https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.32...
Legacy media really sucks.
Reuters is legacy media, hence why I mentioned legacy media.
Like basically any rocket attack I assume happened in like 2006 and between completely different belligerents than whatever a post claims at this point
A podcast doesn't include any video data. How could it show a video?
It annoys me too but I'm young enough to tolerate the kids on my lawn...
Additionally there are far more genres of podcast than one or two talking heads. I wouldn’t call a Dungeons and Dragons podcast a talk show, video or audio.
That's fine with me. In that case, what's the difference between a "video podcast" and a "show"?
> A video podcast is distributed over RSS like any other podcast, unlike a talk show which is distributed via television.
Both of these are obviously false; podcasts need not be distributed by RSS and talk shows need not be distributed by television. Most obviously, radio is well known for the number of talk shows that are distributed over it. Next, podcasts tend to be distributed by providing download links on a web page. Then, talk shows are defined by their content and are distributed via any and all video channels; here's one I follow on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUUc-rp7o3g
That particular video involves asking three guests to discuss the differences between chopsticks in each of their home countries. What would you call it?
I find that most people who criticize people who criticize legacy media are angry that they don't meet their own political leanings.
Depends, the tabloids are really good at providing videos or photos from outside or pull them in so you can watch them on their site.
The more "high-end" the media, the less likely their are to provide you with external material, in my experience.
One they never provide sources. Not just their sources but sources behind figures or statements of truth.
Two it's hard to find articles that highlight different points than the leading article on the topic.
These days most articles have one of two sources:
* rewritten from a single prime news reporting source that did the hard yards,
* copied near verbatim from an official Press Release and|or Advertorial Press Material.
The second is the real bane of modern "news" sourcing - eg: straight up disguised advertising- a mega shopping chain pays a network to insert "news" pieces about fighting back against inflation savings that "local" stores are offering up to "stick it to the big guys" and other such template garbage. Perhaps worse; the undeclared "vested interest" news that comes from (say) a mining or energy companies Press Release.
More and more it's hard to find any truly independant journalism (because of cost cutting), and near impossible to find multiple sources and viewpoints.
One answer is for more citizens to become "press aware" and start to distribute their own press kit releases on local issues to spread the side of events that they want aired. That still faces the counter pressure of actual advertisers that spend with networks that would rather see their take get the airtime.
I'm fairly sure that the #1 source of news articles, social media posts, etc, probably by far is "native advertising" aka hidden advertising (this is actually illegal in some countries) aka PR articles posted as if from the news source.
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Other than the fact that text is sequential I imposed no ranking, these are the two major sources.
> "native advertising" aka hidden advertising
aka submarine news, aka Advertorial Press Material (as I called it above)
Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to.
Either way it's "free" professionally prepared copy that costs nothing in paid reporter time and sometimes comes with a carrot (paid advertisement inches), sometimes with a stick (we're thinking of withdrawing | changing contracts, but we have this copy we'd like to see run).
Never link outside your garden.
Example: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/us/politics/trump-jan-6-c...
Enshittification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) is getting so bad, I'd be willing to pay for sites that actually work. So far, paywall offers are just to remove external ads and that's only part of what I want. The rest of what I want is for the fucking site to actually work. For example, both Google and Amazon search have been seriously degraded and de-featured in recent years and it's been done very intentionally and systematically to optimize for their ad or sales revenue.
I suspect this degradation has crept deeper into their stacks than just at the top layer where it could be easily turned off with a flag and sold as a paywall upgrade.
> For some weird reason, outlinks are to be avoided
To me fair, news is probably pretty hard to measure. Since the real value is in quality. People want information, quickly available, but accurate and easily readable. I mean isn't a big function of the news to explain complex topics more simply? I don't think there are any half way decent metrics for quality in really any domain.
People seem to frequently forget that your measurement is always a proxy. A proxy for what? That's for you to decide. But you can't ever measure anything directly.
It's sadly common even in data science but the biggest offenders I see are business people. You can't use metrics without understanding what they're for otherwise you'll just enshitify your product. Be that number of clicks, time on page/site, number of academic citations, whatever. They're meaningless at face value. A good example is time on site. That's great for social media like YouTube where it generally correlates strongly to "using the website for what the website does" but even then it can be "scrolled for 20 minutes looking for something to watch, gave up. But on a news site, no one fucking cares about that. Your job is to provide information, so time on {page, site} might actually be a negative because it doesn't necessarily mean people are reading that whole time but they might be struggling to find the information they are looking for. A confusing UX also optimizes time on site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law(not being sarcastic...i mean that i may have missed something inadvertently)
The most consequential merger win was probably the NVIDIA/ARM merger that died under FTC litigation.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/02/...
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
In this case, her cases even if lost would be the equivalent of cover fire. Businesses need to re-act to the cover fire and cannot advance (perform their own motion) while she is firing.
The second part is that you would hope/expect her to be able to gain territory in the near future via the "motion" part of the strategy.
So I agree in your framing, just from my perspective you flipped the terminology.
Progress requires testing the system and seeing where the failure points are. It's significantly better than the relative nothing we've gotten from past admins.
Also with the current judicial and congressional makeup it's a wonder anything gets done.
How else could it possibly work? Companies just get to break the law and no one can ever take them to court over it?
And when it’s politically motivated, it is not just harm in the sense of economic inefficiency, but further is unjust and lowers public trust in institutions.
That is a big accusation there. Do you have anything like evidence or just your hurt feelings?
An oversight committee actually doing oversight?! Burn them at the stake.
>> force them to pay for expensive defense in court
Gee, will nobody think about the poor billion dollar companies and their stranglehold on various sectors.
>> then losing when the court decides they did nothing illegal
In an article whose point is a judge allowing the case to move forward.
Sir/Madame/Person, your shilling is top-notch. To the obviousness of such, I doff my hat.
If so, then if she isn't the right person for the job, is there someone who will be more successful?
It's basically the executive sidestepping the legislator and blocking perfectly legal behavior by the threat of burying it in such long and expensive lawsuits it's not longer viable.
3 years ago that would have just been rubber stamped.
Their work on non-tech stuff has probably been even more effective, too.
yes, because companies have decided to consider courts as a cost to do business instead of a regulator they must not piss off at any cost. the courts in that capacity will simply be abused, especially as these fast moving tech companies can make billions beofore a case shuts it all down.
Definitely needs to be some reform to how punishment works, especially retroactive costs.
“Sometimes, you know, the companies decide that they’re going to abandon the merger,” Khan said. Stahl asked if abandoning a merger amid the FTC’s scrutiny was a win, to which Khan said, “That’s right.” https://legal-mag.com/ftcs-lina-khan-defends-merger-and-acqu...
What's wrong with that? Who still watches TV (either OTA or from satellite) in this age, except for elderly people who haven't figured out how to use the internet? This seems like people complaining about the consolidation of companies in the landline telephone market. It's a dying market, so of course the companies still hanging on are going to merge so they can save costs and squeeze the few remaining customers more.
She appears to be improving. But the FTC chair isn’t an internship.
Lina Khan was 32 when she started as FTC chair. Prior to that, she had researched anti-trust at the New America Foundation, received a JD from Yale, worked as a legal director at the Open Markets Institute, worked as a legal fellow at the FTC, and served as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust.
I don't disagree that she made some early missteps at the FTC, but this is far from her first rodeo. I also think that, on balance, it's a benefit to hire young, promising voices to positions of power, and that we should get back to a place where we do that a lot more.
I think the attention she’s bringing to the issue will cause many people to ask why antitrust enforcement has to be so hard. Any company with more than $100B in revenue is a quasi-government, and damages fair competition merely through their existence. Instead of making enforcement rely on years-long court cases, we need more immediate ways to break up or regulate these companies, and what we have today is not enough. If her attempts make more people realize the current laws aren’t enough, that might be its own form of success.
I wish a POTUS candidate would come out in support of Khan so I could point to that as a reason to support that candidate (it’s definitely a component of how I’d vote).
> Last week, before the order was unsealed, some of the initial coverage called it a “partial victory” for Amazon, but as it turns out, the portion of the ruling in which the company was victorious was relatively slim.
> The areas where the judge granted Amazon’s motion to dismiss were related to specific aspects of state claims, including elements of allegations brought by Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Maryland. Eighteen states and one territory, Puerto Rico, joined the FTC in the lawsuit against Amazon.
https://www.geekwire.com/2024/unsealed-order-in-amazon-antit...
I am interested in reading an analysis of this.
As much as I don't want to be a fan of Amazon -- their offering, especially because of the logistics/shipping, combined with generally fair prices, is quite incredible.
I can live with USPS but what made me actually cancel my Prime account was their use of On-Trac shipping in California. They literally missed every single time and had to come back the next day.
In my zip code there are various blocks (including my own) where virtually nothing gets delivered in <5 days. This is in one of the biggest cities in the US.
I've contacted customer service and gone through multiple escalations twice and nothing has changed and it appears to reach a black hole. Addresses a few blocks away get normal prime delivery in 1-2 days.
As much as I love Amazon (I've been a customer since the very beginning) this makes me think that antitrust action is needed. Seeing pictures of Bezos partying with the Kardashians doesn't help Amazon's cause very much either.
For a while things got delivered via Amazon's subcontracted trucks but that stopped and now it's just whatever level of service USPS offers is what you end up with. Houses a few blocks away get normal prime delivery.
I suspect it isn’t next-day in, say, Broome. Last time I was in Hobart even it definitely wasn’t next or two-day shipping, lol.
Yeah, that's probably why. They get people hooked with actually good service and then drop quality to save money once they've captured the market.
As usual Perth gets shafted with 3rd party couriers with 0 SLA :(
Consolidation over the past few decades has limited the capacity for firms to compete in many sectors.
So I appreciate the sentiment of what the FTC is trying to do, but they really come across as amateurs bringing far too many lawsuits and often with weak legal reasoning/argumentation.
In many of the cases they've brought there exists alternative, yet stronger arguments that could have been made.
I'd support congress legislating towards more competition (e.g. forcing open standards for things like APIs/chat clients/smart watches etc), or a more active FTC.
But the current approach is far too disorganized and weak.
And if you haven't kept up this year, Chevron being overturned is showing that the SCOTUS is more than happy to reduce FTC interference.
Unfortunately Congress is largely old and non-technical so the problems present aren't very well recognized or understood.
History will look at walled gardens as bad for competition and thus broader society.
How would this even work? It's on Amazon to deliver your stuff in 2 days but they also have to allow 3rd party shipping they have no control over? Are they allowed to require such a seller to fulfill the order by a specific date?
Because to me a lowly customer Prime === Item Shipped by Amazon. That's the whole value.
I don't understand why this misconception is so widespread. Most inventory is tracked using seller specific FNSKU's. Ergo inventory is not comingled.
> When more than one seller has inventory with the same manufacturer barcode, we may fulfill orders with the inventory that’s closest to the buyer, to facilitate faster delivery.
Isn’t that a form of commingling of inventory? If one of the sellers I selling fakes, I think the other seller would be blamed whenever this happens.
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...
https://www.amazonsellers.attorney/blog/pros-and-cons-of-ama....
> In summary, Amazon's commingling inventory can have serious implications for FBA sellers who are wrongfully accused of selling defective or inauthentic products. While the practice may improve efficiency, it can also make it difficult for sellers to prove their innocence in the event of false accusations. Sellers should be aware of these risks and take steps to protect themselves, such as opting out of commingling inventory or closely monitoring their inventory and customer feedback.
To your point, maybe it depends on the product?
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...
> By default, we use the manufacturer barcode to track eligible inventory throughout the fulfillment process, unless you change your barcode setting or your product is not eligible. When more than one seller has inventory with the same manufacturer barcode, we may fulfill orders with the inventory that’s closest to the buyer, to facilitate faster delivery.
> If your product isn’t eligible for virtual tracking with the manufacturer barcode, an Amazon barcode is required. You may be able to get an exemption to use the manufacturer barcode by enrolling your ASIN in Amazon Brand Registry. To learn more about virtual tracking and see product eligibility requirements, go to,Using manufacturer barcodes with FBA virtual tracking.
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...
> By default, we use the manufacturer barcode to track eligible inventory throughout the fulfillment process, unless you change your barcode setting or your product is not eligible. When more than one seller has inventory with the same manufacturer barcode, we may fulfill orders with the inventory that’s closest to the buyer, to facilitate faster delivery
I hope they also include Amazon allowing thousands of Chinese retailers to stock Amazon's warehouses with counterfeit, faulty products, and potentially dangerous out-of-spec parts - with no way to meaningfully report or bring the offending product to Amazon's attention.
Coincidentally the majority of USPTO trademark submissions are literally just random strings of letters now for this reason.
This is not true. A trademark is only required for Amazon's brand registry which gives brand owners control over who is allowed to sell their branded products.
AB can still look at AM listings in a category and note what is popular (just like anyone can do since that is part of the details AM generally includes in listings), and make a generic version (just like anyone can do), and then sell that on AM. AB products are usually pretty good and usually quite reasonably priced and so even if treated exactly the same as everything else in their category are still likely to end up being included in the products that get algorithmically recommended as alternatives.
It's not clear to me how this would improve competition.
As far as your point on Chinese retailers goes, you are arguing that Amazon should allow fewer sellers and those sellers should be more regulated. That may be a good thing but I'm having some difficulty seeing how it is an antitrust thing.
And I think store brands are pretty mostly a win for the consumer (this is important for any monopoly case).
No I didn't say that.
> It's easy to sell online with Walmart.com. Partner with the largest multi-channel retailer and put your products in front of millions of Walmart shoppers.
Americans are used to American storefronts going through American regulations, but now you're essentially being dropshipped hazardous unregulated products. I generally try to buy from companies directly but this hasn't stopped my family from buying chinesium children toys for me that go straight into the trash.
This is the secret today. Find the product you want, buy straight from that company. Anymore the storefronts are all uniform and shipping (which used to be Amazon's advantage) is the same.
The days of massive online retailers dominating is over at my house. I just wish more people would figure that out.
But aside from that, Amazon almost always has a better return process, and you only need to give one site your payment details rather than many.
(That said, I often buy outside of Amazon, because for certain specialty items, Amazon is pretty lacking.)
How did we end up here? Like why the hell can I buy things on Amazon that can't legally be sold on shelves in the US? Why aren't retailers suing?
Amazon used the excuse it wasn't acting as a distributor and thus shouldn't be held responsible for protecting the public from these products
Because Amazons wiped a lot of them out, and the ones that remain are either doing the same thing, or stand zero chance of comign out of it anything less than bankrupt.
Amazon for all its convenience has decimated likely close to if not more than a million businesses at this point across the world.
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Basics-Speaker-Subwoofer-Gold-...
- Sincerely a kid raised on everything store brand.
Meanwhle I will almost always get an AmazonBasics if it exists as a first result.
99.9% of buyers prefer this over having to wade through innumerate random brands and try to discern quality.
I'd rather these perverse incentives not exist and simply have a more educated consumer base learn to search "Amazon basics X" instead of maximizing conviniece to enable monopolies. We've clearly been shown that we can't handle the latter
You don't have to care per se, that's what the government is for. But taking the time and energy to argue against your long term best interests is disappointing.
It’s not feasible for people to go to China, inspect the manufacturing processes, and figure out what is worth what. There is a whole business there of purveying goods, which is what brands like Amazon and Kroger and Kirkland all the way up to LVMH.
With the advent of the internet, that business is no longer restricted to physical stores, so technically, anyone can make a superior product and sell direct to anyone. There were stories of Kmart and Walmart and whoever else bullying vendors because the vendors used to get nowhere without shelf space.
That's probably the more pressing issue.
I guess you hate every grocery store ever then
Why should I feel bad about Kraft being under permanent pressure by Walmart's Great Value brand?
More competition is needed, not less. Along with more transparency. Banning Amazon from competing would be a mistake. They need a more level playing field, not fewer players.
Also unclear to me why "ecommerce" is a market unto itself that we should be concerned with level of concentration in, as opposed to simply a slice of the broader "retail" market (which is much less concentrated)
It just feels icky to me that you can sign away your rights to do business with someone else.
Aa for E-commerce, it can have a larger inventory than physical retail. You're not going to find many solar charge controllers or mechanical keyboard parts at Walmart, but Amazon will have tons of options deliverable within 48 hours. Few sites can have comparable shipping cost/speed and you have to research each one, whereas Amazon enjoys the position of being the default.
A decade ago, I helped a small Amazon seller with his inventory, and it was eye opening to see all the fees and risks compared to eBay. But he couldn't sell on eBay without losing a massive portion of his customer base, despite their better shopping/buying UX in my experience.
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/1910134amazonec...
It seems completely reasonable to split brick and mortar sales from web-based, given that the business model is pretty significantly different.
And AWS
The issue is that even if you know it's wrong, what are you going to do to. You grow to a certain size, and it then becomes clear that you're inching closer and closer to becoming a monopoly. Do you then stop and inform your shareholders that you unfortunately reached the maximum size for your organisation?
Even if you have no moral issue continuing down your current path, you have very little to fear, because the precedence is that you'll get a relatively mild punishment.
For Amazon, if this was to have any real meaning, the US government could step and an say: Because of the actions of Amazon, the online store, we're no longer able to utilize AWS in good faith. This would force Amazon to split their businesses into two, or lose government contracts, which would both be a real punishment.
Breaking rules definitely isn't an innate part of human nature at scale.
Edit: more seriously, it doesn't help that the laws are entirely subjective. You're not a monopoly until after the fact. Monopolistic behavior is sometimes rewarded, and sometimes punished. Look at court cases involving Apple and Google. The only real difference between them is scale. You're allowed to be big, up until someone decides that you're actually too big. It's only a question of "too big to fail" or "too big to exist".
Consider all the "Lina Khan fans" you see on HN and elsewhere. They rarely articulate why the government should be suing these companies, which laws that company broke, or if those laws make sense. They just don't like big companies and want them taken down a peg.
The Google suit was particularly egregious. There was no alternative to Google search because no one had built a better product for reasons that have nothing to do with anticompetitive behavior. And the real irony here is that Google appears to be behind on LLMs, which have finally given us an alternative to typing things into Google. So the government picked the exact moment when Google's search market share is seriously threatened to sue!
I'll put it to you another way: if you want smaller government, you need smaller corporations, too.
> There was no alternative to Google search because no one had built a better product for reasons that have nothing to do with anticompetitive behavior.
I would first argue that Google's unparalleled superiority in search is overblown. For one, there's ads in it. As Google's founders themselves stated, ads are a perverse incentive to ruin the search experience in favor of advertisers and I can point to several examples[0] in which this happened.
There are paid search engines that do not have advertising (e.g. Kagi) but they themselves have complained about the struggle that is competing with Google. For example, on iOS, there's only five default search engine options, there's no way to add a different search engine as default, and Google pays $$$ to Apple to be set to the default and for that search engine option to be buried in Settings. I don't see how that isn't anticompetitive.
On a technical level, Google has a supracompetitive advantage, too. A lot of websites have restrictive policies that forbid scraping except for Google and Bing. This means only those search engines can actually return results for those sites.
[0] Product ads in web search, every programming search query giving you four or five ads before the actual StackOverflow answer you're interested in, image search becoming a glorified product search with actual functionality being removed, Gemini
Unaccountable to who? I can think of plenty “almost monopolies” that no longer exist or are former shells which would infer they were accountable - at least to the customer.
But the more important question is - how big is too big? Is it the same for every company? If not, who decides? How do you measure it?
If it’s not objective criteria, it becomes a “I know it when I see it” where subjective variables result in a company in the crosshairs. So in the end, the government picking winners and losers.
I'm not a US citizen but I understand that it comes down to the FTC and the courts rather than the government.
If you didn't want to be convicted of murder, you wouldn't walk right up to the line of what constitutes murder. You'd stay far away from that line on the legal side. Same for companies, if the system is doing its job.
There are the standard points around consumer protection. Ticketmaster, Adobe, Amazon, really do engage in anti competitive practices and then burn the consumer once they've consolidated power. People feel that, but to your point, can't articulate all the moving pieces, and that's fine, use the mute button. God help us if Kroger and Safeway get their way and merge.
To your point about "don't forget who's really in charge." - it might feel like there's no upside here, but in reality you do end up with companies that have more power than the government, and that's a dangerous road to go down in a democracy, since there's no real way to hold them accountable. Obviously the government is deeply flawed in a million different ways, but ultimately there are elected officials, which cannot be said of private companies.
Also Lina Khan talks a lot about resiliency. Too much efficiency can make things worse [1]. With mass consolidation, black swan events lead to and outsized impact compared to what they would in an economy where there aren't monopolies everywhere. Climate change, pandemics, instability in Europe and the middle east, etc mean that it's worth trading extreme efficiency for robustness.
[1] https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....
Absolutely. Isn't the recent Crowdstrike incident sort of a testament to this? In terms of efficiency it's great for a bunch of systems to all rely on the same tool. But when something goes wrong, it goes wrong for everyone.
* I'm a big fan of Chairwoman Khan.
* The government should be suing many of the companies FTC is going after because their behavior yields bad outcomes for consumers, such as worse health outcomes after a private equity group captures an entire geography then drives up prices while reducing quality.
* They tend to have broken laws around creating and abusing monopoly positions, usually with various illegal details like kickback arrangements and self-dealing.
* These laws make sense.
* I don't mind big companies and many of the companies FTC goes after are not particularly big.
* Companies that utilize edge cases in market dynamics to produce bad outcomes for consumers should be taken down a peg.
Because it's not productive and against HN guidelines to say "read the article".
>Last year, the FTC alleged Amazon.com, which has 1 billion items in its online superstore, was using an algorithm that pushed up prices U.S. households paid by more than $1 billion. Amazon has said in court papers it stopped using the program in 2019.
Price fixing is generally an illegal tactic. I'm not a lawyer but there's plenty of legal dictionaries that laymen can understand on the whats, why's, and hows. So yes, the goverment should sue if a law is suspected of being broken.
>The Google suit was particularly egregious. There was no alternative to Google search because no one had built a better product for reasons that have nothing to do with anticompetitive behavior.
did you ignore the point where google was spending 250m a year to Apple to be the default search engine on IOS?
Please actually read the topics before complaining that there is no rationale behind it. You're doing the very thing you accuse others of doing. YOu're not providing an argument you're saying arguments don't exist and inserting a strawman.
>the government picked the exact moment when Google's search market share is seriously threatened to sue!
Googles been under scrutiny since pre-pandemic. There is no such thing as "good timing" for a lawsuit because they take years to bring to court, let alone to resolve.
More like ~$20-26 billion
But what happens in the scenario where the person comes in, undercuts them, and then sells to the bigger company? How does this force the larger company to change? This is like antitrust 101.
I don't understand people who claim to be proponents of capitalism and are opposed to antitrust. If you want the free market to determine anything with fewer regulations, then we need antitrust. Otherwise we need a lot more regulations. Which one would you prefer?
I have a feeling you wouldn't recognize anticompetitive behavior despite it hitting you in the face for the past 10 years.
The same government that gives it tax cuts when building new "fulfillment centers" and billions of dollars in cloud/military contracts? Something doesn't add up in your logic.
> Consider all the "Lina Khan fans" you see on HN and elsewhere. They rarely articulate why the government should be suing these companies, which laws that company broke, or if those laws make sense. They just don't like big companies and want them taken down a peg.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/...