On Sun, Oct 17, 2021 at 4:54 AM Masataka Ohta < mohta@necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp> wrote:
Matthew Petach wrote:
I'd like to take a moment to point out the other problem with this sentence, which is "antitrust agencies".
One of the key aspects to both CDN providers and transit providers is they tend to be multi-national organizations with infrastructure in multiple countries on multiple continents.
Your theory that multi-national entities can not be targets of anti-trust agencies of individual countries and can enjoy world wide oligopoly is totally against the reality.
*facepalm* No, the point I was making wasn't that they can't be the target of antitrust agencies, the point was that there's so many conflicting jurisdictions that consistent enforcement in a coordinated fashion is impossible. We can't even get countries to agree on what a copyright or a trademark means, or even what privacy rights a person should have. I know one content distribution company that was originally thinking of putting a site in country X; however, after taking a closer look at the laws in country X, decided instead to put the site in a nearby country with more favourable laws and to interconnect with the network providers just outside country X, thus putting them outside the reach of those laws. It's really, *really* hard to "regulate" global infrastructure because it crosses over/under/through so many different jurisdictions; if one country decides to put considerably stronger restrictions in place, the reaction by and large is to 'route around the damage' so to speak. The lack of success from Brasil's efforts are a good indication of just how successful per-country regulation of internet providers tends to be: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2175352/brazil-to-drop-requirement-that... The GDPR is probably the most successful effort at reining in global internet companies in recent years, and even there, when companies ignore it, the resulting fines are a small slap on the wrist at best, hardly causing them to change their behaviours: https://secureprivacy.ai/blog/gdpr-the-6-biggest-fines-enforced-by-regulator... Even the $5 billion fine Facebook paid to the FTC after the Cambridge Analytica was really only a $106M fine, with an extra $4.9B thrown in to make the personal lawsuit go away: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/21/facebook-paid-billions-extra-to-the... When companies can afford to throw an extra 50x the money at a regulatory agency to make a problem go away, it's pretty clear that thinking that regulatory agencies are going to have enough teeth to fundamentally change the way of life of those businesses is optimistic at best. Looking at the top 15 antitrust cases in the US, you can see how in many cases, the antitrust action was minimally effective in the long term, as the companies that were split up often ended up rejoining again, years down the line: https://stacker.com/stories/3604/15-companies-us-government-tried-break-mono...
Masataka Ohta
Matt