monopoly

The investigation will focus on Google's influence in searches and in the digital advertising market and to see if the Silicon Valley giant is stifling start-ups, delivering inferior service, and improperly using consumer data.

The "full extent" of so-called Russian meddling that took place on Google in 2016 was $4,700 spent on some digital advertisements. Meanwhile, Google employees and executives contributed $1.6 million to 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Bezos chose Virginia to cozy up to the rule makers in Congress to give him huge tax breaks. Bezos has already invested $13 million with 100 lobbyists, and he will have 25,000 new employees in Virginia available as boots on the ground to wield influence.

The Duran’s Alex Christoforou and Editor-in-Chief Alexander Mercouris discuss the stunning leaked video of an ‘all hands’ company meeting after Hillary Clinton’s defeat to Donald Trump in 2016.

Via Zerohedge…

Dad rock, joystick jazz and the Queen of Soul + this day in history w/the Québec Conference and our song of the day by Trevor Moore on your Morning Monarchy for August 17, 2018.

The company is forecast to hit sales of $258.2 billion by the end of 2018, a roughly 30% increase from the previous year. Many people, including President Trump, object to Amazon's advantages from tax loopholes, its special deal with the US Postal Service and hiring foreign workers instead of Americans to save money on labor. [...]

If only successful entrepreneurship were easy to imagine from an armchair, we’d have less expert analysts warning us about the impending dangers to democracy and even more “monopolies” like Amazon to cater to our lesser needs. Although the danger is imminent, its real-life consequences are still ambiguous for trustbusters. To paraphrase a so-called robber baron of the 19th century, “the public be damned.”

Amazon's offer to buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion sounds pretty great to both parties, but it seems that isn't good enough. The proposal has a lot of people worried about Amazon becoming an indestructible monopoly, and the government is all too happy to step in and settle the issue. But this concern ignores consumers' own preferences as well as business and entrepreneurial history. This week in Words and Numbers, Antony Davies and James R.

With the announcement that Amazon.com is purchasing Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, a certain strain of the anti-business Left went into panic mode. It’s the same concern you see every time two large companies merge, amplified by the fact that Whole Foods happens to be particularly popular among people skeptical of corporate power. Of course, all these fears are terribly dramatic and overblown, falling into the classic error that confuses corporate power with government power.