I don't understand why @CarlSzabo from Google-funded advocacy group Netchoice is testifying. Google already had a representative in the last panel.
Now @CarlSzabo says that the UK's CMA remark is just a bad report. "They used the word 'might' more than a hundred times."
Never mind, I like Szabo testifying. He's making a great case, just not the one he thinks he's making.
This is fun. @SenMikeLee asks @CarlSzabo about the consumer welfare standard. "The consumer welfare standard doesn't give a freebie to Google right?"
Szabo won't answer. Lee has to do a follow-up to get him to admit that antitrust law can theoretically even be violated.
Big tech witnesses are so annoying at this point that they are making the antitrust case with their very behavior, even to Senators who really really want to be supportive.
Amy Klobuchar is noting extremely conservative courts have interpreted consumer welfare narrowly. The Bork-interpreted standard means plaintiffs have lost 16 cases and won 0 at the Supreme Court of late.
Szabo says that the fact that plaintiffs lose all their cases doesn't mean the consumer welfare standard is problematic. Europe has a different standard, he notes, and their tech is not particularly innovative. The only big tech company they have, he snorts, is Spotify.
Adam Heimlich is very impressive in describing how ad buying and selling actually works, because he's an industry practitioner speaking out. There's just no way that Google flaks can keep misleading political leaders anymore. Big tech is being demystified.
David Dinielli is calling for a broad antitrust case against Google on both search and adtech.
Adam Heimlich says the remedy needs to be a break-up and interoperability between adtech and search, also says we can't forget about Android and Chrome.
Carl Szabo got Amy Klobuchar to talk about break-ups. Thanks Carl!
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1. Ok so let's talk about socialism, aka the state taking over from private industry. Here are some examples you haven't heard of - Kentucky and Ohio - replacing their pharma pricing middlemen with state agencies.
2. In 2018, the Columbus Dispatch revealed that pharma middlemen CVS Caremark and UnitedHealth Group's OptumRx were ripping off the state Medicaid program, destroying pharmacies, and hurting patients. So Ohio... fired them. And built its own state PBM. thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-rou…
3. It launched in 2022, run by Ohio's Department of Medicaid. It did pharma pricing for Medicaid, rebates for pharmacies, ran call centers, managed a drug list, a network of pharmacies et al. No more conflicts of interest. Caremark predicted DOOM FROM FULL COMMUNISM....
Obama was a malevolent leader and as a person is a mean spirited greedy narcissist. The authoritarian turn we are experiencing now is directly his doing, though not solely his doing.
So is our gruesomely dishonest conversation on race and identity.
I worked on the financial crisis and I remember hearing from people in the White House mockery of the ‘deadbeats’ who couldn’t pay their mortgages. It’s hard to convey the meanness of the Obama insiders.
Obama used his black identity - an important and positive symbol - to oversee the biggest loss of black wealth in our lifetime, with the support of black voters and leaders. He took the moral currency of the Civil Rights movement and spent it on Wall Street. Now it’s gone.
1. Since Yglesias won't address the argument @musharbash_b made about housing, I will. His argument is that Texas, which Abundance authors @DKThomp and @ezraklein point to as a model, has the same housing cost inflation they ascribe to blue areas. Why? thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with…x.com/mattyglesias/s…
2. It's corporate power among homebuilders. Don't just take @musharbash_b word for it, it's a well-known story. Here's a shockingly good CNBC report on how big homebuilders withhold housing supply.
3. This graph from @NewsLambert really tells the story nation-wide. Since 2008, when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt because of zoning policy, 65% of homebuilders have disappeared. And they never returned. Now only the big builders - with huge profit margins - are left.
Mark Zuckerberg is on the stand, the FTC lawyer is grilling him on documents showing the point of the service is to connect to friends. This is about market definition. #ftcvmeta
FTC asks if Meta is still built on a 'social graph,' Zuckerberg says he's not sure what that means but that it's a 'core concept' of Facebook.
"The friend part has gone down quite a bit."
He wants the judge to see TikTok as a rival.
Zuckerberg emphasizes that connecting w/friends and family is important to Facebook but less and less important. This testimony is about showing how Meta is a monopolist in a clear market, social networking services connecting with friends/family.
The basic problem with America is that nearly all of our major institutions are led by vastly overpaid incompetent greedheads who all have agreed to not snitch on each other. It's easy to explain how to fix it once you get this basic diagnosis. Here are a few ideas.
1) Corporate boards are full of lazy kiss-assers who get $100k to show up to a meeting a few times a year. So how about this? No board members of a company can get paid while there's a strike going on at their company.
2) The Federal Reserve actually runs our economic policy. So how about saying that not all of the Fed board members can be millionaires? Some of them have to be borrowers and not just lenders.
American big tech firms are bad at building things because their focus is not on building things, it’s on monopolization and political power. No different than Boeing. This has been obvious for years. thebignewsletter.com/p/national-cha…