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warmfuzzykitten | 4 years ago

If he were actually "calling" executives in other companies to get them to agree to lower wages and benefits, that would be illegal activity in the US. Companies are not allowed to conspire to fix wages.

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dheera|4 years ago

How can you regulate conspiring? It would seem to me that people have the right to private channels of communication, and free speech over said communication. They could do it over Signal and nobody would know nor have records.

cl42|4 years ago

You can regulate conspiring. There are tons of laws for this already, either within antitrust, criminal law, etc.

The challenge is proving the conspiring happened. If a CEO specifically admits to calling companies and conspiring, then, well, there's the evidence.

EDIT:

Case in point from 2014 -- "Four major tech companies including Apple and Google have agreed to pay a total of $324 million to settle a lawsuit accusing them of conspiring to hold down salaries in Silicon Valley..."[1]

[1]: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-apple-google-pay...

thebean11|4 years ago

The speech isn't at issue here, it's the act of lowering wages in cooperation with your competitors.

Do you think a murder conspiracy is a free speech issue as well?

mattnewport|4 years ago

Covering your tracks when committing a crime doesn't make it not a crime. At best it makes you harder to catch.

In this case he posted publicly so was obviously not trying to cover his tracks. I've no idea whether he is doing anything illegal under Israeli law though.

imajoredinecon|4 years ago

> How can you regulate conspiring?

It seems to work pretty well in practice: testimony from other participants in the conspiracies, technical evidence (just because E2E-encrypted messaging exists doesn't mean it's the sole choice of people conspiring to commit crimes), ...

> people have the right to private channels of communication

This is an intuitively appealing idea (and something I think I personally agree with) but doesn't seem to be totally settled. But let's assume it is:

> [People have the right to] free speech over said communication

Well, no: free speech isn't absolute. That's why people are generally in favor of laws against plotting murders.

pjerem|4 years ago

This would require conspiring as such a scale that it would be impossible not to leak. It could even be a prisoner’s dilemma since you would have to conspire with lots of your competitors, someone could have interest into leaking the conspiracy.

kelnos|4 years ago

Sure, and if there were no records of it, and no compelling witness testimony, then the people conspiring would likely get away with it.

Fortunately, often people committing crimes slip up and use communication channels that leave a paper trail.

smorgusofborg|4 years ago

The smart company goes along with the conspiracy but records everything and then they rat and turn over the evidence. They screw employees and their competitors and get exempted from the fine. In theory, they could collect a portion of the fines that their competition pays as whistleblower comp.