Pretty much. Like most political issues, it's probably something that should be done but I don't trust our current system to do it effectively.

It needs to be done for various reasons. A company like Amazon is annihilating all competition. Main street is dying out precisely because of companies like Walmart and Amazon. Hard to maintain a healthy middle class at the rate we're going.

Google and FB essentially control the public square at this point. It's a danger to democracy for information sourcing and public discussion to be monopolized by a few companies. Every other week we hear of these companies manipulating their platform for some desired outcome or selling private data.

This is the setup to pretty much every dystopian movie.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Oct 5 2019 04:26pm

The solution to that was to not repeal legislation against media mergers 20 years ago. Even local papers, newstations, etc. are all falling under the control of media companies like Sinclair (sp?) Broadcasting.

Local papers are failing because they waited too many years to adapt to the internet age. As subscribers to the physical paper drop they have to charge more for the paper, dropping subscriptions further. Their market consists almost entirely of retired boomers who don't take issue with a $3.50 newspaper and who complain that screens give them headaches. Most small papers have lost more than half of their physical subscribers in the last 20 years with marginal gains in online subscriptions. Instead of trying to get more online subscribers, the big push was to raise the number of physical subscribers.

I've worked for two papers owned by Berkshire. I've been laid off by two papers owned by Berkshire. Their failure is their own fault. These large media companies are buying failed businesses, propping them up to make a profit past their initial investment then selling them off or letting them close down.

This post was edited by SuperButt420 on Oct 5 2019 04:39pm

Nice thought, but will never happen. We are thoroughly slaves to our corporate overlords until the fall of America.

Here in australia rupurt murdoch runs almost all of our papers and he will happily take a loss and use it as a tax break since he uses the papers to manipulate the boomers into doing anything he wants.

As to the proposal, i support it, in fact i support breaking up any company with more than a 20% monopoly on anything.

This post was edited by Plaguefear on Oct 5 2019 06:18pm

Noticed that some high IQ people here can buy a "Mexico will pay for this" but can't handle a "promote more competition on big tech"