Jam To-Day

Liberating Big Tech’s hostages on day one

A half-empty jam jar on a table; the jar is labelled with Tenniel’s engraving of the Red Queen wagging her finger at Alice in Through the Looking-Glass.
Oleg Sidorenko/CC BY 2.0

“The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday — but never jam to-day.”

-The Red Queen, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (Lewis Carroll)

The new, surging antitrust movement has given hope to many who yearn to throw off the yoke of Big Tech. After all, the tech giants’ dominance was attained through solidly illegal conduct, such as anti-competitive mergers and acquisitions, predatory pricing, and price-fixing. This produced conditions in which the companies were able to engage in more flagrant illegal conduct, including unambiguous, multi-billion-dollar acts of fraud.

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Pluralistic: 24 Sep 2021


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Pluralistic: 23 Sep 2021


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Pluralistic: 31 Aug 2021


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Pluralistic: 30 Aug 2021


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Pluralistic: 28 Aug 2021


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Pluralistic: 13 Aug 2021


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Pluralistic: 12 Jul 2021


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The EU, Tech Trustbusting, and Trade Wars

There’s a difference between protectionism and political will

The EU flag superimposed over a Matrix “code waterfall” effect; in the center of the ring of stars is a vintage newspaper caricature of Roosevelt as a trustbuster, swinging his “big stick.”

Competition regulators in the EU, the UK and the US are all looking hard at concentration in the tech sector, and well they should: an industry that was once hailed for its dynamism — for being a sector where yesterday’s world-spanning titans are sold for parts to companies that were mere napkin doodles a year or two before — has calcified into “a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.

The reasons for tech concentration are pretty straightforward. Despite a lot of fatalistic tech exceptionalism about “network effects” leading to inevitable monopolization, the actual means by which tech companies consolidated is actually easy to see in the historical record.

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A Monopoly Isn’t the Same as Legitimate Greatness

Competent monopolists aren’t good monopolists

Ida Tarbell’s uses her writing to kindle a fire on a tree labelled “Standard Oil Traditional Policy of Silence.” A panicked John D Rockefeller peers out of a squirrel-hole, screaming in alarm.

If you do much reading about antitrust, you’re sure to come across Ida Tarbell, the campaigning investigative journalist whose masterful 1904 book, The History of the Standard Oil Company (free ebook, free audiobook), brought down John D. Rockefeller and his monopolistic Standard Oil Company, which was broken up in 1911. It split into seven companies, many of which are still with us—or were, until recent mergers (think: Exxon, Mobil, Esso, Chevron, Texaco, and Amoco).

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