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Dystopian | 5 years ago
No it wouldn't be. That is not how anti-trust works. Amazon doesn't need to rent servers to Walmart. Walmart doesn't need to rent storage space or placement to Amazon. There's nothing in anti-trust which compells companies to have to provide services to one another.
If people want to talk about these issues they need to frame it in terms of strengthening anti-discrimination laws for speech. If that's something we want to talk about it's valid - it's just not the route most people getting angry about this want to take since it would run against many other opinions they've made previously (Masterpiece Cakeshop, et al.)
grawprog|5 years ago
These companies openly take billions of dollars in government subsidies and tax breaks, most of them have one or more contracts with the US government, several of them received funding from the government during their early days, without which, there's a chance they may not be the giants they are today.
How much money should tax payers continue funding these massive corporations before they should finally get a say in their actions?
These companies willingly accept these billions of dollars, wllingly chose to put themselves in the position of being the 'new town square', then they hide behind the 'nope private company' argument.
All I know is, when I was working off government subsidies and grants years ago, i was publically accountable for anything we did and we had far less public impact than any of these companies.
People can argue laws and semantics all they want, but what will it actually take for people to actually recognize the power these companies have over nearly every aspect of modern life and stop just treating them as
'Any other private company'.
That's an excuse and as far as i'm concerned a completely bullshit one. It's very obvious that's not the case and how anyone can deny this is mind boggling to me.