Matt Stoller is the chief anti-monopoly troll on Twitter. He's smart, but just can't help himself. He also wrote a book about this, called Goliath (that I haven't read yet).

I have been seriously thinking about getting Amazon Prime, because the shows I want to watch aren't on Netflix, and I hate myself for it. For books, I can always find another store, but there are movies that are exclusive to Amazon.

I use Amazon prime. I hate guilt as a mechanism to solve collective action problems.

Because I'm opposed to monopolies, I ordered a three pound bag of Hot Tamales (the candy) from Boxed instead.

Anyway, we have Prime and do most of our shopping at Whole Foods. Still boycotting Yuengling though.

We mostly eat Bell and Evans chicken. Is that antimonoploy?

I do shop at Whole Foods now, because. They bought out our local supermarket. I go there for milk and yogurt, because it's a 7 minute walk, and it's not full so I don't have to wait in a line.

I have not heard of Boxed. Do they sell toilet paper?

Do they ever. That's how they hooked us.

3: me too, but I engage in it anyway. I also hate people who don't even think about these issues (not you, obviously) like Tim's SIL who was horrified to learn that if you hired a nanny, you were their employer, and they expected a contract that included paid vacation.

I think some amount of individual responsibility for our consumption choices is important. Exceptions obviously for people who are struggling financially.

Watch for Facebook news today. Monopoly-wise The times might be a-changing.

If it's like school, they'll break up into groups and leave me in the one with the assholes.

9: I basically agree entirely.

I find Amazon a particularly hard habit to reduce, though, because it speaks to my achilles heel, in that it saves me time.

Paypal has actually helped a lot, by providing a more uniform check out experience with a lot of smaller vendors. The situation that kills me is when a small scale company has a website with an onerous interface and insane password rules, and so on and so forth.

I'm glad I don't use toilet paper any more. $20 at any hardware store lets you put a sprayer attachment on your john.

13 A shatafa is best but you still gotta dry your ass.

With a Dyson Butt-Dryer.

I think some amount of individual responsibility for our consumption choices is important. Exceptions obviously for people who are struggling financially.

That raises the question of, "should people who are well off go ahead, buy the cheapest option, and then donate the difference?" Which makes me think of both Tom Slee's No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart"

And also this CT post (in which, unsurprisingly, no consensus is reached on comments).

Who can help with this moral riddle? Somewhere in the near future I have to be in Venice [leaving from Amsterdam]. I can take the train for about 200 Euro, which emits 0.04 ton CO2. Or I can take the plane for about 40 Euro, which emits 0.15 ton CO2 AND spend 160 Euro on buying emissions rights from the EU ETS which will remove 8 ton CO2 emissions. What is better for the climate and what is the moral right thing to do? I really intend to spend the entire difference on compensation.

10: I would like to subscribe to your very insightful newsletter.

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So, the Moderate Republicans amicus brief in the Texas case at the Sup Ct uses the term 'jiggery pokery.' And cites Shelby County with approval. These folks know their audience.

Election lawsuits always end up exposing weird little flaws in the law. According to the concurring justice in today's Michigan Supreme Court case, unlike nearly every other state, Michigan doesn't actually have a statutory process where you can challenge the presidential election in court, and so (a) the safe harbor doesn't apply and (b) only the legislature can hear a contention that ineligible people voted. This was the Republican justice who nonetheless cast that deciding vote against Trump. She seems to have already been something of a pariah among Republicans -- she'll get no thanks for giving them a roadmap.

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Can someone explain why consumer welfare shouldn't be the overriding concern in monopoly considerations? There's sooo many consumers and only a few producers.

Don't get the FB monopoly concerns at all. It's so easy to start a competing social media company. Hard to get people to switch en masse of course but that's always gonna be true bc network effects; you don't need nefarious monopolistic behavior to explain that.

Presumably, if you want until there's few enough producers, consumer welfare takes a huge hit and it's too late to fix easily.

19: Employee welfare? Domestic industrial capacity? Plenty of other things one could think of.

Of course Chicago making it "consumer welfare" was paired in practice with bad economic analysis that pretended monopolies reduced prices rather than increased them.

Citizen welfare is a better frame than consumer welfare, wrapping up 21.1 (I would add anti-pollution lobbying weight, economic resilience as well as efficiency, and the economic benefits of free trade distinct from capitalism.) The transaction between seller and buyer is producer-consumer, but the laws regulating them all should have a bigger frame.

19. Access to the means of production matters a lot in my opinion. Both for the chicken farmers ( the individuals who own land and manage buildings of chickens rather than the conglomerate packers who sell to grocery chains) and for small sellers on Amazon (who are squeezed in a variety of ways), dealing with an unrestrained monopoly means poverty. Having viable small businesses possibilities is in principle a way to preserve something like a middle class, and in the case of poultry in particular, maybe to create an avenue for less horrible conditions for raising the most widely consumed meat in the US.

20: has stuff like that happened before? maybe I'm being naive but I feel like usually when these companies start jacking up their prices/"monetizing" that's when someone else comes in and the whole cycle starts over.

Re employee protections, environmental concerns, poultry-raising conditions: I think those things are all super-valid concerns but I don't get how they relate to anti-trust. Amazon was one of the big forces for raising the minimum wage (because their competitors couldn't afford to pay it), and Starbucks famously paid their workers better than random indie places. And it seems like it'd be easier to environmentally regulate one Amazon-sized company than Amazon one-sized companies.

It is not proving easy to regulate on Amazon-sized company because it has Amazon-sized PR and legal teams.

If you believe 24.1, you presumably don't think any of the 19th or early 20th c antitrust was needed, since harmful monopolies get undercut. Yesno?

24: I don't know.

24.1 Yes. Railroads, banking, and steelmaking were all extremely concentrated from 1880 -1920 in the US. Many industries in India are now dominated by single domestic companies part of family-owned conglomerates.

24.2 The monopoly will not respond to unprofitable legislators or regulators meekly. The article in OP explains how Tom Vilsack at USDA chose sides.

25.1 Good point, bigger companies can afford bigger lobbyists.. on the other hand farm subsidies have been chugging along fine for years without the lobbying departments.

25.2 IDK much about antitrust history but I feel like 19th century dudes were doing sketchier shit than "low prices, low prices, low prices, AHA high prices!"

"bigger lobbyists" as though AMZN's lobbyists are gargantua lol.

19- It is true that network effects make social media an area that tends towards natural monopoly. Telephony used to be the same way. I don't need Facebook to be broken up. I'd just like them to be as well regulated as Ma Bell was.

You can only use Facebook at this terminal attached to your wall in the kitchen.

What examples are you thinking about where "someone else comes in"? That may happen often when industries are in development, but once they mature monopolies can keep rising competitors out - look at pharma, where it's one of the normal paths to success to have your startup bought by a big one. Many of the US monopolies ("trusts") would never have been broken up without antitrust law.

Re: farming, just because lobbying is possible by non-consolidated industries collectively (and there are plenty of consolidation concerns in ag too) doesn't mean it's no worse under monopolies.

Re: employee exploitation, look at Prop 22 in California - the rideshare companies spent more than has ever been spent in a California election to get themselves exempted from treating their employees fairly.

I'm not an antitrust guy, so I basically just default of 'Bork is wrong' as my general view. Oh, here's some intelligent discussion of that: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1553226

My understanding is that the EU still views antitrust with a lens of fairness towards other competitors in the market, rather than "consumer benefit", and many of the companies in question are substantially multinational even if based in the USA.

There are some weird things that this produces, though, like considering Android a monopoly in the "operating system for mobile handsets" market - completely ignoring Apple/iOS, because that's not available to manufacturers of mobile handsets for any price, so not part of the market.

(I work for Google, so you should probably apply a layer of salt to what I say on the subject)

(I worked on a Sherman Act case as a first/second year associate, having to do with pagers. We were on the defense side. I was just reading the opinion on a couple of the issues, and find, to my relief, that I've completely forgotten everything about the legal research I did.)

34: My Pixel sucks. Is the new one less shitty?

Not to put you on the spot.

I had a Pixel 1 for several years, and it was decent, until the battery got old and terrible. I now have a Pixel 4, which is pretty swank (even if the face-ID instead of fingerprint turned out to be the wrong choice going into a global mask-wearing situation), and I'm told that the Pixel 5 is a step more towards "midrange" parts but has a great battery and is solid overall. I really don't have any complaints with the product line besides that they don't age that well, and I think that's sadly par for the course with current tech phones.

The battery on the Pixel 2 is horrible in the cold, plus it keeps changing my brilliant text into gibberish.

Facebook's monopoly, or rather dominant market position for antitrust purposes, isn't social media, it's internet advertising. Same for Google, but in the and broking stack.

40: ginger, what word did you mean to place after "the", and what is "booking stack "?

Sorry, the ad broking stack. There's a handy chart from a UK regulatory investigation I'll try to dig out a link for

This should work.

Actually, the whole report is worth a read, though it is long and I'm not sure the suggested remedies are particularly practical. But it's a really good overview of how this marketplace, which is largely invisible to most people, actually functions. See also the ICO report on the awful adtech industry

39: John Scalzi recently got a Pixel 5 and wrote up his impressions here:

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2020/10/30/the-pixel-5-why-i-got-one-first-impressions/

and here:

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2020/11/09/pixel-5-follow-up/

I just replaced a Pixel 2 with a PIxel 4a and I have no complaints at all. The screen is better; the battery life is better; things happen a bit more quickly. Also, it's half the price of a pixel 5.

I read Marshall Steinbaum on twitter on this topic.

Was the Oracle lawsuit against Google over the copyright of the Java Swing(?) API recently argued to the supreme court? How did that go?

El Reg summary, obviously mainly from a tech rather than legal perspective.

Thanks for 48.

So, there's no chance at all that this Paxton SCOTUS thing will succeed, right? (Need reassurance from law-talkin' guys.)

Probably won't? Certainly shouldn't, and none of the other weird suits have gotten further than they should, so I'm not worrying, but I'm not going to say crazy things can't happen.

If people can do crazy longshots with no adverse consequences if they fail, they will eventually win even though the odds of any one win are tiny.

Right. People should be getting disbarred for this shit.

There are lots of lessons one can take from the rise of the Nazis, but one of the biggest is to treat the clownish, easily-foiled, dickless coup instigators seriously.

That's sort of less categorical than what I was hoping to hear. I'm having flashbacks to a few years ago when IIRC the argument in King vs Burwell was supposed to be a non-starter until suddenly it wasn't, and only some shred of sanity in John Roberts prevented Obamacare getting struck down.

There are lots of lessons one can take from the rise of the Nazis, but one of the biggest is to treat the clownish, easily-foiled, dickless coup instigators seriously.

Mayor: Is this true?
Bill Murray: Yes, it's true. These men have no dick.

It was just "this man has no dick."

It's true that Hitler had only one ball

People should be getting disbarred for this shit.

Powell surely will when the dust gets settled, right? She has clearly deliberately misled the court on multiple occasions now.

55 They have to break a lot of china to make Trump president. A lot of china. It's fair to read their swift dismissal of the Kelly stay as an unwillingness to go that far for him.

57: I may have employed some poetic license.

Fun fact: in England you can say "the redneck army are dickless".

Anyway, the guy was exactly right in his warning.

60: My blood-pressure thanks you and I thank you.

My phone is defending itself. The news feed just put up an article titled "The Pixel 2XL Is the Best Phone Ever."

The problem is that SCOTUS can do whatever it wants, so while it's legally ridiculous, it's ultimately impossible to predict with total certainty. We have a revolutionary court. It's hard to believe they will plunge the country into civil war on such an absurd pretext, but that's not really a legal question.

More importantly, Netflix is coming out with a gritty adult live-action Winx Club. Any hopes that we were going to stop living in a parody of reality are premature.

66: This was my worry. And, moreover, what reason do they have to believe that anything like civil war would be the result. Why wouldn't they figure that non-crazy half of the US is just gonna roll over like every other time? In which case, all that's standing between us and the end of democracy is a thin layer of institutionalist gabardine...

I just replaced a Pixel 2 with a PIxel 4a and I have no complaints at all.

I have a Pixel 3a and it's great for anything other than actual phone calls. The camera is great, the UI is responsive, it's fairly light.

The ring tones don't sound very good and the sound quality for calls is kind of lousy. I don't make many calls but it's annoying enough that I will upgrade sooner than I otherwise would.

67: It's worth remembering that the shithead-wing of the Supreme Court really fucked the county with Dredd Scott thinking decent people would roll over.

67- That's what I've been thinking for some time now. I'll be pleasantly surprised if Joe Biden takes office.

69 No, they believed in that shit, and were certain, probably correctly, that most of the people who wrote the constitution did as well. When I used to meet conservatives, I'd tell them Dred Scott is what origalism looks like, and they'd stop talking to me.

The SC didn't have to break much china at all for that one. Bush v. Gore did require them to reach out disingenuously, but at least they could say that what they were doing was freezing the status quo in the face of a (supposedly) lawless refusal by a state court to let the election certification stand, when there wasn't really time to fix the problem the state court was (supposedly) trying to fix.

Here, the status quo and the commands of all the statutes point in one way, and it's only completely novel legal theory that lets them disturb it. A half dozen completely novel legal theories.

You could look at today's standing case for clues, I suppose, but Breyer wrote it, so it doesn't tell you anything about where Gorsuch and Roberts really are.

I suppose it's true that slave owners had a more fixed set of ethical beliefs than any current Republican.

To say that we roll over every time is deranged. Yes, we didn't murder our enemies in a dramatic action-movie-style climax...

(Today's case was over whether the provisions of the Delaware constitution about party balance on the courts violate the US Constitution. The Court decided that the retired Delaware lawyer who changed his party affiliation to I so he could challenge them didn't have standing.)

I do feel, probably optimistically, like the level of incompetence and reality-denial on display, as shown by them not having anything that could warrant even the current SCOTUS intervening, that if they all kept tongue-in-cheekly escalating it all the way to an armed uprising, they would not be able to enlist more than a tiny sliver of military or governmental administrators, even in GOP areas.

73: In talking about "rolling over" on previous Republican norm-breaking and malfeasance, I wasn't thinking of the alternative as being violence or threatened violence, which it goes without saying would have been neither morally justified nor strategically useful. I meant treating norm-breaking as norm-breaking, by making clear that Democrats will pursue the imposition of whatever legal and institutional consequences are at their disposal e.g. making clear that constitutional hardball will be met with constitutional hardball, and in this case calling for disbarments. Just calling a spade a spade, or in this case a coup a coup, would help. Pennsylvania's reply brief calling the Paxton suit 'seditious' is a start.

76last: I only know about this via a quote at LGM: The Court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.