47 Attorneys general now support Facebook antitrust investigation | Hacker News Reader

47 Attorneys general now support Facebook antitrust investigation

sociable.co

98 pointshinchlt22 comments

Consider, though, that antitrust investigations generate employment for attorneys.

"47 plumbing company bosses now support complete inspection of all NY city pipes ..."

Or consider Facebook has a long history of anticompetitive behavior and the Government attorneys are doing their job by investigating. If anything it creates employment for Facebook attorneys not the other way around.

Of course; so an attorney can support the investigation regardless of which side they work for, which allows them to combine their support with their moral stance and pretend that they are one and the same.

The Attorney's General Offices are government institutions their budgets and their salaries are set by the legislatures. They don't get bigger budgets and employ more attorneys because they are investigating Facebook. Its the same as any DA/state attorney office, they don't get more money or hire more attorney's because they file more criminal charges.

If anything the government attorneys are hurting themselves professionally because they will be blackballed from ever working at Facebook and likely many other big tech companies.

Was the 1990's MS antitrust investigation and case all smoke and mirrors by attorneys for some private gain also?

> They don't get bigger budgets and employ more attorneys because they are investigating Facebook.

That seems a bit naive though; of course investigating Facebook is a demonstration of the wielding of power. If they can investigate and punish Facebook, their power and importance grows.

> If anything the government attorneys are hurting themselves professionally ...

Not if we consider their profession to be more of whatever they are doing now; if they do a good job in that, they advance. The more junior people involved in the investigation do good jobs, and advance to better, more senior positions and so on.

Of course they can investigate Facebook. That is literally their job. Their power isn't growing they are just using the power they already have.

Are you saying Facebook should be above the law and not answerable to any government?

Attorney General is a government position. These are government employees. They aren't going to make a personal profit off of this, unless you're saying that all 47 are corrupt in some way.

Also, there's only I think around 56 state-level attorneys general (if you include territories and DC) so this is roughly 80% of state-level AGs, and 90% of state AGs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_attorney_general

I would find that extremely concerning. Also, New York City is already spending a fortune on just that. The main lines that feed into New York can't really be shut down for maintnence without massive water outages.

Ah yes, it's all a grift :eyeroll:

Every government prosecution office Ive ever worked with is overwhelmed and doing everything they can to reduce their case load. If they want an anti-trust investigation I'm confident it's not because they are looking for work.

It’s an issue with bipartisan support, so you can bet no matter how hastily conceived some of the specific proposals are, that you’ll see them all clamoring to get credit for “taking down the man.” It will be interesting to see if out of the anti-monopoly legislation some genuinely interesting start-ups can find a new, interesting niche.

I see mention to a Google one as well. What about others like Amazon?

What is amazon a near-monopoly in?

Amazon is a trust, not yet a monopoly. There is an inherent conflict of interest, and lack of recourse (forced arbitration), between Amazon marketplace sellers and Amazon the e-commerce store. Likewise between AWS customers and Amazon the e-commerce store and advertising network. By any reasonable consumer standards, AWS should be split off into a separate company. The pervasive surveillance and continual scandals surrounding Ring's handling of user data, when taken in context of Amazon's collection of user data from the e-commerce store, advertising network, Alexa, other Amazon business units, and purchased third party data, mean that Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire Ring in the first place. If the Department of Justice Antitrust Division had not been completely captured by corporate interests, they would be in the process of litigating to undo this acquisition right now.

Have we seen companies get split off in similar circumstances in the past?

Not exactly the same, but in the 90's we almost split up Microsoft to two separate divisions: a company that builds the operating system, and a company that builds user-space applications.

This was because, during the browser wars of the 90s, Microsoft was purposefully gimping competing browsers at the OS level like Netscape Navigator so as to encourage people to use Internet Explorer.

The textbook case studies would be the break up of Bell Telephone Company [1] or Standard Oil [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil_Co._of_New_Jersey...

They're buying competing booksellers, which is by definition anti-competitive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

Amazon provides cloud services to the government now; and Bezos owns the Washington Post. Plus, and perhaps more importantly, the Democrats did not try to pin "Russiagate" allegations on Amazon. Now, Trump kind of dislikes him IIRC, but still - the political climate does not seem favorable to going after Amazon that way.

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