(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Is anti-trust on the way back? [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-09-26 The FTC has sued Amazon for monopoly practices: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/26/technology/ftc-amazon.html The Google antitrust trial is already underway, and the FTC is suing Meta, too. That is a lot of progress, and to me this is looking like a sea-change from the previous 3 administrations, maybe since the 1990s? Where is Apple so far? IMO, their only big issue is the App Store, and hopefully that can be handled by regulatory actions in the EU and then in the US, so there may be no far-reaching antitrust suit for that tech giant. In any case, it seems like the jig may be up for big tech monopolies, and enforcement is happening at scale now. The work to start these actions must have begun in 2021, so I expect it was an early priority of the Biden administration, but not widely reported. The timing may be just right to de-monopolize the tech giants. Their normal strategy would be to delay the lawsuits, heavily contribute to the opposition party, and count on a future republican appointee to shut down the enforcement action. That does not work as well this time around because it looks like it will be Biden vs. Trump. Most tech giant employees don’t have the stomach for more Trump, and it is not clear they would get help from a future GOP to wiggle out of this anyway. Excuse me for being slightly giddy about the prospect of real antitrust enforcement against tech monopolies. I’m an engineer myself (an old one) and the monopolies have held back my career at various junctures. I have seen first hand the way the giants stifle innovation (including some of my own.) They have their way of “green washing” their reputation as innovators by taking credit for work that happened in startups they acquired. But if you are in the business, you know that tech monopolies are where innovation goes to die. Like all monopolies, they profit from control of the status quo, and long-term lock-in to products and commodities where they have destroyed consumer choice. Honestly, there are a few exceptions to the innovation-killing giants story: every once in a while there is a technology that actually requires a billion dollar plus investment, like a chip Fab, or a “Large Language Model” (LLM) like ChatGPT that took a billion dollars of hardware just to get off the ground. But I would prefer a world where more of the billion-dollar investments take place at government labs, and in academic environments rather than corporate. The science and engineering talent will follow the investment whether it is public or private, so innovation does not have to be privatized. The basic technology behind the latest AI has its roots in academic and government research that actually started in the 1950’s – this multi-generational effort is how long it really took to get the break-thoughs in statistical modeling that were needed for LLM’s. Quarterly profits have nothing to do with successful long-term research. Our best technology is the work of lifetimes, not quarters. An expensive tech like ChatGPT may take billions to develop, but once the concept works, LLM’s can be deployed and improved using hardware that costs a few thousand dollars. Concentrating the huge initial investment in private companies just makes the tech less open and less useful afterwards. Every once in a while one tech monopoly might open-source code in order to undermine another tech monopoly (like Meta with the Llama AI) but that is a lot less reliable than having strong public investment to begin with. So why did I “digress” into talking about AI? Maybe because I am using it today, but mostly because I feel a little desperate that the tech monopolies need to be reined in urgently, given how rapidly AI is changing the work patterns in the US. AI could be used to decentralize market power by distributing design and production processes, and it could also be weaponized to further centralize corporate power. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/26/2195722/-Is-anti-trust-on-the-way-back Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/