Martin Wolf, writing in the Financial Times, touches on a few points that resonate with my readings over the years.
He believes capitalism, as a system, is not a bad one, but it is bad when it is âriggedâ; and that Aristotle was indeed right (as history has since proved) that a sizeable middle class is necessary for the functioning of a democracy.
We know that the US, for instance, doesnât really do much about monopolies, having redefined them since the 1980s as essentially OK if no one gets charged more. Hence, Wolf, citing Prof Thomas Philipponâs The Great Reversal, notes that the spikes in M&A activity in the US has weakened competition. I should note that this isnât the province of âthe rightââPhilippon also shows that M&A activity reduced under Nixon.
I alluded to the lack of competition driving down innovation, but Wolf adds that it has driven up prices (so much for the USâs stance, since people are being charged more), and resulted in lower investment and lower productivity growth.
In line with some of my recent posts, Wolf says, âIn the past decade, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft combined have made over 400 acquisitions globally. Dominant companies should not be given a free hand to buy potential rivals. Such market and political power is unacceptable. A refurbishment of competition policy should start from the assumption that mergers and acquisitions need to be properly justified.â
History shows us that Big Techâs acquisitions have not been healthy to consumers, especially on the privacy front; they colluded to suppress wages before getting busted. In a serious case, according to one company, Google itself commits outright intellectual property theft: âGoogle would solicit a party to share with it highly confidential trade secrets under a non-disclosure agreement, conduct negotiations with the party, then terminate negotiations with the party professing a lack of interest in the partyâs technology, followed by the unlawful use of the partyâs trade secrets in its business.â (The case, Attia v. Google, is ongoing, I believe.) Their own Federal Trade Commission said Google âused anticompetitive tactics and abused its monopoly power in ways that harmed Internet users and rivals,â quoting the Murdoch Press. We see many undesirable patterns with other firms there exercising monopoly powers, some of which Iâve detailed on this blog, and so far, only Europe has had the cohones to slap Google with massive fines (in the milliards, since 2017), though other jurisdictions have begun to investigate.
As New Zealand seeks to reexamine its Commerce Act, we need to ensure that we donât merely parrot the US and UK approach.
Wolf also notes that inequality âundermines social mobility; weakens aggregate demand and slows economic growth.â The central point Iâve made before on Twitter: why would I want people to do poorly when those same people are potentially my customers? It seems to be good capitalism to ensure thereâs a healthy base of consumers.
Posts tagged ‘Big Tech’
Capitalism falls down when it’s rigged
04.12.2019Tags: 1980s, 2010s, 2019, Aristotle, Big Tech, capitalism, consumerism, democracy, economics, economy, Federal Trade Commission, Financial Times, Google, inequality, innovation, intellectual property, law, M&A, Martin Wolf, monopoly, Murdoch Press, occident, philosophy, technology, theft, Thomas Philippon, USA
Posted in business, internet, politics, USA | No Comments »
Tesla or SpaceX doesn’t like you? They’ll say you’re an active shooter
24.11.2019What does Tesla do to whistleblowers?
They tell the cops youâre an active shooter.
Apparently, this case about a gentleman called Martin Tripp emerged in 2018 but only today were the police documents released, and are worth reading.
Above: Two of the pages from the Storey County Sheriff’s Office over the false Martin Tripp ‘active shooter’ incident at Tesla.
One could attempt to read it generously in Teslaâs favour but I think youâd be fooling yourself.
Tripp had concerns about waste, and even raised them with Musk. From what I can tell, Musk only engaged Tripp after Tripp had been fired; and it was after that email exchange that the tip was given to police.
Itâs a far cry from the admirable firm I remember, being run by Martin Eberhard. Back then, it was optimistic and transparent. Nowadays it seems a truck prototype canât stand up to scrutiny for 25 minutes, CEO Elon Musk disses one of the Thai cave rescue divers, Vernon Unsworth, calling him âpedo guyâ, and Tweets misleading information that lands him in trouble with the US SEC. As far as I can tell in the Twitter thread above, Musk knew about Trippâenough to speak on the case and be excessively paranoid about him, thinking he could be part of a conspiracy involving oil companies, claiming he committed ‘extensive and damaging sabotage’.
As Bloomberg put it: ‘Many chief executive officers would try to ignore somebody like Tripp. Instead, as accounts from police, former employees, and documents produced by Teslaâs own internal investigation reveal, Musk set out to destroy him.’
Also from Bloomberg:
The security manager at the Gigafactory, an ex-military guy with a high-and-tight haircut named Sean Gouthro, has filed a whistleblower report with the SEC. Gouthro says Teslaâs security operation behaved unethically in its zeal to nail the leaker. Investigators, he claims, hacked into Trippâs phone, had him followed, and misled police about the surveillance. Gouthro says that Tripp didnât sabotage Tesla or hack anything and that Musk knew this and sought to damage his reputation by spreading misinformation.
When Gouthro says Facebook (where he had worked before) is more professional than Tesla, that’s really worrying.
In another case, Jason Blasdell claims that SpaceX, another Musk venture, where he was employed, falsified test documents. When he brought this to his superiorâs attention, he was fired. In Blasdellâs case, two of his managers suggested he would âcome in to work shooting.â His account makes for sobering reading as the legal avenues he had get shut down, one by one.
Google and Facebook might do some terrible things in the market-place, but I donât think Iâve come across this level of vindictiveness against employees further down the food chain from the CEO.
They seem to be mounting as wellâI wouldn’t have known about the two ex-employee cases if not for spotting the Tripp police report Tweets. They both follow a similar pattern of discrediting people with valid concerns, going well beyond any reasonableness. We’re talking about lives and reputations getting destroyed.
It all points to a deep insecurity within these firms, which go beyond the sort of monopolistic, anticompetitive, un-American, anti-innovation behaviours of the usual Big Tech suspects. Yes, Google will go as far as to get your fired, according to Barry Lynn of Citizens Against Monopoly (Google denies it), or it might play silly buggers and seemingly shut down your Adwords account, or blacklist your site by falsely claiming it is infected, hack your Iphone and bypass its ‘Do Not Track’ setting, expose your private information for years, and plain lie about tracking, but I’ve yet to hear them sicking armed police on you and having their staff say you’d be heading to the office shooting. So maybe in this context, Google can say it hasn’t been evil. Well done. Slow clap.
At this rate, it’s Big Tech and the monopolies the US government has fostered that’ll drag down the reputation of ‘Made in the USA’.
Tags: Big Tech, car industry, corporate culture, defamation, Elon Musk, ethics, Google, law, Nevada, SpaceX, Tesla, USA, whistle-blowing
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EU copyright: as far as we’re concerned, link away
13.04.2019
European Unionâwww.europarl.europa.eu/downloadcentre/en/visual-identity, Public Domain; link
Iâm reading more about this EU copyright directive that was voted in last month.
Without doing a full analysis, I can say that we wonât go after anyone who links to our publications.
We presently donât care if you use a brief snippet of our content and link back to the rest. I canât see our position changing on this.
We do care if you take entire chunks (e.g. the text of an entry on Autocade, since they’re only a paragraph long). In some cases we only have the rights to photos appearing on our own site so we may want those removed if they’ve been copied from us.
Over the years Iâve just contacted publishers and asked them politely. Only a tiny handful actually respond; quite a few sites are bot-driven with feedback forms that no one checks. They get DMCAed.
But I donât have a problem with the systems that are in place today.
It seems the EU is going to wind up creating a segregated internet: one where Big Tech and large media corporations can afford to do everything and smaller publishers canât. This is already happening, thanks to Googleâs own actions with favouring mainstream media sources rather than the outlet that had the guts to break the news item. Big companies are flexing their muscles and lawmakers are bending over backwards to serve them ahead of their own citizens. (Incidentally, I canât see the UK doing anything differently here post-Brexit.)
Smaller publications might band together and share among themselves by some sort of informal agreement.
So for us, when it comes to linking and excerpting, keep doing it. Unless something happens that forces me to change my mind, Iâm all for the status quo ante in the EU.
Tags: 2019, Big Tech, copyright, copyright law, EU, fair use, Google, law, media, publishing
Posted in business, internet, media, publishing, technology, UK | No Comments »
More lies: Instagram’s separate (and now possibly secret) set of ad preferences
02.09.2018This post was originally going to be about Facebook lying. It still is, just not in the way originally conceived.
Those who follow this blog know that, on Instagram, I get alcohol advertising. Alcohol is one of the categories you can restrict on Facebook. Instagram claims that it relies on your Facebook ad preferences to control what advertising you see. That is a lie, and itâs still a lie even as of today (with an ad for Johnnie Walker in my feed). I turned off alcohol advertising in Facebook ages ago, and itâs made no difference to what I see on Instagram.
What it doesnât tell you is that Instagram keeps its own set of advertising interests, which can be found at www.instagram.com/accounts/access_tool/ads_interests, but itâs only accessible on the web version, which no one ever really checks out. When I last checked on August 18, you could still see a snippet of these interests, and they are completely different to those that I have on Facebook (where I go in to delete my interests regularly, something which, I might add, I should actually not have to do since I opted out of interest-based advertising on Facebook, which means that Facebook should have no need to collect preferences, but I digress). You cannot edit your Instagram ad preferences. They are, like the Facebook ones, completely laughable and bear no resemblance to my real interests. Advertisers: caveat venditor.
As of now, Instagram no longer lists ad interests for me, though those alcohol ads still show up.
So, Instagram lies about Facebook ad preferences affecting your Instagram advertising, because they donât.
And as late as August 18, because Instagram kept its own set of preferences, it was lying about its reliance on Facebook ad preferences.
And today, Instagram might still be lying because while it doesnât show your preferences on Instagram any more, Facebook ad preferences still have no effect on Instagram advertising. As far as I can tell, even though the Instagram ad preference page is blank, it still relies on a separate set of preferences that is now secret and, as before, not editable.
But we are talking Big Tech in Silicon Valley. Google lies, Facebook lies. You just have to remember that this is par for the course and there is no need to believe anything they say. Even in a year when Facebook is under fire, they continue to give ammo to its critics. This makes me very happy now that there is a bodyâthe EUâthat has the cohones to issue fines, something that its own countryâs authorities are either too weak or too corrupt to do.
Tags: 2018, advertising, Big Tech, Facebook, Instagram, law, privacy, USA
Posted in business, internet, technology, USA | 1 Comment »