On Tuesday, U.S. Attorney General William Barr said he expected Justice Department investigations of Big Tech – Facebook, Alphabet’s Google, Amazon, and Apple – to be completed next year.
“We started in earnest in July. It’s been moving very quickly,” Barr told the Wall Street Journal CEO Council. “We’re talking very broadly with people and getting a lot of input from people in the industry and experts and so forth.”
“I’d like to have it completed some time next year. I think it’s important to move quickly on things,” Barr said. “These things have a cost to the marketplace and businesses. I think at some point the government has to fish or cut bait.”
The attorney general, however, also cited his previous work for Verizon Communications, in arguing that big companies provided some benefits to consumers, particularly in telecommunications.
“Big is not bad,” he said. “I think in certain network industries you can be too Balkanized and no one has the scale necessary for the kind of innovation that we’re seeing.”
MacDailyNews Take: We’ll say this until we’re the color of the “Daily” in our logo: Lumping Apple in with the likes of Google and Facebook is preposterous!
Unlike Google or, arguably, Facebook, Apple does not have a monopoly in any market in which it participates. (Neither does Amazon, for that matter.)
The real problems where too much power is concentrated and the potential for abuse of their market power is greatest is clearly Google and Facebook.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
When is the investigation of Barr himself, complete?
Don’t tell me—let me guess: Bill Barr is a Russian operative plus agent plus White Supremacist plus tormentor of Illegal Invader Children™ who colluded and quid pro quo-ed and bribed for Trump, plus said an unkind word about Hillary Clinton.
Does that about covert it?
Actually he is trump’s personal fixer.
You mean like Eric Holder was for Barack Hussein Obama?
And what, pray tell, is Barr “fixing”?
CitizenX, you are absolutely correct. Anybody who is familiar with how real prosecutors operate knows that Barr is not acting within the scope of his employment. He is collecting a public salary for acting as DJT’s personal lawyer. Real prosecutors do investigations and issue reports based on the evidence. Twice now, Barr has taken detailed reports that Republican-appointed officials within his department have written and “summarized” them as saying almost the opposite of what a fair reading actually reveals.
The “investigation” of Big Tech is more of the same. Barr will come out with red meat for the Trump base in time for next year’s election. As in his comments on those prior reports, he will mischaracterize the evidence to produce what his master wants said. The Faithful will swallow it whole as evidence that the Administration is looking out for the Common Man while draining the swamp.
Barr’s approach is right up there with the Administration insistence that it is possible to design an encryption scheme that can be easily cracked by somebody with a valid warrant while remaining impenetrable to anyone else. As in the case of climate change, environmental protection, and Russian hacking, scientific facts are just opinions that can be contradicted by so-called Real News without any harmful consequences.
It is always too cute by half to watch left-wingers pretend to care about facts and ethics. What they do instead is project their crimes onto others. What Eric Holder ACTUALLY did is projected onto Bill Barr. What Obama, Biden, and Hillary ACTUALLY did is projected onto Trump. So on and so forth. And these baby-killing sociopaths do all this with a straight face and without even a hint of self-awareness. When you have no conscience, you have no humanity.
There has never been any group of lowlifes more dishonest, neurotic, degenerate, and reprehensible, and if they all disappeared in an instant, humanity would celebrate at its sudden fantastic fortune.
Brainwashed And deplorable, aren’t you. How do you sleep?
He too should be impeached, locked up, then hanged.
On what grounds?
After years of visiting the site, I’ve never, and I mean never have read an auramac post that includes the explanation/refutation of an idea.
His post in this thread is a great example of a typical post, but this time he throws in a pathological jab of hanging one of his objects of hate.
Normally TDS is something that I don’t take seriously, but with auramac, I wonder. If there ever was a textbook example, here it/he is.
Has Barr finished looking into the death of Jeffrey Epstein, who died under Barr’s watch?
Sorry, but Epstein is a Democrat albatross. Not a Republican one.
Does “preposterous” have any meaning to this congress? It seems to me, MDN, absurdity is policy.
You can’t exclude Apple if you’re investigating Big Tech. Do the investigation and then you can exclude the innocent.