It's in violation of the sacred law of the attention economy:

Never link outside your garden.

I find this to be the case with most primary sources, not just for court cases. A couple days ago, an American WWII bomb exploded at a Japanese airport and the article linked on HN didn't even show or link the video.

Legacy media really sucks.

I happened to come across her on 60 Minutes a couple of weeks ago, and that interview seemed awkward and sound-bitey to me. Thinking that she just might not be great at short-form segments I dug a little deeper and found an awesome long-form interview that she did with the Council on Foreign Relations. I highly recommend this to get a feel for what she is actually like as a policy person. She really impressed me.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L_QaZk5iJOA

Too early to call. At least initially, her FTC was incompetent to the point that M&A lawyers were urging companies to attempt mergers because shit that wouldn’t usually get through would get bungled in court. She was aggressive but incompetent.

She appears to be improving. But the FTC chair isn’t an internship.

I don't know if I accept Khan's framing of, even though I haven't won any cases I have scared off potential mergers and that is a win. I think the US already leans too heavily on tying everything up in courts forever.

What has she done that didn't fail or get shot down as political overreach?

(not being sarcastic...i mean that i may have missed something inadvertently)

Wrath of Khan and I'm here for it.

Didn’t they drop the two-day shipping promise a while back?

All of the federal counts move forward, some of the counts relating to specific states who joined the lawsuit are dismissed.

> Last week, before the order was unsealed, some of the initial coverage called it a “partial victory” for Amazon, but as it turns out, the portion of the ruling in which the company was victorious was relatively slim.

> The areas where the judge granted Amazon’s motion to dismiss were related to specific aspects of state claims, including elements of allegations brought by Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Maryland. Eighteen states and one territory, Puerto Rico, joined the FTC in the lawsuit against Amazon.

https://www.geekwire.com/2024/unsealed-order-in-amazon-antit...

From what I have read, the pieces that were dismissed are still sealed so we don't know yet.

I mean, I'm not a lawyer so I won't really judge what's a good or bad argument. My impression is that forcing open standards is a much harder argument than an antitrust one. Open standards can come at a later step.

And if you haven't kept up this year, Chevron being overturned is showing that the SCOTUS is more than happy to reduce FTC interference.

You mean you don't like having the choice between ZOSLRD-branded stuff and TUMACO-branded stuff, both of which have descriptions that look like someone put Mandarin Chinese through an LLM, because that's probably what they did?

I don't think it's part of an antitrust case, but I am tired of seeing every item being sold from 200 chinese companies with randomly generated names and fake/bought reviews. Walmart has started to do something similar with their online store. I'll use their words.

> It's easy to sell online with Walmart.com. Partner with the largest multi-channel retailer and put your products in front of millions of Walmart shoppers.

Americans are used to American storefronts going through American regulations, but now you're essentially being dropshipped hazardous unregulated products. I generally try to buy from companies directly but this hasn't stopped my family from buying chinesium children toys for me that go straight into the trash.

> I hope they include Amazon's practice of taking popular products on their storefront, making generic "Amazon Basics" versions, and selling them to undercut the popular options.

I guess you hate every grocery store ever then

Not every one can afford the name brand.

- Sincerely a kid raised on everything store brand.

Amazon's "favoured nation" policy stipulates that vendors can't sell an item anywhere else for a lower price. This policy seems designed by them to put a moat between them and retail.

Yes, but we don't know when the next technology shift will happen. Amazon might be able to abuse their position for decades if a disruption doesn't come.

Aa for E-commerce, it can have a larger inventory than physical retail. You're not going to find many solar charge controllers or mechanical keyboard parts at Walmart, but Amazon will have tons of options deliverable within 48 hours. Few sites can have comparable shipping cost/speed and you have to research each one, whereas Amazon enjoys the position of being the default.

A decade ago, I helped a small Amazon seller with his inventory, and it was eye opening to see all the fees and risks compared to eBay. But he couldn't sell on eBay without losing a massive portion of his customer base, despite their better shopping/buying UX in my experience.

The original complaint has a number of pages starting at 39 (43 in pdf) dedicated to defining the relevant markets and why they feel brick and mortar isn't part of the relevant market.

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/1910134amazonec...

This is why pinning anti-trust to monopolies is a mistake. Anti-trust is about competition and creating more of it... and if it's about increasing competition then they both need attention. They are both very big and abuse their dominance in ways that stifles competition. That is, in the last 15 years we added another company that needs anti-trust attention, nothing was replaced.

The criticisms of Walmart 15 years ago are still pretty valid today, so I’m not sure this whataboutism really resonates with people.

It seems completely reasonable to split brick and mortar sales from web-based, given that the business model is pretty significantly different.

And AWS

Why does what keep happening? Antitrust cases or companies becoming monopolies?

Monopolies are a feature of unregulated capitalism. Every company wants to dominate the sector they're in, competition invariably leads to monopolies.

On the charge of just wanting to break up big companies because they're big, I plead not guilty on the virtue of this not being a crime. The whole point of breaking up large companies is because their size renders them unaccountable quazi-governments. To properly regulate them requires making the government even bigger with ever-more-complicated regulatory apparatus, compliance departments, administrative rulemaking, and "special understandings" (read: giving up) for the largest players.

I'll put it to you another way: if you want smaller government, you need smaller corporations, too.

> There was no alternative to Google search because no one had built a better product for reasons that have nothing to do with anticompetitive behavior.

I would first argue that Google's unparalleled superiority in search is overblown. For one, there's ads in it. As Google's founders themselves stated, ads are a perverse incentive to ruin the search experience in favor of advertisers and I can point to several examples[0] in which this happened.

There are paid search engines that do not have advertising (e.g. Kagi) but they themselves have complained about the struggle that is competing with Google. For example, on iOS, there's only five default search engine options, there's no way to add a different search engine as default, and Google pays $$$ to Apple to be set to the default and for that search engine option to be buried in Settings. I don't see how that isn't anticompetitive.

On a technical level, Google has a supracompetitive advantage, too. A lot of websites have restrictive policies that forbid scraping except for Google and Bing. This means only those search engines can actually return results for those sites.

[0] Product ads in web search, every programming search query giving you four or five ads before the actual StackOverflow answer you're interested in, image search becoming a glorified product search with actual functionality being removed, Gemini

Point taken about the level of discourse on the internet and the mainstream media, no argument there. It is painful, but just because the discourse around the topic is smooth brained doesn't mean that the position is wrong. This is something that I struggle with. Sometimes the discourse is so unimaginably stupid that it pushes you to default to the other side's point of view, but that doesn't actually mean you got to that point of view through any reasoning, you got there from emotion.

There are the standard points around consumer protection. Ticketmaster, Adobe, Amazon, really do engage in anti competitive practices and then burn the consumer once they've consolidated power. People feel that, but to your point, can't articulate all the moving pieces, and that's fine, use the mute button. God help us if Kroger and Safeway get their way and merge.

To your point about "don't forget who's really in charge." - it might feel like there's no upside here, but in reality you do end up with companies that have more power than the government, and that's a dangerous road to go down in a democracy, since there's no real way to hold them accountable. Obviously the government is deeply flawed in a million different ways, but ultimately there are elected officials, which cannot be said of private companies.

Also Lina Khan talks a lot about resiliency. Too much efficiency can make things worse [1]. With mass consolidation, black swan events lead to and outsized impact compared to what they would in an economy where there aren't monopolies everywhere. Climate change, pandemics, instability in Europe and the middle east, etc mean that it's worth trading extreme efficiency for robustness.

[1] https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....

Here you go:

* I'm a big fan of Chairwoman Khan.

* The government should be suing many of the companies FTC is going after because their behavior yields bad outcomes for consumers, such as worse health outcomes after a private equity group captures an entire geography then drives up prices while reducing quality.

* They tend to have broken laws around creating and abusing monopoly positions, usually with various illegal details like kickback arrangements and self-dealing.

* These laws make sense.

* I don't mind big companies and many of the companies FTC goes after are not particularly big.

* Companies that utilize edge cases in market dynamics to produce bad outcomes for consumers should be taken down a peg.

The entire conceit of capitalism is that competition is good, and that competition forces companies to better address their customers needs. If they're not doing this, then someone can come in and undercut them.

But what happens in the scenario where the person comes in, undercuts them, and then sells to the bigger company? How does this force the larger company to change? This is like antitrust 101.

I don't understand people who claim to be proponents of capitalism and are opposed to antitrust. If you want the free market to determine anything with fewer regulations, then we need antitrust. Otherwise we need a lot more regulations. Which one would you prefer?

I have a feeling you wouldn't recognize anticompetitive behavior despite it hitting you in the face for the past 10 years.