Wietze Brandsma’s Comments

• Jul 10th, 2021 @ 10:32am

  Re: Re: Amazon's unchecked market power

  on Biden's Executive Order On Competition Has... Lots Of Really Good Ideas? Though, Potential Overreaches On Executive Power

  The consumer welfare standard has its shortcomings, an alternative would be: The Effective Competition Standard: A New Standard for Antitrust; the abstract says:

  Ambiguous and inadequate, the consumer welfare standard identifies threats to competition only by the potential consequences for consumers and ignores adverse effects on workers, suppliers, product quality, and innovation.

  The effective competition standard as an alternative would revive the original aims of antitrust law — to preserve competitive market structures.

• Jul 10th, 2021 @ 7:01am

  Amazon's unchecked market power poses a threat to competition

  on Biden's Executive Order On Competition Has... Lots Of Really Good Ideas? Though, Potential Overreaches On Executive Power

  From the panel series "Crafting Effective Rules for Internet Platforms:"

  Amazon poses the unique threat of both owning the market and participating within it. By wearing these two hats, Amazon can leverage the data it collects on both buyers and sellers in its marketplace to better inform and promote its own products, and it can also favor larger, preferred sellers.

  And:

  In a world where everything collapses into a single channel, [small businesses] have no way to introduce new products.

• Jun 17th, 2021 @ 8:31am

  The Effective Competition Standard: A New Standard for Antitrust

  on Recent Antitrust Push Is Weirdly Narrow, Pretends Telecom And Banking Don't Exist

  The effective competition standard offers an alternative to the consumer welfare standard. Report <a href="https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/the-effective-competition-standard-a-new-stan dard-for-antitrust/">here</a&gt;.

• Dec 18th, 2018 @ 12:32pm

  Monopsony power

  on YouTube's $100 Million Upload Filter Failures Demonstrate What A Disaster Article 13 Will Be For The Internet
  > They just want YouTube to hand them a giant check to "license" their entire catalog. That's the real endgame here. That it would block out independents and amateurs (i.e., competitors) is just icing on the cake.
  
  Blocking out competitors will give then (more) monopsony power, so they can lower compensation for creators. It looks like it is the other way around.
• Jun 7th, 2016 @ 12:52am

  2014: Indonesia to terminate more than 60 bilateral investment treaties

  on India Seeks To Renegotiate 47 Investment Treaties Because Of Their Corporate Sovereignty Clauses
  In 2014 Indonesia was planning to terminate all 67 bilateral investment treaties with such ISDS provisions.
  Source: Financial Times
• Jul 15th, 2015 @ 1:20pm

  Putin is weak.

  on Putin Aide, Apparently Non-Ironically, Gives Facebook A Lecture On Free Speech
  Analyses by Vox-journalist Amanda Taub: Putin is weak.
  The Russian strongman is terrified of losing control.
  Long-term strength is being sacrificed for short-term stability.
• Jul 2nd, 2015 @ 11:51am

  “the ratchet effect”

  on David Cameron Promises To Do Away With 'Safe Spaces' On The Internet
  From the Economist: Margaret Thatcher transformed not just her own Conservative Party, she reversed what her mentor, Keith Joseph, liked to call “the ratchet effect”, whereby the state was rewarded for its failures with yet more power. But today, the pendulum is swinging dangerously away from the principles Mrs Thatcher espoused. For a world in desperate need of growth, this is the wrong direction to head in. This is a crucial time to hang on to Margaret Thatcher’s central perception—that for countries to flourish, people need to push back against the advance of the state.