GOOG down .25% today. Seems people mostly figured this was coming?
Oh, I misread the ticker. Counting after-hours trading, down .38%. Still not huge, but I imagine starting to be something Sundar Google wouldn’t be happy about.
Yes. What the government does is mostly public. There have been all kinds of anti-trust hearings and people pushing exactly for this sort of thing to happen for quite some time.
But also, the government has yet to prove it has actual anti-trust teeth at any time since AT&T was broken up. Would you be sad if you had MSFT stock before their anti-trust case and still had it now? I don’t think so.
If you start seeing companies actually face severe anti-trust consequences, then I think we’ll see the market response negatively to not just the companies being punished, but other companies likely to face similar action.
I recently heard MSFT was $50 in 2016, and now it’s north of $200. Today it closed at $220.
I would not have guessed Microsoft added 3+ more Microsofts in the last 4 years.
The evidence is incontrovertible, 2016 was the year of Linux on the desktop.
OH, COME ON!
5 bills
3 that are less likely, but not impossible to pass
- The FTC and Justice Dept. will have the power to bust up big tech companies when different divisions create a conflict of interest.
- Explicitly illegal to use your strength in on area to give a boost over competitors. e.g.: Prioritizing your own products in your own search engine over competitor products.
- No buying competitors.
2 that seem likely to pass.
- When big companies merge, the fees are higher, so the government has more resources to investigate the situation. This just seems like common sense.
- Forced data interoperability between service providers.
The data interoperability one passing is huge. Right now most of the services are offering the ability for us to backup our data, which is very nice. I take full advantage of it. But it’s kind of useless when you can’t import it anywhere else. If you leave GMail for some other mail provider, good luck importing your gmail.
It will be very interesting to see if this law passes exactly how companies implement this, following which standards, and with what limitations. If it becomes easy for customers to switch platforms, we could see some excitement. This could be really interesting if it makes switching mobile OSes easy.
It could also be fun to see if people make new platforms where the first feature they make is the ability to import the backup from another service. Imagine if there was some sort of footmovie that sprung up to compete with facebook. It was actually good and private and not evil. And you could just move your entire facebook account over to it with a few clicks. That could really gain some traction.
I googled footmovie and I’m still stumped. What do you mean? Or what did you mean to type?
face = foot
book = movie
Footmovie, a fictional Facebook alternative I just made up.
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Maybe not the best example? Gmail speaks IMAP which makes copying mail mostly straightforward, at least while you still have the account active. Is the archival format wildly different?
That’s not good enough. If you simply backup the data available via IMAP, that is not the same as truly backing up GMail. Labels, filters, draft, snooze, stars, etc. All that metadata and the features surrounding them are what make switching services so impossible. Sure, you have the contents of all your emails, but leaving still puts you in a hell world. To truly give users mobility they need everything to translate over to whatever service they migrate to, not just the raw data.
- Labels and drafts map to IMAP folders. Stars map to IMAP flags and a folder. Personally, that’s all I need and expect. Honestly, I remember migrating to gmail, and getting my old mails there was trivial with an IMAP-aware mail user agent (MUA).
- Snooze and filtering are MUA features. It’s weird that you’d expect another MUA to have gmail’s features or have them be compatible. What else could read gmail’s goofy filter syntax?
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That’s exactly what I’m saying. If the alternative service doesn’t have feature parity, then it’s not something that can be switched to. If the search and spam filters of the alternate mail service aren’t as good or better, then it’s a non-starter.
But the goal here is here to make it easy for actual users to switch providers easily to foster competition and break monopolies. Even if an alternate service achieves feature parity, or even exceeds the entrenched service’s features, they still can’t have users seamlessly switch with a mere expert of just the basic data. They need a complete export of all the metadata associated with all the features provided by the user’s current service. That way as soon as you switch, it will be no different than if you had been using that new service all along. And if you switch back, it will be as if you had never left in the first place.
The core functionality of gmail is mail, and the core protocol of modern MUAs is IMAP, which gmail supports. That doesn’t even count whatever the takeout format is, which I’m guessing is in some standard, useful format.
Are you arguing in an ideal world or in the specific case of anti-trust action?
There is a lot of merit in requiring simple backups, and they are far from useless. But I do not believe it will help promote competition unless users can transition seamlessly. I think back to the days of music libraries. Sure, you could move all the mp3s. Sure you could save your playlists as standard m3u files. But there was so much other stuff that you couldn’t export and/or import between platforms. Switching between any two was an arduous task.
If the goal is to bust trusts, the bar is going to have to be set very high as to the quality, completeness, and openness of the data that these services allow users to export.
Yessss
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Good. The tide is turning.
I know we’re all hot and bothered for breaking up big tech right now, but don’t forget the regular old telecoms need to be broken up too:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-oneamerica-att/
In his 2019 deposition in the labor suit unrelated to AT&T, the elder Herring said he created OAN for two reasons.
“To make money, number one,” Robert Herring said. “But number two, is that AT&T told us … they wanted a conservative network.”
The lawyer questioning Herring, Rodney Diggs, followed up.
“So,” the lawyer said, “AT&T kind of dictated the kind of network that they wanted. Because there was an opportunity, you jumped at it?”
“Yes, sir,” Herring replied.
And this is a utility company.
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