What I have noticed in Australia is that this kind of enforcement seems to happen in 2 situations:
A) A foreign company is not doing something the government wants. This might be taking down certain information from the Internet (facebook, X, in particular) or not being sufficiently helpful in providing access to information, etc. These big consumer cases seem to mainly hit companies that are not perceived as sufficiently "pliable".
B) A foreign company is competing with local interests that are powerful enough to get in politician's ears. This is often re-sold to the public as some grass-roots "fairness" thing that will benefit all of us. To be fair, sometimes it is.
Which is to say, I don't see these enforcement actions as a "reversal of gravity" so much as a re-branding of its immutable laws.
BlarfMcFlarf · 1h ago
> Most of us are not esoteric authoritarian freaks pining for a CEO of America who'll track us all using mandatory Fitbits and assign us jobs based on an AI's estimation of our cranial geometry.
Maybe not broadly, but have you seen hacker news?
PaulKeeble · 2h ago
I wouldn't bet on the populace, other than a few moments in history they have been impossible to organise towards improvement as they are under constant propaganda pressure. My bet is on the billionaires winning and a move to feudalism with money continuing to be the main mechanism that governments decide who to help and who to hurt.
api · 1h ago
Propaganda pressure is one thing, dogmatic ideologies are another. Many in the populace have value systems that simply don’t value prosperity, or that are more concerned with hatred of our groups or maintaining some social order than prosperity.
bigbadfeline · 46m ago
> Propaganda pressure is one thing, dogmatic ideologies are another.
Propaganda pressure creates dogmatic ideologies and skewed value systems. Where do you think these come from? The moon?
mrbluecoat · 2h ago
> It's money. It's totally, utterly money. When billionaires want something, it literally doesn't matter how much the rest of us hate it, they're gonna get their way.
Venice agrees.
Nevermark · 2h ago
I don’t think antitrust is defying the wishes of the rich (law of gravity).
The rich in general have had enough of these gatekeepers. Epic Games has had it up to here!
The hyper dominance of some tech companies is making many billionaires uncomfortable.
On the glass is half full news: once again, the regular citizen wins big! … when their concerns happen to coincide with the powerful.
api · 2h ago
Also if you look historically antitrust often un-locks markets and opens them to venture investment. To some extent having a market dominated by a couple beached whales is terrible for the investor class.
bigbadfeline · 51m ago
> antitrust often un-locks markets and opens them to venture investment.
That's true with a caveat that the unlocking isn't for everyone but for specific members of the "investor class".
> To some extent having a market dominated by a couple beached whales is terrible for the investor class.
That's also true with the clarification that there's no homogeneous "investor class", redistribution of assets within that class is what moves the world today.
Also, while a couple of whale spots are definitely not enough for the number of candidates, too many spots are even a bigger threat, so you rarely see antitrust action as a means of opening another spot on the whale beach. Besides, there are other options for doing that, antitrust is the last resort.
lapcat · 2h ago
I found the narrative a bit strange, because Doctorow first mentions the famous 2014 polisci paper about US politics but then pivots to antitrust enforcement in the EU and other countries. The US has been a plutocracy from its founding and has remained that way by design and by various demographic factors. Even America's most "progressive" Presidents, the Roosevelts, were themselves plutocrats.
To me, the current situation in the US is reminiscent of 25 years ago, when the Clinton DoJ had won an antitrust case against Microsoft—with the breakup of the company on the table!—but then G.W. Bush was elected, MS was given a slap on the wrist, and 9/11 happened almost immediately afterward, causing US v. MS to disappear from the public consiousness. Similarly, the Biden DoJ won an antitrust case against Google, with the breakup of the company on the table, but then Trump was elected with the backing of the tech billionairies, and it still remains to be seen whether Google will suffer any major consequences or just get a slap on the wrist and continue with business as usual. Remember that billionaires such as Leonard Leo are fully in control of the openly corrupt US Supreme Court, so anything that happens in court at lower levels can be overturned in favor of the billionaires. Apple is still appealing its temporary loss against Epic Games.
AnimalMuppet · 2h ago
Microsoft got much more than a slap on the wrist. They got a consent decree, which they then had to live under for... I forget how long, but at least a decade. They got monitoring from the DOJ during that time. So, they didn't get broken up, and they didn't get a huge financial hit, but they got handcuffed in a way that actually curbed their behavior.
cowpig · 2h ago
There's this belief system in San Francisco that I find borders on religion, which idolizes the corporation. It claims to be "libertarian" but when you think about it, it's the farthest thing.
The "invisible hand" effect is a powerful and just result of a free market. And so we should all fight to make markets more free, right?
A free market means perfect competition. No natural monopoly, minimal barriers to entry, etc.
The more a market is concentrated, the *worse it performs*. When you have a monopolist, they are effectively the same as a zero-representation government which sets fixed prices. The only difference is that instead of trying to accomplish whatever government objective, the price-fixing is optimized for extracting maximum surplus out of the system to benefit the singular corporate entity.
In aggregate, this minimizes economic activity.
The rhetoric coming out of SF around AI magically solving all of our problems (don't worry about climate change, the rising cost of housing, our crumbling government systems, our extractive healthcare system!) is like the stripped-down version of this perverse ideology: ignore all of the properties of the market system and say "because technology".
lotharcable · 1h ago
I wish more people understood what "The Administrative State" is and its history.
Because the "oligarchy" people complain about isn't the cause of massive government corruption.
"Oligarchy" is the natural result of creating a massive politically controlled administrative bureaucracy in charge of most aspects of the business regulation, banking, and so on and so forth.
That is if you want to ensure a powerful oligarchy making decisions for the country the first step in accomplishing this is to make a big and powerful government to regulate the economy.
That is how you get all powerful billionaires.
mensetmanusman · 2h ago
Antitrust applied naively by activists who are anti growth has its negatives though when it comes to R&D.
It killed Bell Labs, and it would have killed LLM research at Google before it started.
Figure out how to protect research and I’m all for anti trust.
cowpig · 2h ago
The vast majority of the fundamental research that led to the AI "explosion" today was done in academia.
mensetmanusman · 1h ago
Academia did not have the scale of billions in compute resources to execute.
bigbadfeline · 4m ago
That's a good argument for more taxes and more antitrust.
9283409232 · 2h ago
You say that like killing Bell Labs was a bad thing and Google did not give us LLMs. They may have wrote the paper on transformers but the ground work was done by universities.
AnimalMuppet · 2h ago
Do you have any reason for claiming that killing Bell Labs was something other than bad?
9283409232 · 2h ago
Do you have any reason for thinking Bell Labs was good for the industry? The DoJ broke up AT&T specifically because their monopoly was putting their foot on competition.
AnimalMuppet · 1h ago
What industry are we talking about here? Yes, the DoJ broke up AT&T because it was a monopoly in the phone industry.
When we talk about Bell Labs and R&D, though, we usually aren't talking about the phone industry. We're usually talking about things from semiconductors to computer science. And yes, Bell Labs was very good for that.
You're the one who made the first claim, that Bell Labs was "bad for the industry". It's your claim; it's your job to defend it, not mine to prove it wrong. So let's see your case that Bell Labs was bad.
A) A foreign company is not doing something the government wants. This might be taking down certain information from the Internet (facebook, X, in particular) or not being sufficiently helpful in providing access to information, etc. These big consumer cases seem to mainly hit companies that are not perceived as sufficiently "pliable".
B) A foreign company is competing with local interests that are powerful enough to get in politician's ears. This is often re-sold to the public as some grass-roots "fairness" thing that will benefit all of us. To be fair, sometimes it is.
Which is to say, I don't see these enforcement actions as a "reversal of gravity" so much as a re-branding of its immutable laws.
Maybe not broadly, but have you seen hacker news?
Propaganda pressure creates dogmatic ideologies and skewed value systems. Where do you think these come from? The moon?
Venice agrees.
The rich in general have had enough of these gatekeepers. Epic Games has had it up to here!
The hyper dominance of some tech companies is making many billionaires uncomfortable.
On the glass is half full news: once again, the regular citizen wins big! … when their concerns happen to coincide with the powerful.
That's true with a caveat that the unlocking isn't for everyone but for specific members of the "investor class".
> To some extent having a market dominated by a couple beached whales is terrible for the investor class.
That's also true with the clarification that there's no homogeneous "investor class", redistribution of assets within that class is what moves the world today.
Also, while a couple of whale spots are definitely not enough for the number of candidates, too many spots are even a bigger threat, so you rarely see antitrust action as a means of opening another spot on the whale beach. Besides, there are other options for doing that, antitrust is the last resort.
To me, the current situation in the US is reminiscent of 25 years ago, when the Clinton DoJ had won an antitrust case against Microsoft—with the breakup of the company on the table!—but then G.W. Bush was elected, MS was given a slap on the wrist, and 9/11 happened almost immediately afterward, causing US v. MS to disappear from the public consiousness. Similarly, the Biden DoJ won an antitrust case against Google, with the breakup of the company on the table, but then Trump was elected with the backing of the tech billionairies, and it still remains to be seen whether Google will suffer any major consequences or just get a slap on the wrist and continue with business as usual. Remember that billionaires such as Leonard Leo are fully in control of the openly corrupt US Supreme Court, so anything that happens in court at lower levels can be overturned in favor of the billionaires. Apple is still appealing its temporary loss against Epic Games.
The "invisible hand" effect is a powerful and just result of a free market. And so we should all fight to make markets more free, right?
A free market means perfect competition. No natural monopoly, minimal barriers to entry, etc.
The more a market is concentrated, the *worse it performs*. When you have a monopolist, they are effectively the same as a zero-representation government which sets fixed prices. The only difference is that instead of trying to accomplish whatever government objective, the price-fixing is optimized for extracting maximum surplus out of the system to benefit the singular corporate entity.
In aggregate, this minimizes economic activity.
The rhetoric coming out of SF around AI magically solving all of our problems (don't worry about climate change, the rising cost of housing, our crumbling government systems, our extractive healthcare system!) is like the stripped-down version of this perverse ideology: ignore all of the properties of the market system and say "because technology".
Because the "oligarchy" people complain about isn't the cause of massive government corruption.
"Oligarchy" is the natural result of creating a massive politically controlled administrative bureaucracy in charge of most aspects of the business regulation, banking, and so on and so forth.
That is if you want to ensure a powerful oligarchy making decisions for the country the first step in accomplishing this is to make a big and powerful government to regulate the economy.
That is how you get all powerful billionaires.
It killed Bell Labs, and it would have killed LLM research at Google before it started.
Figure out how to protect research and I’m all for anti trust.
When we talk about Bell Labs and R&D, though, we usually aren't talking about the phone industry. We're usually talking about things from semiconductors to computer science. And yes, Bell Labs was very good for that.
You're the one who made the first claim, that Bell Labs was "bad for the industry". It's your claim; it's your job to defend it, not mine to prove it wrong. So let's see your case that Bell Labs was bad.