I'll believe it when I see it. What are the actual remedies going to be? More piddly payouts that net each customer 57 cents?
The penalties for monopolies need to be RUINOUS. The sword of Damocles should be hanging over every company and every individual with decision-making power at every company.
I'm tired of all the proverbial wrist-slapping. It's the cost of doing business. Let a wronged consumer give a monopolist CEO some physical wrist-slapping, on a public channel. Perhaps then it has a bigger chance of stopping.
Law is slow and gradual. I'm not sure if States can break up companies, but these build undeniable precedent for when the feds get around to suing. So I wouldn't underestimate these cases just because they aren't the case that will be remembered in history
I actually think - the reward for reporting a monopoly and providing evidence- should be the allowance to take part of that company and run with it. As in - i report on solid evidence that google is a monopoly. Fine- have AddSense and run with it, or take youtube. Like the whistle blowing becomes a company founding event. The shareholders in a ex-monopoly get to choose which new horse too back.
The thrust-busting state entity , should only be involved as a peripheral rubber-stamping agency of the legality of the process and as evaluators of the solidity of the evidence. The falling to pieces and becoming fresh competitors should feel natural.
I wonder why they explicitly mentioned Warren Buffett. I'm assuming that means something to some group, but I have absolutely no idea what I'm supposed to read into that.
Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents, please don't post shallow dismissals of other people's work, please omit internet tropes, and please don't use HN for political battle. This is all in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
(I'm not arguing with you politically btw—just trying to avoid what predictably leads to repetitive and generic, and therefore bad, HN threads.)
For sure they are rightfully angry. From a moderation point of view, should we let that anger, however rightful, break this site for its intended purpose? I don't see what good that would do.
Sometimes I wonder whether you were ordered to take a "neutral" editorial stance that was favorable to tech nazis or whether you did it by accident.
In the end it doesn't matter all that much. Getting trump and musk in power was the most significant project you've ever contributed to, and you're going to be hearing about it for the rest of your life.
No one ordered me to take any editorial stance about that or anything else. Actually, no one at YC has ever ordered me to do anything. That's one reason I'm grateful for this job.
The only people "ordering" me are HN users with strong feelings, and some of them even add menacing threats.
p.s. I'm not sure why, but your comment got me thinking about the lines "everything is political" and "neutrality is not possible"—lines I happen to agree with and (believe it or not) keep in mind while moderating HN—yet which somehow push people to a place where the only thing they feel they can do is destroy each other.
It must be possible to recognize how (nearly) everything has a political valence and (nearly) nothing is neutral, yet still have some option other than "band together with one tribe to destroy another tribe". Yet that is the pressure that we end up feeling. To that my answer is no, I'm not going to and I don't believe that is the only choice, even though nothing is apolitical in the end.
The Democratic base is tired of reaching across the aisle only to have their hands slapped and be met with disapproval and silence. This will all be a huge blow back very soon but it also means the angry people will look to revenge. And revenge means a D Potus coming in and doing things like firing every Republican they can, attempting to redirect funds.
A lot of flip floppers often quote “both sides” talking points but both-sides-arguments only really apply in the context of what has happened historically and lack of willingness to set new precedents (I need all the flaws to also win mentality). Those arguments aren’t helpful in the actual solution to the problem. Even though the arguer isn’t exactly incorrect.
IMO, the only revenge that will work is by making laws forcing both sides to legislate. Idk what that looks like but not legislating has led to interpreting the law as acceptable behavior for the team to win, not interpreting the law as applied against the acting individual. However something like a legislation quota sounds messy and easily abused in a country of lobbyists.
The only other solution is getting non-term limited people to agree to term limits.
The best solution would be a reform of the voting system. It has become clear over the last decades that a two-party system slowly radicalizes both sides. It is also very problematic in the face of single-issue voters. But the two-party system exists just because first-past-the-post voting makes it a strategically bad choice to vote for anyone but the two dominant parties, and makes party-internal reform hard by making it a nonstarter to split a party, no matter how severe the disagreement.
Now first-past-the-post made some sense in the 1700s, but with the vastly improved communication of the 1900s and 2000s it's just a bad voting system. Basically anything else is better.
Right. During stable times, neither party would take such a risk. Big reforms occur during unusual periods where a system experiences shocks and its limits are tested. If there was ever a time for voting reform it would be the 2028 term, assuming that Democrats actually manage to capitalize on the historic moment rather than capitulate and shift right while campaigning on some limp slogan like "back to normal."
The direction of political discourse hasn't been toward "radicalization" per se. Democrats have only moved slightly to the left of where they were in the early 1970s, but the majority of that movement has taken place since 2011. Republicans, OTOH, have been moving rightward at a steady and near-constant pace since 1971, though they did start shifting faster around 2001. This has lead to Congress becoming significantly more conservative over time. Keep in mind, the Democrats would be considered just slightly left of center in most European countries.
"All that is necessary for evil to win is for good people to do nothing", and 1/3 of the people of voting age did not vote in 2024 - they did nothing, they just didn't care.
You can reform voting all you want but if a significant portion of people still aren't voting then it's not going to do much for the country.
> The Democratic base is tired of reaching across the aisle only to have their hands slapped and be met with disapproval and silence.
Perhaps the Democratic base should stop "reaching across the aisle" the way they are because it clearly isn't working. On any given issue, Republicans generally understand the Democratic position on things and reject it. Democrats rarely understand the Republican position. That makes it sound like "reaching across the aisle" is a bit more of "preaching across the aisle" than truly attempting collaboration.
> And revenge means a D Potus coming in and doing things like firing every Republican they can, attempting to redirect funds.
This already generally happens, and more power to the Democrats who want to swing the pendulum hard on the Republicans after this one. The fact remains that for the last several administrations, if you were high up in one of these organizations, you would have to expect to get fired or demoted when the other party gets into power. If you want to see the history of this, the EPA has some of the most visible examples. The situation that's new is the wholesale gutting of entire agencies at the direction of a third party (Elon Musk).
> IMO, the only revenge that will work is by making laws forcing both sides to legislate. Idk what that looks like but not legislating has led to interpreting the law as acceptable behavior for the team to win, not interpreting the law as applied against the acting individual. However something like a legislation quota sounds messy and easily abused in a country of lobbyists.
I completely agree with you here. The administrative bloat of the executive branch is largely because the legislature has abdicated the power to write the rules on all but the broadest basis to the executive branch. The executive branch is run by only one elected person who has the power to change quite a bit about its operations.
> The Democratic base is tired of reaching across the aisle only to have their hands slapped and be met with disapproval and silence.
You mean, like the Democrats have been doing since the Obama administration? The ACA was not a bipartisan bill, it was a jam-down, and that attitude only continued. Pendulum-swing indeed.
The solution is the same one Lincoln pointed out. The people aren't fooled anymore, so if you really want to do something, you can't just shuffle the problem around for campaign donations and not actually fix it. You have to make an honest attempt to support the good of the people. At the moment, President Trump is seen as the one doing it, because the Democrats have so clearly been acting against the interests of the majority of their constituents in favor of ideological luxuries. We're done with that for a while.
You’re both right, it was done without Republicans but it was watered down for moderates on both sides. It was passed because it was a smart play against those opposing groups.
You missed my paragraph about both sides arguments.
It was “jammed-in” because Democrats got tired of Republicans opposing everything. A bipartisan effort was risky that it would be altered to be undesirable. Even so it was altered to be pretty moderate overall. Either way it was jammed because of revenge tactics I’m discussing.
Yes, if history has taught us anything it's that the pendulum will swing back. Sometimes it takes a decade, sometimes it takes 500 years, but it always comes back. Hopefully we'll be alive to see it!
The problem we've consistently had is that when Democrats run they say they're going to do something about these megacorps and then when they get in years pass and the corporations have only swallowed even more of each other up. Then Republicans say they're going to lower taxes and streamline regulations and they get in and government revenue as a percent of GDP never really goes down and the number of pages of legislation keeps going up.
It would be nice if either of them would actually do the thing they say they're going to do.
There are pretty big differences between the parties but one thing they both do incredibly well is bold-faced lying the to public.
Its all a game to these clowns who have been in power for 40+ years. Chuck Schumer & Mitch McConnell are different sides of the same coin and that coin ain’t in our pockets. That coin belongs to the multinational billionaire class.
The lies are indistinguishable from facts these days, which doesn’t change your assertion of violence IMO - just that it’s unlikely to be targeted at the actual problem
No, the lies are so bad, self contradictory and illogical that they stand out quite easily. They are very easy to expose as lies. The problem is that there are so many of them that it makes focusing harder on the problem at hand. But we don’t need to be stupid and start laboriously fact checking everything, we could be much smarter than that. We could localize the sources where these lies originate.
>It would be nice if either of them would actually do the thing they say they're going to do.
It would be nice if voters voted. It would be nice if voters actually gave the Democrats enough power in Congress (and POTUS) to enact the legislation they want instead of being obstructed by Republicans at every single turn.
Mitch McConnel famously obstructed Obama and prevented him from seating a SCOTUS judge because "it's too close to an election" that was a year away.
So when you call out Democrats as doing nothing, please realize it isn't for lack of trying, it's for lack of power that the people didn't give them.
The US has had antitrust laws on the books for more than a century. Obama was President for 8 years and Biden for 4. How many megacorps were broken up? Why are Visa and Mastercard still a thing?
Obama had control over the House and Senate during his first term. Republicans filibuster things that Republican constituencies have strong objections to, but they're not going to put up a strong defense of Hollywood or Facebook etc., so why didn't they go after the villains in their own house?
Why didn't either of them pardon Snowden?
Why didn't they make deals to do things that are good? There are reasonable things Republicans want that it's the Democrats who strongly oppose, like school choice, or loser-pays for civil court cases against non-megacorps. If you're not willing to give any of that stuff up and you want them to give up things that their constituents oppose, of course they fight you tooth and nail. But if you could find a way to be objective for a moment, some of the things your side wants are bad or at least not great and you only want them because their interest groups are in your tent. Instead of finding a compromise where the public gets screwed to benefit the interest groups on both sides, you could find a compromise where the interest groups on both sides get screwed to benefit the public. Yet they don't.
Trump is for whoever brown noses the most. He has no independent preferences. Big tech gave him millions, now he's for big tech, but only the ones who donated. Most of them figured out that Trump is for sale to every bidder and got in line. Don't be naive.
I agree. I also note that Trump also isn't credible in the slightest. He could take all that money and decide to "only" break up a few divisions instead of the biggest sectors. Very few people are coming out of this unscathed. Even among billionaires.
You might be surprised to learn (it surprised me too!) that the new FTC leadership has affirmed Khan and Kantor's 2023 guidelines on anti-trust and stated they will carry forward with them.
It's an odd situation where more aggressive anti-trust posture is actually rather popular with Trump's base. Anecdotally, I know several 2024 Trump voters who cite Khan's FTC as the thing they liked the most (or only) under Biden.
I tend to agree with you otherwise, but this issue does have a bipartisan consensus forming and it's unwise to seek conflict where you share values.
Having an extreme regulatory posture, which is then lifted for friends and family, is typical in developing countries. The barriers make it so that your friends' companies do not get significant competition.
Americans are going to be very surprised when they figure out what happens to the government when the country becomes a third world Latin American state.
At least those of us that did live through the turmoil in these countries can see what is going on.
On some level I hope he tries. There's already mounting hostility on the populist wing of the right towards Elon. Going after anti-trust might just be the bridge too far.
And frankly, given his public comments about and noted vitriol towards Lina Khan and the FTC (and his own tendencies towards seeking monopolies) I assume at some point he'll try.
Further, purely speculating: it may be he already has tried. It's indicative that we didn't immediately see him go for the FTC. He's too small of a man to not have wanted to for personal reasons, and too greedy to not have wanted to for long-term business reasons. I have to wonder if he was restrained from doing so on account of (correctly) predicted blowback from such an action.
Seeming to come down on the side of John Deere and DuPont subsidiaries and spinoffs is not a smart move. These are hot issues for the populist wing of the party who want to purge what they label as the "Con(servative) Inc" wing and routinely make hobbyhorses of issues affecting farmers in flyover states.
He has started by going after the groups that are investigating his companies. USAID investigated overpaying for starlink in Ukraine. FDA doesn't like neuralink. The FAA investigates every time he blows up a rocket and showers debris into the airspace. The IRS has audited his tax filings before and he expressed frustration about it. He hasn't done anything the FTC cares about yet, though.
You clearly don't read Matt's newsletter if you're trying to paint that he's somehow a Trump fan. The point is that the administration has taken some surprising stances affirming some pro-labor results, but probably not in a way that's more than posturing.
.com domains are essentially a public resource, created mostly be public investment (e.g.: tax money).
It's completely absurd that it has been handed over for "administration" to a private organisation with operating margins of roughly 70% on $1.5 billion in revenue.
This is essentially money that belongs to the public (and should go back to public infrastructure). Instead, legislation ensures that this doesn't happen.
I'll believe it when I see it. What are the actual remedies going to be? More piddly payouts that net each customer 57 cents?
The penalties for monopolies need to be RUINOUS. The sword of Damocles should be hanging over every company and every individual with decision-making power at every company.
I'm tired of all the proverbial wrist-slapping. It's the cost of doing business. Let a wronged consumer give a monopolist CEO some physical wrist-slapping, on a public channel. Perhaps then it has a bigger chance of stopping.
[dead]
Law is slow and gradual. I'm not sure if States can break up companies, but these build undeniable precedent for when the feds get around to suing. So I wouldn't underestimate these cases just because they aren't the case that will be remembered in history
> I'm not sure if States can break up companies,
States used to pull corporate charters if you weren't operating for the common good.
That needs to come back.
I actually think - the reward for reporting a monopoly and providing evidence- should be the allowance to take part of that company and run with it. As in - i report on solid evidence that google is a monopoly. Fine- have AddSense and run with it, or take youtube. Like the whistle blowing becomes a company founding event. The shareholders in a ex-monopoly get to choose which new horse too back. The thrust-busting state entity , should only be involved as a peripheral rubber-stamping agency of the legality of the process and as evaluators of the solidity of the evidence. The falling to pieces and becoming fresh competitors should feel natural.
I wonder why they explicitly mentioned Warren Buffett. I'm assuming that means something to some group, but I have absolutely no idea what I'm supposed to read into that.
I think it means the writers expected more people to have heard of Buffet than of Versisign.
Why can't antitrust be a class action lawsuit?
I mean ... all those Ticketmaster fees.
[flagged]
Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents, please don't post shallow dismissals of other people's work, please omit internet tropes, and please don't use HN for political battle. This is all in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
(I'm not arguing with you politically btw—just trying to avoid what predictably leads to repetitive and generic, and therefore bad, HN threads.)
People are, unfortunately but rightfully, angry. I don't envy you your job the next few years.
For sure they are rightfully angry. From a moderation point of view, should we let that anger, however rightful, break this site for its intended purpose? I don't see what good that would do.
(I realize you weren't arguing for that)
Sometimes I wonder whether you were ordered to take a "neutral" editorial stance that was favorable to tech nazis or whether you did it by accident.
In the end it doesn't matter all that much. Getting trump and musk in power was the most significant project you've ever contributed to, and you're going to be hearing about it for the rest of your life.
No one ordered me to take any editorial stance about that or anything else. Actually, no one at YC has ever ordered me to do anything. That's one reason I'm grateful for this job.
(Edit: if you look at the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), you'll find these links, which I suppose are relevant: https://venturebeat.com/business/y-combinator-spins-out-hack..., https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/two-hn-announcements.)
The only people "ordering" me are HN users with strong feelings, and some of them even add menacing threats.
p.s. I'm not sure why, but your comment got me thinking about the lines "everything is political" and "neutrality is not possible"—lines I happen to agree with and (believe it or not) keep in mind while moderating HN—yet which somehow push people to a place where the only thing they feel they can do is destroy each other.
It must be possible to recognize how (nearly) everything has a political valence and (nearly) nothing is neutral, yet still have some option other than "band together with one tribe to destroy another tribe". Yet that is the pressure that we end up feeling. To that my answer is no, I'm not going to and I don't believe that is the only choice, even though nothing is apolitical in the end.
Yeah but only bots don’t care about this. So bots and trolls like me are the only ones left.
[flagged]
True. I would expect a big reversal at some point, with confiscatory tax rises. The Democratic base is angrier than I've ever seen it.
The Democratic base is tired of reaching across the aisle only to have their hands slapped and be met with disapproval and silence. This will all be a huge blow back very soon but it also means the angry people will look to revenge. And revenge means a D Potus coming in and doing things like firing every Republican they can, attempting to redirect funds.
A lot of flip floppers often quote “both sides” talking points but both-sides-arguments only really apply in the context of what has happened historically and lack of willingness to set new precedents (I need all the flaws to also win mentality). Those arguments aren’t helpful in the actual solution to the problem. Even though the arguer isn’t exactly incorrect.
IMO, the only revenge that will work is by making laws forcing both sides to legislate. Idk what that looks like but not legislating has led to interpreting the law as acceptable behavior for the team to win, not interpreting the law as applied against the acting individual. However something like a legislation quota sounds messy and easily abused in a country of lobbyists.
The only other solution is getting non-term limited people to agree to term limits.
The best solution would be a reform of the voting system. It has become clear over the last decades that a two-party system slowly radicalizes both sides. It is also very problematic in the face of single-issue voters. But the two-party system exists just because first-past-the-post voting makes it a strategically bad choice to vote for anyone but the two dominant parties, and makes party-internal reform hard by making it a nonstarter to split a party, no matter how severe the disagreement.
Now first-past-the-post made some sense in the 1700s, but with the vastly improved communication of the 1900s and 2000s it's just a bad voting system. Basically anything else is better.
Someone has to do those reforms in the first place.
Right. During stable times, neither party would take such a risk. Big reforms occur during unusual periods where a system experiences shocks and its limits are tested. If there was ever a time for voting reform it would be the 2028 term, assuming that Democrats actually manage to capitalize on the historic moment rather than capitulate and shift right while campaigning on some limp slogan like "back to normal."
The direction of political discourse hasn't been toward "radicalization" per se. Democrats have only moved slightly to the left of where they were in the early 1970s, but the majority of that movement has taken place since 2011. Republicans, OTOH, have been moving rightward at a steady and near-constant pace since 1971, though they did start shifting faster around 2001. This has lead to Congress becoming significantly more conservative over time. Keep in mind, the Democrats would be considered just slightly left of center in most European countries.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/10/the-polar...
TL;DR: there's no "radicalization" taking place in the Democratic party. It's the Republicans that are driving it.
"All that is necessary for evil to win is for good people to do nothing", and 1/3 of the people of voting age did not vote in 2024 - they did nothing, they just didn't care.
You can reform voting all you want but if a significant portion of people still aren't voting then it's not going to do much for the country.
> The Democratic base is tired of reaching across the aisle only to have their hands slapped and be met with disapproval and silence.
Perhaps the Democratic base should stop "reaching across the aisle" the way they are because it clearly isn't working. On any given issue, Republicans generally understand the Democratic position on things and reject it. Democrats rarely understand the Republican position. That makes it sound like "reaching across the aisle" is a bit more of "preaching across the aisle" than truly attempting collaboration.
> And revenge means a D Potus coming in and doing things like firing every Republican they can, attempting to redirect funds.
This already generally happens, and more power to the Democrats who want to swing the pendulum hard on the Republicans after this one. The fact remains that for the last several administrations, if you were high up in one of these organizations, you would have to expect to get fired or demoted when the other party gets into power. If you want to see the history of this, the EPA has some of the most visible examples. The situation that's new is the wholesale gutting of entire agencies at the direction of a third party (Elon Musk).
> IMO, the only revenge that will work is by making laws forcing both sides to legislate. Idk what that looks like but not legislating has led to interpreting the law as acceptable behavior for the team to win, not interpreting the law as applied against the acting individual. However something like a legislation quota sounds messy and easily abused in a country of lobbyists.
I completely agree with you here. The administrative bloat of the executive branch is largely because the legislature has abdicated the power to write the rules on all but the broadest basis to the executive branch. The executive branch is run by only one elected person who has the power to change quite a bit about its operations.
> Democrats rarely understand the Republican position.
This is an extremely shallow and incorrect take.
This has been studied several times. The most famous study was Johnathan Haidt's.
That is optimistic scenario. Pessimistic one is that this will be irreversible because remaining agencies and wealth will be used against opposition.
My thoughts as well. However, the pendullum will swing harder this time
> The Democratic base is tired of reaching across the aisle only to have their hands slapped and be met with disapproval and silence.
You mean, like the Democrats have been doing since the Obama administration? The ACA was not a bipartisan bill, it was a jam-down, and that attitude only continued. Pendulum-swing indeed.
The solution is the same one Lincoln pointed out. The people aren't fooled anymore, so if you really want to do something, you can't just shuffle the problem around for campaign donations and not actually fix it. You have to make an honest attempt to support the good of the people. At the moment, President Trump is seen as the one doing it, because the Democrats have so clearly been acting against the interests of the majority of their constituents in favor of ideological luxuries. We're done with that for a while.
> The ACA was not a bipartisan bill, it was a jam-down
No, it wasn't. It was watered down substantially.
Yes, it was: https://www.forbes.com/sites/physiciansfoundation/2014/03/26...
You’re both right, it was done without Republicans but it was watered down for moderates on both sides. It was passed because it was a smart play against those opposing groups.
You missed my paragraph about both sides arguments.
It was “jammed-in” because Democrats got tired of Republicans opposing everything. A bipartisan effort was risky that it would be altered to be undesirable. Even so it was altered to be pretty moderate overall. Either way it was jammed because of revenge tactics I’m discussing.
A political comment is about to be the fuel that shoots me over 1k karma. Apply your down-votes here to help keep me grounded.
We have to fail to succeed again.
Yes, if history has taught us anything it's that the pendulum will swing back. Sometimes it takes a decade, sometimes it takes 500 years, but it always comes back. Hopefully we'll be alive to see it!
The problem we've consistently had is that when Democrats run they say they're going to do something about these megacorps and then when they get in years pass and the corporations have only swallowed even more of each other up. Then Republicans say they're going to lower taxes and streamline regulations and they get in and government revenue as a percent of GDP never really goes down and the number of pages of legislation keeps going up.
It would be nice if either of them would actually do the thing they say they're going to do.
There are pretty big differences between the parties but one thing they both do incredibly well is bold-faced lying the to public.
Its all a game to these clowns who have been in power for 40+ years. Chuck Schumer & Mitch McConnell are different sides of the same coin and that coin ain’t in our pockets. That coin belongs to the multinational billionaire class.
When things become really bad lying won’t help anymore. The more delayed the response the more violent it will become
The lies are indistinguishable from facts these days, which doesn’t change your assertion of violence IMO - just that it’s unlikely to be targeted at the actual problem
No, the lies are so bad, self contradictory and illogical that they stand out quite easily. They are very easy to expose as lies. The problem is that there are so many of them that it makes focusing harder on the problem at hand. But we don’t need to be stupid and start laboriously fact checking everything, we could be much smarter than that. We could localize the sources where these lies originate.
>It would be nice if either of them would actually do the thing they say they're going to do.
It would be nice if voters voted. It would be nice if voters actually gave the Democrats enough power in Congress (and POTUS) to enact the legislation they want instead of being obstructed by Republicans at every single turn.
Mitch McConnel famously obstructed Obama and prevented him from seating a SCOTUS judge because "it's too close to an election" that was a year away.
So when you call out Democrats as doing nothing, please realize it isn't for lack of trying, it's for lack of power that the people didn't give them.
The US has had antitrust laws on the books for more than a century. Obama was President for 8 years and Biden for 4. How many megacorps were broken up? Why are Visa and Mastercard still a thing?
Obama had control over the House and Senate during his first term. Republicans filibuster things that Republican constituencies have strong objections to, but they're not going to put up a strong defense of Hollywood or Facebook etc., so why didn't they go after the villains in their own house?
Why didn't either of them pardon Snowden?
Why didn't they make deals to do things that are good? There are reasonable things Republicans want that it's the Democrats who strongly oppose, like school choice, or loser-pays for civil court cases against non-megacorps. If you're not willing to give any of that stuff up and you want them to give up things that their constituents oppose, of course they fight you tooth and nail. But if you could find a way to be objective for a moment, some of the things your side wants are bad or at least not great and you only want them because their interest groups are in your tent. Instead of finding a compromise where the public gets screwed to benefit the interest groups on both sides, you could find a compromise where the interest groups on both sides get screwed to benefit the public. Yet they don't.
>The Trump administration is tearing down every regulatory part of government capable of limiting corporations
Even Trump is against Big Tech. We're seeing right now how much of that brown nosing is making him look the other way. It's not a certainty
Also, the government isn't in entire lock step with trump just yet. People are still trying to do some good while they can.
Trump is for whoever brown noses the most. He has no independent preferences. Big tech gave him millions, now he's for big tech, but only the ones who donated. Most of them figured out that Trump is for sale to every bidder and got in line. Don't be naive.
I agree. I also note that Trump also isn't credible in the slightest. He could take all that money and decide to "only" break up a few divisions instead of the biggest sectors. Very few people are coming out of this unscathed. Even among billionaires.
You might be surprised to learn (it surprised me too!) that the new FTC leadership has affirmed Khan and Kantor's 2023 guidelines on anti-trust and stated they will carry forward with them.
It's an odd situation where more aggressive anti-trust posture is actually rather popular with Trump's base. Anecdotally, I know several 2024 Trump voters who cite Khan's FTC as the thing they liked the most (or only) under Biden.
I tend to agree with you otherwise, but this issue does have a bipartisan consensus forming and it's unwise to seek conflict where you share values.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/trump-enforcers-affirm-li...
Having an extreme regulatory posture, which is then lifted for friends and family, is typical in developing countries. The barriers make it so that your friends' companies do not get significant competition.
Americans are going to be very surprised when they figure out what happens to the government when the country becomes a third world Latin American state.
At least those of us that did live through the turmoil in these countries can see what is going on.
American exceptionalism shield them from learning from others mistakes
“For my friends: everything; for my enemies: the law.”
For all the weight that carries in an environment where an un-elected billionaire can come in and ransack the place at a moments notice.
On some level I hope he tries. There's already mounting hostility on the populist wing of the right towards Elon. Going after anti-trust might just be the bridge too far.
And frankly, given his public comments about and noted vitriol towards Lina Khan and the FTC (and his own tendencies towards seeking monopolies) I assume at some point he'll try.
Further, purely speculating: it may be he already has tried. It's indicative that we didn't immediately see him go for the FTC. He's too small of a man to not have wanted to for personal reasons, and too greedy to not have wanted to for long-term business reasons. I have to wonder if he was restrained from doing so on account of (correctly) predicted blowback from such an action.
Seeming to come down on the side of John Deere and DuPont subsidiaries and spinoffs is not a smart move. These are hot issues for the populist wing of the party who want to purge what they label as the "Con(servative) Inc" wing and routinely make hobbyhorses of issues affecting farmers in flyover states.
well then you will be surprised by the facts. trump just sided with khan on this issue
> Further, purely speculating: it may be he already has tried. It's indicative that we didn't immediately see him go for the FTC.
Pure speculation. It could just as easily be frog boiling. I guess we'll all find out soon.
He has started by going after the groups that are investigating his companies. USAID investigated overpaying for starlink in Ukraine. FDA doesn't like neuralink. The FAA investigates every time he blows up a rocket and showers debris into the airspace. The IRS has audited his tax filings before and he expressed frustration about it. He hasn't done anything the FTC cares about yet, though.
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You clearly don't read Matt's newsletter if you're trying to paint that he's somehow a Trump fan. The point is that the administration has taken some surprising stances affirming some pro-labor results, but probably not in a way that's more than posturing.
what are you talking about?
> the Trump administration ratified that the merger guidelines from the Biden administration are a fair reading of the law.
.com domains are essentially a public resource, created mostly be public investment (e.g.: tax money).
It's completely absurd that it has been handed over for "administration" to a private organisation with operating margins of roughly 70% on $1.5 billion in revenue.
This is essentially money that belongs to the public (and should go back to public infrastructure). Instead, legislation ensures that this doesn't happen.
> legislation ensures that this doesn't happen
Which law?
https://www.ntia.gov/federal-register-notice/statement-polic...
More policy than law