>>221851>No archive linksI know a small minority wants these, but when you’re trying to do things in meat space and you are away from your laptop, the niceties of having archived links don’t always outweigh the extra time, effort, and risk of losing the whole post to a refresh.
>its a little early to break out the bubbly.The reason this case is so significant is because it is a signal of how the Kavanaugh era Supreme Court will vote on antitrust cases that come before it. The United States formerly had fairly robust anti-trust laws, until the 1980s when the Court became dominated by “conservative” appointees, who reflexively vote against the plaintiffs in anti-trust cases because industrialists good, plaintiffs lawyers and regulations bad. So antitrust has been slowly whittled away under decades of conservative dominance. See the Virginia Slims case for an example.
To take another rather extreme instance, look at the 2007 case of “Bell Atlantic Corp v Twombly.” In that case, a consumer alleged that telephone companies were conspiring to not compete with each other and remain in their specific regions, as evidenced by the fact that they were mutually respecting each other’s territory. The defendants moved to dismiss, and the motion to dismiss was appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court decides that the complaint didn’t not allege enough facts to evidence collusion, and so dismissed it. This is not a case that went to trial and was overturned, it never even went to
discovery to allow any evidence to be found. This case so fucked up American law concerning motions to dismiss that every single law student in the US has to read this case in their Civil Procedure class, because of how it changed the law. Modern antitrust has been pretty bleak with the court having a majority of its members appointed by republicans for decades.
Along came this case. Four of the conservatives voted against the plaintiffs because plaintiffs lawyers bad. The four liberals, as per usual, voted against the corporation defendant because corporations bad. What was different this session - what shall be different for years to come - was and is Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who broke with conservative wing to vote against Apple.
Tell me, if you were an attorney general in one of the deep red states like Nebraska, Texas, or Oklahoma, what would your guess be about the likelihood of success of future anti-trust suits against Apple, Facebook, or Google, should they ever end up before the Supreme Court? You’d feel more optimistic about your chances of ultimate success than if the case had gone the other way. Even more so if you were a private law firm thinking about taking on a class action lawsuit against Google or Apple. Massive class action antitrust lawsuits require reviewing millions of documents, hundreds of depositions, and take many years. No law firm is going to want to spend millions of dollars and the better part of s decade just for their case to go all the way to the Supreme Court and be dismissed.
This case here is basically a green light for State’s Attorney Generals and private plaintiffs to sue tech giants, and I promise you it will affect their behavior.
>This also could go either way, as if its left to the AttyGen, it could end up being something entirely unacted uponYou’re forgetting that the US State of Texas is about as crazily right wing as American government gets. Texas is the State that elected Ted Cruz. The Texas Attorney General’s Office is the Office that made Ted Cruz it’s Solicitor General for years, and it’s current Attorney General, Ken Paxton, sued the Obama Administration for is DAPA amnesty, sued the EPA, sued the Department of labor, defended Exxon Mobile in a lawsuit relating to climate change, and that repeatedly engages in judicial activism of all kinds. The Anti-trust division of the Texas AG is extremely aggressive, leading lawsuits against American Airlines, Microsoft, and even a Google. The Consumer Protection Division - the Division which would be enforcing this law if ever passed - is currently suing pharmaceutical companies over the Opioid crisis. Texas loves using litigation as an instrument of right wing political activism.
But forget about Texas. Because there is no logical reason this same legislation cannot be proposed and passed in any of the 24 other states where Republicans hold trifecta power in the legislature and governor’s office. Oklahoma can do it. Ohio can do it. Alabama can do it. Many states can pass this law, and their attorney generals can sue Facebook.
Besides the realistic plausibility if enforcement, this proposed bill has one answer to the old question “how do we take legal action against censorship? After all, the First Amendment only applies to the government, not private corporations. Hughes gives one answer to that question by proposing laws on truth in advertising, under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act, be applied to sites claiming not to be publishers of a certain view point, but who actually show a measurable bias, allowing persons and companies whose adds are refused to sue these social media companies.
Now, we may see more proposed laws in more states. Over the past couple years, the degree of poser these social media companies have has come to light, and they have been pretty bold with their censorship. This shows there is and will be push back.
>Even if ruled against, its hardly a win. Google can handle paying a fine.Death by a thousand cuts. This antitrust action is more or less India doing what Europe did last year, and it shows that countries around the world - including ones we never expected. This is not the first action by other countries, and it won’t be the last. Keep fining them and fining them, and they won’t have as much money to pour into elections
\r