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Japan To Join Forces With US, Europe in Regulating Big Tech Firms (reuters.com) 55

Posted by msmash from the ripple-effect dept.
Japan will join forces with the United States and Europe to take on any market abuses by the four Big Tech companies, the new head of its antitrust watchdog said on Monday, a sign Tokyo will join global efforts to regulate digital platform operators. From a report: Kazuyuki Furuya, chairman of Japan's Fair Trade Commission (FTC), also said Tokyo could open a probe into any merger or business tie-up involving fitness tracker maker Fitbit if the size of such deals are big enough. "If the size of any merger or business-tie up is big, we can launch an anti-monopoly investigation into the buyer's process of acquiring a start-up (like Fitbit)," he told Reuters. "We're closely watching developments including in Europe." EU antitrust regulators in August launched an investigation into a $2.1 billion deal by Google's bid to buy Fitbit that aimed to take on Apple and Samsung in the wearable technology market. Japan is laying the groundwork to regulate platform operators. Among them are big tech giants dubbed "GAFA" - Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook -- that face various antitrust probes in western nations.
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Japan To Join Forces With US, Europe in Regulating Big Tech Firms More

Japan To Join Forces With US, Europe in Regulating Big Tech Firms

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  • If the establishment understood the Internet (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday October 19, 2020 @10:33AM (#60624980)
    They never would have let us have it. This is them moving to clamp down and take back control. Not sure about US/Japan but in America this means doing away with Net Neutrality and Section 230 of the CDA. They want to turn Internet into cable TV: something only a few big, well connected companies that "play ball" can post content to.
    • Yes, because repealing net neutrality goes hand in hand with fighting market abuses, right?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        They are potentially related. If the content co's can merge with delivery co's, then we get even bigger winner-take-all conglomerates that stifle competition and buy politicians. I will agree net neutrality is partially tangential to the topic, but does suggest the power of oligopoly lobbyists to get their way.

        • They are related, but how does it work in this direction instead of the opposite one? That is, the opposite direction being repealing network neutrality meaning an intent to perpetrate market abuse?
      • because there really aren't all that many market abuses. There's a mountain of competition in the social media system. I never use Facebook and really just read other peoples tweets I find on Fark.com. I've got other forums that I use (like this one).

        Yeah, Facebook is popular but there's no sign of them abusing that popularity in any significant anti-trust capacity, at least not in the legal sense. They do buy up a lot of their potential competitors, but they've been allowed to do that already. And ther

    • Re:If the establishment understood the Internet (Score:4, Interesting)

      by shanen ( 462549 ) on Monday October 19, 2020 @11:18AM (#60625128) Homepage Journal

      Worse than that. You forgot to mention the Great Firewall of China as the model and proof-of-concept for what they REALLY want. I was actually thinking about this in relation to the Internet-driven incitement of violence that led to the beheading of Samuel Paty in France. So NOW the French establishment wants to crack down on it? But they can't do that unless they block the Web where the hate-speech lives.

      It's the Paradox of Tolerance again. We want to encourage free speech, which is intimately linked to tolerating "bad" speech. But when you tolerate bad speech that encourages intolerance, then sooner or later the tolerance principle is going to lose. Therefore intolerant speech cannot be tolerated on the same basis as "normal" free speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      • .. the Great Firewall of China as the model and proof-of-concept for what they REALLY want.

        I don't think you're wrong, and I've thought the same thing myself.
        I also am beginning to think that like with so many other things, the human species wasn't really evolved enough for the Internet when it happened, which is why you now have anal-retentive control-freak governments that, as you say, want to break it all up into pieces that THEY control. It's a case of The Few who misused/abused the Internet ruining it for everyone else -- and by The Few I don't necessarily mean individuals, there's plenty

        • the human species wasn't really evolved enough

          Isn't really evolved enough... Adolescence, or more like pre-teen.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by rtb61 ( 674572 )

            Hey speak for yourself monkey person. I feel I am not doing too bad, believe entirely evolved out of my genes, simply not able to be betrayed by my own cognitive matter into accept, retaining and locking information based upon no substantiating additional information upon which reason can be based.

            Brings to mine https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duck... [duckduckgo.com] only because, as of now and make no mistake, the big four have been deemed entirely to naughty and untrustworthy, the ducks, well of course they and their various

            • :-) DDG -- uBlock blocked 5 "offenders". I really hope you don't believe they make tracking any more difficult. They send your queries to Bing, Yahoo, Google, and other ad partners... and claim to strip any referencing back to you. Nobody can prove they don't track and log like everybody else. And they still filter results for all the regular "liability" reasons.

              As for the "Big Four". They sell dime store trinkets on the temple stairs, some through DDG. Hardly the likes of Standard Oil and the railroads.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shanen ( 462549 )

          Three primary reactions to your comment:

          (1) Chapter 9 of Homo Deus by Yuval Harari addresses a lot of the issues you are raising. His conclusion seems bleak. He write well and I can recommend him with few reservations. (I've read two other books he wrote.)

          (2) My own position is more directly based on the Fermi Paradox, but my conclusions are even more bleak. In short, I see this as just another path towards our extinction, whereas Harari seems to be convinced we will have successors of some sort.

          (3) If yo

      • Re:If the establishment understood the Internet (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Monday October 19, 2020 @04:18PM (#60626254)

        It's the Paradox of Tolerance again. We want to encourage free speech, which is intimately linked to tolerating "bad" speech. But when you tolerate bad speech that encourages intolerance, then sooner or later the tolerance principle is going to lose. Therefore intolerant speech cannot be tolerated on the same basis as "normal" free speech.

        You were right, up until the last sentence. The problem with being able to target certain speech as intolerant, is that it is logically inconsistent [wikipedia.org] and results in a paradox.

        • You classify certain speech as intolerant, and demand it be banned.
        • Your promotion of not tolerating that speech is in itself intolerant.
        • I can then call you out, and demand that your intolerant speech be banned.
        • Someone can call me out, and correctly identify my position as intolerant, and demand my speech be banned.
        • Someone else can call them out, and correctly identify that position as intolerant, and demand that speech be banned.
        • etc.

        The only solution which is logically self-consistent is tolerance for all speech. Anything else is intolerance. And you're just grasping at illogical straws to try to justify your own beliefs and biases being given precedence over other people's beliefs and biases.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shanen ( 462549 )

          I acknowledge that my solution approach is debatable and I haven't studied Popper deeply enough to know his own conclusions. My resolution of the paradox is more Godelian, basically an extension of the system to essentially give a truth value of false to advocacy of intolerance before the proponents of intolerance succeed in suppressing the speech they don't want to tolerate.

          And I am NOT advocating censorship or banning of any speech. My basic position is self-censorship for stupidity, which includes advoca

        • so it's best not to get too hung up on logic. The real world is messy and analog.
    • You're not wrong. I've said the same thing, and so have many others.
      Ironically they do that, they'll lose plenty of customers. If the Internet turned into something nigh-unto 'read-only' for end users, I'd stop paying for it, or just pay for the cheapest possible shitty service I could get, only because I have TiVo and it gets it's program guide updates over the Internet (I have an antenna on the roof BTW, not cable or satellite).
      I'm old enough to remember that we all lived our lives well enough pre-Inter

  • Why the US? (Score:3)

    by Pimpy ( 143938 ) on Monday October 19, 2020 @10:37AM (#60624998)

    I can understand the EU and Japan, but what does the US, as a country that has failed utterly at regulating big tech bring to the table?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Everyone should get together and try to work out common rules. It could also benefit the tech/media firms in that they would have an international standard to work with instead of lots of local rules, fractured by country.

    • Being that most of these companies are US Based. The US has primary responsibility in what they do and don't do. the SEC has done more than nothing to make sure these companies are not completely monopolizing the industry.

      Also with the current government in the US, in order to get what you want, it is a good idea to Kiss up to the United States, say how good and helpful they are. Doing the right thing because it is right, doesn't score political points, but having others publicly show off how much they we

  • Big Four (Score:3)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Monday October 19, 2020 @10:41AM (#60625008)

    Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple. No Alibaba? Alibaba is like Google, Amazon, Facebook, TRW, Citibank, eBay and Paypal rolled together. If you want to do any e-commerce of any size in China, you basically *have* to go through Alibaba in one way or another.

  • Tech Companies have been unleashed for too long (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Monday October 19, 2020 @10:55AM (#60625064)

    Early Tech companies, were in general not responsible for what its users say and do on their platform. At the time it wasn't a big problem, because while you still get the crazy nuts on the boards who trolled the site and caused problems, the user base was small enough to filter them out and just ignore such traffic. Also with early tech, there was a bigger expense in making something looks professional and official.
    Today anyone can make a fake story, publish it, and have it look official and accurate, for only a few hours of work. Which then causes other people to see it, and many will believe it, and some to a point where they feel they must act on such news. Now that these fake news has gotten traffic and effort, tech sites algorithms consider it real news, and promote the information. In which more people trust the data.

    The line is drawn when such companies begin ranking the information it gets. Google, Facebook are the biggest offenders. They do this by algorithms coded in the system, so they don't need so much human staff which is expensive looking at the data. But that is also the point these companies should be responsible for the content that is being posted. Or they decide what ads should be connected with what content for which user. Now that they making decisions on what we see and not see, they need to take the responsibility of the content.

  • If you're gonna mess with "Big Tech Firms", you really should look into Oracle and Microsoft...

  • Atlas Shrugged (Score:3)

    by MDMurphy ( 208495 ) on Monday October 19, 2020 @11:20AM (#60625136)
    Most of these big tech antitrust rumblings sound more like something from Atlas Shrugged than actually protecting us from monopolies.

    What about all the monopolies in internet providers? They are usually aided and abetted by states passing laws to prevent community ISPs. How the hell are those not monopolies? Give me a choice of 3-4 cable providers, not one. Lots of stink was made over the T-Mobile / Sprint merger, but I still have several mobile providers to choose from, not the single cable company.

    To make matter worse, those single operators in a city no longer have to abide by net neutrality. So you have only one viable cable provider *and* they can throttle, block, prefer, or otherwise dicker with who you connect to.

    I have more options in search engines, browsers, mapping, and email providers than I do of ISPs. So this looks more like a grandstanding money grab than actually protecting consumers. Big does not necessarily equal a monopoly.

  • Regulation is needed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sinij ( 911942 ) on Monday October 19, 2020 @11:39AM (#60625220)
    Far too many consumer abuses are coming from big tech - from wanton violations of privacy on industrial scale, to rent-seeking as gatekeepers of commerce, entertainment and news. To finally, the recent attempts to become the arbiters of truth.

    We can't have a free society unless there are ground rules to these. It isn't free market if you are channeled to buy "amazon affiliated", it isn't being informed if your news have to be from "authoritative" organizations and it isn't free exchange of ideas if your on-line communications get blackholed if they contain unapproved links.

    Could regulation fix all of this? Theoretically, yes. But I am not optimistic.

    • Could regulation fix all of this? Theoretically, yes. But I am not optimistic.

      Some simple changes could really change the dynamic. Today, anyone can start a web site claiming to be a journal of integrity, but hide who registered the site using a third-party as a proxy. Boom, there's no way to verify the identity of the publisher. One simple change, and a whole class of misinformation goes out the window, don't allow sites to be registered by proxy.

  • From the article : " Any such move would help Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s push to slash Japan’s mobile phone charges, which he has repeatedly criticised as too high."

    These guys never ever see the price of phone charge in Canada.

  • You meant the EU, didn't you?

    Last time I checked, "Europe" was defined as ending shortly after Moscow, and its border going straight through Istanbul.

    No matter how much the EU likes to distort that fact recently.

    For me, it is silly in any case. "Eurasia" would make sense, given it being one piece of land, surrounded by water.
    Or, if you want to go cultural, then the line of Slav culture goes almost vertically through Germany, and includes the Prussians, and the line of Austrian culture goes horizontally thro

  • Much of the top abusive companies are FROM the US and loving it. A little bit of superficial action doesn't mean anything and the companies aren't the problem so much as the lack of law to protect people's data or out of control targeted advertising. Unless they take on data mining and regulate targeted advertising I don't see how they are really doing anything but playing musical chairs.

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