The @HouseJudiciary antitrust report is out, and it's jammed with recommendations that would fundamentally reshape the way the biz/tech/media economy works. judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/…
Lots of people reading it at this moment, so I'm going to focus on imagining a world in which certain recommendations take form in our lives.
Imagine a federally enforced "due process" by which a business that's been demoted or kicked off something like Amazon or Facebook could have their day in court. 
Imagine that Google couldn't acquire a company unless it could definitively prove that doing so was in the public interest, and that it had to demonstrate that the acquisition wasn't just an end-run around developing the same business internally.
Imagine if news outlets were given permission to band together (currently forbidden under antitrust laws) and negotiate as a group with the big platforms for a cut of the money the platforms make off their reporting, rather than trying to negotiate piecemeal.
(This paragraph on the ways that big platforms tend to seep into all parts of whatever business they touch is very interesting, and leads to a call for structural separations and line of business limitations.)
("Structural separation" would presumably mean Amazon can't sell is own stuff against the merchants it hosts on its platform, just as Congress "enacted a provision to prohibit railroads from transporting any goods that they had produced or in which they held an interest.")
Imagine if you could participate in any social network from any other social network.
Someone help me with this one. Imagine companies can no longer make you buy one service in order to get access to another, ostensibly unrelated service. Is that the end of Amazon Prime, Google Play, Apple TV+?
Imagine the end of forced arbitration clauses, which the report concludes "tend to suppress valid claims and shield wrongdoing."
@threadreaderapp unroll please!
Facebook responds, in part, "we compete with a wide variety of services with millions, even billions, of people using them. Acquisitions are part of every industry, and just one way we innovate new technologies to deliver more value to people."
Amazon calls the report's recommendations "fringe," and argues that "far from enhancing competition, these uninformed notions would instead reduce it." blog.aboutamazon.com/policy/fringe-…
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