We've fined Apple over €1.8 billion over abusive App Store rules for music streaming providers.
For a decade, Apple abused its dominant position by restricting developers from informing consumers about alternative, cheaper music services available outside of the Apple ecosystem.
A jury just found Google guilty on all counts of #antitrust violations stemming from its dispute with #Epic, maker of #Fortnite, which brought a variety of claims related to how Google runs its app marketplace. This is huge:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Folks, the reason #Facebook/ #Instagram/ #Meta/ Zuckerberg hasn’t launched #Threads in the #EU isn’t because the EU is determined to protect your privacy, it’s because the EU is determined to protect The Single Market (peace be upon it) from anticompetitive behaviour. It’s because they’re using Instagram to launch Threads and sharing data between them (and not with EU startups that might want to use that data too). It’s #antitrust, not #privacy. It’s markets, not people.
The bill, sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), would create a new agency called the Digital Consumer Protection Commission that would be empowered to go after giant tech firms for a slew of anti-competitive behaviors and failing to protect consumer privacy.
Cory Doctorow has an opinion piece in the Financial Times? The Financial Times is ready to consider the scourge of enshittification? 🤩 Well done, @pluralistic !
This brings me hope for a de-enshittified future. May we all come together to "disrupt" enshittification!
"Kraft, General Mills & other major food companies persuaded a fed jury that top US egg producers are liable for unlawfully inflating prices. The verdict on Tues followed a >5-week antitrust trial against a group of egg producers incl. Cal-Maine Foods & Rose Acre, over claims that they'd "rigged" the market by conspiring to charge artificially high prices."
#CoryDoctorow, "we used to have the standard for antitrust that was grounded in the idea of harmful dominance...
When a company gets too big, it becomes impossible to discipline by competition or regulation or through labor organizing."
In this clip @pluralistic evokes
John Sherman on his #antitrust act.
"If we would not allow a king to rule America, we shouldn't allow an autocrat of trade to determine how we attain the necessities of our lives or work for our wages." https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation
They said it couldn't happen. After decades of #antitrust enforcement against #PredatoryPricing - selling goods below cost to kill existing competitors and prevent new ones from arising - the #ChicagoSchool of neoliberal #economists "proved" that predatory pricing didn't exist and that the courts could stand down and stop busting companies for it.
The Department of Justice kicked off its antitrust trial against Google this week by presenting evidence that Google allegedly hid monopolistic behaviors not just by auto-deleting four years of chats, but also by training employees to avoid using certain words in office communications.
"Today, at long last, after generations of deadly corporate power-grabs, we are living through an ecology moment where all kind of fights are coalescing into one big fight: the fight to save democracy from oligarchy."
This week @adam & @jerod are talking with Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic) about how we can get back to that “new good internet.”
Cory’s new book, The Internet Con, offers a lens to this conversation about disenshittifying the internet through anti-trust laws, limits on corporate tweaking, regulating unconstrained capitalism & all the ways enshittification is enabled.
More #greedflation (this time in #babyformula#milk products) in a market dominates by twi firms (who have 85% of the market)
Once again this demonstrates the problem the UK has with #oligopoly and while #antitrust & #competition regulation may seem complex & arcane to most #voters, actually such regulation has real world impact when lax, badly enforced or loosely legislated - the UK needs to strengthen the Competition & Markets Authority and empower it to work better!
So, the US filed an antitrust suit against Apple. The people who are generally inclined to defend Apple were quick to pounce with accusations that the government was clueless and unbalanced and simply wrong in its accusations. Personally I have no opinion on the subject, but here’s a person with credible-sounding legal credentials who argues that the case is in fact strong: https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/22/24109033/doj-apple-antitrust-lawsuit-legal-expert-praise
I thought the EU were supposed to be the competition experts? Amazon isn’t buying iRobot to crowd out other robot vacuum companies. It wants all the data its robots are collecting on people’s homes.
This is easy for Amazon to agree to so it can get the valuable data it’s after.
If you are hearing about #RudyGiuliani today remember the massive harm he caused #RubyFreeman & #ShayeMoss. They had to leave their homes because of the threats they got following Giuliani's @defamation. Today on @nicolesandler 's Show I talked about #Rudy and the crimes #AlexJones & #ElonMusk commit with their words and what we can do about it.
A special shout out to @pluralistic because we talked about #antitrust and his new book, The Internet Con
"The worse Google’s search results are, the more they depend on being the default search (because no one would actively choose a search engine with unreliable, spammy results). The more they spend on being the default, the sweatier and more desperate their money-grabbing tactics become, and the worse the search results get, and the more they need to spend to keep you locked in"
➥ @pluralistic
US Oil producers withheld prod. to DRIVE UP OIL PRICES BY COORDINATING WITH #OPEC.
-h/t M Stoller
Exxon is set to close its $60B deal for Pioneer following an agreement with #antitrust enforcers not to add fmr Pioneer Chief Exec Sheffield to its BOD.
News: Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants to build a new agency to police Big Tech (www.theverge.com)
The bill, sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), would create a new agency called the Digital Consumer Protection Commission that would be empowered to go after giant tech firms for a slew of anti-competitive behaviors and failing to protect consumer privacy.
Microsoft would buy Valve 'if opportunity arises,' said Phil Spencer in leaked email (www.pcgamer.com)
But its prime target was Nintendo, according to a 2020 email leaked during the FTC v Microsoft trial.
Google hid evidence by training workers to avoid words monopolists use, DOJ says (arstechnica.com)
The Department of Justice kicked off its antitrust trial against Google this week by presenting evidence that Google allegedly hid monopolistic behaviors not just by auto-deleting four years of chats, but also by training employees to avoid using certain words in office communications.