FTC Removes Posts Critical of Amazon, Microsoft, and AI Companies

Isn't this in violation of records keeping requirements?

Erasing history is an important tool in normalizing the (current, and many more planned) authoritarian abused of the Trump regime.

The fact that they deleted everything over a 4 year period instead of just a subset made you less angry?

Would you mind explaining why?

It has been theoretically tamped down with independent agencies and watchdogs.

What's happening isn't just business as usual, it's unusual. The last president we had that openly defied the courts and the law was Andrew Jackson. And even he wasn't so brazen.

What we are finding out is that rules don't mean anything without enforcement and the US had a particular unaddressed threat in a party that doesn't care about the law and an executive agency filled with sycophants.

What the Trump admin is doing was supposed to be resolved with impeachment and removal from office. Fat chance republicans will react accordingly.

Hockeystick curve for corruption right now though.

It's not just "has no use for", but he's seeking revenge for being regulated. FTC for telling him he can't do securities fraud, FAA & FCC for telling him he has to launch rockets responsibly, etc.

> At the same time, conservatives cannot be blind to certain developments in the American economy that appear to make government–private sector collusion more likely, threaten vital democratic institutions, such as free speech, and threaten the happiness and mental well-being of many Americans, particularly children. Many, but not all, conservatives believe that these develop- ments may warrant the FTC’s making a careful recalibration of certain aspects of antitrust and consumer protection law and enforcement.

That's a CYA if I've ever seen one.

They couldn't care less about government-private sector collusion. It's literally the dream of the tech Neo-feudalist crowd. Before the idea of "private property" came about in Enlightenment-era England, some guy owned everything, and the commoners labored for his enrichment. Since capitalism - at least as we've interpreted it in America - means consolidation of massively-capitalized corporations which control more numerous and diverse markets, that's kind of the endgame when one removes the ability of the government to stop such consolidation.

The question is, if nothing is done, who will it be?

There's a conflict between destroying all government, corrupting it for personal gain by a given elected official, and corrupting it to serve a given owner of a given megacorp.

Somewhere along the way ethics, morals, truth, and serving We the People was lost.

Funny, while there were a couple of things I may not have loved...the vast majority of her enforcement actions I thought were quite good for the average American. Heck, the enforcement on banking fees alone was huge for the average person.

Khan made a lot of good regulatory changes, and some good litigation (like RealPage), but a lot of the litigation was frankly counterproductive and/or badly handled.

Splitting Chrome off of Google and making it so that Firefox can't get search engine royalty payments is not going to lead to societally useful outcomes. And voters don't give a shit about it either. The FTC could have had much more impact if they were focused on, say, healthcare, health insurance, preventing private equity from owning (and closing) so many hospitals and chains and nursing homes, etc. They did some of that but it was very clear that big tech was the focus.

And I'm not against taking on big tech even a little bit, but you kind of have to have a plan for the desired outcomes, and it doesn't feel like there was much of one.

Yes, but the fact that Harris cared more about her donors interests than what people wanted, lost her the election and bought us Trump.

I would't put it beyond them to create these kinds of companies, but doing so upfront is a huge gamble if you don't know for sure what is going to take off. It would seem to be much more efficient to just sit and wait until some company becomes well established and then infiltrate them using agents, compromised supply chains or plain and simple warrants combined with gag orders.

My point was related to free speech, and these incidents are all infringing on it. Unless you don't consider censorship in the removal of these blogs, or similar incidents, as attacks on free speech. I am censoring it to protect myself from repercussions. You might not be paying attention...

  Israel really wants the whole world to conflate "Israeli", "Jewish" and "Zionist", but it is a lie.

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