Antitrust

The UK’s OFCOM has referred AWS and Microsoft to the Competition and Market Authority (CMA) for anticompetitive behavior. The report (pdf) is on point. The major concerns listed are: egress fees technical incompatibility committed spend discounts It’s an interesting read. The cloud (e.g., someone else’s server) is critical for many companies and is becoming increasingly important. It’s a very profitable business for the hyperscalers and deserves some attention by antitrust authorities.

In yet another example of why Ticketmaster should be broken up 404 describes how scalpers game the system. Essentially, scalpers are pros at buying up high-demand tickets and they are much smarter and more motivated than Ticketmaster who throws up some weak-sauce barriers to them. It’s an interesting discussion of the techniques used and how they short-circuit efforts to prevent multiple ticket sales. I can’t say that I’ve got a brilliant idea off the top of my head to prevent this abuse but with the money that Ticketmaster rakes in, you would think they could come up with something.

Matt Stoller has a very interesting article about The World’s Most Profitable Traffic Jam in which he lays out the economic incentives that are causing big problems with the supply chain. The crux of the problem is a very complex intermodal system that gives large transocean shippers an incentive to slow things down once they hit the ports because they collect fees for congestion and don’t bear the costs. We might actually get some real legislation out of Congress to help sort this problem out.

Bass Pro Shops called off the aquisition of Sportsman’s Warehouse after it was challenged by the FTC and various state attorneys general. This is a good sign that the FTC is back in the business of challenging mergers that are anticompetitive. We would be much better off if we still had four major mobile phone companies, five major network airlines and more competition in Big Tech. It’s the rampant mergers and anticompetitive behaviors in the latter than has really killed the Good Internet as we used to know it.