myaltacct415

Facebook should have dominated the payments space. It failed. Every few years they announce new payments products and strategy. Nothing fundamentally changes.

He talks about it in interviews. While he was at Facebook, he started an investment fund outside of work. Now I do not want to get sued for mischaracterizing what he did. You will have to listen to those interviews yourself.

It would be a wholly incomplete picture to think that such actions are happening organically. Whether antitrust is justified or not, ignoring the behind the scenes maneuvering will do a disservice to the discussion.

I'm not claiming they are being bullied by lobbyists. I'm claiming that the antitrust arguments have a long history of political motivation, as opposed to broadly beneficial economic motivation.

Lawmakers did not just wake up one morning and decide to push antitrust forward. I would love to see which companies or people are pushing for, or against, it.

Yelp was singularly active in bringing scrutiny to Google years ago - https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/01/yelps-six-year-grudge-agains... "antitrust law is boring, complicated and political"

https://antilop.cc/sr/ was a great source of information for those not following closely.

One of the corrupt agents involved, Carl Force, gets out of prison in a couple of weeks. The other corrupt agent, Shaun Bridges, gets out in a year. I find the corruption angle to be most intriguing. Maybe more were not caught.

My simple answer: we became afraid. 9/11 showed us we were not invincible. Technology to enable mass surveillance had quick answers for our collective fears. Stoking our fears is a profitable industry. Here we are today.

It makes me so happy to see people standing up for what they believe in. I don't agree with the author's views on Google but I do agree with his personal stance of willing to be inconvenienced because of his views on Google.

I observe that most people are willing to hold an opinion until they are inconvenienced. Society would be better if citizens backed their values with their actions. Convenience is not a value.