Displaying items by tag: antitrust

Facebook was blacked out on Monday October 5, 2021, which they claim was related to technical issues on their backbone routers. This came just before Frances Haugen, former product manager for Facebook’s civil integrity team, said that regulators need to intervene in the ‘crisis’. Haugen told ‘60 Minutes’ that she saw Facebook consistently choose profits over public safety at Facebook.She took with her tens of thousands of documents that prove these claims. Additionally, she filed complaints with the SEC that Facebook misled investors and advertisers by not sharing the whole picture about its platform.

FINSUM: This was a huge hit to Facebook stock on Monday, but it piggybacked on the rest of tech’s rally Tuesday morning to see some recovery. It is difficult to tell how long this may loom over the stock.

(Washington)

Amazon is contacting third-party vendors who use their site to sell goods to tell them that Congress’s new antitrust regulation will limit or bar them from selling through Amazon. This is in response to a series of six bills that have passed the House Judiciary Committee in June that will be making their way to a House vote. The legislation will overall haul major U.S. antitrust regulations seeking to tackle big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. It looks to make it more difficult for these companies to make mergers and acquisitions, discriminate against other businesses on their platforms, and make it easier for state attorneys to bring antitrust cases against them to court. Third-party vendors might be barred from paying Amazon fees for holding and storage, third-party vendors are one of Amazon’s fastest-growing segments of the company. Many of these companies are facing antitrust measures currently and this legislation could only spike that.

FINSUM: Don’t jump off tech just yet. The fundamentals are still great with the FAANGs having great earnings through the pandemic. The final bill could end up being very friendly for the tech giants.

(San Francisco)

The anti-trust probe into Google elicited little more than a shrug from markets. Investors seem to think this just Washington saber-rattling. However, what is not well understood is that the probe is not just a risk for Google, but a major one for Apple. Apple is intimately connected to the case the DOJ is trying to form. In particular, Google pays Apple billions of Dollars a year to be the default search engine on iPhone, a fact which the DOJ has centered its case on. That money flows into Apple’s services unit, which has been its biggest growth driver in recent years. According to an analyst from Bernstein “There’s a risk, if you play it out, that there actually could be more financial impact to Apple than there is for Google”.

FINSUM: The market seems to have fundamentally misunderstood the risk here. Google got the headlines, but Apple potentially has even bigger risk.

(Washington)

It has been stewing for a while, but antitrust regulation regarding some of the stock market’s largest companies is starting to look like more of a reality. However, it is not in the way one might expect. Trump has long said he wanted to work on anti-trust regulation—with Amazon the frequent target of his ire—but now he is taking steps that actually support big companies and corporate power. The way the administration is going about is through the Justice Department filing many legal arguments in cases where it is not even a party. In this way, it is trying to influence how the courts handle competition cases, and it has generally been pushing patent-holder friendly positions and undercutting lawsuits of other enforcement agencies.

FINSUM: This does not track very well with Trump’s general rhetoric, but it does follow a general Republican economic line. It seems positive for stocks.

(San Francisco)

It is getting ugly on the left. While big tech companies have always been fairly far-left politically, a new line has just been drawn. In new transcripts just released, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, says he will “go to the mat and fight” with presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren to stop her plan to break up big tech companies. “If she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government … But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight”, said Zuckerberg. Warren retorted “What would really ‘suck’ is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anti-competitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy”.

FINSUM: Warren is still a long way from office, but this is a glimpse of what the future would look like should the far-left win the election. Instead of probes and whistleblowers, we would have major courtroom dramas over anti-monopoly measures.