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#monopolies

3 posts3 participants0 posts today
Public
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"The trends for Walgreens aren’t good - it has closed a thousand stores since 2018, and plans to shut 1,200 more this year. And if you look at the gross operating income of the U.S. retail segment, it is collapsing.

I put these charts together based on data in Walgreen’s annual reports.
What’s going on? Well that’s simple. Margins are falling apart.

Galloway and Elson went back and forth on why Walgreens is flailing. The company hasn’t modernized in the age of Amazon. It has too many stores. Bad management. A dumb acquisition of VillageMD in 2021. Etc. And these would seem like reasonable causes, since lots of other retailers are dying in the face of low price competition.

But the real reason Walgreens, and the pharmacy business in general, is dying, is because of a failure to enforce antitrust laws against unfair business methods and illegal mergers. Elson touched on it when he mentioned lower reimbursement rates, but I don’t think people appreciate the full scope of what happened to Walgreens, and to the full pharmacy business in general. This is not a case of bad management, it’s a case of desperate management."

thebignewsletter.com/p/the-rea

#USA#Walgreens#Monopolies
Public
Miguel Afonso Caetano

Probably the only acceptable choice made by Trump until now...:

"Among the loyalists selected by Donald Trump to staff his second administration, Gail Slater stands out for a different reason: she unites right and left with a sceptical view of big business.

While the US president’s other nominees tend to be traditional conservative free market advocates, Slater, his pick to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division, is expected to maintain the Biden administration’s vigorous approach to enforcement — much to Wall Street’s chagrin.

In public remarks and written submissions to lawmakers, the 53-year-old Oxford graduate has expressed concern about market concentration and said enforcement should be focused on technology and sectors with a direct impact on Americans’ pocketbooks.

Slater embodies the unlikely alignment of progressives who support tough antitrust enforcement and a new generation of populist conservatives helmed by vice-president JD Vance, who has called for the break-up of Google."

ft.com/content/769709d5-f897-4

#USA#Trump#Antitrust
Public
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment. These are changes to the rules of the game, undertaken in living memory, by named parties, who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, and face no consequences or accountability for their role in ushering in the enshittocene. They venture out into polite society without ever once wondering if someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.

In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.

And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet."

pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/urs

pluralistic.netPluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility (26 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
#Enshittification#Capitalism#BigTech
Continued thread
Public
Toni Aittoniemi

”Fromm asserts, then ‘this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden’. It is this freedom from bonds which, according to Fromm, leads to a desire for submission. Authoritarianism constitutes a regressive attempt to resolve the tension between a threatening outside world and a precarious self.”

3/3

Fromm/Adorno/Horkheimer’s post-#fascism analysis from 1950’s sounds eerily similar.

Too similar for comfort. It is happening again.

#1933again#criticaltheory#monopolies
Public
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"It’s early in the second Trump term, but it seems like politics is now in a different place. This time, corporate America and billionaires are working with the Trump administration, not against it. The inaugural photos of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Sundar Pichai kissing the ring were crystal clear in their implication. Big fancy lawyers aren’t doing pro bono work “resisting” Trump, for fear of upsetting their clients. The mask is off.

More importantly, the public is in a different place. Democratic voters, who almost always support their leaders, are actually angry with their own party. Certain institutional elites get that. Here’s the President of the United Auto Workers union, Shawn Fain, attacking Democrats, saying that “Trump is president because we have candidates in this party who can’t decide who the fuck they want to represent.”

There’s a lot of skepticism about whether we live in a democratic society, as it often seems like the government and our corporations just aren’t responsive to the public’s concerns over corruption, inequality, monopoly, and so forth. But I think this view masks a much scarier possibility, which is that we do live in a democratic society, and the public just hasn’t been particularly concerned about corruption, inequality, monopoly, and so forth.

What’s important about what Bernie is doing, and these other signals, is he might be showing that fear of oligarchy is the dominant view of a large swath of the public. If that’s the case, a lot of things could change, and quicker than we might imagine."

thebignewsletter.com/p/monopol

#USA#Trump#Bernie
Public
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"Requiring AI developers to get authorization from rightsholders before training models on copyrighted works would limit competition to companies that have their own trove of training data, or the means to strike a deal with such a company. This would result in all the usual harms of limited competition—higher costs, worse service, and heightened security risks—as well as reducing the variety of expression used to train such tools and the expression allowed to users seeking to express themselves with the aid of AI. As the Federal Trade Commission recently explained, if a handful of companies control AI training data, “they may be able to leverage their control to dampen or distort competition in generative AI markets” and “wield outsized influence over a significant swath of economic activity.”

Legacy gatekeepers have already used copyright to stifle access to information and the creation of new tools for understanding it. Consider, for example, Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, widely considered to be the first lawsuit over AI training rights ever filed."

eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/ai-a

Electronic Frontier Foundation · AI and Copyright: Expanding Copyright Hurts Everyone—Here’s What to Do InsteadYou shouldn't need a permission slip to read a webpage–whether you do it with your own eyes, or use software to help. AI is a category of general-purpose tools with myriad beneficial uses. Requiring developers to license the materials needed to create this technology threatens the development of...
#AI#GenerativeAI#Copyright
Public
Lisa

#MattStoller is apparently trusting the most transactional, corrupt, destructive, lying, cheating, power abusing, law dodging presidential administration in US history to do the right thing regarding antitrust.

They’re going to pick and choose which antitrust laws to enforce and which ones they can use for their own gain.
#AntiTrust #uspol #Corruption #CorporateMergers #Monopolies

thebignewsletter.com/p/trump-e

Public
beSpacific

#Meta made $20.8B dollars of profit in its last reported quarterly earnings off the back of products that are bordering on non-functional, #Microsoft made $24.11B in profit with an increasingly-deteriorating series of productivity products and #cloud -based solutions that its customers #hate, and #Google made $26.5B in #profit from multiple #monopolies and making its core #search product worse as a means of increasing the amount of times that people search for stuff. #AWS wheresyoured.at/what-were-figh

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At · What We're Fighting ForSoundtrack: Bad Religion — The Resist Stance A great deal of what I write feels like narrating the end of the world — watching as the growth-at-all-costs, hyper-financialized Rot Economy seemingly tarnishes every corner of our digital lives. My core frustration isn't just how shitty things have gotten, but how said shittiness
Public *
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"On a firm-by-firm basis, small businesses score an easy win, according to beautifully detailed Census Bureau data — the invaluable Business Dynamics Statistics — built from government records drawn from just about every private sector employer in the country. About 60 percent of American businesses have fewer than five employees, and 98 percent have fewer than 100 employees.

But we’re not sure about the utility of a measure that counts Goldman Sachs and Tariq’s #1 Halal Food equally — even if we can all agree that Tariq makes the superior chicken biryani.

If we weigh America’s businesses instead by the number of their employees, we see the trend Texas Pete feared: Before the Great Recession, most Americans worked for businesses with fewer than 500 employees. Today, it’s reversed, with 53 percent of us working for businesses with 500 or more workers.

The rule applies across the economy — the smaller the business, the slower the growth. But the real drivers of this economy-wide shift sit at the extremes: Businesses with fewer than 100 employees have steadily lost ground while business with more than 10,000 employees have gained."

washingtonpost.com/business/20

The Washington Post · Is America still a nation of small businesses?By Andrew Van Dam
#USA#Monopolies#Oligopolies
Public
The Internet is Crack

Fighting the Monopolies! The internet was supposed to set us free, but as Cory Doctorow reveals, it’s been hijacked by monopolies that lock us in, strip us down, and sell us back to ourselves… though the fight isn’t over yet.
Watch or listen to the full episode wherever your podcast is.
youtu.be/0N3q-qHVdg8
@pluralistic
#antitrust #monopolies #monopoly #laws #theinternetiscrack #podcast #podcasts #bigtech #ethics #AI

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