each week, you can sign up here.
When Epic Games sued Apple in August 2020 over iPhone maker’s 30% cut of in-app payments, it did so with a splashy media blitz…
Harmful dominance, democratic privacy controls, interop and illegitimate greatness.
In “The New Antitrust/Data Privacy Law Interface,” Temple Law’s Erika M Douglas presents a fascinating look at the tensions between privacy and competition.
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-new-antitrustdata-privacy-law-interface
It’s only fitting that Douglas published her paper in the Yale Law Journal, as that’s the same journal that kickstarted the modern antitrust revolution when it…
A Federal Judge just told us what I’ve been saying all along
A few years ago, after one of the first fireworks-filled Capitol Hill hearings on big tech, I wrote that lawmakers who should know better appeared to have forgotten the definition of a monopoly.
According to US Legal:
“The two elements of monopolization are (1) the power to fix prices and…
Pattern Matching
The roots of Big Tech’s antitrust problem can be found in his bestselling 2014 business book, ‘Zero to One’
“Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival,” Peter Thiel wrote in his bestselling 2014 book, Zero to One. That one thing, Thiel stated outright, is “monopoly profits.”
In the book, which was embraced as a business bible in Silicon Valley and beyond…
‘Copy, acquire, and kill’
Wednesday’s filing of a major government antitrust suit against Facebook is a landmark in the internet’s history. We knew the suit was coming; we didn’t know it would call for a full-on breakup that would split off Instagram and WhatsApp from the parent company. …
Will the AMP format die as a result?
By Adrianne Jeffries
Four years after offering special placement in a “top stories carousel” in search results to entice publishers to use a format it created for mobile pages, called AMP, Google announced last week that it will end that preferential treatment in the spring.
“We will prioritize pages with…
A new policy perfectly illustrates a core issue across the industry
After five years of Google Photos offering unlimited, free storage of “high-quality” compressed images, Google announced on Wednesday that its policy is changing. Starting next June, any new photos you upload will count toward the 15 gigabytes of free storage offered to every Google account. (Your old photos won’t.) …
Pattern Matching
Google’s antitrust case won’t reshape the industry. But it’s the start of something that might.
The Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Google got a lot of attention this week, and understandably so. It mirrors the landmark antitrust case against Microsoft two decades ago, which stands as the prototypical example of the U.S. government grappling with a big tech company’s power.
But it is also…
The DOJ’s antitrust case is simpler than you might expect
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit this week alleging that Google is an illegal monopoly. Now comes the tricky part: proving it.
Once a humble search engine with no business model, Google has grown into such a vast conglomerate that the word “monopoly” seems almost inadequate to describe…
Pattern Matching
Democrats aren’t the only ones ready to rewrite the antitrust rules for internet platforms
Never in world history has one sector of the global economy risen to such global dominance, so fast, as Big Tech has in the past 20 years.
In 2000, Amazon was an online bookseller, Apple was still an underdog, Google was a scrappy startup with little revenue, and Facebook didn’t…
OneZero
The undercurrents of the future. A publication from Medium about technology and people.
