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.
#Amazon#FTC#Antitrust#BigTech#Monopolies: "[I]n amazon’s case, the FTC lawsuit suggests that the company’s financial disclosures effectively conceal a major source of profits: its third-party marketplace, which connects buyers with outside sellers. Third-party transactions represent about 60 percent of Amazon’s sales volume. The company acts as a middleman, matching vendors with shoppers and providing logistics to get the product from one to the other. The FTC alleges that, within this third-party market, Amazon imposes exorbitant fees on the sellers who rely on its site to reach customers, fees well in excess of what it costs Amazon to provide those services, leading to big profits. How big? That’s redacted.
The amount of profit that Amazon makes from third-party sellers, as opposed to AWS or some other division, might sound like a technical distinction, but it’s essential to the case against the company. The FTC alleges that Amazon’s low-price image is a mirage: According to the FTC, the company actually keeps prices higher than they would be in a competitive market—not just on Amazon but across the internet—squeezing consumers and small businesses in the process. Amazon famously lost billions of dollars in its early years and was barely in the black for many years after that."
Good, another antitrust action, this time against a serial abuser: United Health:
The DOJ is probing ties between UnitedHealth insurer & its healthcare units. The regulator is investigating the $372B revenue from the health insurance/benefit program & PBM (Optum).
We need to laud the successful ppl in Biden's admin. Two are #empoweredwomen & POC -so often maligned, esp. when aggressively defending what's right & lawful. FTC CHM Khan & VP Harris have wins. Cowardly, SEC CHM Gensler let the financiers win with crypto & Pence was...
FTC Chair Lina Khan is taking antitrust violations seriously as noted⬆️& today, blocking Kroger from merging with Albertsons. Khan is a fierce defender for consumers & workers:
FTC sues to block Kroger, Albertsons merger, arguing deal would raise grocery prices and hurt workers.
#Intermediaries#Antitrust#Competition#Capitalism: "The problem, in other words, isn't intermediation – it's power. The thing that distinguishes a useful intermediary from an enshittified bully is power. Intermediaries gain power when our governments stop enforcing competition law. This lets intermediaries buy each other up and corner markets. Once they've formed cozy cartels, they can capture their regulators and commit rampant labor, privacy and consumer violations with impunity. That capture also lets them harness governments to punish smaller players that want to free workers, creators, audiences and customers from walled gardens. It also hands them a whip-hand over their workers, so that any worker who refuses to aid in these nefarious plans can be easily fired:
A world with intermediaries is a better world. As much as I love Crad Kilodney's books, I wouldn't want to live in a world where the only books on my shelves came from people prepared to stand on a street-corner wearing a "FOUL PUS FROM DEAD DOGS" sign.
The problem isn't intermediaries – it's powerful intermediaries. That's why the world's surging antitrust movement is so exciting: by reinstating competition law, we can keep intermediaries small and comparatively weak, so that creators and audiences, drivers and riders, sellers and buyers, and other groups seeking to connect will not find themselves made subservient to middlemen."
💰 EU to hit Apple with first ever fine in €500mn penalty over music streaming
— FT
"The probe is investigating whether Apple blocked apps from informing iPhone users of cheaper alternatives to access music subscriptions outside the App Store. It was launched after music-streaming app Spotify made a formal complaint to regulators in 2019."
First was an engaging panel on antitrust as an agent for change at Cristina Caffarra's antitrust conference with Sarah Cardell, Benoît Coeuré, Nuno Cunha Rodrigues, John Newman, and Aviv Nevo. There's great detail on recent cases undertaken by various authorities, as well as insight into how they view antitrust evolving moving forward https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5nQ-1drW58 (2/11) #law#antitrust#economics
Next was a great talk by Michael Whinston on whether regulators should focus on overall concentration or its change in horizontal mergers at the Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation (MaCCI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4QOJfv_srU (5/11) #economics#antitrust
#EU#DSA#BigTech#Antitrust#Competition: "Despite all the shortcomings touched upon above, EDRi holds that the DSA is a positive step forward. That is because, while not ambitious enough, it has — maybe for the first time in Europe — enabled politicians and the public to debate and understand the harms inflicted by the data-driven advertising models that many of the largest tech firms would rather keep hidden from public view.
Now it is known that Google is not a search engine provider and Facebook never was a social media company. They are global commercial surveillance corporations.
The biggest contribution of all debates around the DSA is that next time around, lawmakers and the public are already aware."
Apple has very publicly told you to go fuck yourselves with its malicious compliance. What you do next will decide whether malicious compliance is acceptable in the EU or not.
If firms can squeeze out supplier margin -lowers the cost of a well =more prod. But fewer oil field service firms with less margin will in turn reduce innovation -could mean the opp. Explosion of E&P firms has led to a healthy ecosystem of dom. firms, if consolidation -innovation may move from Dallas to Dubai. Big players: more high FIN than oilman -strategies are driven by WS. Big firms engage in mergers. Small firms have rights thru antitrust-. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/fear-and-consolidation-in-the-oil