 Welcome to likable science. I'm your host with Ethan Allen today. Our topic is is it time to break up big tech? On July 29th, the house judiciary subcommittee on antitrust commercial and administrative law held a hearing on online platforms and market power on Capitol Hill legislators question big tech CEOs including Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Apple's Tim Cook, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, and Google's Zunder Pechai. And Ethan and I are going to discuss this today about whether to break up big tech. What do you think, Ethan? Well, I think I think first off, you and I are probably not going to come up with all the answers. That's probably the take home message. No, we're not. We're not. It's a big and complex subject and should be dealt with by a wide range of people besides the CEOs, besides the Congress, obviously antitrust attorneys should be involved, business people, secretary of commerce, that kind of thing, as well as of course they should have the voices of standard consumers of their products heard. But yeah, it has very wide ranging ramifications though, right? Right. And you know what, as a very frequent Facebook user and Amazon orderer and Googler, I'm certainly concerned about this. As a scientist, do you have any particular concerns? Well, sure. I mean, for one, these companies have developed amazing products over the years. They've gotten very good at gathering a whole bunch of data. And big data is sort of inherently very useful. You can derive a lot of useful information from large data sets, which is valuable. But of course, it can be misused too. And that's, I think part of the concern is how are these companies using this data? How are they both protecting the data? How are they themselves using it? Oh, I think the focus of the hearing was much more, have they gotten so big that now there is no competition in that arena anymore? Sure. And you have like Amazon buying whole foods. I mean, what are they? Do they sell books? Do they sell every product in the universe? Or are they a food store? I mean, we don't know what they are. And we don't know what they're going to buy next, and they have so much power now, they can pretty much buy out anything. So I get that. I get the concern. Right. On the other hand, we haven't seen sort of the kind of price gouging that can happen with a monopoly, typically, where once some one group gets in control of a given industry, they start jacking up the prices and jacking up the prices because nobody else can give that commodity, right? We haven't really seen that. No one's talking about sort of upping charges for internet connectivity, or if anything, prices on a lot of this stuff seem to be dropping right now. But I share your concern, particularly in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic here, pandemic. People are more sort of dependent on, particularly on Amazon than they ever were before. People don't want to go out to stores and face crowds of people. They very much want to order online and get stuff delivered to them. And they just feel it's a safer way to do business. And this would seem like a bad time to rock that boat, right? Yeah. It may just be the worst time to do that because Amazon is well experienced and in a good position to provide us those goods we need and that we want and want quickly, except for those wipes that I wanted and they canceled that order. But anyway, but a lot of times when we are involved with tech and we interact with Amazon and we interact with Facebook and Google, we don't know what kind of data they're getting. We just want the results. And whether they're collecting our private information or not, we kind of have to turn a blind eye to that. Yeah. Or you could make the argument that basically the government should regulate what kind of information can be gathered. I mean, I was struck several years ago when at one point I had been searching for a particular item online and then the next day when I went on to Facebook, suddenly all the ads that were showing up were just for this same item I was looking at. And so that sort of seems harmless enough, although it's a little unnerving the first time you see it. But when you realize that basically at this point companies can gather all kinds of data about where you're looking online, what you're doing, how long you're spending on particular pages. Do you really want companies to know that much about you? Or on the other hand, what if you do want to shop and find out about a particular product and you think, you know what, if I search this product, then I don't have to do anything. Facebook will provide me these ads when I'm looking at it on the product I'm looking for and it will be very simple. However, if you're buying a screwdriver for a friend of yours and you have no interest in screwdrivers and you get ads on screwdrivers for a few days, you may not appreciate that that much. Right. I mean, I think Facebook would argue sort of your first argument. They're providing a service. They're basically targeting, rather than just seeing random ads, most of which you won't be interested in, you're only going to see the ads that really interest you. And they know that they interest you because these are things you've been looking at. So they would argue that that's doing all of us a big favor. Right. Yeah. And this is likable science. It's not likable law. So we won't get into the legal issues too much. But I would ask them what laws these companies are violating if they're going to break them up. I believe they have to actually be violating laws rather than providing the best product at the lowest price. Yeah. I think that was part of the issue is they've not behaved in the way the big oil companies did when they sort of got together. They've not behaved the way AT&T did when it sort of controlled all the telecommunications. They sort of haven't shown any of the real sort of signs of big monopoly at this stage, although effectively these several companies control a huge amount of our communications and our commerce. Right. Right. And you know what? In a lot of ways, I am more concerned about the fact that the price of gas seems or at least in Hawaii seems to be high most of the time. And I'm less concerned about the fact that I can go on Amazon and I can buy a product for very cheap. So in terms of this concern about pricing and price gouging, I'm not really seeing it either. Right. I mean, I guess there were isolated incidents early on in the pandemic when certain products on Amazon, particularly offered by third parties became very expensive, certain things like masks and all. But I think they pretty quickly put a sort of stomp down on that and stopped that kind of behavior pretty rapidly. So yeah, it's sort of an interesting thing now. Are they sort of why is Congress going after them at this point? What is the real point? What do they hope to accomplish from this? Right. I think to some extent it may be an issue of people realize that our technology is changing very rapidly and our technological capabilities are changing very rapidly. The ability of companies to gather data is rapidly advanced far as we're outstripping our advancement of our legal policies and our rules and regulations, right? And so in a sense, I think maybe this is sort of a almost a belated attempt to start catching up a bit. Sure. And some of this we just don't know. The typical consumer wouldn't know what could be going on in the background. For example, if you look at China and interference with human rights and violating privacy, I mean, what are your thoughts about that and in relation to our tech companies and how they might get that data and use it? Yeah. I mean, China provides a really nice sort of extreme example because they already gather immense amounts of data about people in China, as I understand it, are forced to use certain apps on their phone that basically keep feeding this data into governmental servers. If you basically start like looking on the wrong websites and or emailing the wrong people, you already China can and will limit your ability, for instance, to travel. And suddenly you won't be able to buy tickets on a train or a plane, travel somewhere else in China or outside of China, simply because you sort of lost social points, basically. You sort of prove yourself to be a less good social person. And what they're doing actually in Western provinces with the Uyghurs is makes out that stuff they're currently doing for most of China look like sort of chicken feed. I mean, they're really, they're gathering mass amounts of data. They have huge rays of camera cameras all over very sophisticated facial recognition where they claim they can recognize faces with 95% accuracy, even when mass. Wow. And then they track people. Little they know if any of your behaviors change, you start going to work at a different time, if you start leaving your house by the back door instead of the front door, if you change the routines in terms of this person used to be surfing the web between these hours. Now they're surfing the web a whole lot less. Any of these things can trigger an investigation now, but by the Chinese authorities. So it's a real example of what can happen when a lot of data gets centralized in the one person or one entity's hands. Yeah, very sober. Right. And then that brings us to Google because, okay, I write fiction. And so I may choose to Google things like how to, you know, murder someone or how, you know, how does, how do you make a bomb? Those kind of things as part of my fiction. And I know a lot of authors have to do that. But when you look at Google, they, they, you know, you can definitely see history of Google searches. And the government certainly, if someone is suspected of a crime, they may subpoena their computers so that they can look at their history of searches and, and other computer interactions to find out, you know, to get evidence against them. And so, you know, that raises kind of that China issue. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, it's very interesting again gets it has been used for good and for bad. The classic case a few months ago of the golden state killer finally being identified and brought to justice. Based on essentially massive data from his relatives, they had uploaded on to not 23 and me, but one of the genetic database sites, you know, ancestry, whatever. And they were able to pull that data and through that identify who their key suspect had to be. A very, very good thing, you know, this person, you know, committed heinous crimes and has never brought justice. So it's, you know, like, like most technologies, right, that can be used for good or it can be used for ill. Sure. And then, you know, if that, what does it look like if you break up Google? Because, I mean, how are you going to get, are you still going to have a company called Google? I mean, does that mean that some people have to use Bing and some people have to use other search engines? I mean, as search engine, how do you, how do you break that up? That seems fairly complicated. Yeah, yeah. Again, if you recall the AT&T, when they broke AT&T up, you know, that they made instead of my bell became all the baby bells. There was a Southern bell and Pacific bell and you know, they sort of geographically sliced up the pie. I don't know, that's nearly as practical in, you know, in the sort of the telecommunication that our current telecommunications world where things are so much more globalized. But yeah, and what would be the point of it? Yeah, people seem pretty happy. It's really changed the way people get information fundamentally to have Google around. Right. And you know, another, one thing that is always on my mind and especially during COVID in Hawaii, we have a tremendous job loss situation because of COVID and the shutdown of our tourism industry. And if you, and one thing that we have seen is we've had seen a tremendous increase in job opportunities at Amazon. And in tech, those opportunities seem to have increased. But if you then break up these companies, what does that mean for jobs when we need those jobs so badly? Yes, a very good point. If you sort of destabilize this big segment of our economy right now, is that going to really hurt us very badly in terms of individually hurting the job availability and as a country really hurting our economy even more? Yeah, it's truly far beyond me. I'm not an economist. I can't speak to that. But yeah. Well, you know, one thing that I can say is that if they proceed with this and there's a litigation, the antitrust lawyers will have increased job security. Right. That is true. I mean, even if they try to move ahead on it, you know, there's going to be years and years of legal wrangling back and forth, up and down suits, countersuits, appeals, counter-appeals. Yeah. It won't get settled for a long time. Right, right. And, you know, okay, so now let's kind of move more into your area. Do you think that the government breakups would slow down the technological process or would it likely increase? Yeah, that's a fascinating question to speculate on. I mean, a lot of innovation in this country comes from smaller companies, right? Estimates, I forget what the percentages are, but huge percentages of our really, really innovative stuff happens at companies that are quite small, actually. And a relatively little true innovation happens in the really big companies. So in that sense, you could argue, well, yeah, we should break it up to if we want to stimulate innovation. But on the other hand, how do you break this up when things sort of hit the size now? This huge, huge, huge data sets. You can't sort of change the data sets apart anymore and say, well, you get to deal with personal information, you get to deal with website searches, you get to deal with where the people have been actually located physically. I mean, none of that makes any sense to me. So it's very unclear to me how that could play out, how it would play out. But you know, in COVID times, we've got a unique situation in relation to innovation, because I think what we've been learning since March is that we're operating in an entirely different environment. We have people that are shifting their manufacturing to masks and kind of shields and other things, hand sanitizers, changing innovation to the attempt to find either a cure for COVID or vaccinations for COVID. So we see those kind of innovations. We've seen the increase in use of Zoom and other means of communication that we didn't before. So we have kind of in our society right now, we have this sort of place where there's a lot of opportunity to innovate and change. So I don't know, I don't know that we would need to break up these big companies in order to kind of stir the pot and create innovation. What do you think about that? No, I totally agree with this. COVID has really shown what good innovators can do and how rapidly they can do it. I mean, we have from the time that this virus was first identified in an amazingly short time that had derived its entire genomic code and then all the proteins that got made from that and started work on vaccines. And there are now multiple candidates of vaccines in various levels of various stages of testing, some of which are being actually tested in people. You know, three or four years ago, you couldn't really imagine that. I mean, ISR was our first case where it really did happen. Internationally, there was a great effort to push to get the genome sequenced of the virus and companies all around the world, multiple labs around the world to work together, figuring out what to do about it. But this current one has really been an amazing international effort. There are teams all around the world looking at all sorts of interesting, different approaches. There is a whole new way of looking at vaccines, whole new classes of vaccines now being being developed at these, just this whole approach to doing a vaccine of making against RNA or DNA instead of being against the protein code has been sort of unheard of before. And so, yeah, there's been a huge amount of innovation. I can say the people in business are developing new ways of delivering their services, right? Everyone, yes, you've got to do it virtually. So, yes, companies like Zoom, of course, have profited immensely. People are learning new skills themselves. We've all had to learn how to conduct Zoom meetings, you know, how to use teams, whatever your flavor may be. But, yeah, so I agree. This doesn't seem like a time when we need Pricky to stir the pot of innovation. We've been stirring it. Right. And then the other thing is, as we develop vaccines or cures or other products to assist us in the pandemic, then don't we need to have information dissemination and product dissemination available easily as we have with Amazon, with Facebook, with Google? I mean, you know, doesn't that make this, these other innovations more easy or actually more easier to disseminate? Yes. And I think you hit on a really interesting and critical point there. There's a lot of misinformation now being spread. There are, you know, all sorts of conspiracy theories about COVID and blah, blah, blah. It seems very like misinformation is proliferated. And yet, because we have a relatively small number of groups who deal with most of this, anytime a new sort of threat comes up, they can deal with it. If you had instead, you know, 50 different smaller companies that would give nefarious actors sort of a lot more space to apply their trade, right, to spread disinformation. And it would be harder to stop down because each company would have their own platform, their own software and have to be adapted. So arguably, there's some real value here. And plus, you know, you want, at this time, some very big, very powerful groups. I mean, Bill Gates got on there and funded seven major laboratories, not laboratories, production laboratories, basically to produce vaccines, knowing full well that probably three or four of them will just be wasted money, because we'll be settled on another two or three good vaccine candidates that will be produced en masse. But he understood we needed to be ready to ramp up production whenever it comes. And so, you know, he just figured it's better to waste a few billion now and save a few trillion down the road, you know. Sure. Boy, I wish I could be seeking in billions and trillion like that. But we do have a question from a viewer. Could a big company find the cure for COVID and force people to buy it at a really inflated price? Yeah, that's very interesting. Certainly, Big Pharma has a best, very mixed reputation, right? They have at times tried to charge and at times very successfully charge huge amounts of money for products when they are the only supplier of them. There is reason to think at times, you know, big pharmaceutical companies also sometimes with some pressure behaved somewhat generously and licensed out their process to third world nations, developing nations when it was needed to produce the same product much more cheaply. Yeah, it's interesting that a number of the leading vaccine candidates are not being produced by big companies. I guess Pfizer has one of the vaccine candidates in the running. But most of them are relatively small, relatively new companies. So, I'm sure they'd like to make money. Yeah, and you know what? When you innovate by creating a vaccine, the amount of the cost of doing so is immense. And so to actually pay for that to become profitable is challenging. And so, right? Yeah, it takes billions of dollars to bring a drug to market these days. Billions of dollars, I mean. Right. And they don't do it for a lot to have a loss. They do it to make a profit. And the only thing that drives that is the potential for profit. But this impacts insurance carriers and impacts your bottom line, the cost of your insurance premiums. If everyone in the world has to get a COVID vaccine or vaccination, then that's a challenge economically for the world. Right. On the other hand, that sort of spreads the burden out. If you're making 6 billion, 7 billion doses of this stuff, you don't need to charge so much for any one dose because you're going to make a lot of money. Right, exactly. And this is like an orphan drug where there's only a handful of people who want it, like everyone wants this. So, yeah, it's very interesting balance how that capitalist economic system might work with this. And it'll be intriguing to see how it plays out. So next time this issue is discussed on ThinkTech, what we need is we need an economist. We need a business person we may need Jeff Bezos on as well as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates as well and an antitrust lawyer as well as yourself and Jay Fidel. And there we go. Absolutely. Got to have Jay in there. Absolutely. Any final remarks, Ethan? No, just I'm sort of waiting to see how this plays out. I'll be very interested to see it and great fun talking with you about this. Sure. I think it's been it's a terrific issue and it's allowed me to do a little research on it. It's been a pleasure to talk about this and I hope this has raised some issues for you at home. So whenever you use Google or whenever you're on Facebook or ordering a product on Amazon, you can think about what would happen if these companies were broken up. So thank you for joining us today and we'll see you next time. Aloha.