18
votes
US House Democrats say Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple enjoy ‘monopoly power’ and recommend big changes
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- Authors
- Lauren Feiner
- Published
- Oct 6 2020
- Word count
- 440 words
I am very excited about privacy regulation and data protection. I am very nervous about eCommerce and platform regulation, however. Not because I don’t think it’s good in principle, but in practice most of our legislators still have their staff print out their emails for them. There is no Office of Technology Research in Congress. They’re absolutely clueless. So the worst case scenario is the regulations they do push down are counterproductive and annoying. I’m thinking of the EU’s horribly considered Cookie Law as an example. All it’s ended up doing is made browsing the Internet onerous and a pain in the ass for no meaningful privacy benefit. There’s a reason UI/UX in health IT (which I work in as well) is garbage. Regulatory compliance-focused workflows just do not lend themselves to good design thinking.
At worst, it could operate in a way that further entrenched the monopoly power of your facebooks and Amazon’s. Regulatory compliance is expensive as well and independent creators can’t afford in-house counsel to tell them the ins-and-outs of it.
Odd that Microsoft got left off that list. It definitely should be included, since they're the ones that killed antitrust to begin with.
I'm having a bit of trouble imagining people that out of touch with technology, who aren't retired or working in completely non-technical jobs.
Most of Congress. . .
That's such a broad area that it seems like the only reasonable answer is, well, it depends. Some workers might be using specialized, legacy Windows apps while others might be using apps with good alternatives.
Even Google, which is mostly Mac or Linux, has some people who really need Windows for miscellaneous reasons.
If this leads to any antitrust legislation, it will certainly make 2021 an interesting year in adtech. For those who are not aware, the industry is currently going through a fundamental shift away from cookies and persistent identifiers. While the rest of the advertising ecosystem has until the end of 2021 to create new business models, the reality is that the 80% share of digital advertising spend that Facebook and Google receive became bolstered from these privacy changes (due to these platforms being ubiquitous "walled gardens" that have both the users and the demographic profiles to target ads).
With a major change like splitting these companies up (or at least putting limits on their operations), it will be interesting to see how the industry will cope with so much disruption happening all at the same time.