The US Department of Justice and 16 state and district attorneys general accused Apple of operating an illegal monopoly in the smartphone market in a new antitrust lawsuit. The DOJ and states are accusing Apple of driving up prices for consumers and developers at the expense of making users more reliant on its iPhones.
*Sees EU fining Apple*
Oh shit we can tell corporations what to do!
This. Smells like me too (the expression, not the movement) as opposed to a well thought out plan as to how they’ll tackle the monopoly.
Biden appointed a bunch of pretty vehemently anti-monopoly people to power, this is just how long it actually takes them to conduct an investigation thorough enough to bring suit.
The investigation actually started in 2019 under Trump’s DoJ.
Right. Real Estate is a shit show and has been a shit show for decades with corporations buying out SFH homes and properties, driving up prices and making them unaffordable for the average American. If I was stack list of problems to tackle impacting Americans, that would be pretty high up the list instead of a tech company.
Of course, you can and should do both, but considering time and money are finite resources, it’s very on the nose to pick this fight instead of the one that impacts Americans the most.
I don’t think monopolies should exist, but also, we should be looking at regulations and law making instead of law suits.
I don’t know how much of that falls under the DOJ’s purview. Based on what I’ve heard from various congressional staffers, a physical letter mailed to your congressional representative actually does mean something. You can also go to your city council meetings and tell the city council they should do something about housing.
Oh, I’m in the heart of a place well known for exorbitant property values, and there’s been plenty of talk of “fixing housing”. Literally everybody runs on the platform of lowering property values, so I’m sure the letting your congressional staffer know has been done to death.
In addition to that, countless articles, op-eds, research has been published in the last 4 years alone and the point I’m making is, that this DOJ move seems more political theater than anything, which is surprising coming from folks that are supposedly about consumer rights and protections.
We need actual problems to be solved, not grand gestures and showboating of supposed take downs of “monopolies” when the laws around monopolistic practices are about as ancient as the presidential candidates trying to win points with their voter base.
Also, as everybody knows, governments can only do one thing at a time.
Awhile back a non tech person at work got hoodwinked into a sales pitch by a no name “AI” vendor. They, of course, invited a distribution list of all the IT and IT adjacent people to this pitch, thinking their ingenuity was going to transform our workplace and they were going to get accolades.
During the pitch, the sales guy (or CEO?) talked about Google getting surprised by Open AI, and that they rushed to build Bard, so they “could have their own ‘Me Too’ moment.” (With an inflection to indicate the Me Too comment was a reference.)
While I was watching people unmute, stay silent, then mute again, multiple group chats lit up at once.
(And the guy either didn’t understand LLM’s, or was hoping we really didn’t. It was peak marketing speak. He got crushed in the Q&A, ultimately revealing that the extent of his offering was to resell access to an established LLM vendor.)
Hahahaha that’s awesome! All the while scary to see the snakeoil-ism in tech.