[jeffbee]

Spoiler: they don't! The ACCESS act, for example, applies only to services with > 50 million MAU and either sales or market caps over $600 billion. Since there has never been any company with $600 billion annual sales, it applies to only 7 companies in the world, and really only 6 because I don't think Saudi Aramco really qualifies.

[Judgmentality]

> Since there has never been any company with $600 billion annual sales

I wonder if someone clever might exploit this loophole to kill the reverse repo market, which is almost hitting $600 billion daily. And technically it's run by the fed, which is technically a private entity. This is obviously an outlier within an outlier and God knows the government wouldn't let it's magical money maker come under fire, but it seems like with the right set of circumstances this going in front of SCOTUS could completely undermine how our entire concept of debt and lending works in the US economy.

Everything I'm saying is purely speculation. This actually happening is about as likely as the US admitting it invaded Iraq for oil (and a bunch of other more nuanced reasons). It's not about honesty; it's about money.

[JumpCrisscross]

> technically it's run by the fed

The Fed executes repos and reverse repos. It does not run the market. Primary dealers execute these through tri-party repo agents, which practically is like two banks.

[vitus]

Walmart is close to that $600B sales number (~$560B revenue in 2020), but not quite there. Their website claims 100M MAUs, though, so they'd be covered [0].

Comcast likely does meet that 50M number, depending on how you look at things. They have ~30M residential customer relationships, but that's likely only counting each household once (as opposed to per person in the household).

AT&T's Q1 earnings listed 44.2M domestic subscribers, just considering WarnerMedia (HBO + HBO Max). Again, probably counting customers as opposed to household members that use the service.

Verizon's Q1 earnings listed 94 million "total wireless retail connections".

(While we're listing subscriber counts for video streaming -- Netflix also meets the 50M threshold, and Disney+ probably does.

Netflix has 74M US+Canada subscribers, but there are only 10M households in Canada... Likewise, Disney+ "only" has 40M US subscriptions but again, subscriptions vs household members.)

[0] "Our largest website, Walmart.com, sees up to 100 million unique visitors a month, according to comScore, and is growing every year." https://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/our-business

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_wireless... says AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile all have >100M US subscribers.

[ethbr0]

Personal opinion? Good.

The restrictions and remedies here seem fairly harsh. Of the sort you'd only want to cover monopolies (but-we-don't-want-to-prosecute-you-as-monopolies).

Telecom definitely needs its share of modernizing, but it should probably be more targeted.

[ocdtrekkie]

The fact that ISPs don't even come close to those numbers is a good example of why tech companies are a much bigger problem than ISPs. ISPs are the monster under the bed big tech has been paying people to scare you with so you don't look too closely at them.

[wbl]

The competition for my ISP is not a click away.

[ocdtrekkie]

Neither is Google's, their marketing to the contrary. Installing another app store on their phone OS (which has no competition) requires several steps involving disabling so-called security protections and then side-loading the store. Search is largely protected by the fact that every business must do business with Google if they're to have any customers at all, etc.

Obviously, physical infrastructure is a bit harder to switch, but I have three major wireline ISPs here, four major wireless ones, and I believe two satellite services are an option too. Meanwhile, most Google services have no meaningful competition that isn't incredible niche.

[indigochill]

> Installing another app store on their phone OS (which has no competition) requires several steps involving disabling so-called security protections and then side-loading the store.

Letting users sideload an alternative store the Android way seems like a pretty reasonable solution to me. The experience is pretty much identical to installing arbitrary executables from the internet on PC (in that sometimes your system will pop up a security warning but you can continue despite it). The key difference being people are used to doing that on PCs and not on mobile devices.

But the only alternative seems to be mandating that app stores host competitors, which feels too specific to make for good legislation in my opinion.

But there's another problem which is the Google Play marketplace has a nation's worth of advertising spend to throw at getting eyeballs on it while something like F-Droid... doesn't advertise? And while there are good apps there, the level of polish is nothing like what you see at the top of the Google Play store. People are just so conditioned by shiny trillion-dollar tech that human-scale tech seems old/shady/etc and no amount of legislation is going to change that.

[judge2020]

It’s safe to say that the main revenue driver, Google Search, has easy-to-switch-to competitors like ddg or bing. Android is an indirect revenue driver since it defaults to Google search but it’s far from the majority way people get to Search.

[ocdtrekkie]

This is untrue, if you understand who the customer is, and who the product is. As long as Google holds 70-90% of Search, businesses have no choice but to pay Google to run Google Ads. Because most products being sold are using Google, and Google sells the top search result as an ad. Businesses can't meaningfully switch their ad revenue over to Bing or DDG, and the network effects of that ensure Google can't be deposed.

[mahogany]

> Obviously, physical infrastructure is a bit harder to switch, but I have three major wireline ISPs here, four major wireless ones, and I believe two satellite services are an option too.

Okay, but tens of millions of other Americans have only one broadband choice (if they have one at all). There is clearly a monopoly issue there.

[elzbardico]

For the vast majority of people on dense urban areas, it is.