#anticompetitive

[pkgam]

Confirmation: Google Only cares about the Adverts and Money, Not users

There were some leaks in regards to the Google Antitrust case and it's nice to finally see this in writing with a section of it:

"One document the company unsuccessfully tried to keep behind closed doors — Judge Amit Mehta made it public — involved a Google vice president bragging about how “addictive” the search giant’s services are, comparing them to tobacco and illicit drugs.

The executive, Michael Roszak, said that means Google is free to “mostly ignore the demand side” — i.e., consumers — in favor of “the supply side of advertisers, ad formats, and sales.” "

-----

Well well well... I wonder what all those naysayers/fanboys that blindly said Google listens and is trying to make the world a better place have to say now. I mean this is pretty sickening stuff. Like being proud of creating an addiction like alcohol and/or tobacco?... No wonder they want to keep this trial as secretive as possible: Because it'll make them look really bad. But I have a strong hunch we'll be seeing more leaks as time goes on. ;)

In any case, I for one am glad that I seen it long ago and only use the bare minimum of their stuff. I also don't adopt anything new (I use the term "new" loosely too because a lot of it is copies/buyouts) that they make because we all know they'll just shut it down later anyway. So I wonder if a lot of people picked up on that because they are no longer getting the widespread support for stuff like they used to. Or maybe people are tired of their crappy services in general and just use the bare minimum as well. Hard to say because there can be a lot of reasons. All I know is that their new stuff doesn't last long because of a lack of adoption and being unable to make profits. Which is good! Bad companies don't deserve to make money.

I guess if you still have to use their "services" and want to try and give them feedback on how to change things for the better, you've gotta throw in something that relates it with money so it has the best chance of not going in the proverbial paper shredder. But even then it's not guaranteed of course as they'll do whatever benefits "them" and not the users they claim to care about publicly while boasting about creating addictions privately.

Please spread the word on this. The more people who see them for who they are the better.

Your thoughts?

Thanks for reading and have a good one!

[erebusvincent]

He's so unserious. The same guy who pretends to be a free speech defender and liberty-minded person is arguing that companies don't get to choose what platforms they advertise on. How embarrassing for him.

[usnewsper-business]

Oilfield Waste Company Ordered to Sell Assets, Restoring Competition for Oilfield Waste Disposal Services in Western Canada #Alberta #anticompetitive #anticompetitivebehavior #Canadianoperations #CompetitionBureau #consumerinterests #divestassets #equipment #Innovation #landfills #lowerprices #market #marketplace #merger #oilfieldwastecompany #oilfieldwastedisposalservices #regulatoryrequirements #restorecompetition #rivalfirm #Saskatchewan #smallerplayers #treatmentplants #WesternCanada

[mykhuranaandkhurana-blog]

In order to demonstrate how these agreements, operate in an anti-competitive manner, a brief description of the types of agreements is given.

[gynoidgearhead]

[Image captions: tweets by @existentialcomics reading as follows.]

Bill Gates made his money by extinguishing free software and forcing us to pay him a tax just to turn our computers on. This was only possible because the State was ready to violently enforce his "intellectual property". He didn't create a computer revolution, he destroyed one. Zuckerberg made his money in the exact same way, of course - by destroying a free social network. A social network was bound to emerge; what Zuckerberg did was prevent it from following open protocols, like email, so just anyone couldn't set up a server to socialize with anyone. To say these people added value to the world and therefore "deserve" their billions is absurd. They subtracted value, an enormous amount of value, and stymied progress to seize control and extract wealth. Computers and the internet would be more advanced if they had never existed.

[End caption.]

[not-terezi-pyrope]

I haven't personally verified this as I'm not at a computer, but multiple people in multiple places are saying the same thing. This is fucking insane. First the endless war on UBlock, then the Chromium changes to shut out some blocker functionalities entirely next year, now this?

Something is deeply rotten in recent Google/YouTube policy. I can't imagine that this is legal - how is this not anticompetitive? Google needs to get mega fucked in the press and the courts sooner rather than later.

And I need to switch to Firefox as soon as I get home.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.

Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.

That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.

Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against

Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.

A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority."

Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/keyword-swarming-dotdash.jpg

The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.

Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.

This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:

https://twitter.com/ichbinGisele/status/1642481590524583936

There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:

https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/

The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:

https://moneygroup.pr/

Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:

https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/

All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:

https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/

As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.

A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).

Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.

Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.

As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:

https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1777408051357585425

As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.

All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.

Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/

This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-payments-apple-reached-20-220947331.html

Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:

https://www.ft.com/content/b9eb3180-2a6e-41eb-91fe-2ab5942d4150

But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.

It cheated.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Image: freezelight (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spam_wall_-_Flickr_-_freezelight.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[fans4wga]

Writers Guild West Official: Era of Hollywood Mergers Hastened the Strike

August 10, 2023

Laura Blum-Smith, the Writers Guild of America West’s director of research and public policy, considers the strike a result of a tsunami of Hollywood mergers that has handed studios and streamers the power to its exploit workers.

“Harmful mergers and attempts to monopolize markets are a recurring theme in the history of media and entertainment, and they are a key part of what led 11,500 writers to go on strike more than 100 days ago against their employers,” Blum-Smith said on Thursday at an event with the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice over new merger guidelines unveiled in July.

She pointed to Disney, Amazon and Netflix as companies that “gained power through anticompetitive consolidation and vertical integration,” allowing them to impose “more and more precarious working conditions, increasingly short term employment and lower pay for writers and other workers across the industry.” But she sees revisions to the merger guidelines that address labor concerns a key part of the solution to prevent further mergers in the entertainment industry moving forward.

“The FTC and DOJ’s new draft merger guidelines are part of a deeply necessary effort to revive antitrust enforcement,” she added. “Compared with earlier guidelines, the new ones are much more skeptical of the idea that mergers are the natural way for companies to grow. And they focus more on the various ways mergers hurt competition, including how mergers impact workers.”

In July, the FTC and DOJ jointly released a new road map for regulatory review of mergers. They require companies to consider the impact of proposed transactions on labor, signaling that the agencies intend to review whether mergers could negatively impact wages and working conditions. FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, who was joined by agency chair Lina Khan, said in a statement about the guidelines that “a merger that may substantially lessen competition for workers will not be immunized by a prediction that predicted savings from a merger will be passed on to consumers.” Historically, transactions have been considered mostly through the lens of benefits to consumers.

The guidelines lack the force of law but influence the way in which judges consider lawsuits to block proposed transactions. They also tell the public how competition enforcers will assess the potential for a merger’s harm to competition.

Antitrust enforcers have steadily been taking notice of negative impacts to labor as a result of industry consolidation. “We’ve heard concerns that a handful of companies may now again be controlling the bulk of the entertainment supply chain from content creation to distribution,” Khan said last year during a listening forum over revisions to the guidelines, in a nod to anticompetitive conduct by studios that led to the Paramount Decrees. “We’ve heard concerns that this type of consolidation and integration can enable firms to exert market power over creators and workers alike.”

Adam Conover, writer and WGA board member, said in that April 2022 forum that his show Adam Ruins Everything was killed by AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner in 2018 when TruTV’s parent company forced the network to cut costs. He stressed that a handful of companies “now control the production and distribution of almost all entertainment content available to the American public,” allowing them to “more easily hold down our wages and set onerous terms for our employment.” It’s not just writers that are impacted by an overly consolidated Hollywood either, he explained. After Disney acquired 21st Century Fox in 2019, he said that the studios pushed the industry into ending backend participation and trapping actors in exclusive contracts preventing them from pursuing other work.

Blum-Smith said that aggressive competition enforcement is necessary as “Wall Street continues to push for more consolidation among our employers despite the industry’s history of mergers that failed to deliver any of the consumer benefits they’ve claimed that left writers and audiences worse off with less diversity of content and fewer choices.”

“More mergers will leave writers with even fewer places to sell their work and tell their stories and the remaining companies will have even more power to lower pay and worsen working conditions,” she warned. “Strong enforcement against mergers is essential to protect workers in media and workers across the country and these guidelines are an important step in the right direction.”

[mariacallous]

If you’ve rented an apartment in the US in the past several years, you may have had the sense that the game was rigged: Prices creep up not only at your building but at others throughout the city, seemingly in lockstep. A new civil lawsuit brought by the US Department of Justice today alleges that in many cases it’s not just in your head—and that a single company’s algorithm is to blame.

That company is RealPage, a Texas-based firm that provides commercial revenue management software for landlords. In other words, it helps set the prices of apartments. But it does so, the DOJ alleges in its lawsuit, by effectively helping its clients cheat; landlords feed rental rate and lease terms into the system, and the RealPage algorithm in turn spits out a suggested price that enables coordination and hinders competition.

“By feeding sensitive data into a sophisticated algorithm powered by artificial intelligence, RealPage has found a modern way to violate a century-old law through systematic coordination of rental housing prices,” deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco said in a statement.

RealPage’s reach is broad. It controls 80 percent of the market for software of its kind, which in turn is used to set prices of around 3 million units across the country, according to the DOJ. It already faces multiple lawsuits, including one from the state of Arizona and another in Washington, DC, where RealPage software is allegedly used to price more than 90 percent of units in large apartment buildings. RealPage’s algorithmic pricing first gained broader attention when a 2022 ProPublica investigation detailed how the company’s YieldStar software works.

The DOJ civil lawsuit, which was joined by the attorneys general of eight states, is a significant escalation in legal action against the company. It’s also a first for the DOJ, according to officials speaking on background during a call to discuss the complaint. While the government had previously filed criminal charges against an Amazon seller for algorithm-enabled price-fixing, this is the first civil action in which the algorithm itself, the Justice Department official says, was effectively the means of the violation.

The complaint itself quotes RealPage executives allegedly acknowledging anticompetitive aspects of its product. “There is greater good in everybody succeeding versus essentially trying to compete against one another in a way that actually keeps the entire industry down,” one RealPage executive allegedly wrote.

RealPage has repeatedly denied any allegations of antitrust violations, going so far as to publish a six-page digital pamphlet that claims to tell “the Real Story” about its products, along with an extensive FAQ page on a dedicated public policy website. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “Attacks on the industry’s revenue management are based on demonstrably false information,” one section of that site reads. “RealPage revenue management software benefits both housing providers and residents.”

“We are disappointed that, after multiple years of education and cooperation on the antitrust matters concerning RealPage, the DOJ has chosen this moment to pursue a lawsuit that seeks to scapegoat pro-competitive technology that has been used responsibly for years,” said Jennifer Bowcock, senior vice president of communications and creative at RealPage, in an emailed statement. “RealPage’s revenue management software is purposely built to be legally compliant, and we have a long history of working constructively with the DOJ to show that."

The DOJ disagrees. “Algorithms don’t exist in a law-free zone,” said Monaco in a press conference to discuss the case. “Training a machine to break the law is still breaking the law.”

In this case, the complaint alleges that those algorithms consistently drove rental prices upward. “RealPage’s software tends to maximize price increases, minimize price decreases, and maximize landlords’ pricing power,” said the DOJ in a press release. RealPage also doesn’t just recommend prices; in many cases, it actively sets them.

“RealPage actively polices landlords’ compliance with those recommendations,” said US attorney general Merrick Garland in today’s press conference. “A large number of landlords effectively agree to outsource their pricing decisions to RealPage by using an ‘auto-accept’ setting that effectively permits RealPage to determine the price a renter will pay.”

The DOJ also claims RealPage has created a “self-reinforcing feedback loop” with its data intake and pricing recommendations structure that also gives it an alleged monopoly in the apartment revenue management software industry. Any competitor who plays by the rules, the DOJ claims, is at a distinct disadvantage.

The Justice Department has spent the past several years staffing up with technologists and data scientists, better enabling them to “interrogate the code,” as multiple officials described the investigative process. While this is the first major algorithmic collusion case, DOJ officials suggested it would be far from the last.

[follow-up-news]

The Federal Trade Commission said Friday that it is suing three drug middlemen, accusing them of inflating insulin prices. The FTC accused the "Big Three" pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) — UnitedHealth Group's Optum Rx, CVS Health's Caremark and Cigna's Express Scripts — of "engaging in anticompetitive and unfair rebating practices that have artificially inflated the list price of insulin drugs, impaired patients’ access to lower list price products, and shifted the cost of high insulin list prices to vulnerable patients." Around 8 million Americans rely on insulin in the U.S., per the FTC. PBMs work with insurance companies to negotiate discounted prices from drug companies in exchange for including the drugs in their coverage. In theory, they are supposed to save patients money. Also included in the lawsuit are the PBMs' group purchasing organizations, which include Zinc Health Services, Ascent Health Services and Emisar Pharma Services. The "Big Three" oversee around 80% of all prescription drug plans in the U.S., according to the complaint, which alleges that they created a rebate system prioritizing high rebates from drug manufacturers, which led to the inflated insulin prices.

[iww-gnv]

The Writers Guild will picket Amazon’s upcoming “Prime Day,” the retail giant’s biggest sales event of the year. Recasting it as “Crime Day,” the guild says it will take to social media to let the company know it “won’t let Amazon turn Hollywood into a gig economy with its Silicon Valley business practices.” The guild, whose strike is now in its 68th day, also will picket Amazon’s Culver Studios on Wednesday. “Big Tech companies like Amazon have taken advantage of changes in the industry business model to hollow out the middle class of our profession in pursuit of growing profits,” the WGA’s negotiating committee told members on Saturday. “With the rise of streaming, writers are asked to do more work in less time for less money.” The guild says its contract demands seek “reasonable protections that will guarantee that writing remains a sustainable career for current and future writers. For Amazon, the cost of our proposals is just $32 million per year, 0.006% of the conglomerate’s annual revenue.” “Amazon has gained a sizeable footprint in media in a short time by using the same anticompetitive playbook critical to its rise as a tech company,” the negotiating committee said in its latest communique. “It is positioning itself to be a new industry gatekeeper, growing through acquisitions and using its power to disadvantage competitors, raise prices for consumers, and to push down wages for writers. Unfortunately, our situation is not unique. Across the country, Big Tech has invaded nearly every industry, building gig economies where there were once sustainable careers. We are not alone in this fight.”

[niroke]

An excerpt from the CNN article reporting on it is listed below.

After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” US District Judge Amit Mehta wrote in Monday’s opinion. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”

The decision by the US District Court for the District of Columbia is a stunning rebuke of Google’s oldest and most important business. The company has spent tens of billions of dollars on exclusive contracts to secure a dominant position as the world’s default search provider on smartphones and web browsers.

Those contracts have given it the scale to block out would-be rivals such as Microsoft’s Bing and DuckDuckGo, the US government alleged in a historic antitrust lawsuit filed during the Trump administration.

Now, said Mehta, that powerful position has led to anticompetitive behavior that must be stopped.

Specifically, Google’s exclusive deals with Apple and other key players in the mobile ecosystem were anticompetitive, Mehta said. Google has also charged high prices in search advertising that reflect its monopoly power in search, he added.

[usnewsper-business]

Oilfield Waste Company Ordered to Sell Assets, Restoring Competition for Oilfield Waste Disposal Services in Western Canada #Alberta #anticompetitive #anticompetitivebehavior #Canadianoperations #CompetitionBureau #consumerinterests #divestassets #equipment #Innovation #landfills #lowerprices #market #marketplace #merger #oilfieldwastecompany #oilfieldwastedisposalservices #regulatoryrequirements #restorecompetition #rivalfirm #Saskatchewan #smallerplayers #treatmentplants #WesternCanada

[alexanderwales]

One of the more pointlessly frustrating things that ever happened to me was getting an email that told me I was switching cell phone carriers. The email just said "Notice: Your Verizon Wireless service is transitioning to AT&T". This was back in 2010, when that was a slightly bigger deal, since LTE wasn't widely available in the United States at the time. Verizon was using one standard, AT&T was using the other, and most phones could not switch between the two because they required fundamentally different hardware.

The email said that they were going to get me a new phone, and that my Verizon plan would become an AT&T plan in some kind of bastardized version of grandfathering, without changing the rate I was paying.

It did not explain to me why this was happening, or how, and I didn't find out until later, in spite of a few emails inquiring what the fuck they thought they were doing.

This was the biggest pain in the ass I have ever experienced. I was one of a group of people this was happening to, but it was a small group of mostly rural customers, and between the time I'd signed up with Verizon and when the switch happened, I had moved away from where virtually all the other customers were. I had no way of knowing this at the time, but it meant that when I went to the AT&T store, they had not had any training whatsoever in what was supposed to happen. They didn't believe me until I showed them the documentation, and even then, I think they were a little skeptical. Managers were called.

Eventually I got it sorted out, but it was even more complicated than it needed to be because my dad had been the one to sign me up for the phone (I was in college at the time) and his name was the one on the account. He lived four hours away from me, and AT&T did not seem to know what to do about this whole thing.

But I did, eventually, learn how and why I was being made to switch carriers.

What had happened is that back in 2008, two years prior, Verizon announced that it was set to acquire Alltel. This would have created a monopoly (Alltel and Verizon were significant competitors), so the FCC required that part of Alltel would be spun off into its own company that would remain independent in order to ensure that there was market competition, particularly in rural areas. AT&T then snapped up some of the remaining pieces of Alltel. In theory this should not have affected me, because I was a Verizon customer, not an Alltel or AT&T customer.

So what happened to me was more complicated.

As background, the FCC divides cell phone markets into Cellular Market Areas (CMAs), which are then either Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) or Rural Service Areas (RSAs). There are about 750 total CMAs in the United States.

Back in 2005, Alltel acquired Midwest Wireless Holdings. There was a consent decree in 2006 that required them to divest markets that would have been anticompetitive, and four of those RSAs were then snatched up by Rural Cellular Corporation. Rural Cellular was then bought by Verizon in 2009.

So there was one single RSA, out of 750 in the United States, which was covered by the Alltel/Midwest consent decree and the Alltel/Verizon consent decree, and for all this merger madness to go ahead, it was agreed that Verizon could acquire everything in that RSA conditional on "prompt redivestiture" to a buyer approved by the DOJ. Most of these customers would go from being Alltel customers to being customers of someone else, not Verizon, but Verizon did also have to give up some of their own original customers.

Here is the punchline: the Department of Justice, in order to promote competition in the free market, forced me to change carriers to someone I did not choose for myself. Like if I was about to go to Burger King and they forced me to go to McDonald's instead so that there would be "fair competition". Absolutely ludicrous, at least from my perspective.

Anyway, this was all back in 2010, so ... thanks, Obama.

[rjzimmerman]

Insurers Are Deserting Homeowners as Climate Shocks Worsen. (New York Times)

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

Since 2018, more than 1.9 million home insurance contracts nationwide have been dropped — “nonrenewed,” in the parlance of the industry. In more than 200 counties, the nonrenewal rate has tripled or more, according to the findings of a congressional investigation released Wednesday.

As a warming planet delivers more wildfires, hurricanes and other threats, America’s once reliably boring home insurance market has become the place where climate shocks collide with everyday life.

The consequences could be profound. Without insurance, you can’t get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home. Communities that are deemed too dangerous to insure face the risk of falling property values, which means less tax revenue for schools, police and other basic services. As insurers pull back, they can destabilize the communities left behind, making their decisions a predictor of the disruption to come.

Now, for the first time, the scale of that pullback is becoming public. Last fall, the Senate Budget Committee demanded the country’s largest insurance companies provide the number of nonrenewals by county and year. The result is a map that tracks the climate crisis in a new way.

The American Property Casualty Insurance Association, a trade group, said information about nonrenewals was “unsuitable for providing meaningful information about climate change impacts,” because the data doesn’t show why individual insurers made decisions. The group added that efforts to gather data from insurers “could have an anticompetitive effect on the market.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island and the committee’s chairman, said the new information was crucial. In an interview, he called the new data as good an indicator as any “for predicting the likelihood and timing of a significant, systemic economic crash,” as disruption in the insurance market spreads to property values.

“The climate crisis that is coming our way is not just about polar bears, and it’s not just about green jobs,” Mr. Whitehouse said Wednesday during a hearing on the investigation’s findings. “It actually is coming through your mail slot, in the form of insurance cancellations, insurance nonrenewals and dramatic increases in insurance costs.”

The map of dropped policies shows how the crisis in the American home insurance market has spread beyond well-known problems in Florida and California. The jump in nonrenewals now extends along the Gulf Coast, through Alabama and Mississippi; up the Atlantic seaboard, through the Carolinas, Virginia and into southern New England; inland, to parts of the plains and Intermountain West; and even as far as Hawaii.

[obsidiannebula]

Google has been ruled a monopoly!

*Google has been found guilty of anticompetitive practices, violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act by use of exclusive dealing to buy default search engine status on most phones and browsers, preventing competition.

*Google "enjoys an 89.2% share of the market for general search services, which increases to 94.9% on mobile devices,” according to the ruling.

*The exclusive contracts see Google as the default search engine for 70% of the market. The majority of people never change their defaults, and so only Google ever had enough data to create a truly viable search engine. Moreover, they could raise prices for advertisers on their platform because theirs was the only one that mattered to advertise on.

*One key evidence demonstrating the importance of default status is Microsoft's Bing having 80% of the search market as the default search engine in the Microsoft Edge browser.

*Judge Mehta did not sanction Google's team for destroying reams of evidence because it was so blatantly unlawful and sanctioning Google would have made no difference in the outcome of the case, so he just didn't bother.

*Both parties must submit a schedule for the remedy phase, the next part of the trial in which both sides will present arguments about what to do about Google's anticompetitive conduct, by September 4th, 2024.

*Google can still appeal the decision, and likely will.

*Judge Mehta has the power to end the exclusive dealing contracts, and could go even further, requiring Google to share its unfairly acquired search data with competitors or even breaking Google up. I don't expect anything as big as the latter option to happen, but it COULD.

*Even if Google doesn't get broken up, its monopoly on search has ended, and that effectively breaks its hold over the web.

*Moreover, monopolization laws have been largely unenforced in recenr decades, but this case should strike fear into the hearts of American megacorps, who now face a real risk of having their illegal dealings exposed and prosecuted.