Headline, August 07 2020/ !WOW! : ''' '' GROOVY TECHNOLOGY GIANTS '' '''

!WOW! : 

''' '' GROOVY TECHNOLOGY GIANTS '' '''

THE WORLD STUDENTS SOCIETY : the exclusive ownership of every student in the world, rises to give Mankind a standing ovation: 

''ALMIGHTY GOD'S BLESSINGS AND BENEVOLENCE'' in the service of Mankind to build a great world for the present and future generations, - based on honor, dignity, and justice.

The rise of The World Students Society is the very story : a saga of ingenuity and courage and pure genius of the ''Founder Framers'' and the students of the entire world.

THE SPECTACLE OF THE chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google testifying before the U.S. Congress last week made for good TV drama.

Yet the theatrics of the showdown distracted from the real payoff of the hearings : the accompanying cache of subpoenaed emails and texts from the past decade and a half.

These documents provide compelling evidence - long rumored but seldom established - that the companies, especially Facebook and Amazon, in their rise to dominance did not always play by the rules and apparently violated antitrust laws.

Both public opinion and American law distinguish between two kinds of dominant company. The first is the monopoly fairly held : a corporation like Ford Motor that achieves dominance by virtue of its incomparable greatness.

The second and evil doppelganger, is the company that achieves dominance unfairly - for instance, by suffocating or absorbing would-be challengers.

The Big Tech companies insist that their rise to power has been the first story, a saga of ingenuity and courage, and that their market dominance is a byproduct of continued excellence.

They may be giants, the story goes, but they're friendly giants. Their immense size and power is simply what is necessary to offer users the best possible services.

The subpoenaed documents destroy that narrative. No one can deny that these are well-run companies, loaded with talent, and that each at some point offered something great.

But it appears that without illegal maneuvers - without, above all, the anticompetitive buying of potential rivals - there might be no Big Tech, but rather a much wider array of smaller, better, more specialized tech companies.  

Exhibit A is Facebook, whose documents are the most damning. 

Emails from Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive strongly suggest that since about 2008 he has had a method for controlling what in a 2012 email he called ''nascent'' companies that posed very disruptive threats to Facebook.

His method has been the buyout or the aggressive cloning of features to compel a company to sell itself to Facebook. He foresaw that there would be a limited number of ''social mechanics'' or areas of innovation in social media, each of which would have one winner.

''Instagram can hurt us,'' he wrote in 2012, right before acquiring the company and eliminating the threat that its photo - and video-sharing technology posed to Facebook.

Amazon doesn't come off much better. Its documents show an apparent willingness to lose money to keep competitors under water. Early on, because of low pricing, Amazon lost more than $200 million from diaper products in a single month. It ran its chief competitor, Quidsi, into the ground. [Quidsi owned Diapers.com.]

Then Amazon bought the weakened company. This approach, like Facebook, acquiring of competitors, is how John. D. Rockfeller built up Standard Oil in the 1870s. ''It's join us - or face extermination.''

Likewise, Amazon has admitted to sometimes selling smart speaker, Echo, below cost, presumably on the theory that collecting huge amounts of data on users and securing direct access to their homes will present an insurmountable barrier to potential rivals.

Then there's Google. In the company's early days, its document suggest, its executives had little interest in YouTube as a product, but they feared its rise would threaten Google's monopoly on search.

The answer? Once again, buy away the problem - rather than compete to see who can offer users the best service. Google purchased YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion.

The Honor and Serving of The Latest Global Operational Research and Thinking on Technology Giants, continues. The World Students Society thanks the opinion author, Professor of Law Tim Wu, Columbia University.

With respectful dedication to The Grandparents, Leaders, Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world.

See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011:

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Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless