Tech Monopolies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
LastWeekTonight1 HN recommenders · 2022–2023
10.9M views · commentary · news · Uploaded 2022-06-13
A Last Week Tonight segment on tech monopolies, their hidden harms and possible remedies such as antitrust reform. John Oliver covers lobbying and legislation along the way.
Cited as a mainstream summary of antitrust arguments and tech-company behavior in related threads.
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5 comments from Hacker News
John Oliver also covered tech monopolies recently. Tech Monopolies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [VIDEO]
> means you don't respect your users. I was just pontif- er, talking about this to someone, a couple of days ago. I love the users of my products. Most of my products are free, and are carefully-crafted, highly-polished, complete deliverables, and I fret over how they are used -even if by a tiny number of end users-, like a nervous hen. I do what I do, out of love for the craft, and out of a genuine desire to make people's lives easier, through the technology I have at my disposal. It is my belief that most tech companies despise their user base. Users are little more than cattle, to be fattened and slaughtered. "Caring about the user" means optimizing for "engagement," or keeping them trapped within their own ecosystem. John Oliver did a rant about this, recently[0]. It has nothing to do with actually caring about the user, or solving their problem. It is about harvesting users. In fact, my discussion about this, came about, because someone wanted to keep users inside the app I'm writing, as opposed to linking them to a more familiar app, on their phone (for the record, it was for videoconferencing). Linking is a "no-brainer," as I can link out to dozens of installed apps, using the simple URL scheme method, built into iOS[1], and "keeping them in the app," would have required several months of extra work, polluting the app with megabytes of junk code, because I'd need to use SDKs, and also kill the ability to easily scale to add new clients (contrary to popular belief, Zoom
Lobbyists probably also tend to hire ex-politicians as a form of (perfectly legal) delayed bribery; and hire family members of politicians ( [VIDEO] ).
John Oliver claims that the 2022 antitrust bills are being blocked by Schumer, whose daughters work as Lobbyists for Amazon. [VIDEO]
> Leave us behind whom or what? Whom: The corporations with enough money to burn. What: Technological progress. Here's a nice video that showcases the same patterns in history and how having free and open tech + breaking monopolies helped move society forward - [VIDEO]