Krystal and Saagar: Amazon Tries to BLOCK Anti-Trust Suit

Krystal and Saagar discuss Amazon’s fight against the new FTC Chair Lina Khan

Step 1: Blatantly violate anti-trust laws
Step 2: Ask anyone who points out your blatant violations to recuse themselves from regulating you because they can’t be “impartial”
Step 3:Hire Thomas Barnett, a George W Bush appointee — who ran anti-trust and then joined Amazon afterwards — to request the recusal
Step 4: Profit

So ..

Having an opinion is a conflict of interest, but getting paid by the party is not.

Amazon pressures companies to give them warrants (become part owner).

The Internet’s Mid-Life Crisis: The Agenda with Steve Paikin

In the 1990s the internet was thought of as democratic and anarchic. Then came social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram; political movements such as the Arab Spring; and Amazon and Google galvanized the attention spans of millions of users. The Agenda looks at the internet’s original promise, its milestones, and the future of the hyper-connected world.

OK, Boomer

If I hear another lecture from Fred Smith and his fellow billionaires on trickle-down tax cuts and the “benefits to the United States economy, especially lower and middle class wage earners”, I’m going to lose it.

If I hear another lecture from Jay Powell and his fellow centimillionaires and decamillionaires at the Fed on trickle-down monetary policy and the “benefits to the United States economy, especially lower and middle class wage earners”, I’m going to lose it.

OK, boomer.

What’s the boomer world?

It’s a world where our current President is an on-the-make billionaire, and our most recent former President seems hell-bent on becoming one. A world where lawyers from Citadel write our securities regulations, and VPs from Boeing run our Defense Dept. A world where corporate managers can become billionaires – not by innovation or risk-taking – but by stock-based comp at scale. A world where asset managers can become billionaires – not by invention or outperformance – but by asset-gathering at scale.

It’s a world that has been systematically hollowed out for decades, through

  • narrative capture of monetary policy,
  • trade policy,
  • antitrust law,
  • mass media and the
  • tax code.

“Yay, trickle-down economics!”

It’s a bipartisan thing. It’s a Zeitgeist thing.

And the 2017 Tax Cuts and (LOL) Jobs Act was just the latest smiley-face punch in the gut.

Worried about losing your freedom to a redistributive State? I think you’ve already lost it.

Just not in the direction you thought.

Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier

Antitrust investigation gives competitors chance to air complaints about Facebook’s hardball tactics

Facebook Inc. FB -1.93% for most of the past decade was Silicon Valley’s 800-pound gorilla, squashing rivals, ripping off their best ideas or buying them outright as it cemented its dominance of social media.

Now the knives are coming out.

A number of Facebook’s current and former competitors are talking about the company’s hardball tactics to investigators from the Federal Trade Commission, as part of its broader antitrust investigation into the social-media giant’s business practices, according to people familiar with the matter.

One of them is Snap Inc., SNAP +0.76% where the legal team for years kept a dossier of ways that the company felt Facebook was trying to thwart competition from the buzzy upstart, according to some of those people. The title of the documents: Project Voldemort.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel in Half Moon Bay, Calif., in February. PHOTO: DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS

The files in Voldemort, a reference to the fictional antagonist in the popular Harry Potter children’s books, chronicled Facebook moves that Snap officials believed were a threat to undermine Snap’s business, including discouraging popular account holders, or influencers, from referencing Snap on their Instagram accounts, according to people familiar with the project. Executives also suspected Instagram was preventing Snap content from trending on its app, the people said.

In recent months, the FTC has made contact with dozens of tech executives and app developers, people familiar with the agency’s outreach said. The agency’s investigators are also talking to executives from startups that became defunct after losing access to Facebook’s platform in addition to founders who sold their companies to Facebook, according to some of those people.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in Washington on Sept. 19. PHOTO: ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

The discussions have focused on the aggressive growth tactics that propelled Facebook from a social network for college students 15 years ago to a collection of services now used by more than one in four people in the world every day.

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The talks are a sign that the FTC may be trying to put together “a picture of what might be a pattern of behavior to prevent competition to the core Facebook business,” said Gene Kimmelman, a senior adviser at Public Knowledge, a consumer group that focuses on tech issues who was a Justice Department antitrust official in the Obama administration. Discussions with rivals are typical in antitrust probes, said Mr. Kimmelman, who isn’t involved in the case.

Inside Facebook, senior leaders are concerned about the possibility of rivals divulging damaging information to federal officials and have discussed ways to improve the company’s relationships around Silicon Valley, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

Facebook has previously said that its acquisitions fuel innovation, rather than stifle it, and a spokeswoman said the company’s addition of new services and features over the years gives consumers more choices.

“This is competition at work and one of the longtime hallmarks of the tech sector,” she said. “Businesses continually build and iterate on concepts and ideas in the marketplace—making them better or taking them in different directions. This is good for consumers.”

The FTC investigation is one of several antitrust probes into Facebook and major tech giants in the U.S. and around the world. Earlier this month, the House Judiciary Committee requested Facebook executive communications about the company’s decisions to buy the photo- and video-sharing network Instagram in 2012 and the messaging app WhatsApp in 2014. Lawmakers have contacted several of those companies’ rivals as part of that probe, The Wall Street Journal reported previously.

The House panel can’t take enforcement actions against the companies. The FTC, however, can.