Prevent loss, the elevator goes directly to the safety island
Source: negative review (chaping321)
Recently, the major technology giants in the United States are like sitting on pins and needles, which is called a uneasy feeling.
Because after several years of preparation, a new antitrust bill is coming and will be passed by the Senate as soon as this month.
As for this law, it is almost equivalent to surrounding the giants in a fence and then beating them with golf clubs.
In addition, this pole still has wolf teeth.
bad reviewer doesn’t want to be a Riddler, so what’s the point?
This devastating bill is called "American Innovation and Choice Online Act" (American Innovation and Choice Online Act), and is referred to as AICO. The purpose of
is to completely reform the antitrust laws of the United States, and crack down on the monopoly of a wave of Internet platforms, restricting them from abusing their advantageous position of money, power, and traffic.
And the relevant departments have been well prepared. They have collected data since about 2019 and wrote a 450-page report, listing the "crimes" of the major Internet giants.
The bad reviewer also smelled the smell and went to take a look at AICO's specific legal provisions and related reports.
There is only one word for my thoughts after reading this, well, that is "absolutely".
First of all, when it comes to superb knife skills, everyone may think of Lao Huang who makes nuclear bombs, or Cook from the fruit shop.
But now, I think the U.S. legislative branch must have names.
To know a law, you must first understand who the law is aimed at, and AICO probably cuts the knife like this:
"Companies that meet these conditions, please pay attention, I am here to supervise you!"
One is the market value. Or the sales volume must be more than .55 trillion US dollars (according to the recent inflation rate, it may rise to .6 trillion US dollars ), or it must be a platform company with an average monthly active user of more than 50 million in the United States.
The second is a platform company with more than 1 billion monthly active users globally or $550 billion in annual net sales.
According to the situation at that time, if the knife is pulled like this, the only ones that meet the conditions are probably Apple , Google , Amazon , Facebook and other well-known Internet giants. The only little regret for
is that since Facebook changed its name to Meta and decided to engage in the metaverse, the market value has plummeted to more than 400 billion US dollars.
Therefore, Xiao Zha’s Meta may be a blessing in disguise. Accurate control of scores generally falls below the threshold of this law.
After the names were called, AICO told these Internet platforms what they had done wrong.
is actually very simple to sum up, that is, the big platforms say: is my platform, listen to me!
The antitrust department said: is not, the platform belongs to everyone.
Because these platforms often dominate the mountain, relying on their dominant position, they secretly attract traffic to their own products and services. At the same time,
will also secretly crack down on disobedient users and limit its potential competitors.
I will just give you a few examples from the 450-page "Charge".
Like Google, the report is on the ranking of its search results, and it also curses on the advertising business.
For example, when searching for videos, Google puts YouTube videos first by default.
Old Americans think this is not okay. The search engine is yours and the YouTube is yours. If you provide your own traffic, you will definitely make money without losing money.
If other video websites want to be higher on the search page, they have to pay Google to help with marketing. . .
An example is that when Google adjusted the price comparison website Froogle, when searching for price comparison, the new website Froogle ranked first.
Many other price comparison websites have been downgraded, and you have to turn several pages to find them. The income of one price comparison website has been reduced by 85%.
Just because the golf course is owned by the landowner, a relative of the landowner must win to play on this property. This is somewhat unreasonable. There are many similar examples in the
report, such as Amazon’s Alexa, which was also caught.
Alexa is a smart speaker, and Amazon is a shopping website. These are two markets.
However, when issuing the "Help me buy some dog food" command to Alexa, Alexa actually defaulted to using Amazon to place the order. . . The
report complained: Use the promotion of smart speaker Alexa to drive traffic to Amazon. No wonder you are all working on smart homes. When the time comes, all entrances will be directed to your own services and will not give other third parties a fair chance to compete. You really are a giant. them.
By analogy, everyone should be able to imagine the "accusations" about Apple.
is a mobile phone manufacturer, but it turns out that it has its own app store. It cannot avoid taking a 30% commission, and sideloading is not allowed. . . It also comes with a lot of its own software by default.
In addition, just the default search engine entrance of Safari browser can collect tens of billions of dollars in protection fees from Google.
It turns out that as long as mobile phones have a monopoly, related applications, payments, search engines and other services will be under your shadow, and you will have to pay tolls. Apple, you are so powerful!
Epic When I saw this paragraph, my hands probably hurt from clapping.
Having said so much, everyone should have discovered that most of the criticisms in this report are examples of platform companies preferring themselves to suppress other opponents. To put it bluntly,
cannot rely on the advantages of the platform to attract traffic to its other products.
The purpose of the AICO bill is to punish these behaviors to make competition fairer. If
is illegal, according to AICO regulations, you will have to pay a fine of 15% of the platform's annual revenue. . .
How big is the impact of this plan? The change is likely to be like this (may be a slap in the face):
Amazon’s Prime membership service may be cancelled, because after opening a Prime membership, products with Prime labels can be Free shipping, which isn't fair to other items. . .
Apple Safari will allow you to choose your default search engine when you first open the browser, instead of the default Google or Baidu ; sideloading of applications will also be allowed.
When searching for something on Google, by default, Google’s own products will no longer be ranked high, unless Google can prove that it did not use backdoors to rank higher.
Generally speaking, this law seems to have pros and cons for us consumers. There is a fair competitive market environment, but it is a pity that good products like Amazon Prime have been cancelled.
But for some small and medium-sized enterprises, this bill can bring them great joy. Companies such as music software Spotify, search engine DuckDuckGo and other companies are happy to open the champagne. . .
They also jointly sent a letter to the Senate urging them to pass the bill as soon as possible.
At present, the two parties in the United States have basically reached a consensus on this matter, so the probability of the bill passing is actually very high.
On the other hand, what the bad reviewer wants to say is that this bill is not just about antitrust.
Because to a certain extent, this is also a revolution in the American antitrust system.
Among them, the most important thing is that the AICO bill has once again changed the current situation in which " Chicago School " had the exclusive upper hand. The attitude of the
school towards antitrust is: efficiency comes first.
“Although my family is the only one, the entire industry can concentrate on big things, and the cost is lower; people pay less, consumers also make profits, everyone is happy, and the efficiency of the entire market has improved! "As long as
can prove like this that it has not infringed on consumers or harmed the interests of the entire industry, will most likely be able to escape the iron fist of antitrust.
The "General Dynamics Case" in the United States is a very classic example.
At that time, General Dynamics made various purchases in the coal field, which caused coal prices to rise rapidly in a short period of time and made consumers miserable. In theory, this was undoubtedly a monopoly.
Judges who believe in the Chicago School believe that GM's purchase has integrated the coal industry. . . On the contrary, it will increase the intensity of competition between coal and other energy sources. In the long run, coal prices will actually become lower.
For consumers and the entire industry, this will do more good than harm. In the end, General Dynamics won the lawsuit.
However, the views of New Brandeisism, which has become popular in the United States recently, and are different.
They feel that in this information age, monopoly is not a purely economic issue, and it is not enough to just look at the final efficiency.
Especially for those with a large number of users and multiple data platforms, the continuous expansion and concentration of economic power and information power is too unsafe. Now they are efficient, but if they cause harm to society, they will be more powerful than anyone else. This must be prevented in advance.
also believes that fairness is as important as efficiency. Let's not just look at the efficiency of the immediate results. Let everyone compete fairly and create different sparks. This is a good recipe for long-term and innovation.
Anyway, after this plan was proposed, the relevant departments of our country are also actively paying attention to it.
In addition to Chinese overseas companies such as TikTok, which may also be included in the supervision of AICO, you may also want to watch other people's chess games.
What I want to say in the end is that the U.S. antitrust law was formed more than a hundred years ago, and many years later it explored a path that put efficiency first.
In today's information age, these bills may be a bit old, and an innovation in antitrust laws is coming.
Let’s not talk about whether Laomei’s new tactics will work or not. The only thing that is certain is that the antitrust troubles are not limited to Yingjiang.
How to put the Internet giants in a cage while taking into account fairness and efficiency is likely to be a problem that our generation must face and continue to explore and solve.
Written by: Jiang Jiang Editor: Mianxian Cover: Xuanxuan
pictures, data source:
Sina Technology, the US Internet giant is in danger, the new anti-monopoly law is finally about to be implemented. Wall Street News, anti-monopoly reform is in progress! The U.S. Congress is bound to restrict technology giants from "abusing their dominant position"
Economic Observer, Chen Yongwei, The Echoing Pendulum: Justice, Fairness, and Efficiency in Antitrust
Text - S.2992 - 117th Congress (2021-2022)
competition in digital
