 Congress has been engaged for the last year in investigations, they call it, into the potential antitrust behavior of big tech. And they've been investigating, we know, they've been investigating Apple and Google and Amazon and Facebook, of course. I'm surprised Microsoft didn't make it. Probably, you know, maybe they'd be tired of going after Microsoft and maybe, who knows. Microsoft's being sued right now for antitrust in Europe. So maybe Microsoft's in trouble in Europe and not so much in the US. Or maybe Microsoft has spent enough lobbying dollars over the last 10 years since it got sued the first time to prevent future investigations into the antitrust. Anyway, so they've been digging, they've been going through emails, they've been using congressional subpoenas, to get internal memos, internal emails, they've been talking to competitors, they've been talking to suppliers and customers and they have really gone out and done their homework. All in an effort to decide whether the big tech are violating antitrust laws. And I think, more specifically though, I think it's not even that they're violating, whether they're violating antitrust laws right now, but really whether they are too powerful, too big, and the Congress needs to do something about it. Because after all, Congress is not limited to antitrust laws. If one of these companies is violating antitrust laws and will get to antitrust laws in a minute, if one of these countries is indeed violating antitrust laws, then there is a simple remedy. The Justice Department files a lawsuit against them and they take them to court and there are all kinds of nasty things that can happen to these companies in court. Congress doesn't have to get involved unless Congress is contemplating actually potentially writing laws specifically for these companies. And that's, I think, what's on the table. What's on the table is not just that the Justice Department will go after them for antitrust violations, but that Congress will write a bunch of laws trying to regulate and control these companies and ultimately could write a law that breaks them up. I don't think it's unconstitutional. If they make it broad enough and they're not just breaking up one company, to revise the antitrust laws to expand them and they've been expanded and changed over the decades, I think several times at least once or twice, and Congress to do that as well. So they're not limiting themselves, I don't think, to a common understanding or the court's common understanding of what constitutes antitrust. Indeed, one of the motivations for doing all this is the idea that over the last, since the 1980s, I would say over the last 40 years, that the interpretation of antitrust laws, the use of antitrust laws has been too moderate that Justice Department has do infrequently used antitrust that antitrust should be invoked much more often, that more and more companies should be sued and that maybe Congress is thinking, many people think Congress is thinking. Antitrust needs to be modernized, need to be strengthened and need to be expanded. If the courts and the Justice Department is not interpreting the existing laws the way Congress would like them to, well, we can write new laws. So you really gotta think of this as a broad attempt by Congress to re-examine, re-look at our antitrust laws as they exist and apply them to the specifics of the situation with Big Tech because the fact is that antitrust laws it would be very difficult to apply existing antitrust laws to Big Tech. So let's take some examples. I mean, typically antitrust laws are built on a particular type of economic theory that basically says that when companies attain a large market share in a particular market they then can charge consumers a higher price then would be derived in a competitive market. So, and gain excessive in quotes, profits from that, right? In standard economics, the ideal, and very much this is a platonic ideal, the ideal situation in the marketplace, the ideal form of capitalism, if you will, is perfect competition. Perfect competition is an environment in which all firms, I can't say with a straight face because it's so ludicrous. All firms are the same. All firms have the same information, the same ability, the same talent, the same, they're the same. And in such a situation, no firm can charge more for a product than any other firm because they're selling exactly the same product. Yeah. How is this perfect? This is like the most boring, stupid, uninteresting, unrealistic, detached from reality, floating world possible. But this is how they, how economics, and if you've taken an economics class, economics 101, let's talk about this. This is how it's presented. So you have these monolithic little companies competing with one another. And all the other competition does is it keeps prices the same, keeps prices the same. And they're cheap because no company can make a profit. And basically perfect competition drives profits to zero. So there are no profits. So it's perfectly impossible and perfectly ridiculous and perfectly not capitalism. And if a company discovers something new and adds a new feature and charges a higher price, because information is perfect, within minutes, hours, days, all other companies make the same change. And therefore, they take away the advantage the first company had and prices drop again. And the whole process of economics, the whole process of market says, this concept moving towards equilibrium, which is perfect competition where an innovation happens, everybody catches up. Why anybody would innovate? What the motivation for innovation is, is beyond me. Why be a first mover is beyond me. Now, you have to remember that that is the framework from which most people think that is the ideal, that is the Garden of Eden. We talked about the Garden of Eden a few shows ago. That is what they strive for. That is perfect. Perfect. And therefore, everything else is measured relative to that. Relative to that. So a monopoly is when somebody has so much market power that they don't have to, they don't keep the price as low as it would be in perfect competition. They can actually raise the price so that they find that point in which raising the price does not affect demand for the product by enough as to, so they raise it to the price where they make the most money. Where they make the most money, where they maximize their profit. Right, it's not an infinite price because demand will go down as price goes up, but there is a switchback. And that price is by definition going to be higher than the price of perfect competition. And that is kind of the thinking behind much of the economic arguments against antitrust. That monopoly school consumers, they charge too high a price. And the other thing that happens in such a market, they claim, they claim, is that quality goes down because they're no competitive pressures to match and that price goes up and quality goes down. And that's standard economic 101. Everybody's taught that. I can't even blame these congressmen for being economic idiots, making ramesses because this is what the economic professors who should know better teach them. And they hire all these young kids to work for them and they go out and do the research and what have they got in their head? They've got the model of perfect competition in monopolies as their standard, which is indeed insane. So, here we are. We have companies that are dominant in their marketplace. It depends how you define marketplace, but they seem dominant in their marketplace. Google, I can't remember what the number of searches, you know, 70%, 80%, 90% of searches go through Google. Facebook, you know, there is no other global player that matches Facebook. You know, Twitter, but Twitter's tiny in comparison. YouTube, but is YouTube really a competitive Facebook? I think it is, but you know, in its world of social networking, it has a dominant market position. You've got Amazon, which it's hard to understand the dominant market position because retail is retail is retail, whether you get a delivered, whether you order on the internet or go to a store, it's still retail. And they don't have a dominant position in retail. Global sales, it's not like 4%. You know, online retail, it's hard to tell. I've seen lots of different studies, but the number is somewhere between 33% and 49% of all online sales go through Amazon, but that's not just Amazon selling you. It's Amazon plus the Amazon marketplace selling you. So there are platforms plus direct sellers. So what do they exactly dominate? They dominate online sales, but even then it's less than 50%. And who am I missing? Apple, I don't know what they dominate. Oh, I know what they dominate. We'll get to that. They dominate the Apple Store. They dominate the App Store. I mean, isn't that bizarre, right? They control the ecosystem. They can't go after them on the iPhone because they have competition, you know, Samsung and lots of other little guys. They can't go after them for, I don't know, computers because they have Dell and they have Lenovo and they have all these other competitions. Indeed, they're a minority. They can go after them on iPads, I mean, what? They can go after them on operating system because they're Microsoft. So the only thing they can go after them is on. It's funny because they're looking for something. Is the App Store, which they control? You cannot, 100% of the App Store is controlled by Apple. How does that, anyway, we'll get to the App Store. So think about these companies. Put aside Apple a minute because Apple didn't really belong there. Apple's a different animal. It just shows that they're not really looking for anything significant. The whole point of Apple, the whole point of bringing Apple is to attack big tech, quad big tech, right? And then to break up big tech, quad big tech, not for any real issue that is common to all big tech. But the other three you could argue in some way, Amazon, so-so, the problem is that they dominate their marketplace. But this is the problem politicians have. And this is the problem the Justice Department has and this is the problem, and this is the reason why none of these companies has been sued yet although I wouldn't be surprised if they are. Google and Facebook actually offer their product for, how much did you pay to use Facebook? How much are you paying to be in YouTube right now? I mean, you should be paying me, but how much are you paying to use YouTube right now? How much you pay to use the Google search engine? They offer their products for free. Perfect competition wouldn't lower the price. Economic theory is out the window. We've got a so-called monopolist who are charging zero for their product. I mean, that's insanity. How could you do that? Well, television did it before, radio did it before. So it's not new, and nothing about this is new. Even the claims about so-called limiting speech or whatever is not new. So they've got a price of zero. So what do you do? I'm not asking you to pay for the platform. I'm asking you to pay for the value you get from me. I'm not asking you to pay YouTube. I'm asking you to pay me. And I'm asking, you don't have to. If you get a value, I for one, try to pay for the values I've received. Even if somebody playing in the subway a beautiful tune on a violin, I'll drop a couple of bucks into their bucket. If they're just sitting there with a handout, they're not getting a dime. But if they're providing a value, they're doing something good, they're doing something worthwhile, I'll drop, I'll make a contribution. Seems just, seems like justice. Seems like consistent with the trade of principle. But anyway, I digress, right? This wasn't about me. They offer the product for free. So how are they violating? They're not behaving like a monopolist. They're actually at the same price point as you would under so-called perfect competition. So what the hell? An Amazon. Amazon is not making huge profits on its marketplace. Amazon, where it supposedly dominates, makes very low profits. Indeed, Amazon is responsible for lowering prices on goods. I mean, there have been several times where I've gone to a Best Buy and bought something and said, oh, wait a minute, it's cheap on Amazon. You gotta lower your price. So Amazon is not behaving like a monopolist. Amazon is behaving like a, like as if it faced perfect competition. So-called. Amazon is just maximizing its strategy vis-a-vis Bezos. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist broods. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. That should be at least 100. 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