Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here
Speaker 1: and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
Speaker 1: ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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Speaker 2: the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that,
Speaker 2: let's get to the show everything.
Speaker 1: So, in the wake of that crash of the F
Speaker 1: thirty five jet in South Carolina, with a lot of
Speaker 1: questions remaining about what the hell actually happened there, we've
Speaker 1: got a new report that outlines some not great details
Speaker 1: about this very very expensive thing. Put this up on
Speaker 1: the screen. So they say that the F thirty five
Speaker 1: fighter jets can only fly fifty five percent of the time,
Speaker 1: so about half of the time. This is according to
Speaker 1: a US watchdog. Let me read you a little bit
Speaker 1: from this article. They say that maintenance issues keep the
Speaker 1: aircraft on the ground often despite the growing reliance on
Speaker 1: this plane by the US and its allies. The fleet's
Speaker 1: mission capable rate, or the percentage of time a plane
Speaker 1: can perform one of its assigned missions was fifty five percent.
Speaker 1: That is far below the Pentagon's goal of eighty five
Speaker 1: percent to ninety percent. The F thirty five share of
Speaker 1: the US's overall tactical aviation fleet is expected to keep growing.
Speaker 1: Basically every branch the military is increasingly relying on the
Speaker 1: F thirty five and moving in this direction in spite
Speaker 1: of the fact that it is incredibly costly and apparently
Speaker 1: down from maintenance roughly half the time. This is the
Speaker 1: world's costliest defense procurement project. Let me give you the
Speaker 1: numbers here. The Pentagon plans to buy roughly two thousand
Speaker 1: more of these things by the mid twenty forties, costing
Speaker 1: one point seven trillion dollars over the program's life cycle,
Speaker 1: including one point three trillion for maintaining the aircraft. Music
Speaker 1: to the ears of manufacturer Lockheed.
Speaker 2: Martin, absolutely and not only that, Crystal, it actually costs
Speaker 2: forty two thousand dollars per flight hour for F thirty five,
Speaker 2: forty two thousand dollars an hour to fly this thing.
Speaker 2: I've always been obsessed with the flight hour costs for
Speaker 2: a lot of these things. A lot of Americans don't
Speaker 2: even understand. It's not just about buying the plane. Costs
Speaker 2: of running these planes is outrageous and it reminds me
Speaker 2: of there was I think it was a B two bomber.
Speaker 2: So the B two bomber flight costs per hour, let's
Speaker 2: go ahead look it up live. Yeah, okay, so B
Speaker 2: two costs one hundred and sixty three thousand dollars per hour.
Speaker 2: And at one point we had these guys who flew
Speaker 2: from like Louisiana all the way to Libya to bomb
Speaker 2: Isis with a B two drop the bombs, which that's
Speaker 2: what another million, million and a half and so the
Speaker 2: cost of the bomb and then fly back it was
Speaker 2: like a thirty six hour mission. The collective mission costs
Speaker 2: like ten million dollars for a single bombing run. And
Speaker 2: it's just one of those we just ride it off.
Speaker 2: And you know, this was a huge fight in the military.
Speaker 2: I know aviation geeks are going to get mad at
Speaker 2: me for screwing up some of the details, but there
Speaker 2: was this fight around a ten Warthog, which was like
Speaker 2: it's a very cheap plane. It's much cheaper in order
Speaker 2: to fly, and it has like the sound that people
Speaker 2: are familiar with with the machine guns. It was used
Speaker 2: as a terrorist killer a lot in the Global War
Speaker 2: on Terror, and especially because a lot of these guys
Speaker 2: don't have anti aircraft stuff, it was much easier in
Speaker 2: order to fly and to use. But the air Force
Speaker 2: was trying to get rid of it because they're much
Speaker 2: more in favor of these costly gadgets like fifth generation
Speaker 2: fighters at thirty fives, B two s all these other
Speaker 2: very very expensive aircraft. I think we're gonna have a
Speaker 2: reckoning whenever we have another war. We're going to find
Speaker 2: out that a lot of these costly toy projects, you know,
Speaker 2: fifty games and all that stuff, that war has not
Speaker 2: changed that much. It's all about what flies, what actually works,
Speaker 2: and can you produce a ton of them in a
Speaker 2: major war of attrition. Just look at Ukraine. You know
Speaker 2: this is very nerdy, But there was entire ideas in
Speaker 2: the nineteen nineties called there was a new generation of
Speaker 2: warfare as in war changed for all time and whateveryone
Speaker 2: would point to. Was the US campaign against the Iraqi
Speaker 2: military because the Iraqi Republican Guard and the military was
Speaker 2: one of the largest militaries in the world. We steamroll
Speaker 2: them in thirty days. The Highway of Death and they're like,
Speaker 2: oh my god, like wars forever change, it's all about
Speaker 2: computers and all that stuff. What are we learning from Ukraine?
Speaker 2: You would be better off learning the tactics of World
Speaker 2: War One than you would anything afterwards about the fighting.
Speaker 1: Well, and also what was like the most critical thing.
Speaker 1: It's just ammo.
Speaker 2: Ammo artillery, same fight nineteen twelve. So look, I'm not
Speaker 2: going to sit here and claim that all of war
Speaker 2: is exactly the same, but I think war is a
Speaker 2: lot more analogous in rhymes with some of the major
Speaker 2: conflicts we've had, as opposed to some video game that
Speaker 2: a lot of these idiots have been pushing us into
Speaker 2: for a long time. This is all like, you can
Speaker 2: nerd out on this stuff forever, and I know people
Speaker 2: who do. About China and the US and fifth generation aircraft.
Speaker 3: Here's the deal.
Speaker 2: We ever got into a war w Taiwan. You know
Speaker 2: what's gonna matter? Anti shit missiles. You know, a bunch
Speaker 2: of mines in the middle of the sea. We've been
Speaker 2: doing that since what since time immemorial. So it's like
Speaker 2: we can talk about this forever. But the F thirty
Speaker 2: five is the symbol I think of this new bet
Speaker 2: that war is just easily outsourced to computers and drones
Speaker 2: and all this. And I'm not saying those things don't matter,
Speaker 2: but you know, the very nitty gritty about what can
Speaker 2: be produced, what can go on time, what actually works? Yeah,
Speaker 2: what's really employable on the battlefield. We'll find it all
Speaker 2: out very soon. And most of the time people are
Speaker 2: totally wrong in terms of the before a major war break.
Speaker 1: It also just shows there's just literally no cost control. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know how much this is the Financial Times. This
Speaker 1: is not even a US media outlet that's reporting on this,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, this GAO report got very little
Speaker 1: pickup and think of on you know. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: like any sort of civilian program that was going to
Speaker 1: like feed the nity or was abused by quote unquote
Speaker 1: world ar queens or whatever, there would be endless media
Speaker 1: coverage of that type of waste, waste, fraud, an abuse.
Speaker 1: But this, I mean this again, most costly defense procurement
Speaker 1: project in the entire world, and we have so little scrutiny,
Speaker 1: so little expectations. We're just happy to give literally trillions
Speaker 1: of dollars to Lockheed Martin for a product that is
Speaker 1: not standing up to the standards that the Defense Department
Speaker 1: themselves have set for these jets, so you know, and
Speaker 1: it also does just raise more questions about what the
Speaker 1: hell happened in that other incident, because if you're having
Speaker 1: a lot of problems with these with these jets, did
Speaker 1: that play into this crash? And the fact that you
Speaker 1: know they were unable to find the debris for a while,
Speaker 1: so good, pretty extraordinary. The total lack of oversight and
Speaker 1: how the Pentagon just gets a pass like trillions to
Speaker 1: the tune of trillions of dollars to waste money and
Speaker 1: have no accountability whatsoever. True.
Speaker 2: All right, we'll see you guys later. You will very
Speaker 2: rarely see me recommend CNN. But one of the only
Speaker 2: people who works there who I really like is Harry Enton.
Speaker 2: He used to work over at five thirty eight. He's
Speaker 2: kind of their polling guru, and he did a fantastic
Speaker 2: breakdown which we also on our focus group about the
Speaker 2: demise of Fox News amongst Republican voters and how their
Speaker 2: power is waning, how they really need Trump a lot
Speaker 2: more than Trump needs them. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 4: Seventy four percent say not Fox News. Now the plurality
Speaker 4: leader is Fox News a twenty six percent, But the
Speaker 4: fact is most Republicans are in fact not tuning to
Speaker 4: Fox News as its main news source. Other follow ups
Speaker 4: social media twelve percent, broadcast networks at eleven percent. But
Speaker 4: I think that this is a key number to keep
Speaker 4: in mind going forward. Seventy four percent of Republican likely
Speaker 4: voters say the news erance they turn to most is
Speaker 4: not Fox News. But I guess the other question to
Speaker 4: flip that is does Fox News need Donald Trump? Yes,
Speaker 4: this is what I would say is absolutely Fox News
Speaker 4: needs Donald Trump more than Donald Trump needs Fox News.
Speaker 3: Why is that?
Speaker 2: I actually love that clip because they were using the
Speaker 2: New York Times data to illustrate a point that we
Speaker 2: keep hammering home. And of course, look, CNN has an
Speaker 2: incentive to bash Fox. They're just as bad. Ask them
Speaker 2: how much they need other politicians and Democrats. Okay, so
Speaker 2: let's put that aside. But the meta point is correct.
Speaker 2: As we saw in our focus group, we had eight
Speaker 2: likely viewers or likely voters in the New Hampshire primary
Speaker 2: GOP primary, only one said Fox is the prime amazing
Speaker 2: ten years ago, every single person twenty years ago, O'Reilly
Speaker 2: or earlier? They would have been like a Riley fan club,
Speaker 2: you know, and that's dead gone. Only one person said
Speaker 2: Fox and Tucker Carlson. Every other person said some version
Speaker 2: of Internet.
Speaker 1: Right, But the Tucker Carlson person was like, I watch
Speaker 1: him on X exactly.
Speaker 3: She doesn't even watch.
Speaker 1: Our great focus group leader there. James like like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're watching him on X. She's like, yeah, yeah, what
Speaker 1: it needs to be Twitter. So yeah, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: just it's a very different era for them. And what's
Speaker 1: interesting is they also went into like of their viewers.
Speaker 1: They are having an impact on their viewers somewhat because
Speaker 1: Trump gets forty three percent of the Fox News viewer vote,
Speaker 1: which is still like pretty high, but of the Newsmax
Speaker 1: viewer vote, he's getting seventy six percent. So there's clearly
Speaker 1: an impact here in terms of their coverage and trying
Speaker 1: to pump up Rondo, Santis and whatever. So among the
Speaker 1: people who are still watching them, they have an impact.
Speaker 1: It's just that they don't have that lock on all
Speaker 1: of the GOP base. There are other options, and you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to say that that landscape has like
Speaker 1: really made things better because I'm not sure Newsmacs one
Speaker 1: American News Network and some of these other you know,
Speaker 1: like Steedman.
Speaker 3: Or war Room or whatever.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure they're providing better information or that it's
Speaker 1: improving the stag of democracy. It just shows the fractured
Speaker 1: media landscape has made it so that, you know, Rupert
Speaker 1: Murdoch who now has stepped down from the top position.
Speaker 1: But they're no longer the kingmakers that they once were.
Speaker 1: They no longer have the control that they once did,
Speaker 1: and that is an astonishing change in American political media.
Speaker 2: Yep, absolutely, it's now Here's the thing. I'm not going
Speaker 2: to sit here and defend all these alternatives, but those
Speaker 2: alternatives are what make our show possible. So I'm going
Speaker 2: to just defend the ecosystem. People have options for the
Speaker 2: first time in a long time. Lack of centralized control
Speaker 2: in general is a net benefit. Will see who emerges
Speaker 2: whatever real competition news.
Speaker 1: It creates first possibility exactly, it creates possibility. And even
Speaker 1: as listen, there's challenges in independent media as well that
Speaker 1: we've talked about here too, and challenges in the incentive
Speaker 1: structure for independent media, you know, especially with the amount
Speaker 1: that tech oligarchs drive the algorithms and create who are
Speaker 1: the winners and who are the losers in that new ecosystem.
Speaker 1: So there's a little bit of an illusion of independence.
Speaker 1: It's not as independent as you would want it to be.
Speaker 1: But the best thing you can say for is it
Speaker 1: does create space and optionality and possibility, and that, you know,
Speaker 1: that is an exciting landscape to be able to look at,
Speaker 1: you know, in terms of Fox News, ultimately, I think
Speaker 1: that Harryeton is right that Trump has more power and
Speaker 1: relationship than they do at this point. And so as
Speaker 1: much as they wanted to turn the page on Trump
Speaker 1: or whatever, they're not going to be able to. They're
Speaker 1: going to fall right back into the extent that they
Speaker 1: ever low. They've always had hosts there who are sort
Speaker 1: of like slavishly committed to Trump, but they're going to
Speaker 1: all be one hundred percent towing the line is not
Speaker 1: going to be a question because they need his audience.
Speaker 2: In the words of a great character, chaos isn't a pit,
Speaker 2: Chaos is a ladder.
Speaker 3: We'll see you guys later.
Speaker 1: Hi.
Speaker 5: I'm Matt Stoler, author of monopoly focused newsletter Big and
Speaker 5: an anti trust policy analyst. I have a really good
Speaker 5: segment for you today on this big breakdown because this
Speaker 5: week the Federal Trade Commission in seventeen States filed an
Speaker 5: antitrust suit against Amazon, which is, of course, as you know,
Speaker 5: one of the biggest companies in the world, and the
Speaker 5: suit was about monopolization and unfair methods of competition. So
Speaker 5: this segment is about what the case means, the government's claims,
Speaker 5: and whether the legal arguments that the government is using
Speaker 5: are strong. Now, for a lot of you, this explanation
Speaker 5: is going to sound sort of familiar because I laid
Speaker 5: out what would become the basis for this lawsuit in
Speaker 5: a video about a year ago. Okay, let's dive in.
Speaker 5: For almost twenty years, Amazon's business has existed on a
Speaker 5: very strange premise that almost no one questions extensively. The
Speaker 5: retail firm is the lowest price option in the market,
Speaker 5: and it offers quote unquote free shipping to over one
Speaker 5: hundred million Amazon Prime customers, for which it charges one
Speaker 5: hundred and thirty nine dollars a year membership fee. The
Speaker 5: revenue from Prime does not come close to covering its
Speaker 5: logistics arm, which cost about eighty five billion dollars in
Speaker 5: twenty twenty two, and one analyst says that the value
Speaker 5: of Amazon Prime, if you unbundle it is about one
Speaker 5: thousand dollars per user. So how can Amazon do all
Speaker 5: of this? How can it be the lowest cost retailer
Speaker 5: and give free shipping all while making money or at
Speaker 5: least not losing a ton of it. The answer, as
Speaker 5: it turns out, is that, as we all know, there
Speaker 5: is no such thing as a free lunch. Consumers pay
Speaker 5: for the free shipping. You and I pay for free shipping.
Speaker 5: It's just we do it through a hidden tax baked
Speaker 5: into the price of what you buy by an extraordinarily
Speaker 5: clever scheme orchestrated by Amazon. And that's what the Federal
Speaker 5: Trade Commission and the seventeen States are suing over. This
Speaker 5: hidden tax is well known in the industry. Here's Mike Beckham,
Speaker 5: the CEO of Simple Modern, which is a very successful retailer,
Speaker 5: and he made that point in August, essentially knowing that
Speaker 5: the suit was going to come out in some form
Speaker 5: or fashion. So he says that Amazon should not have
Speaker 5: normalized the idea of free shipping. They would have won
Speaker 5: the market without it. Now they are forced to lean
Speaker 5: heavily on a hidden tax that drives up prices. Aka advertising,
Speaker 5: because their unit economics don't work without it.
Speaker 3: What does that mean? All right?
Speaker 5: Most people think of Amazon as a retailer who sell
Speaker 5: to retail customers. That is what people think their businesses.
Speaker 5: But retail end users, you and me aren't really Amazon's customer.
Speaker 5: In fact, we are really Amazon's product Amazon does you know. Yeah,
Speaker 5: they sell to us, but they are more of their
Speaker 5: business is that they operate as a middleman who sells
Speaker 5: access to us. The actual customers of Amazon, the customers
Speaker 5: who provide Amazon's retail profit, are third party businesses who
Speaker 5: rely on Amazon's infrastructure to get their wares to the public. Now,
Speaker 5: you can see in this picture that sixty percent of
Speaker 5: Amazon's products are not actually sold by Amazon, but are
Speaker 5: sold through Amazon by what are called third party sellers. Now,
Speaker 5: in twenty twenty two, Amazon CEO Andy Jasse, who took
Speaker 5: over from Jeff Bezos, he said this explicitly, quote unquote,
Speaker 5: small and medium sized sellers use Amazon not because of
Speaker 5: the e commerce software Amazon provides, but quote because they
Speaker 5: get access to a few one hundred million customers end quote.
Speaker 5: There are extremely high switching costs if you are a
Speaker 5: third party seller who sells whatever it is sneakers, widgets,
Speaker 5: cups to move from one online superstore to another. So
Speaker 5: Amazon and being an online retailler with a deep and
Speaker 5: rich selection is a business with really significant barriers to entry,
Speaker 5: and there are only a few players. One result is
Speaker 5: that Amazon has an overwhelming share of online shoppers. It's monopoly,
Speaker 5: which means that third party sellers must either pay Amazon
Speaker 5: what it demands or they lose access to the market.
Speaker 5: As one seller put it, quote, we have nowhere else
Speaker 5: to go, and Amazon knows it end quote. Now, as
Speaker 5: a third party seller, you pay a lot of fees.
Speaker 5: You pay a fee for listing on Amazon, you pay
Speaker 5: a fee for using Amazon's warehouse services known as Fulfillment
Speaker 5: by Amazon. You also have to pay for advertising. What
Speaker 5: happens if you don't pay, well, if you don't pay,
Speaker 5: you don't get put in a place on the site
Speaker 5: where consumers click. So this is one of the things
Speaker 5: the FTC noted. Advertised products on Amazon are quote forty
Speaker 5: six times more likely to be clicked on when compared
Speaker 5: with products that are not advertised end quote. So this
Speaker 5: actually makes the experience for consumers a lot worse. You've
Speaker 5: probably noticed in the last few years Amazon when you
Speaker 5: search for something, it's so full of pay to play
Speaker 5: ads that actually consumers are complaining that they can't really
Speaker 5: find organic results. They can't find the best product. They
Speaker 5: find the product that Amazon put in front of them,
Speaker 5: which is often higher cost and worse quality. It's a
Speaker 5: steering problem. As the FTC noted, one senior Amazon executive
Speaker 5: quote reportedly compared Amazon's advertising and search divisions to the
Speaker 5: parable of the scorpion and the frog. It was in
Speaker 5: the advertising division's nature, as the proverbial scorpion, to poison
Speaker 5: organic search results end quote. And this actually went all
Speaker 5: the way up to Jeff Bezos, and he said, yes,
Speaker 5: we want to distort our organic search results and make
Speaker 5: the extra many billions that will bring in. Now, at
Speaker 5: this point, the price Amazon charges third party sellers, who
Speaker 5: again are the real customers, has grown to nearly fifty
Speaker 5: percent of their revenue.
Speaker 3: That's what they call the take rate.
Speaker 5: It's one out of every two dollars if you sell
Speaker 5: on Amazon, that's what you're giving to Amazon. And it
Speaker 5: is this money, which one group estimates at one hundred
Speaker 5: and twenty three billion dollars in total revenue for Amazon
Speaker 5: last year, that pays for the free shipping as well
Speaker 5: as Amazon Prime Video, It's music service, Twitch and everything
Speaker 5: else that comes bundled with Prime. Now what do these
Speaker 5: third party sellers do Well, They, in turn, and this
Speaker 5: is where the hidden task comes in, they raise their
Speaker 5: prices to consumers aka you and me, and then they
Speaker 5: send that money back to Amazon in the form of fees.
Speaker 5: It's basically a giant money laundering scheme. Okay, So this
Speaker 5: leaves one reasonable question that a lot of people can
Speaker 5: have once you think through this scheme, which is all right,
Speaker 5: So it's so expensive to go use Amazon, you have
Speaker 5: to raise your prices. Why can't you just go off
Speaker 5: Amazon and offer lower price. Why can't you go to
Speaker 5: Walmart's marketplace, or why can't you go to targets or
Speaker 5: ebays or why can't you set up your own website
Speaker 5: and do it? Well, this is a good question, and
Speaker 5: that's where the scheme gets clever. Originally, Amazon imposed contracts,
Speaker 5: as the FTC noted, barring all sellers from offering their
Speaker 5: goods for lower prices anywhere else. So this was an
Speaker 5: anti discounting measure. They said, you have to through Amazon
Speaker 5: at your lowest price, and you can't offer it anywhere
Speaker 5: for lower They originally they did this through contract, They
Speaker 5: just put it in contracts, but this seems really sketchy,
Speaker 5: and Europeans as well as Senator Richard Blumenthal complained about
Speaker 5: what are called price parity agreements. So Amazon dropped it's
Speaker 5: explicit contractual requirements in twenty nineteen. However, the change was
Speaker 5: a farce. The firm simple did through code what it
Speaker 5: couldn't do through contract. Amazon claims the FTC has implemented
Speaker 5: an algorithm for the express purpose of deterring other online
Speaker 5: stores from offering lower prices, But just weeks after dropping
Speaker 5: this requirement, Amazon wrote in an internal memo it would
Speaker 5: not change its policies, and today Amazon tells sellers that
Speaker 5: if it detects a lower price on any other online
Speaker 5: store for their products this, according to the FTC, they
Speaker 5: will be punished, which is to say, their ability to
Speaker 5: get their products onto a place on the Amazon website
Speaker 5: where customers click will go away. And the net effect
Speaker 5: inaggregate on Amazon is that and this is from Amazon's
Speaker 5: internal documents themselves. Quote prices will go up now they
Speaker 5: won't just go up on Amazon, they will go up
Speaker 5: across and have gone up across the Internet, because remember,
Speaker 5: it's not it's not just that they have to raise
Speaker 5: prices on Amazon, they're not allowed to discount those those prices,
Speaker 5: and this was in the complaint as well. Indeed, Amazon
Speaker 5: actually tells third party sellers to raise prices. The Amazon
Speaker 5: VP of Price of Pricing once told a seller's account
Speaker 5: manager who complained the seller. The seller was complaining that
Speaker 5: we can't afford to take our prices down on Amazon
Speaker 5: to match our own website because of all the fees
Speaker 5: and the Amazon VP of Price he had said, said
Speaker 5: to his account manager, he said, you know, go tell
Speaker 5: the seller. You may want to ask him to check
Speaker 5: if his sales on other sites directly or through distributors
Speaker 5: is putting him and us at a relative competitive disadvantages.
Speaker 5: He might get the hint smile emoji. The overall point
Speaker 5: is that Amazon is degrading the shopping experience, raising prices,
Speaker 5: and yet somehow still gaining market share. It's able to
Speaker 5: block third party sellers from going elsewhere, and therefore able
Speaker 5: to stop potential rivals from entering the market or from
Speaker 5: expanding in the market or investing in the market. It's
Speaker 5: a pretty strong complaint, and while anti trust cases are
Speaker 5: always random, and they depend on the judge. Bill Beher,
Speaker 5: the former Assistant Attorney General for anti trust under the
Speaker 5: Obama administration, said it's a good it's good argument quote
Speaker 5: if the FTC and States can prove even some of
Speaker 5: the factual allegations in this one hundred and seventy two
Speaker 5: page complaint, he said, Amazon is in a world of hurt.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 5: I want to note something else that I think matters.
Speaker 5: One of the more disturbing trends in anti trust in
Speaker 5: law in general is how secretive courts have become about corporations,
Speaker 5: allowing corporations to hide their dirty laundry under the guys
Speaker 5: that it's competitively sensitive, whether it is or not. For instance,
Speaker 5: in the current Google antitrust trial, which is over the
Speaker 5: two trillion dollars search firms monopoly power, the secrecy ordered
Speaker 5: by the judge on what should be a public record is,
Speaker 5: according to New York Times quote unprecedented. Similarly, the Amazon
Speaker 5: complaint is heavily redacted, large because at this point courts
Speaker 5: are highly deferential to what corporations claim is our trade secrets.
Speaker 5: Was very different than the way it was in the
Speaker 5: nineteen nineties when Microsoft was brought to trial, and there's
Speaker 5: a ton of stuff that was released.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 5: Judges are very scared that anything that might embarrass a
Speaker 5: company might harm the market.
Speaker 3: This is a problem.
Speaker 5: So here are two elements in the Amazon complaint that
Speaker 5: are partly redacted that I think are important and hopefully
Speaker 5: we'll learn more in a few weeks or in a
Speaker 5: few months when the case, you know, some of this
Speaker 5: stuff might come out.
Speaker 3: The first is that Amazon.
Speaker 5: Like Google, has been destroying documents and internal conversations relating
Speaker 5: to the case, or seems to have so. Amazon executives
Speaker 5: systematically and intentionally redacted redacted, redacted of the signal messaging
Speaker 5: app redacted, redacted, redacted, despite the plaintiff instructing Amazon not
Speaker 5: to do so. The extent of the bad behavior is
Speaker 5: not clear, since the paragraph alleging wrongdoing is well redacted,
Speaker 5: but that seems pretty bad. The second secretive thing.
Speaker 3: That we don't know.
Speaker 5: We don't know what it is is something that the
Speaker 5: FTC calls notes is an Amazon internal project called Project NeSSI.
Speaker 5: It's an algorithmic pricing system so egregious that the FTC
Speaker 5: determined that it deserved its own legal charge as an
Speaker 5: unfair method of competition.
Speaker 3: So what is project NeSSI.
Speaker 5: We don't know, since nearly all of the information about
Speaker 5: it is redacted, but it looks bad.
Speaker 3: Now. A lot is.
Speaker 5: Gonna come out in this Amazon trial, and Amazon is
Speaker 5: gonna fight tooth and nail. You know, we're gonna who
Speaker 5: knows how it will resolve itself. It's going to take
Speaker 5: a while. But here's the thing. Because of this case,
Speaker 5: because of the Google case, because of a whole bunch
Speaker 5: of cases that are now slimming into the court system.
Speaker 5: I don't think it's fair to say that our interest
Speaker 5: and our pressure in politics doesn't matter. I think it
Speaker 5: actually shows that what we do, what we care about,
Speaker 5: what we pay attention to, what we advocate for, does matter,
Speaker 5: and that we do get responses from our politics.
Speaker 3: It's slow, but it's real.
Speaker 5: So here's an Axios reporter, Ashley Gold, making the point
Speaker 5: that things actually can change in politics for the positive.
Speaker 5: So she tweeted, if you would have told me in
Speaker 5: say twenty eighteen, that's just five years ago, that I
Speaker 5: would barely have time to cover all of the tech
Speaker 5: anti trust cases actually coming to fruition because the whole
Speaker 5: beat being so busy, I would have laughed, What a
Speaker 5: time indeed, what a time. Thanks for watching this big
Speaker 5: breakdown on the Breaking Points channel. If you'd like to
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Speaker 3: Big Thanks and have a
Speaker 1: Good one, Critt