News US DOJ Launches Antitrust Review of Amazon, Facebook, Other Tech Giants

I think the real issue with these sites is the use of tracking services for advertisement.

These companies provide no way to disable these tracking features and automatically opt you into this tracking.
 

kenjitamura

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Jan 3, 2012
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Usually, it's the FTC that prosecutes antitrust cases; the DOJ hasn't had a high-profile antitrust case since it prosecuted Microsoft in 2011. This could be read in different ways: perhaps the DOJ is as serious about these cases as it was about the Microsoft case. Or maybe it's trying to gain points with a public growing weary of the power of tech giants.

The DOJ is very serious about these cases but not for any altruistic pro-consumer reasoning. Anyone who has been keeping tabs on the political climate knows the exact reason that this issue has become the center of attention. Likewise it means that the tech giants know very well how to bury these investigations: Stop banning far/alt right commentators.

The tech giants are definitely a monopoly and are hurting consumers so I'm all for busting them up. But the DOJ is interested in this for the wrong reason and it's going to make it very easy for the tech giants to dangle some bait, that won't harm their marketing approaches, to kill off the investigations.
 
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It'll be very easy to see if the tech giants are playing games to hide their activity...a simple Google search on any given politician tells the whole story. If you search on Pres Trump as an obvious example and get nothing but negative CNN and NYT articles it's very hard to say Google isn't manipulating searches for political reasons...especially when other search engines like Duckduckgo yield completely different results using the same search terms. I could care less which political party is in power...what I care about is the system being fair to all players in the game so they win on merit and not ideology. Breaking up the obvious monopolies held by companies like Google and Facebook which have vast control over modern media and can bury or elevate news stories at will is long past due.