Tech Monopolies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as a mainstream summary of antitrust arguments and tech-company behavior in related threads.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2022 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends NayamAmarshe · 2023-03 · on “Dalai: Automatically install, run, and play with LLaMA on your computer”
> 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 - [this video]
Cites throwaway_1928 · 2022-06 · on “Calling for Antitrust Reform”
John Oliver also covered tech monopolies recently. Tech Monopolies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [this video]
Cites ChrisMarshallNY · 2022-07 · on “A/B testing gets misused to juice metrics in the short term”
> 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 trapp
Cites ofer2 · 2022-10 · on “AT&T to pay $23M fine for bribing lawmaker’s ally in exchange for vote”
Lobbyists probably also tend to hire ex-politicians as a form of (perfectly legal) delayed bribery; and hire family members of politicians ( [this video] ).
Cites fxtentacle · 2023-01 · on “Why Is Amazon Selling These Fake 16TB Portable SSD Drives?”
John Oliver claims that the 2022 antitrust bills are being blocked by Schumer, whose daughters work as Lobbyists for Amazon. [this video]