From "Battle over Big Tech bills goes down to the wire" posted Monday in The Hill:
Lobbying both for and against legislation to crack down on U.S. tech giants is intensifying as the Senate enters a critical month for the antitrust bills...
All eyes are on Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who will need to decide whether to prioritize measures to regulate Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta over other key bills prior to the August recess...
In an effort to run out the clock, the big four tech firms and their Washington allies are warning Senate Democrats that their voters expect progress on other pressing issues entering November’s elections.
Smaller companies that support the bills, however, are making the case that regulating Big Tech is a winning midterm issue.
The digital rights group Fight for the Future has had two mobile billboard trucks at the Senate leader’s New York and D.C. residences all week playing a John Oliver segment about the antitrust bills...
Tech giants ramped up their lobbying spending to record levels as the antitrust bills gained traction earlier this year. Apple shelled out more than $2.5 million on lobbying in the first three months of 2022, up 71 percent from the same period last year. Meta and Amazon spent $5.4 million and $5 million, respectively, both first-quarter highs.
My take: This photo -- shot a couple blocks from where I lived in Brooklyn for nearly two decades -- takes me back. That's Prospect Park West in the background and in the foreground is the bike lane that Iris Weinshall, wife of Sen. Schumer and former NYC Transportation Commissioner, tried mightily to block. She lost that fight.
See also:
For the same reason, I doubt that they will be able to write laws that are enforceable, or that can hold up under judicial review.
So I agree. They’re totally different and articles that reference “Big Tech” can generally be discounted.
Agreed. Microsoft was clearly delineated from Apple years and years ago as a software company that jobbed out the hardware it depended on. That has hardly changed. Even in the Cloud, it’s all about their software.
They were also the biggest pirates on the planet. Some of us are convinced that leopard never did change its spots….