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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. We have a return guest today and a very interesting topic. We're going to be talking about big tech, we're going to be talking about the government's role in perhaps controlling that big tech. We have an expert with us today, back on The Common Bridge, Adam Kovacevich. Adam, good to see you, how've you been?
Adam Kovacevich
Great, thanks for having me back.
Richard Helppie
Great. Adam, of course, runs the Chamber of Progress. It's a center-left trade association. It's funded by the largest of the big tech players from A to Z, including Airbnb and Amazon to Google to Meta to Zillow and just about everything in between. You can find them at progresschamber.org. There's been a lot in the news about information, misinformation, disinformation, content moderation and in Episode 177 on The Common Bridge back in October of 2022, we talked about the role of technology, specifically big tech in our lives and now finding a place where it could be abused for power versus used to enhance our lives. I hope that you read that or listen to it in our archives. So Adam, since our last conversation, big tech has had a little more transparency - I mean transparency with the old definition of transparency - we've had the Twitter files through Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger. We talked a little bit more about the shadow banning that's gone on. And just to me, it looks like any other kind of creeping corruption; first, it's a one off, a couple more exceptions, then a standard practice and then an overreach. But today, we're going to be talking about the FTC and Amazon. The FTC is the Federal Trade Commission [which] is looking at Amazon. What is it that the FTC is alleging today and why should this be a concern to us?
Adam Kovacevich
Well, I think in some ways, this goes back several years, probably about six years. Lina Khan, who is now the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, six years ago was a law student and wrote a paper called "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," which looked at Amazon's behavior and said, look, under traditional applications of antitrust law Amazon's behavior...Amazon has a pro-consumer justification for its behavior, but she was arguing that there were aspects of Amazon's behavior that hurt sellers, for example, marketplace sellers on Amazon's service, as well as potentially other retailers and that policymakers, regulators, ought to take a broader, more expansive approach to antitrust law in a way that would deal with what she saw as these problems from Amazon. So flash flash forward. Now she is the chair of the FTC and last year, she directed that several attorneys at the FTC spend more of their time investigating Amazon, looking at their behavior. It's now been rumored for several months and been reported that they are on the verge of filing an antitrust lawsuit of their own against Amazon, which will likely focus on Amazon Prime, and I'm happy to get into the details of what we expect.
Richard Helppie
What I'd like to hear is what is it the FTC is alleging; who's harmed? What's the remedy that they're talking about and what's the response from the Chamber of Progress in general - if there is one? And then what's Amazon saying?
Adam Kovacevich
Well, based on press reports at this point, that focus on what the complaints are likely to be, there are really three aspects to it. One is focused on the Amazon Prime bundle. So if you are an Amazon Prime subscriber right now, you get discounts, you get free shipping, but you also get access to Amazon Prime Video and Amazon photos and Amazon books. There's some feeling that the FTC will allege that Amazon's bundle of services is unfair to competing retailers like WalMart, Target, Costco, particularly larger super retailers, and that that bundle of things together is anti-competitive or harmful. The second allegation has to do with Prime and how Prime works. Right now, Prime promises that a product you order through Prime, that has the Prime label, can get to your house within two days. The reason why Amazon is able to make that work is because they require that sellers - in order to be eligible for Prime - participate in what's called Fulfillment by Amazon. That ensures that Amazon itself keeps those goods and fulfills them and ships them. They control the whole fulfillment and shipping process so that they can guarantee the product gets there. Some sellers complain about that requirement. Again, I'm happy to get into more detail, but it's very likely that the FTC will accuse Amazon of unfairly linking Prime to this Fulfillment by Amazon service. The last area that they are expected to bring a case on is what's called the Buy Box. Right now, you search for a blender on Amazon and you look on the right hand side and there's a box that says "buy it now" or "add to your cart," that's essentially a sale for a particular seller; there might be multiple sellers of that good but one seller is picked to have the "Buy Box." Amazon essentially has certain policies that says that in order to be the Buy Box retailer, you have to have essentially the lowest price on the internet for a given item. Again, some have alleged problems with that. So those are the three big areas that we're expecting them to focus on.
Richard Helppie
Well, that's really interesting that first of all, we have an agency of the federal government that's going to go out and protect Walmart from what sounds like competition. I mean...
Adam Kovacevich
Especially since Walmart already has its own Amazon Prime program, which is called Walmart Plus, they offer access to Paramount Plus, they offer free shipping, they offer a lot of the same benefits.
Richard Helppie
And then on the fulfillment, I guess I can see Amazon's point that look, if I'm going to guarantee you delivery in one or two days, whatever their commitment is, I've got to be able to make good on that promise. Otherwise, theoretically, you could do it in a flow down contract to your suppliers but you've got millions of suppliers you'd have to monitor, and you're on the hook for not getting that there.
Adam Kovacevich
Well, and in fact, it's interesting. Several years ago - about four or five years ago - Amazon introduced a program called Seller Fulfilled Prime, where they basically gave retailers in that program, or sellers in that program, the ability to both have their products be labeled as Amazon Prime, but also handle the shipping and fulfillment themselves. What did they find? They found that the sellers couldn't live up to the quality standards in general so they had to close enrollment in that program, and actually reworked the program to put in place certain quality standards so that they can ensure that that the sellers who use that program live up to that guarantee. Otherwise, the Prime label is sort of useless from the perspective of consumers if it's not really getting there within two days.
Richard Helppie
So you're saying that the craft maker in northeastern Iowa may not be as reliable as Amazon and their technology and their distributed warehouses?
Adam Kovacevich
They are almost certainly not as reliable, but the point is that Amazon - and that's okay, when I order something from Etsy, it might take a couple of weeks to get there, that's fine. I expect that - the idea, though, is that if something's going to carry the Amazon Prime label then Amazon should be able to apply certain standards to how that good is fulfilled and shipped just to make sure it gets there in time. That's the value proposition of Prime for consumers.
Richard Helppie
Well, I know that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has said that she thinks it's unfair for Amazon to control the leading marketplace and sell their own products there; they have Amazon manufactured and labeled products there. It's an interesting argument. Is it terribly different than a grocery store having a house brand but still carrying Delmonte and such?
Adam Kovacevich
No, it's not different at all, or Costco having its Kirkland brand or Walmart having Sam's brand. No, there's no difference at all. We know that these store brands are often a really important way for consumers to save money, too, because they're not carrying the marketing costs of the prominent brands. Interestingly, this has been an area of critique of Amazon for years now but according to recent reports, it is not, at this point, part of the FTC's complaint against Amazon. I'm hopeful that it stays out of their lawsuit and hopeful they've sort of recognized that these store brands can play a valuable role in helping consumers get goods less expensively.
Richard Helppie
Any idea what is the remedy the FTC would be looking for in this?
Adam Kovacevich
I think in the first case, it would be trying to break apart the Prime bundle of services; that would presumably then raise the cost of each individual thing. If you cannot subscribe to Prime as we know it today, then are you going to have to start paying shipping for each individual product? It's hard to imagine that that will be the consequence there. On the second point about unlinking Prime with Fulfillment by Amazon, one of the interesting things about that is that The European Commission, the European antitrust regulators, actually struck an agreement with Amazon last summer around Seller Fulfilled Prime. They said, okay, well actually Seller Fulfilled Prime is a good idea and we understand there needs to be certain quality controls. That solved the problem in the eyes of the EU regulators, which, to me, shows that there is an opportunity for compromise on that issue. On the Buy Box issue I think the strange thing is that I don't know what the remedy is. If the remedy is that Amazon can't pick the lowest priced seller to highlight, that seems odd to me that the government would be telling them that they have to pick a higher price and show a higher price to consumers. That seems strange to me. At this stage I don't know that they've put much thought to remedies to be honest.
Richard Helppie
On that Buy Box I know there are allegations that you can't get into that Buy Box unless you purchase advertising on Amazon. Is there any substance to that notion?
Adam Kovacevich
Well, I think there are two different things. One is that you do see a lot of retailers advertising for certain keywords. So again, to use my example for blenders, when you search for blender, you might see something that's ranked like the Amazon top choice, maybe that's the highest most popular item but then ahead of that you might see sponsored links. Those are basically advertisements and nobody's really alleging any problem with that. What we're really talking about is that when you open up the product page for an item for a particular blender, Cuisinart blender let's say - it's technically in the background - you might have 20 different sellers selling that blender through Amazon, but only one seller can be matched with the Buy Box. So understandably, the sellers who don't win the Buy Box are upset, they'd all like to win the Buy Box. But also, understandably, Amazon should be able to put certain rules on, essentially, who's going to make [it to] the Buy Box, I have no reason to believe that advertising plays any role in that, I strongly suspect has much more to do with price, quality, ratings, those kinds of things.
Richard Helppie
When I buy things on Amazon, it'll say this product is available for less money from other sellers. (Adam Kocacevich: Yeah, that's right.) and I sometimes investigate that. My understanding also is that third party merchants, they're not allowed to sell their products on other websites at a price lower than Amazon has. (Adam Kocacevich: That's right.) So let's say I'm a manufacturer of insulated mugs. I can't go on my own website and say, look, you can buy it for five dollars because Amazon says no, the lowest we can sell it for is $5.50. I'm trying to figure out what would be the fair thing to do if someone could sell on their own website versus being forced to meet a price that Amazon sets?
Adam Kovacevich
Well, it's important to say that the seller sets the price, Amazon doesn't set the price and Amazon doesn't say that you have to set the price at a certain spot. It just says that if you, the seller, are selling that good for a lower price somewhere else on the internet, you're probably not going to be featured in the Buy Box, somebody else will be featured in the Buy Box. And that's because Amazon as a general matter doesn't want to...they want to be able to promise their customers that they're getting the lowest price on the internet. So there is a theory that that rule, or that aspect of Amazon's criteria has forced sellers to lower their prices elsewhere on the internet. I think it's sort of - I'll be honest - it's sort of an odd argument. There's already a lawsuit against Amazon on this point by the California attorney general. There's also a plaintiff's law firm who has been pushing this theory for a couple of years now. There was a case by the Washington DC attorney general, which was actually thrown out and interestingly enough, it was thrown out because the judge said that it was not plausible. They hadn't provided any evidence of the central allegation that Amazon's policy had forced other people to lower their prices. So anyway, there is not a lot of evidence there.
Richard Helppie
Of all the things that big tech is stumbling into, some of the things that some people might say are outrageous, it's just odd that they're kind of picking here. I know my own personal shopping preference - and I'm a Amazon Prime user - is if I can find something not on Amazon I'll typically go there. Some of the places, their technology is just so horrible you can't get the product. I won't name them but I like to do a lot of grilling and barbecuing and the best meat thermometer is a thing called ThermoPop but they're not on Amazon.
Adam Kovacevich
I purchased some lawn equipment a couple months back, also not an Amazon, it was specialized, like a lawn fence and and I had to go to a specialty retailer. So they don't have everything. I think that's an important point.
Richard Helppie
This other part about bundling the delivery services with the purchasing, with the marketplace, is the proposed resolution that Amazon doesn't use their own distribution?
Adam Kovacevich
Well, the proposed resolution is that you as a seller could still have your product labeled Prime, even if you don't use Amazon's fulfillment service. And again, what Amazon's agreed to in Europe is essentially that, but they said, we're willing to offer that so long as we can put certain rules around Fulfillment by Amazon to ensure the product is getting there in time. I just mention that because I think it sort of shows that actually, to the extent the FTC is concerned about this, I'm sure that Amazon would be willing to make that concession in the US just as they've done in Europe; it seems odd that this would have to come to a lawsuit. On the other hand, Chairwoman Khan really made her reputation in going after Amazon. So I think it's somewhat difficult for her optics to appear overly conciliatory to Amazon, even if they...but this has been her approach through many, many situations; she'd rather sue than extract a compromise.
Richard Helppie
Again, very, very odd. I mean, when we look at the intersection of government and big tech, law enforcement, regulation, this just seems like a real odd place. Is Google just too big that they can't get their arms around that given how much data they control and how much tracking they do? I know they're one of your members but it seems to me that Google would be a lot more readily available target. It would make a lot more sense to break up search and marketplaces and mail and advertising and all the things that they do in one bundle; looking at us each as a set of data that can be tracked and processed.
Adam Kovacevich
Well, in fact, there are two active federal government antitrust lawsuits against Google too, one actually starts in court next week. That was a case that was launched by the Trump administration against Google over its search distribution agreements. So right now, if you open up Safari on your desktop or on your phone, Google is the default search engine right out of the box. Google pays Apple a fair amount of money to be that default position and they do the same thing for phone operators to be the default search on new phones. The central allegation of the Department of Justice says that these deals have given Google an unfair leg up. Now, I think these deals are more akin to Oreo paying a supermarket a lot of money to have a lot of shelf space; that's a pretty ordinary type of deal that we've seen. It doesn't mean that people can't pick Hydrox or other kinds of cookies. It just gives them a prominent position. So that case is going to start in court next week and will unfold over eight weeks. The Department of Justice also has a lawsuit against Google over its advertising tech network and the allegation that it owns or controls too many parts of the ad tech space. That case probably won't see court until next year or the year after, so there are active cases there. There's an active case against Meta by the FTC, there's a long rumored potential case against Apple. So all the big tech companies have cases or prospective cases against them.
Richard Helppie
Again, it seems a little unusual that we've got one part of our government saying that we need to control these, we've got another part that saying we want to get this geofence data from Google. I've been doing some research leading up to our talk today that Google had a geofence warrant that gave [data on] over 5700 phones that were in the general vicinity of the Capitol on January 6. So it's not like, hey, we think this person was there, can you verify it? It was just, tell us everybody who was there. I think this has some civil liberties implications and it's being directed by one arm of the government. How does this get reconciled in your world and in the world of the regulators in DC?
Adam Kovacevich
A great example, I worked at Google for 12 years so I spent a lot of time on this question of law enforcement access. These sorts of geofence warrants were becoming an increasing issue for companies to deal with. Companies would prefer law enforcement to come to them and say, okay, we have reason to believe that John Doe committed this crime, here's a warrant with John Doe's information. That's a lot higher standard than a geofence warrant, which says show us everybody who was in that area at the time. But it puts the companies in an uncomfortable spot. I do think one of the things you're pointing to is that policymakers have come...they have a split relationship with particularly big tech platforms. There are some who want to break up their power and then there are some who want to harness their power for whatever their goals are. I think that's a kind of a shorthand there.
Richard Helppie
This was the kind of thing, the newspeak I think, is content moderation, that's newspeak for censoring; look, we're not going to do that saith those that we elect. But wouldn't your members - or you in particular - make a difference between a legitimate law enforcement inquiry versus the politically elected administration suggesting that Facebook or X - formerly Twitter - throttle certain content and certain speakers?
Adam Kovacevich
Well, I'm one who believes that content moderation is basically essential if you want to run a healthy platform. There is almost no platform that's both a successful social media business and that lets anything go. Maybe Parler lets anything go but the fact is, they're not a successful business. On the other end of that spectrum, Instagram has a quite a bit of content moderation and they're extremely successful as a business. So I think if you want to attract advertising, you need to have some kind of content moderation on your platform. You can disagree about what things should be allowed or disallowed but I think in general, it's kind of an important thing.
Richard Helppie
But Adam, not the general content moderation...and we've talked about section 230 on our last talk and what these companies are doing as businesses, and I think we have an agreement that clearly illegal content - child pornography is a prime example - would have to be moderated. But this is more than moderation. This is we don't like this group talking so we're going to throttle them. I've seen in recent days fairly prominent political figures demonstrating that they've been shadow banned so that their voices can't get out there on Meta and on X. These places are becoming the public square. Particularly, we've now had the Biden administration come right out and say, yeah, we routinely made requests to throttle content. We don't have to rehash it chapter and verse, we all know what they are. That to me is a lot different than a group inside of any of these companies saying, hey, these folks are talking about gun running, child pornography, what have you. That, to me, it's like, how do we prevent that? Because we literally have to have one part of the government suing another part of the government.
Adam Kovacevich
In general, there isn't really any dispute really about platforms removing illegal speech, but there's a lot of speech that somebody might say is awful, but lawful. So it does mean that platforms have to make a lot of tough decisions about allowing speech which is legal - neo-Nazi speech, Holocaust denial speech - Parler might allow that but Instagram doesn't and that's okay for both of them to make different decisions. I don't think we have one town square. I don't love that analogy. But we certainly have room for multiple social networks that have different platforms. I think what you're pointing out is that there is a lot of effort by policymakers to what's called "Jawbone" the platforms to take certain steps, certainly, there have been steps by the Biden administration to do that. Certainly the Democrats in Congress, but Republicans in Congress too; during the speaker debate it came out that Kevin McCarthy's office had lobbied Twitter to restore Marjorie Taylor Greene's Twitter account, so it happens on both sides. I don't love that and I know, the companies, it puts them in an awkward position. Sometimes it can be valuable for you to get information from the government about new threats. For example, if you saw that China was engaging in a pretty sophisticated cyber attack or a spoofing regime, I think if I was Twitter, or Facebook or Google, I'd want to know what the FBI knew. Actually that intelligence can be helpful for them. So I don't think it's as black and white as maybe some might might think.
Richard Helppie
I don't think anybody's making the case that it's black and white. I think that the point about legitimate law enforcement...so by way of example, during the Clinton administration, they put a wall up between the CIA and the FBI. I'm trying to recall her name Jamie - I'm blanking on her last name - actually wrote the rule and in hindsight, they believed that that was one of the things that let the 911 terrorists conduct their operation, because the CIA couldn't share what they were learning from overseas with the FBI. So we've got those legitimate criminal pursuits but I'm just wondering how would your members react to differentiating between a investigation of a legitimate criminal or terrorist threat versus hey, don't let the MAGA Republicans talk? We saw the president, a year ago, set the table for that. I just read this morning that we had a prominent Senator talking about, we want to destroy that voter bloc. Again, I don't agree with them but we know that the end result of going after one philosophy is going to be all philosophies if you can exercise that kind of power. So where do your members come down on this?
Adam Kovacevich
Well, I think that, again, I don't think there's any hesitation to remove content that's clearly illegal. And frankly, there's not much dispute about that type of thing. That's pretty clear. Sometimes there might be a scale problem; that might be a lot it. You work hard to try to find all that speech but it's hard sometimes. I think that candidly, on the other side of it, I don't see platforms saying let's silence them - all the MAGA speech. I see hard calls are on the agenda, and frankly, when there have been things...for example, I mean, I think even the previous owners of Twitter said that, in hindsight, their approach to the first New York Post story on Hunter Biden's laptop, they handled incorrectly. They said that they had actually handled it poorly and would not have put the label on it or restricted the access to it. I think they reversed that pretty quickly. A lot of times these kind of things can actually generate more interest in the topic. So I think...anyway, I've seen that happen quite a bit.
Richard Helppie
I think there's a thirst out there for unvarnished clear information. Frankly, I have to tell you that when I hear the Biden administration's pronouncements on the economy, I have to kind of feel like Winston Smith did listening to the glorious crop reports in the book "1984". I mean, Americans are struggling, the dollar value is down 17%. During this administration, the home mortgage costs are up 250%, we've had a credit downgrade, a lot of downward revisions after the fact. The fundamentals of the economy are not doing what they should be doing for your average American, and the spending that was packed into those bills is now still rippling through the economy. There's still a lot more damage ahead. It just kind of bothers me that any of these big platforms would influence the content that gets out there. Numbers are numbers, we should be able to talk about them, not have to be [inaudible]. And I share your point, by the way, jumping back to the New York Post, that's a lesson learned but that pile-on of 51 intelligence heads who bolstered the same fake story were never held accountable.
Adam Kovacevich
I think I might disagree with you a little bit of on the economy. I mean, I see positive signs; inflation is down, real wages are up, consumer spending is up. I mean, it's actually for reasons that...
Richard Helppie
The numbers belie that on an after tax basis. They want to say, well, inflation went from nine percent to three and a quarter; the nine percent didn't come off. And when you look at the rules of big numbers, it's like asking someone, do you want a ten percent return on $1,000 or do you want a two percent return on 10 million, it's the law of those numbers; you still have persistently high prices and it's being fueled further by the spending that was baked into that bill. I don't know how things were played in your world but they're not fooling anybody here in the Midwest; people go to the grocery store, people go to the gas station, people buy clothes; it's a problem. The way it hit me when I hear these things, it just reminds me of the reports that Winston Smith got: glorious crop production.
Adam Kovacevich
Well, again, I do respectfully disagree on this point and agree that we agree to disagree. I think that my concern is that I view, for example, this case against Amazon targeting Amazon Prime to be not a wise move for, particularly, the economy. This is something that a lot of people depend on, nearly half the country are Amazon Prime members. Amazon Prime is actually slightly more popular among Democrats even than Republicans. So I just think regardless of how you view the economic fundamentals, it's hard to look at this and say people are clamoring for the government to go after Amazon Prime.
Richard Helppie
Again, when I was reading up on this, I kept trying to say, where's the harm? And like the first part of this was, let's protect Walmart. I'm like, okay, the biggest retailer on the planet, they can figure this out. I watched what happened to Toys R Us, they clearly didn't invest in the technology and they got behind. Amazon could sell a product at a loss and the shareholders rewarded them and you know what happened at Toys R Us. But in recent weeks someone said people still like to browse, we're going to make a little mini-mall with a lot of retail and a lot of restaurants and let people have a little store within a store; maybe Bed Bath and Beyond, maybe Toys R Us. And I'm like, okay, great, that's the notion of capitalism. It's, somebody comes up with something new, they leave gaps, someone else jumps into that gap. Because what I've yet to hear is what is Amazon doing that's illegal or anti-consumer and the argument can't be you're giving your members too good of a deal.
Adam Kovacevich
Right. I don't think she'll allege that. I think she'll argue that it's somehow been unfair to sellers.
Richard Helppie
The small business people. Well, look, it's tough to be a small business person. Anybody that's ever been one knows that. I don't know that there is an entitlement to a distribution network like an Amazon.
Adam Kovacevich
Well, exactly. I mean, Amazon spent billions building this fulfillment network. And again, it used to - people forget this, and you asked an earlier question about this - it used to be that everything on Amazon was directly sold by Amazon themselves and then they created this marketplace that gave other sellers the chance to have their goods sold and fulfilled through Amazon. They didn't have to choose that. A lot of them don't, by the way, but it's an option and if they do that they pay Amazon a commission fee for those sales. And so I think like, in some ways, do I wonder if the FTC would prefer the world where Amazon direct sold all these goods and didn't have all these marketplace sellers? Because to the extent that the case is sort of going after how they treat Marketplace sellers, Amazon could say, well, look this isn't worth the hassle, let's just go back to selling all these goods directly ourselves.
Richard Helppie
Exactly. And for the small seller, it's not difficult today to get an actionable website for e-commerce thrown up, lots of digital ways to pay. Maybe the next battle is going to be how the search engine optimization is set up so that it doesn't price a small manufacturer out. But there's an infinite number of ways to get a product out to market.
Adam Kovacevich
Well, and in fact, one of the things you see quite a bit is you see a lot of sellers, particularly direct to consumer retailers, using a combination of ads on Facebook and Instagram to create awareness of the product, and then drive the consumer directly to their site. And those sites' e-commerce sales are powered by Shopify. That is a very common alternative, frankly, to the seller selling through the Amazon marketplace.
Richard Helppie
Yeah, absolutely. Just seems like an unusual regulation. It'll be interesting to watch. I really appreciate the fact that you're digging into this. As we come to the end here, what did we not talk about that would be important for the listeners, the readers and the viewers of The Common Bridge?
Adam Kovacevich
Again, I think just the biggest thing is kind of how the consumers feel about this. We actually, our organization Chamber of Progress, did a survey earlier this year of voters. And we asked how voters felt about the federal government investigating - particularly suing - Amazon, how do they feel about Amazon Prime. The overall thing that came out of that is that voters felt that there were much bigger fish to fry. They generally had a lot of value in Amazon Prime and the way in which Prime can help them save money and get goods to them quickly. So I just think, set the law aside, legal questions aside, for a second, I just don't think this is great politics for the administration to be going after something that half the country use utilizes and values.
Richard Helppie
I'm trying to find that fundamental role of government to keep the private sector in check, and I'll say it. Is Go Fund Me one of your members? (Adam Kocacevich: No, they're a pretty small outfit.) Okay. They get a lot of publicity and this notion that they're not going to take funds from anybody they don't like their political views; I don't know if you have a cut on that or not. I know that you weren't prepared to talk about this today.
Adam Kovacevich
I don't know that much about their policies.
Richard Helppie
I only know what I've read in various reports so maybe we'll save that for another time. Adam, you've been great with your time, as always, and your knowledge, and this is terrific information that people need to know about. Any closing comments?
Adam Kovacevich
I think the biggest thing here is that it makes sense for the federal government to be scrutinizing big tech, these are big companies, they have a big role in our lives. They have a big influence over e-commerce, over speech, over social networking. It is appropriate that the government apply a high degree of scrutiny but I also think it's important for them to be careful about what problems they're trying to solve. Are these problems that are rooted in something consumers have really complained about or are they rooted in - I think, in this case - sort of a longer held ideological agenda? Because I think the the actions will be on stronger footing if they're a result of consumers saying, we are really ticked off about this one thing that Amazon or Google or Meta does and they're not fixing it and we really need the government to intervene here; that'll be a much wiser regulatory intervention.
Richard Helppie
We've been talking today with Adam Kocacevich. We're talking about big tech, we're talking about the role of government and we're talking about this progress as a human race with technology available to us for the enrichment of our lives - or perhaps to be misused. This is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
(Watch, Listen or Read) FTC Goes at Big Tech in a Strange Way