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posted by takyon on Saturday March 09 2019, @12:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the monopoly-money dept.

CNet:

"Today's big tech companies have [too much power over] our economy, our society, and our democracy," wrote Warren in a blog post. "They've bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation."

Warren said that big tech companies use mergers to swallow competition and sell products on their own e-commerce platforms, which hurt smaller businesses' opportunities to succeed. Weak antitrust enforcement also resulted in "a dramatic reduction" in competition and innovation in the tech industry, according to Warren's blog post.

With conservative voices decrying Big Tech censorship, internet activists decrying privacy violations, and now Senator Warren calling for outright dismemberment, Big Tech might be in for a rocky stretch of road.


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  • (Score: 2) by Lester on Saturday March 09 2019, @02:47AM (7 children)

    by Lester (6231) on Saturday March 09 2019, @02:47AM (#811889) Journal

    Many of ISP customers use google, facebook etc, if the ISP give preference to traffic from/to this companies, the overall perception of most of its customers is "this ISP has a fast internet". So this big players have more traffic, so they earn more money, so they can buy better facilities, so they are faster, so more people want to use their services, so ISPs give preference to this companies: Any competition is destroyed.

    In Spain, mobile companies offer an amount of GB of traffic a month, but data used for Whatsapp is free. Sure whatsapp is THE instant message service, the app everybody has. But with such offer they have made even more difficult to enter a new player.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 09 2019, @05:53AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 09 2019, @05:53AM (#811950)

    In Spain, mobile companies offer an amount of GB of traffic a month, but data used for Whatsapp is free. Sure whatsapp is THE instant message service, the app everybody has. But with such offer they have made even more difficult to enter a new player.

    WTF are people instant messaging each other, that they would need to worry about hitting a transfer cap? Whole movies?

    • (Score: 2) by Lester on Saturday March 09 2019, @06:12PM (1 child)

      by Lester (6231) on Saturday March 09 2019, @06:12PM (#812077) Journal

      Yes, teenagers send a lot of stupid videos and many, many photos by whatsapp. In addtion, an IM that should be a just few bytes (at least according to its origins, jabber) now sends metrics and God and Zuckerberg know what.

      But that's not the problem. The problem is facebook APP, Instagram APP, streaming videos plus weather applet, games with its advertisings that send nobody knows what. All them drain the bandwidth but the important part is ... magically Whatsapp still works.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 09 2019, @07:37AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 09 2019, @07:37AM (#811960)

    If only there was a concept of Network Neutrality we could rally behind.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 09 2019, @07:04PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 09 2019, @07:04PM (#812102)

      There is. It's called "dumb pipe", like a phone line. No DHCP, no DNS. You do P2P, just like the phone line. You build/buy your own damn firewall. Bandwidth is capped by wire gauge and simple multiplexing. Anything less is not neutral.

      • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday March 10 2019, @03:45AM (1 child)

        by Pino P (4721) on Sunday March 10 2019, @03:45AM (#812222) Journal

        Bandwidth is capped by wire gauge and simple multiplexing.

        But once you've "multiplexed" a whole neighborhood of subscribers onto one cell tower, how many of those subscribers will be able to watch the video services to which they subscribe at the same time?

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 10 2019, @06:54PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 10 2019, @06:54PM (#812377)

          You don't oversell your capacity. You have to put up a "fatter" pipe. And you develop alternative routing, don't use just a single path. You know, one of those "neural" things. We should make the network more ad hoc so we don't need big towers maintained by big companies.