Elizabeth Warren reveals her plan to break up Big Tech

Much like McDonalds has “a monopoly on Big Macs” or Ford has “a monopoly on Ford F-150s.”

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That’s maybe not a great example

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And Facebook has a monopoly on Facebooking and Twitter has a monopoly on tweets. If Facebook isn’t a target of this legislation, then we will never get Friendster and MySpace back.

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The media kept talking about the emails is because it was an interesting topic. And the reason it remained an interesting topic is that Clinton wouldn’t admit she’d given herself special treatment so the controversy never went away.

Same thing with the Clinton foundation, she could have said something like “yes, a lot of those people donated because they wanted to be in my good graces, or at least get their views heard. But I always did my best to make an unbiased decision”. But instead she insists on no issue so that tension remains and that’s what sells viewers.

There’s about a dozen things that went horribly wrong to put Trump in power and this is one of them. But you can’t expect the media to ignore an interesting story, you need to make it non-interesting.

Because the election hasn’t started yet so the GOP isn’t hitting it. If she’s nominated Trump will talk about it every day, she won’t have a good answer, and that will make it newsworthy.

Democratic primary voters. That’s irrelevant when it comes to the general election.

That might help with Native American voters but not the general public. Fox News and the GOP will always be able to find a bunch of really pissed off Native Americans to talk about how outraged they are. And people will keep being enticed by the fact that Warren seemed to be claiming aboriginal ancestry for professional advancement and won’t cop to it.

I definitely agree that Clinton was a terrible campaigner but I don’t think that will help.

I think the one thing that Trump figured out and did really well is realizing that the media isn’t about facts it’s about stories and whether or not they’re finished. If the story hurts your opponent keep it open, if it hurts you then find an answer to close it.

That’s why he was able to dodge the hit on not releasing his tax returns so well. “I’ll release when I’m nominated”, “I can’t release because I’m being audited”, “the election happened and the voters weren’t interested”. If he wants the story to die he gives a simple straightforward answer, and when the story comes back because he lied he gives a different simple straightforward answer and the story dies again.

And when he was accused of assault he brought out a lineup of Bill Clinton’s former victims and now the story is about him.

That’s why his nicknames were effective, because they hit on a characteristic or controversy the candidate didn’t have a good answer for.

And yes, Warren can get out of this, but she needs to admit that she screwed up and apologize that, she needs to give the story a resolution. If she does that and Trump says “Pocahontas” then voters will get pissed off at him for reopening something that was finished.

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Facebook has close to a monopoly on being a social media network. Apple has nothing close to a monopoly on smartphones.

I think you misspelled “twits.”

That sounds like g good thing. I think what needs to replace Facebook is not another single company controlling the network, but a distributed protocol, where everyone can back up their own data, and host it however they want.

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I don’t think it would be too terribly difficult to break google into 3 separate companies and accomplish either or of what you’re trying to argue.

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Forgot to add, the significant thing about this that struck me, was that this story was about an issue - breaking up monopolies - and your post was basically, “Never mind the issue, the thing to talk about is the scandal.” That’s pretty much the emails story.

Fox News can’t keep a story alive all by itself. It reaches about 5 million people, or one voter in 20. When it’s all alone on a “scandal” (Seth Rich), it dies.

There are any number of issues on which people never get “closure”, like apologizing for support of the Iraq War; but if the media stop covering that point, they skate on it.

“Scandals” are not an inherent thing; they’re a media creation, they live and die by its focus.

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To be honest it’s something that I’d realized independently in the last couple days so when a relevant story came up I wanted to discuss it.

And since this proposal is in the context of an election campaign I think discussing the scandal is valid. The vast majority of the discussion should be on the policy, but policies don’t matter if you can’t get elected.

I think you’re wrong on this count. As I said the thing that Trump figured out is if the person doesn’t have a good answer he can keep the scandal alive forever. And Warren doesn’t have a good answer at this point. It doesn’t mean she’d lose, but it’s a vulnerability that he’ll exploit from the nomination to election day.

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You’re not changing your default search engine. You’re changing your search engine from the default search engine.

If you’re the default, you’ve already won the race (cf: Microsoft destroying Netscape by bundling Explorer with Win 95)

That “10 seconds” is literally an eternity when most users dont even know they have a choice.

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This is the second time BB referred to the Senator as a “would-be” something. She earned the title of US Senator (and, for that matter, so did “Bernie Sanders”). You really should refer to these people by their title. The fact that they are running for President is a secondary attribute.

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You are setting a new default on your system. Also, the default search engine for firefox is DuckDuckGo. The default search engine on Edge (which is the default browser on windows, by far the most popular non-phone OS out there) is Bing. If people are using Chrome on Windows, which is where Google is the default search engine, they have already changed their defaults.

Google is the default on Android, but saying they should deliberately set the default to something worse is not, in any sense, protecting consumers.

If the people who do know they have a choice were switching in significant numbers, that fact would get out, and other people would hear about it. The fact is, knowledgable people aren’t switching in droves, because Google generally provides better results.

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They “sell” a large number for the price of “free”, which is frequently not just “the same as selling” but worse if you look at monopoly laws.

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You don’t “set a new default on your system.” The default is the search engine that appears in your browser when you install it. That’s why it’s called a default. It was there before you did anything. It stays there if you do nothing. If you are 90% of the population, you are using the default, not knowing or caring its a default, not knowing or caring that you have a choice in the matter.

The point is that, yes, motivated/knowledgable people can, and always will, modify their setup to work for them, rather than the other way around. But these people are not the majority. They aren’t even close to the majority. Which gets back to why defaults are king.

And the default on Firefox is Google.

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I’m unconvinced that the majority want too. Making a product that can stand on it’s own is very hard. Making one that could complement existing products is a whole lot easier.

So a lot of startups are making products that will pretty much never be profitable as stand alone items, the whole goal of the company is to be bought by an existing company to complement that companies existing products (or replace a specific product).

Other startups that do intend to create viable stand alone products fail at that, but do produce something good enough to be bought. For example P.A. Semi made some kick ass highly integrated PowerPC CPUs, unfortunintly the market for that product was tiny, and doing a poor job of sustaining them. Apple bought them so they could work on kick ass highly integrated ARM designs. I think there is a very good chance that if they hadn’t been purchased they would’ve gone bankrupt (and Apple either would not have world class CPU design, or it wouldn’t be nearly as good as it is now).

The end result may or may not be better for consumers (fewer free products that later get hovered up by giants, but also fewer free products period, and in fact fewer products free or otherwise), but they for sure aren’t better for “tech entrepreneurs”.

This particular idea has about as much hope as the Green New-Deal. Just my opinion, but I am not sure Warren wants to be president, I think she, (and Bernie), just want to pull the Dems a little left before jumping out of the way when Biden declares. It is all pretty sad, dyed-in-the-wool Dems are just as dirty as the GOP, and neither party has the best interest of the country at heart - They just want to win and suck up all that glorious corporate money…

She also lacks Bernie’s voting record, and given how broken Washington is anyone who tries to “meet in the middle” or “be reasonable” will be kneecapped from the start. We need a president who will be unafraid to use executive power to it’s full extent - only this time it won’t be to murder civillians, but to force agencies to enforce the laws we have on the books against the fat cats ruining this country.

On top of his milquetoast neoliberal politics, I’ve heard through the whisper network Biden has some serious deficiences. The creepy uncle Onion meme didn’t come from nowhere.

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I thought he misspelled “racist shitgibbons.”

I originally had a different word there, too.

Right, good tag (90% of ads, search, creepiness, what?) It’s as if she has a great laser-focused exact solution but wants to hold off on making that a thing until the third judicial outing of the weird misfit law, because Mokkona (Knights Rayearth.)

As a special horror, the comments at Medium (once painstakingly unrolled with ChiselHammerMallet.js) suggest a ‘Facebook Version’ with lots of (who knew) negative comments, but nothing in the comment but suggestion to visit Facebook is mistaken. It’s middlin’ rate press. Calling it runway…I should hope not?

Then again maybe the special horror was Team Warren saying what’s easy for Apple. Not quite the YC article archetype “I thought shipping was easy so I started Fentanylbox.”

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Not to forget…

Joe Biden (i) was a major part of the campaign to slander Anita Hill, (ii) opposed desegregation, (iii) was one of the chief architects of mass incarceration and (iv) is a large part of the reason why Delaware is the money-laundering capital of the USA.

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