Rule of Reason

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@matthewstoller Be serious now, the ad revenue Meta earns could never be captured by newspapers and publishers. Meta serves orders of magnitude more people for orders of magnitude more time, and has a much better ad stack mousetrap to boot.

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@jason_kint Is DCN putting together an antitrust lawsuit? 👀

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@jason_kint Correct me if I’m wrong, but YouTube wasn’t part of any of Google’s antitrust cases.

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@matthewstoller His point, which I think you implicitly accept as true, is that one person *can* create more than a billion dollars worth of value and thus “earn” a billion dollars.

Separate from that, it’s also possible to become a billionaire while adding very little value to the world.

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@matthewstoller How are you planning on making airlines more profitable via regulations? Forcing higher ticket prices?

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@jason_kint An argument in favor of divestiture!

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@jason_kint My uninformed guess is that being owned by Google was extremely important early on, but that if YouTube became an independent entity today it would continue to be roughly as successful as it is now.

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@austinahlman Just because private equity ownership of housing isn’t a major problem doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be negative consequences from banning it.

Built-to-rent construction would decline, which would decrease the total supply of housing.

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@matthewstoller Self-driving cars exist today. It doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to believe we’ll figure out self-driving trucks.

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@matthewstoller Matt have you heard of this concept called technology? It makes things cheaper over time!

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@matthewstoller There is a ~50 point difference in trust between some of those institutions.

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@sandeepvaheesan Responding to polling showing how popular Amazon is by talking about labor just feels disingenuous. Is Lee going to disclaim ever advocating for Amazon being forced to sell AWS?

You can just accept that breaking up Amazon is not popular even if you think it is right.

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@johnmarknewman What is the issue that you’re omitting?

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@musharbash_b More likely cause is that sellers are unwilling to take large losses by selling for below what they paid and are willing to hold out for a more favorable market.

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@musharbash_b @sandeepvaheesan We haven’t built enough of it. Other countries regularly build nuclear plants and manage to solve these problems. Solar got cheap after we started building tons and tons of it.

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@austinahlman I appreciate the source, but are these really meaningful measures of public opinion when it’s phrased like would you “support breaking up COMPANY to prevent it from becoming a potential monopoly”?

But I also acknowledge that topline favorability is aggregating a lot of opinions.

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@austinahlman Are they? The first one I checked is from Data for Progress.

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@bigblackjacobin The law treats a founder’s “wealth” as the percentage of control they have, instead of the value of the shares.

Many founders have super voting shares so they can steer the company through multiple rounds of dilution.

A 20x voting share class would result in a 100% wealth tax.