Here’s Why Reality Shouldn’t Require Bezos or Zuckerberg to “Agree With a Premise”
By: Anthony Andranik Moumjian
Tags: Congress, Manipulation, Technology, Internet, Data

Reality doesn’t require anybody to agree with its premise. It simply is.

July 29, 2020, found the major technology companies’ CEOs testify before Congress.

These were the phrases heard consistently:

I don’t agree with that premise.

I’m not sure about that.

I can’t tell you with certainty.

I disagree with that characterization.

I can’t recall.

I don’t remember.

Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, among the other CEOs, were found accused of several things, many of them confirmed by individuals that have been involved in congressional investigations for the last year now.

While each of these CEOs tried to downplay their market power and competitive edge in their respective industries, it’s quite obvious to understand that the truth and their perspectives are widening to disproportionate levels. It’s quite difficult to act like you’re a small fish when the company you run is worth 12 figures.

Illegitimate business practices posed as freedom of expression and capitalism.

Zuckerberg seems to think that the country has been pushing for “illiberalism”, where freedom of expression has not only been limited but also violated. But nobody seems to think that Facebook is being zipped up shut. In fact, Facebook benefits from hate speech, conspiracy theories, and supercharged ideological conformation. These things have benefited Facebook, and Zuckerberg, a great deal through advertising revenue. You could argue that their algorithm looks for virality because the company depends on it as their lifeblood.

“Mr. Zuckerberg, if the [content is not helpful] for your platform, then how do you explain on Monday, the second most popular video, was a Breitbart video claiming that you don’t need a mask and hydroxychloroquine is a cure for COVID. In the first five hours of being posted on Facebook, it racked up 20 million views and a hundred thousand comments before Facebook acted to remove it.” — Congressman Cicilline

It’s not a question of policy anymore. Facebook benefits from advertisements related to videos such as those that disseminate false information no matter what. The Congressman’s argument, in this example, is that even with the right policies in place, enforcement becomes a massive problem that’s unmanageable at scale. His bottom line was that you can’t contain content that is inherently dangerous for the public to read — especially when it reaches 20 million people before it’s taken down. Facebook will benefit from the revenue that the video generates no matter what.

Apple and the app store revisionism/re-curation as wanted.

“In 2018 Apple released an app called Screen Time which helps people limit the amount of time they or their kid spend on their iPhones. But, before Screen Time existed, there were other apps in the app store that gave parents control over their kid’s phone usage. Soon after you introduced Screen Time you removed competing apps from the app store. One mother wrote to Apple saying, and I quote her, ‘I’m deeply disappointed that you have decided to remove this app and others like it’. Mr. Cook, why did Apple remove competing apps right after you released Screen Time?” — Congresswoman McBath

Tim Cook responded by saying that they were acting on behalf of people’s security. However, strange enough, those competing apps came back almost six months later without any provisions to change. No rhyme or reason.

The story on Apple forcing Random House to join their iBook store also documents Apple’s use of power to prevent competitors from developing their own applications and services to distribute content.

Operating on good faith with mega-companies like these four won’t work. Their word on not doing bad things is not good enough. Monopolies won’t stop because a CEO tells Congress that they plan to take a look at something. Companies like Facebook, or Google, or Amazon, or Apple need to have certain parts of the fundamental transaction chain protected and separated from the parent company. When everything has internalized in this fashion, having one conglomerate own every single aspect of the venue, the power, the rulebook, and the sales practice is unheard of and illegal. It serves nobody but the revenue line of the company that it falls under.

Amazon and Facebook as innovation killers.

“Facebook has used its market power to either purchase or replicate the competition, and Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram are the most downloaded apps of the last decade. Your company, sir, owns them all. We have a word for that, and that word is monopoly.” — Congressman Neguse

Congressman Neguse’s line of thought is perfect. When the market capitalization of a technology company is so massive and that technology is not well understood to the world yet, great damage can come across to the entire space as a result. The internet is mostly an unregulated place. If an app comes to dominate some form of social media, the concept can easily be stolen by Facebook or Google or Amazon or Apple.

In fact, Snapchat is a great example of such a concept. The entry of Instagram’s “stories” is essentially Snapchat’s entire business model written off as a feature on Facebook’s subsidiary. That same feature was then duplicated on Facebook’s very own platform, too.

Whatever Facebook can’t duplicate, it can purchase. Whatever Apple, Amazon, or Google fear, they can purchase. That is, if they don’t already have plans to run away with their very own version of the same concept internally. An Amazon venture capital fund was accused of stealing ideas from the very start-ups that they invested in. This is not new news.

It’s just that the regulation and the process and the rulebook for these actions haven’t been invented yet.

“The 10,000 lb gorilla versus the person getting started.” — Congressman Raskin

There is a very curious question of how these companies use all the data they track on their consumers. Whenever you speak on an application, we all know about the anecdotes and the memes circulating about how they hear us and formulate a demographic based on our words.

Those are all true.

“You have access to data that far exceeds the sellers on your platform with whom you compete. You can track consumer habits, interests, even what consumers clicked on but then didn’t buy. You have access to the entirety of a seller’s pricing and inventory information past, present, and future. And you dictate the participation of third-party sellers on your platform. So you can set the rules of the game for your competitors but not actually follow those same rules for yourself.” — Congresswoman Jayapal

And these companies can chew out the competition as soon as they can bring in new people. Their venues are so massive that they can simply discard and add new competition as they please.

“We heard from a small apparel company… here is what they said: Amazon strings you along for a while… in the past, we called it Amazon heroin. Because they just keep going, and they have to get their next fix.” — Congressman Cicilline

When you are a small businessperson attempting to use digital advertising to jumpstart a product or service, you can only go to one or two places. Google, in fact, owns most of the internet’s viable traffic.

A phrase that was often repeated in the congressional hearing was “the only shop in town”. This is very clearly true. These companies know that there is only one place to go, and they use that leverage and bend it to a massive advantage.

These marketplaces are not your ordinary shops, though. You can’t just go anywhere and buy up ad space. You need to go through a channel, specifically, Google’s channel. This is where Google will serve as the buyer, the seller, the transactor, and the rule-maker for whatever you want: