Apple's Backup Plan to Stop Antitrust Legislation

[usonian]

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/apples-backup-plan-to-stop-antitrust?s=r

Long and complex. Hopefully, this is the core argument:

Apple is quite sophisticated, and has been also working on a secondary level to muck up Senate procedure so that the tech antitrust bills never get a vote.

The strategy is to put forward a separate tech bill around Federal privacy, and get that to the Senate floor at roughly the same time as the tech antitrust bill. The idea is to have some Senators saying that we need to deal with both privacy and antitrust matters, and so both parts of the legislation should go together. (and likely weaken antitrust, IMO, usonian) ...

What’s notable is that the committees who organized this legislation - the Senate Commerce Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee - have not done a deep dive into the industry they are trying to regulate. The House Antitrust Subcommittee actually did a long and meaningful investigation into the dominance of big tech firms, reviewing millions of documents, during which members of Congress built enough institutional knowledge they could interrogate big tech CEOs effectively and coherently. It’s why TV comedian John Oliver was able to cite a back and forth from a Congressional hearing showing Jeff Bezos being embarrassed by Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal. That kind of effective interrogation takes enormous amounts of work, which is why the antitrust legislation is directed at real problems and is generating massive pushback from industry in the form of tens of millions of dollars of negative ads.

But the privacy-focused committees, while big tech CEOs did testify, had no such illuminating moments. Rather than doing a deep dive into an industry, they kept musing on privacy and data, absent from any understanding that all of this surveillance is financed by hundreds of billions of dollars of ad money. So now, Apple CEO Tim Cook is now walking around Congress saying that of course there is a problem with tech, but we really need to slow down and make sure that antitrust and privacy go together.

Congressional supporters of the antitrust bill know this, and are pushing back.

Some lawmakers say tying the two efforts to ensure passage before the August congressional recess is a bad idea. “This bill stands on its own and we were promised a vote,” antitrust bill sponsor Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said at a press conference Wednesday. She said more changes could arise and conversations are ongoing, but she wouldn’t allow for a “weak bill.”

FWIW, I have written to Tim Cook about Apple's acquiescence to Chinese and Russian demands in the past (removing apps, censoring stuff, IIRC) But you know ...

[Tetrachloride]

1. Acquiescing to the Russians and Chinese is high on my shit list.

Apple need to be split, not merely sanctioned.