3 Burst results for "Lian Island"
WTOP
"lian island" Discussed on WTOP
WTOP
"lian island" Discussed on WTOP
"W t o p. The effort to try to break up big text influence suffers a major legal blow. A federal judge has just dismissed the government's antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. Which was accused of unfairly using its power to crush the competition. Joining us live with more on Skype Lian Island who covers antitrust investigations for politico. Hey, thanks so much for being with us and what was the rationale for ruling for Facebook in this case? Thanks for having me so the judge ruled that the FTC and some state attorneys general who had sued with them didn't give him enough evidence that Facebook was a monopoly, he said. You know, the prosecutor said that Facebook has a 60% share in networking services, but they didn't give him enough to back that up. How big of a setback is this to try to rein in these huge corporations that make up modern day Silicon Valley? I mean, it's definitely a setback, though not the end of the case. So the judge said that they can try again. He's giving them 30 days to try and, um fix would he identified as deficiencies in their case, But he did, um Get rid of some of the claims that they had made. They had argued, for example, that Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were illegal under U. S murder laws. He said that they waited too long to bring those claims so they can no longer pursue them. So about half of the case that the states have brought is now over, but they can sort of try and move forward with these monopolization claims. Has it become more difficult for antitrust suits over the past decade or so. Yes, that's definitely true. A lot of people think that the courts have been very, um hard on any trust enforcers. They've lost a lot more cases recently than they have in previous years. As you know, sort of the they have adopted sort of more conservative ideas about how to determine when business conduct is anti competitive. That's why there's a lot of people, particularly Democrats in Congress, who have been pushing to update the any trust laws to make it a little bit more clear to the The courts when they should be able to move forward with any trust claims. So where does all this go from here? After today's ruling Well, the FTC sort of has two choices They can, as he said, try and amend their case and bring it to him again. The other option is the FTC does have this sort of administrative court within its own agency, and it could try and bring the case through there. That would take a lot longer And it would be much more difficult and expensive for them, which is sometimes why they don't do it. And the other option is, you know, there are these bills in Congress, um, that are moving forward, some of which would explicitly try and break up. Um you know the tech Cos the FTC could say you know, we're not sure that we can actually do it under the existing any trust laws. We're just going to wait and see what happens with those. Alrighty, Leah. Thanks so much for being with us. Appreciate you. Lian Island covers antitrust and investigations for politico Big win for a Hyattsville guy at Wimbledon. It's 6 14 Elton John's.
600 WREC
"lian island" Discussed on 600 WREC
"For a fairer Internet less riven by special dealing in conflicts of interest, But it's through provisions aimed surgically at the practices of just a handful of the largest U. S companies. An explanation from Lian Island Technology reporter at Politico. Leo. What's this about House Democrats have introduced, uh, package of bipartisan bills. There are some Republicans on it, and it really takes aim at the biggest US tech companies. Apple, Amazon Facebook, Google, possibly also Microsoft, so the way they've structured this is the company has to be really big, so more than $600 billion In annual market cap, and it has to have at least 50 million U. S users or 100,000 businesses. If that's true, then all of a sudden they have all these new obligations and they're banned from doing certain things. They're not going to be allowed to have acquisitions of potential competitors, so companies like Facebook would no longer be allowed to, for example, purchase Instagram or WhatsApp. Companies that might have been able to challenge them in the future. They're also going to have to install new tools sort of develop new tools that will make it a lot easier for consumers like us or businesses to transfer their information elsewhere. So say Facebook comes up with a privacy policy. You really don't like on their social network. This would make it really easy for you to take all of your information, all of your photos all of your past, you know, status updates. To a new social network really easily, almost like with just the push of a button. Wow. And therefore, for example, Facebook would no longer have any of it. Well, Facebook would still have, you know the people who want to belong to its network. But the idea is that this would make it really easy for people to leave the network so that you're not no longer sort of locked into their social network. What the difference is just like canceling your account. For example. Well, actually, I think you can never really cancel your Facebook account. You know, you can. You can delete it, but it always stays there. In case you might want to come back. Wow. Okay. Um, um So this essentially it seems like the government is now saying we have now determined how big is too big. Little bit. This is very focused specifically on tech. These are the sort of Remedies that you might see an antitrust case at the end. So these are the sort of things that you know they might have ended up doing with Microsoft. If you may remember from back in the early nineties, there was a big case against Microsoft. They were considering actually breaking up Microsoft into multiple companies ended up coming up with, uh, sort of work around conduct remedy. That did require them to make it easier for people to make software on their their site and make it interoperable. That's why computers work really easy or really well with lots of different types of software today. Speaking with Leah and Island antitrust reporter at Politico. Her story is called Dems are going after Big tech. It'll affect almost everything you do online. You reference to something about eliminating self preferences. What does that mean? So a lot of the companies today sort of give a leg up to their own products. For example, When you search for something on Google, you may notice that Google maps and all of the Google reviews YouTube. Those are always the things that show up at the top. That's not because those things would you know organically appear there. It's because Google sort of Gives itself a little bit of a boost in the rankings, so this would eliminate that, um, that ability, people told me and it talks a little bit in the report, like if Google maps is legitimately the best mapping service that would show you you know where these things are, it can still be at the top. But what the company can't do is automatically engineer it so that its products always show up first. So this is going to impact, you know, not just Google and Google search results. You know how Amazon often puts like its own products. First in a search, you know, this would also impact apple. You know how if you're looking in the APP store, it's apps are always there right there at the top. So this is sort of a And aim to, like, let you know about other options. That might do the same thing, But you don't hear about them as much because the big tech companies sort of prefer their own products. How is Congress? Uh, Acting on this because it strikes me like, you know, my I have friends like I don't hear anybody complain about Google or Facebook or Amazon. It just seems like I don't know they're being punished because they're the best at what they do. Yeah, That's when, um, criticism that you've definitely heard from some groups, some more conservative groups and a lot of the tech lobbying groups. I mean, these products are generally you know, used by a lot of people because people like using Lia Lee, an island antitrust reporter at Politico..