Anti-Trust Action Now: Tech’s Titans Tiptoe Toward Monopoly

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We were the first to sue the social media giants for our First Amendment rights. In light of that fight, I began to focus AFDI activism to pursue anti-trust laws be used to break up social monopolies and duopolies. The Wall Street Journal now is suggesting the same thing, albeit for the wrong reasons. For the WSJ, it’s all about the Benjamins, but for principled Americans, it’s all about freedom. Please contribute to that fight here. Make no mistake, it is the most pressing issue of day. If we are going to fight against the forces of far-left authoritarianism, and we must, freedom of speech in the social media public square is essential. Freedom of speech is the foundation of a free society. Without it, these leftist tyrants can and are wreaking havoc unopposed, while we are silenced. I have written extensively on this here.

Quick synopsis here: Pamela Geller, American Thinker: Urgent Case for Legislation against Facebook and Google

Here is what I argued back in 2016:

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If the US government could break up Ma Bell, the USG can break up Facebook. Today’s IP address is yesterday’s phone number. It’s how we communicate today — whether by FB comment, messenger, Twitter DM etc.

Facebook adhering to the most extreme and brutal ideology on the face of the earth should trouble all of us, because Mark Zuckerberg has immense power. He controls the flow of information. He controls what you see and don’t see on Facebook. We did not give him the power to abridge our unalienable freedoms.

The US government used anti-trust laws to break up monopolies. They ought to break up Facebook. Section 2 of the Sherman Act highlights particular results deemed anti-competitive by nature and prohibits actions that “shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations.” Couldn’t the same be applied to information? The United States government took down Standard Oil, Alcoa, Northern Securities, the American Tobacco Company and many others without nearly the power that Facebook has.

I do not know how far my lawsuit against the social media giants will get but I do know that something must be done. Whether through legislation or anti-trust lawsuits, the chokehold that the uniformly leftist corporate media managers at social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google have on our means of communication must be broken.

Facebook, Google search, AdSense, Twitter, YouTube have banned, blocked, shadowbanned and scrubbed my site, my work, from their platforms and my millions of followers. And I am hardly alone. It is now standard operating procedure to silence conservatives and counter terror activists.

Settling in: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is pictured above having a meeting in an office-cum-ball pit.

Tech’s Titans Tiptoe Toward Monopoly

By Christopher Mims, Wall Street Journal, May 31, 2018:

Amazon, Facebook and Google may be repeating the history of steel, utility, rail and telegraph empires past—while Apple appears vulnerable
Today’s titans of industry. Photo illustration of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Alphabet’s Larry Page, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple

Imagine a not-too-distant future in which trustbusters force Facebook FB -1.03% to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp. Imagine a time when Amazon’s cloud and delivery services are so dominant the company is broken up like AT&T . Imagine Google’s search or YouTube becoming regulated monopolies, like electricity and water.

Facebook Inc., Google parent Alphabet Inc. GOOGL 1.35% and Amazon.com Inc. AMZN 0.52% are enjoying profit margins, market dominance and clout that, according to economists and historians, suggest they’re developing into a new category of monopolists. They may not yet be ripe for such extreme regulatory action, but as they consolidate control of their markets, negative consequences for innovation and competition are becoming evident.

For example, some who study the past compare Amazon and Facebook to Standard Oil, for their similar quests to vanquish competitors and even their own suppliers through vertical integration.

[….]

One way today’s monopolists are different from the robber barons of old is that they’re not exactly ​behaving like, for example, Andrew Carnegie, who turned armed guards on striking workers. And regulators don’t particularly care if a company is a monopoly unless it harms the public or hampers innovation. But on those counts, many argue we’re close. Take the way both Google and Facebook dominate the harvesting of user data, or Facebook’s ethically dubious decision to release vast quantities of personal information to developers.

Facebook and Google

The reason your electricity comes from a regulated monopoly is that building a grid is expensive, but pushing more electrons to new customers is not. One condition for judging monopolies is how difficult it is for upstarts to challenge them.

Together, Google and Facebook take in 73% of U.S. digital advertising. It may not be something you think about often, but that success rests largely on the fact that both have spent so much money building data centers and filling them with hardware and software designed by an elite, in-demand set of engineers. In this way they resemble the telegraph giants, with investments in physical infrastructure so large no upstart could match them.

Read the rest here.

 

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Suresh
Suresh
5 years ago

saudi/qatar/OIC own part of twitter, Fox Network, fund CNN, MSNBC , buy out politicians , bureaucrats in education dept to push islam in schools/ colleges. Easiest way to brainwash and takeover country and shutdown free speech !

After facebook, twitter , even Google joins lslamofascist gang to suppress conservative
free speech http://tinyurl.com/lgp28rs

felix1999
felix1999
5 years ago
Reply to  Suresh

Paid them off! They treated him like a god down there.

Facebook Goes on a Hiring Spree for Washington Lobbyists
By Naomi Nix , Billy House , and Bill Allison
March 27, 2018, 4:00 AM EDT

Facebook Inc. is on a hiring spree in Washington as the social network bulks up its ranks of lobbyists in the midst of a privacy scandal that cuts to the heart of its business model.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-27/facebook-in-hiring-spree-for-washington-lobbyists-amid-scandal

Halal Bacon
Halal Bacon
5 years ago

the left’s political correct progressive bullying is peer pressure on crack & bath salts

felix1999
felix1999
5 years ago

The obvious monopoly needs to be broken up.
Look what happened to Bell Telephone!
Is it any wonder Obama and Zuckberg were so tight?

Zuckerberg Classmate Reveals the Lie
That Started His Entire Empire
BY BENJAMIN ARIE
APRIL 19, 2018 AT 1:20PM

“You’re in charge of your own data. There’s nothing to worry about.”

That, in so many words, was the basic message of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during his recent testimony in front of Congress. Zuck faced tough questions as part of the fallout from recent scandals, but one of the original users of his social network just dropped a bombshell about how long those problems have existed.

Julia Carrie Wong was among the first people to join Facebook back in 2004. She was also a classmate of Zuckerberg at Harvard University, where the social network famously began.

“I was one of Facebook’s first users. I shouldn’t have trusted Mark Zuckerberg,” declared Wong in a recent feature published by The Guardian, a widely respected British newspaper.

In the scathing article, Wong accused the now-famous CEO of lying to the early members of the site… and of continuing the same lie today.

“Last week, Zuckerberg was called to answer for himself. Over the course of two days of questioning before Congress, Zuckerberg sought to assure the public that we, not he, are in ‘complete control’ of our relationships with Facebook,” Wong explained.

“He repeated this guarantee dozens of times, returning again and again to the idea that users can control their Facebook data,” she continued.

In the former Harvard student’s view, Zuckerberg’s assurances to Congress were the same as his early promises when Facebook was run from a dorm on campus. Both then and now, she insists, the central promise is tragically untrue.

“But the Zuckerberg of 2018 sounds suspiciously like the ‘Mark E Zuckerberg ’06’ who was interviewed by the Harvard Crimson on 9 February 2004 about his brand new website,” she wrote.

“It was this article that prompted my roommates and me to start entrusting a stranger behind a computer screen with the keys to our identities: names, birthdates, photographs, email addresses, and more,” Wong continued.

During the 2004 interview with the student newspaper — a quaint time when Facebook boasted about “hundreds” of users — a fresh-faced Mark Zuckerberg assured his classmates that privacy was in their hands.

“There are pretty intensive privacy options,” he told the paper. “People have very good control over who can see their information.”

The woman who had a front-row seat to the explosive growth of Facebook isn’t buying it.

“Zuckerberg was lying then and he’s lying now,” she declared. “We do not have ‘complete control’ and we never have, as evidenced by the fact that even people who never signed up for Facebook have ‘shadow profiles’ created without their consent.”

“He has been getting away with this same spin for 14 years, two months, and eight days,” the former classmate of Zuckerberg continued.

As evidence of that “spin,” Wong recalled instant messages that were sent between Mark Zuckerberg and one of her Harvard friends during the early days of Facebook.

“During those first few weeks of Facebook’s existence, while he was assuring his fellow college students that we could trust him with our identities, he had a private conversation on instant messenger with a friend,” wrote Wong. “That conversation was subsequently leaked, and published by Silicon Valley Insider. It is as follows:”

ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
ZUCK: just ask
ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don’t know why
ZUCK: they “trust me”
ZUCK: dumb f**ks

Wong then launched into her most scorching criticism of Zuckerberg and Facebook yet.

“In the intervening years, I’ve learned that Zuckerberg values his own privacy so much that he has security guards watching his trash, that he bought four houses surrounding his own house to avoid having neighbors, that he sued hundreds of Hawaiians to sever their claim to tiny plots of land within his massive Kauai estate, and that he secretly built tools to prevent further private messages from coming back to haunt him,” she ranted.

“What I haven’t learned, or seen any sign of, is that he has changed his opinion of the intelligence of his users,” Wong concluded. “It’s Zuckerberg’s world, and we’re all just a bunch of dumb f***s living in it.”

Social networks certainly have value, but they can also become colossal nightmares. Whether the pros outweigh the cons for Americans and conservatives on Facebook remains to be seen.

https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/zuckerberg-classmate-accuses-lie/?utm_source=spotim&utm_medium=spotim_recirculation&spotim_referrer=recirculation

Thomas Black
Thomas Black
5 years ago

Businesses have complained to regulatory authorities in various countries about Google. Microsoft and Oracle are perhaps the most prominent. Examining their complaints may provide ideas about limiting Google’s power.

For example, Google bundles its apps with Android and requires phone vendors to take the whole bundle. Antitrust regulators in Europe and the US have been looking at this as possibly illegal tying arrangements. Free speech may not be an issue in these investigations, but conservative groups being targeted by Google could benefit if Google is forced to remove its apps from Android.

Google has become a cable or wireless provider in some locations. Google may be vulnerable to legal attack if it bundles or promotes biased products (search and YouTube come to mind) with their government-licensed services. Also, the antitrust tying arrangement issue mentioned earlier could apply.

Another approach may concern management’s responsibility to stockholders. We have seen tech company management use company resources to advance personal political views that are unrelated to the business of the company. These views will invariably conflict with those of some shareholders. Management is free to contribute its personal funds to groups that engage in political advocacy. But is it legitimate for management to contribute company funds to leftist groups like SPLC and ProPublica, who use the funds to identify conservative groups and label them “hate groups?”

Also, it is easy enough for tech companies to give users filter options to suit their preferences. But when a tech company is putting its thumb on the scale, as Google, Facebook and other companies are doing, it will likely antagonize people and lose business, to the detriment of the shareholders. Management might be held legally responsible for that.

Sing On
Sing On
5 years ago

These tech titans are NO longer american companies. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has decided to NO longer assist US antiterrorist efforts:
http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/01/technology/google-maven-contract/index.html
No surprise, since Google has offshored the majority of its software development work to India, a country with a large muslim population, so obviously many employees would have issues with this “controversial” program.
And don’t forget what these engineers do with the money they earn in US tech companies:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/us-canada-news/indian-engineer-in-us-pleads-guilty-to-raising-money-for-top-al-qaida-terrorist/articleshow/63729039.cms
And obviously some of their PMs have little respect for US laws:
https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/mid-air-horror-indian-man-arrested-brazenly-sexually-abusing-woman-us-flight-74227

Microsoft also has been busy offshoring its software development to India. Pretty soon CEO Satya Nadella will be vulnerable to internal pressures like CEO Sundar Pichai was.

cylde
cylde
5 years ago

Not tip toeing, they are marching in lockstep much like goose stepping NAZIs.stomping our rights while claiming falsely that they are being fair.

Alleged-Comment
Alleged-Comment
5 years ago

I don’t use F*keturd, or Gooturd or Twiturd. I don’t have a cellphone or a Smartphone either. Don’t want to be dumb (killed in car accident) or get tumors as a badge of courage.

You guyz see them as necessary. I don’t. Lots of alternatives. They nail you anyway. Use you like cattle and sell all your information for the privilege of you revealing yourself to millions.

Even that little Jew said so about you, calling you dumb ucks for giving all that information to him.

Stephen Honig
Stephen Honig
5 years ago

Either you’re a fkn’ Muslim a Nazi or both, you stupid ass anti Semite!

Alleged-Comment
Alleged-Comment
5 years ago
Reply to  Stephen Honig

Why? Just because I called him “little”?.

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