He needs them to save his bacon in November.

He and PUtin planned the last attack and it was successful and he wants them to steal our elections again and nobody better get in the way of Agent Orange Chaos.

He's probably one of their most devoted readers. Just about the only good thing he gets to read about himself on Facebook comes from them. Now he's having trouble finding very many and it is harshing his almost nonexistent mellow.

practices and the like? Antitrust? It took decades to break up the old telephone monopoly giant AT&T into the baby Bells (telephone companies such as Bell South, SWBT, etc.). Can't also arbitrarily break up a company and thus take away assets w/o adequate compensation. This will be fought in the courts for decades.

Is another clear abuse of the power of the office.

Shutting down Alex Jones / Infowars was not a silencing of a conservative voice or news service. It was putting an end to one specific persons broadcasting of insanity.

Last edited Sat Sep 22, 2018, 03:20 PM - Edit history (1)

I don't feel that Trump's motives for doing this are proper. He's not doing it because he really believes monopolistic practices are a problem. They're only a problem when they aren't in his favor.

Reality is though. These companies do have too much control over the media and opinion in this nation. I think we should realize that by now given the last election and Cambridge Analytica.

The only ways of combating the monopolies though are to break them up. I'm old enough to remember the AT&T/Bell breakups. This is absolutely the opposite of what the GOP usually does. So, it will be interesting to see what comes of this.

I predict a lot of foot-dragging in the agencies responsible as people wait out the end of the Trump administration.

ON EDIT: I said they were monopolistic, not monopolies. There is a difference. Also, when FB has almost as many members as the next two largest combined by number of members they have an outsize ability to influence.

you have alternate choices of which there are many.

They may be the most popular but they are not monopolies.

There are alternatives, and no one is forced to use social media. My father uses none of it, and I also tease him because he prefers Yahoo to Google or Bing.

There are some issues with all social media platforms, but this isn't one of them.

Google and FB are dominant because WE made them so, Google because their technology is so good and FB because of the social media craze, I would never say their tech is that great. The behavior of a monopoly is to block competition in an illegal manner, there are plenty of other search engines people can and do use, but they provide less satisfying results. There are other social networks that people can and do use but for some reason people love FB. Now I admit FB did do something that could be considered monopolistic behavior by buying Instagram and Whats App but at the same time there is nothing stopping someone else from creating a Facebook killer. There is plenty of VC money around to do that so this is not a barrier to entry.

Nothing's stopping him from routing searches through Fox News headlines if that's really what people want. In this virtual world everybody gets to choose their own reality anyway. They already have the ridiculous Conservapedia: https://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page

While he's at it, he can initiate a social media platform called TrumpBook if anyone thinks there's money in it. Obviously there isn't.

Don't forget all the neo-Nazis and Russian bots

You can't fool some people at all, any time.

GOP and Anti-trust? A bit of a stretch.

But a packed radical right Supreme Court could be warranted cause for pause on too many levels.

I suspect a lot of PNAC fascist fantasies sitting in dusty DC GOP corners are being converted into Executive Orders that will soon fly through and end up being hand-picked by Justice Roberts in a rush to Scotus' Docket.

Infowars vs Google, Youtube, Twitter - Free speech denied

or something similarly looney.

Check out SCOTUS Docket for 2018.

How many tens of millions of our tax dollars is this going to waste? That's the Party of Fiscal Responsibility for you. Always pissing away money on bullshit.