[Unedited Transcript]
Paul Ford: Richard.
Rich Ziade: How are you, Paul? Fall
Paul Ford: Rode my bike over to Beautiful Day Fall is here.
Rich Ziade: is here. The leafers will be converging on upstate
Paul Ford: Uh, leaf peeping. What do you have a funny leaf peeping story?
Rich Ziade: Don’t say leaf peeping.
Paul Ford: Leaf peeping.
Rich Ziade: Go ahead.
Paul Ford: Uh, my son decided to stay up late. And Sneak, probably YouTube or TV. We was, we have the, most systems are locked down,
Rich Ziade: Sure, I know, I know the lockdown
Paul Ford: but, uh, the lockdown wasn’t working, he got through. So we get, it’s, school’s about to start and he’s like, I’m not going.
I can’t go. Cause he stayed up
Rich Ziade: Oh,
Paul Ford: and he’s like,
Rich Ziade: the whole night.
Paul Ford: yeah, it’s like, he, yeah, this
Rich Ziade: didn’t stay up till midnight. Oh
Paul Ford: So we have a disaster on our hands. And it is the day that my mother in law and her twin sister, it’s like having two mother in laws, identical twin,
Rich Ziade: That’s cool.
Paul Ford: they’re here visiting. It’s actually great because they just hang [00:01:00] out and sort of talk to each other like it’s a very, they’re having a great time.
I love them. They’re great. And so they were to go with my wife to upstate New York and go leaf peeping.
Rich Ziade: no, with
Paul Ford: And so my
Rich Ziade: that my son
Paul Ford: no, no, with my, the day that my son wakes up. So now we, about two years ago.
Rich Ziade: Oh, I was going to say, it’s too early this year. Okay, this happened a couple years ago. Go ahead.
Paul Ford: So now my son wakes up, so now my son is a disaster. His sister goes to school
Rich Ziade: wakes
Paul Ford: and he is now expecting to go back to bed.
Rich Ziade: my son is not functioning. And
Paul Ford: my wife says, no honey, you’re going leaf peeping.
Rich Ziade: Ha ha, the ultimate punishment.
Paul Ford: so a 10 year old
Rich Ziade: Hell
Paul Ford: seven hours in the car,
Rich Ziade: That is, that’s, that’s how
Paul Ford: To look at leaves changing color.
Rich Ziade: way to learn. Ah, I think she’s
Paul Ford: it really is. And it was amazing as she went, you know, [00:02:00] I wonder if his sisters are going to be jealous. And I’m like, no, everybody’s okay.
Rich Ziade: doing fine.
Paul Ford: So he, uh, he still remembers that. He’s like, yeah, that was a bad one. Cause you know, they’re just looking out the window going, Oh, look at that. That’s, you know,
Rich Ziade: So lovely.
Paul Ford: And he’s just, and no, no, you know, no phone, no Pokemon Go,
Rich Ziade: There’s nothing to distract. Yeah.
Paul Ford: Um, all right, so that’s not why we’re here.
Rich Ziade: No?
Paul Ford: But when you said leaf peeping, what are you talking
Rich Ziade: stories about life?
Paul Ford: it was cute. Um, so we are here because, so first of all, you and I, we should, let’s just talk about sponsorship for a second.
We’re sponsored by our own company, Aboard.
Rich Ziade: we give them a discount to sponsor on this podcast.
Paul Ford: God, I do, I’m really enjoying [00:03:00] it lately.
Rich Ziade: Sponsorships?
Paul Ford: Yes, no, building this company. It’s genuinely fun.
Rich Ziade: It is
Paul Ford: It’s hard.
Rich Ziade: It’s hard. It’s hard, but you got to kind of keep going and
Paul Ford: Also, you and I, we’re gonna be okay. We’re alright.
Rich Ziade: we’re doing okay. And on top of that, I think, I think what makes it hard is you really don’t get to see the outcome. You, you can look at stats and our stats are good. The engagement levels are very good on the platform.
Paul Ford: very true.
Rich Ziade: But we are also dead inside and we’re like, well, what about the other
Paul Ford: This is life. There is no, I wrote about this actually for the Aboard blog and newsletter, which is like, there is no good news. You can’t have good
Rich Ziade: You can’t have good news. It is important to pause and celebrate the little wins, like launching. You built software. I had a friend who told me, he’s like, stop looking for failure and just pause for a minute. You shipped a big thing into the world. You should, [00:04:00] you know, celebrate that at least.
Paul Ford: You know how I pursue success is when I’m using the product because I like it. I’m a user of it. I’m actually probably the most dedicated user it the longest. Uh, and I forget. That it’s ours.
Rich Ziade: That’s a big moment.
Paul Ford: I’m like, Oh, it’s just software. Just,
Rich Ziade: into utility, right?
Paul Ford: of moving the cards around doing stuff. This is not a pitch.
I’m just trying to say like, it’s fall. It’s a pretty
Rich Ziade: mentioned the product. It’s Aboard. Join for free at Aboard. com.
Paul Ford: Yeah, that’s
Rich Ziade: We don’t have to say any more than that.
Paul Ford: So now one thing about a board is it is a very little company.
Rich Ziade: Very little. It’s adorable.
Paul Ford: startup. Look
Rich Ziade: Furry little company.
Paul Ford: it on its head, it’s touching you, it’s sitting on your knee. Hi! Woof! That’s our company. But there are very, very big, and we are a tiny mammal in a world of unbelievably large dinosaurs.
Rich Ziade: You’re talking about the tech sector.
Paul Ford: Yes. Yes. Growth, growth, growth. Big, big, big. Google.
Rich Ziade: IBM,
Paul Ford: noticing a
Rich Ziade: [00:05:00] Salesforce,
Paul Ford: a trend and I want you as a legal and technology industry analyst to educate me a little bit. Uh, Google is being sued for antitrust stuff.
Rich Ziade: they are. We had a podcast about it. We recommend you go listen to it if you haven’t already and also subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts.
Paul Ford: So then I woke up, uh, yesterday, you know, trying to do spelling bee and the puzzle and the crossword in the New York Times and big article right at the top of the paper.
Rich Ziade: This
Paul Ford: F T C is suing Amazon. It’s a lot, it’s a lot of antitrust stuff for America. America in general is like, kind of takes its time about antitrust, and here we’re just having one after, one after the other.
Rich Ziade: is true.
Paul Ford: And so we got, we have a, the giant untouchable, ultimate growth industry that runs the world. And now and really kind of government got out of its way for the most part, but they poked it Mark Zuckerberg after after the Weird election stuff right
Rich Ziade: But that’s [00:06:00] not really antitrust.
Paul Ford: know that was like did you enable the crimes?
Right and he’s he sat on that thing, you know, it was it was what it was it was Facebook, I think is probably, Facebook keeps winning lately. Like Twitter implodes and Facebook’s like, Hey, there’s all this antitrust. And I’m sure Facebook is like, not us. You know, we have a lot going on, but none, we don’t have a, our phone failed.
Remember?
Rich Ziade: Yeah, I mean, there’s, don’t look at us only. There’s Twitter,
Paul Ford: Yeah. Yeah.
Rich Ziade: meanwhile, it’s a tiny,
Paul Ford: They should, they should just make sure it survives as long as they
Rich Ziade: I mean, I have that, you know, a lot of people have that theory about, like, Intel kept AMD around. Yeah.
Paul Ford: Uh, there was a point where Intel chips were almost a monopoly. Right. So, okay. So what the hell’s going on? Why are we having? This now and what is this case against Amazon? And the reason I ask is like, we’re in this industry. We use Amazon web services. Even if you think you don’t use Amazon web services, you do because everything that’s sort of used for hosting stuff now is built on AWS.
[00:07:00] It’s just the infrastructure of the world. I buy things from Amazon, even though I buy much less from Amazon than I used to. I do try to use other stores though, cause it just got ridiculous. Um. And Amazon is vast, it runs the world. And Google is vast, it runs the world. So what’s happening? What is going on?
Rich Ziade: Well, I think there’s a couple things going on. Um, the first is the FTC commissioner that Was put in by President Biden. Her name is Lina Khan.
Paul Ford: Okay.
Rich Ziade: And… Since law school, she has been a, a strong advocate of government stepping in to thwart anti competitive practices. She wrote a paper for, when she was at Yale Law School, essentially saying, Amazon is violating antitrust laws.
I don’t know the exact title [00:08:00] of the paper. And that paper actually, um, was a bombshell. It wasn’t just another law journal paper. Like, it was actually, it actually
Paul Ford: Like, so, because it, let me, let me, let me pretend to be lawyers for a minute. Man, I really want to get a Porsche. I like having nice things. I’m a lawyer. Pause. And then, uh, and then I, I pick up a law journal and I go, Oh, Amazon antitrust. And then they read it and they get the logic and they’re like, okay.
Right? Like you don’t think of like lawyers kind of lean in and they’re like, like if the logic is unimpeachable, it’s unimpeachable.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, and look, that, that, that…
Paul Ford: I gotta be frank. That was not my best impersonation of an industry. I’ve done better.
Rich Ziade: it was, it sounded like my cousin Vinny,
Paul Ford: I don’t, I don’t really, I just, I didn’t do the work and I just want to apologize to the audience.
Rich Ziade: let’s talk about Yale Law School.
Paul Ford: Oh my
God.
Let’s. They’re,
Rich Ziade: [00:09:00] is not putting out your run of the mill personal injury lawyer. They are putting out pretty much some of the most powerful
Paul Ford: I’m just imagining that ad
Rich Ziade: Yeah, exactly.
Paul Ford: Seth? Yeah. Yes. Percy.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah
Paul Ford: Have you ever been injured?
Rich Ziade: Oh my goodness Yale, I mean if you run you can hit Wikipedia and look at all the Supreme Court justices and all of the different Commissioners and secretaries of state and secretaries of this and that there’s a lot of Yale Law School It’s a lot of Yale Law School. So Yale law is special in that way.
So this woman Was a student at the law school, wrote this paper, and that paper is not circulating amongst law firms like the one you just imitated. It is circulating in DC. It’s circulating in Washington amongst policy makers,
think tanks, and the
Paul Ford: So if we get a democratic pro labor, pro [00:10:00] union president like Biden, and he goes shopping for someone to run the FTC because they have to, you know, you got to fill the
Rich Ziade: That’s right. This was a right. She’s the youngest
FTC commissioner
Paul Ford: So anyway, so. So his advisors, he’s a lawyer too, so his advisors were like, you know, what do you want to do here? And he’s like, I want to, I want to give it to him. I want him to feel it a little bit. And they went, you should talk to
Rich Ziade: You’re framing that as in like, Oh, I want to like put in motion my left leaning thinking. But if you really think about antitrust and it’s, it is the curve, the curve ball to end all curve balls. It is about heading off anti competitive practices, which is in my mind is actually
quite conservative.
Paul Ford: a super capitalist move. But what, what happens though is it comes in the form of a slap across the face of the giant orgs that, that like you’re Kind of good left leaning person tends to find the most horrific, so it feels good to them.
Rich Ziade: Let me be conservative and throw out a catchphrase. Government [00:11:00] regulation is terrible. Now let me be conservative and throw out another catchphrase. Anti competition is terrible. Everyone should compete. Free markets.
Paul Ford: Absolutely.
Rich Ziade: both of those things come out of any conservative thinker, even fiscal
conservative thinkers mouth,
Paul Ford: why do conservatives end up often allying themselves with these giant orgs? They like them.
Rich Ziade: Because conservatives, across everything, defend the status quo.
Always,
Paul Ford: So they’re like, hey, look, okay, Google’s big. Might be a little bit too big, but come on.
Rich Ziade: That’s what success is. Welcome to America. They made it. They arrived. Don’t take it out of their
Paul Ford: so it’s two competing narratives in the conservative worldview right there.
Rich Ziade: That’s right.
Paul Ford: And then, lest I also forget, I’ll just, let me be cynical for a minute. This is, is K Street lobbying. Like Google has armies of people who are like, Hey, what do you
Rich Ziade: You don’t have a choice. You have to have an army of people, Facebook does as well, Amazon does as well. This woman [00:12:00] getting picked, by the way, little, little factoid for you. When she was put forward as the potential FTC commissioner. Amazon petitioned saying, she can’t be that FTC commissioner. She wrote a big, big essay in law school.
Paul Ford: is essentially like Canada, right? Like,
Rich Ziade: the U S government turned to them and said, what are you doing here?
Paul Ford: yeah. How, what are you guys worried about? What?
Rich Ziade: Well, it was a well founded
worry.
Paul Ford: is kind of the classic, like, if you have nothing to hide.
Rich Ziade: Who invited you to this conversation? Anyway, they tried, they failed. It’s been brewing for a while. She is someone, by the way, antitrust law is out of step with, uh, technology, monopolies. If you want to call them, they’re not as straightforward
as your classic
monopolies. And I want to explain
Paul Ford: classic monopoly was the Bell system, which, yes, it had tiny bits of competition, but it was understood, it was a government sanctioned, it was a government [00:13:00] accepted monopoly.
Rich Ziade: not coming
into the game.
Paul Ford: no, it was like, we have to connect all the phones to all the other phones and you need one, you need one company to do that.
We’re going to build that up.
Rich Ziade: that’s right. That’s right. No, but, but it was a private company and it was anti competitive because you weren’t going to show up with Richie phone service and, and say, hey,
Paul Ford: was tricky. There were regional, like there were all these things that happened that let them go like, no, we’re not completely anti competitive, like MCI and sort of,
Rich Ziade: yeah, yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: but ultimately, you know what I think did a
Rich Ziade: was clear.
Paul Ford: know what their stock ticker symbol was? T.
Rich Ziade: The one
Paul Ford: What? Yeah.
So it’s like, hey, we’re not a monopoly. Oh, really? Your, your symbol is T.
Rich Ziade: The FTC was formed in the early 1900s essentially to protect against monopolies. You’re seeing it in railroads. You’re seeing it in big oil. Um, where people essentially controlled everything, right? And because of that,
Paul Ford: had all the oil and, I mean,
Rich Ziade: it was, I mean, it was the Industrial Revolution. The thing that happens after revolutions end [00:14:00] is that you have a new set of stakeholders that hold
on real good.
Paul Ford: Yeah, yeah. When do they start to consolidate power? They’re no longer getting beheaded. Yeah.
Rich Ziade: So now… What is different about tech is it’s not about oh my god They own every train station at every waypoint across every city. That’s not what’s going on It’s actually different because there are plenty of places to
shop.
Paul Ford: There are, I can go to Target.
Rich Ziade: You can go to Target, Target. com Walmart, Walmart. com.
Walmart has invested billions to make sure they’re relevant in
that against Amazon
Paul Ford: check, there’s like a Walmart labs on GitHub. I love that. I love when, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. They got big into Clojure at one point. Like, no, no, good, go Walmart, sort of,
Rich Ziade: FTC is saying, what they are not saying is that, oh my god, it’s the only store. They can’t say that, right? There’s plenty of shops on the internet. Frankly, I think they should shut down Newegg just because of its UI, but that’s a
separate podcast
Paul Ford: Yeah, but if you need, [00:15:00] um, oh man, like a good 30 gigabytes, 30 terabytes of hard drive.
Rich Ziade: fan for your CPU, Newegg’s
the
Paul Ford: Sometimes you just need a good network attached storage device, and that’s, that’s where Newegg
Rich Ziade: way they rate it with
eggs, I love
Paul Ford: it’s really
good.
Rich Ziade: Anyway, that’s not what this is about. So they’re not suing Amazon. You’re the only shop and you don’t let anybody else shop anywhere else. That’s not what they’re saying. What they are saying is, Amazon did something very subtle. They used to just be a store.
And then they used their reach to establish what is effectively a commerce platform where anyone can sell their goods
on Amazon.
Paul Ford: effectively a commerce platform where anyone can sell their goods on Amazon.
Rich Ziade: That’s…
Exactly. So, Amazon created… Effectively a, a shopping mall is a good way to look at it. They also created an ad buying platform. So if you [00:16:00] wanted to promote your goods in that mall,
you could.
Paul Ford: It sounds like a good business to be.
Rich Ziade: And they provide fulfillment services. So if you don’t want to deal with the actual shipping of the stuff, you can use their warehouses.
They essentially created their own economy, like their own greenhouse
economy.
Paul Ford: Right. So the money never leaves the system.
Rich Ziade: But there’s one wrinkle, which is there is one seller on Amazon
that competes with all the little guys who are selling stuff on Amazon.
Paul Ford: Amazon. Amazon, Yeah.
Rich Ziade: right? And so what, uh, there are a few things they’ve put, put forward in the complaint. One of them is if you are looking at an Amazon product and then they have, you know, related products or comparable products over on the side, if a merchant tries to sell a similar, like there’s Amazon slippers and they’re for 10 bucks and the merchant, a third party wants to sell them for eight, Amazon’s
Paul Ford: Amazon’s algorithm
Rich Ziade: algorithm knocks them out of [00:17:00] the side view.
Or minimizes them. So effectively, what they’re doing is they’re pushing out anybody that’s competing on price with Amazon’s own products. That’s what the FTC is putting
Paul Ford: I mean, I, I get it.
Right. I get it.
Rich Ziade: No, but here’s what’s, oh, but it’s their marketplace, you could say. Yeah, it is their marketplace. There’s a big consequence here.
And this isn’t about the guy who sells the slippers. This is about us. We are paying more money for products because the competitive dynamics have been thwarted, effectively crippled by… The people who hold the
keys, which is Amazon.
Paul Ford: the competition isn’t happening because Amazon can ultimately define how the market’s going to work and say, I think Amazon can be like, I think flip flops are going to run around here. Okay.
Rich Ziade: And, and, and what they’re doing
Paul Ford: logic, their plot is towards those.
Rich Ziade: their logic, their platform is effectively biased towards their own products, right?
And, [00:18:00] and the truth is,
Paul Ford: case is,
saying. I don’t know if that’s
Rich Ziade: it is what the case is saying, and I, my guess is they, they’ve had people locked
in a room for two
Paul Ford: This would be a hell of a move if you didn’t have any evidence.
Rich Ziade: correct.
There’s another
Paul Ford: they’re also I mean, let’s be clear like the vibes light up right like like you’ve we’ve all ordered things and it’s like
Rich Ziade: That’s right. By the way, Europe is also peering in, and Europe is more aggressive,
um, with
Paul Ford: well there’s a moment to where you would like look for something that was for sale on Amazon and go find it much cheaper Somewhere else. I mean like there are these these like it no longer is a really good store in a lot of ways It’s got everything
Rich Ziade: It’s got
Paul Ford: but it but it’s like impossible to shop like
Rich Ziade: another, um, uh, case they’re making, which is around fulfillment. In essence, they’re, they, they, and I don’t know the exact details, but it’s something along these lines. They want you to use Amazon’s fulfillment services because Amazon makes money from it.
Like, if you, and, and, and if you want to show up as a [00:19:00] Amazon Prime delivery product, you have to use their services. And Amazon Prime is a world, right? Like, almost everybody’s on it. So what does that say, and what the FTC said was, hey, what if I want to start a trucking company? And I want to deliver stuff.
You’ve killed me. I can’t even get in the
Paul Ford: can’t select, like, Rich’s Trucking Company versus Amazon Prime.
Rich Ziade: Not only that, I don’t think Fundamentally, when monopolies are in full bloom, you don’t bother. No one’s even saying it. No one’s going to even go in. That’s the end of the competitive sphere,
Paul Ford: those trucks that make that weird crow noise when they back up. And there’s Amazon trucks, there’s probably an Amazon truck parked in front of this house right now. And, uh, you don’t see, they’re all gray. And nobody’s making yellow ones or pink ones. You know, there’s no like Bob’s Amazon style delivery
Rich Ziade: there isn’t. They, they used a bunch for a while. They used like Lasership. These are smaller delivery people, but [00:20:00] then they, they have, once they do the math and they’re like, okay, we’ve crossed
the point.
Paul Ford: the ultimate spreadsheet company. Like, remember
Rich Ziade: the ultimate
Paul Ford: we’re going to figure out how to pack things more efficiently? Remember when they moved to, like, the inflatable plastic bags?
Rich Ziade: they did the, there’s a, there’s an equation that
made that make
Paul Ford: there are so many cardboard geniuses who work there.
Rich Ziade: Oh my God. And, and look, we’re painting a picture here of an evil empire,
like a little bit,
Paul Ford: I don’t even know if we are. I think
Rich Ziade: I use Amazon. I buy stuff from Amazon. When I’m feeling lonely and dead inside, I order from
Paul Ford: When I need like 137, 000 pencil erasers,
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
You go on Amazon. Yeah. I think, uh, a couple of sort of overarching thoughts here. One is… This is what success looks like. You won.
You won.
Paul Ford: didn’t
just won.
Like they, they, won
like a hurricane
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
they own Whole Foods. They own
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: iRobot, which makes the Roomba. They [00:21:00] just recently bought Metro Goldwyn Mayer, which makes the James Bond movie, so they own that property as well.
They won. Like you won
and, and, and
Paul Ford: let’s be clear too, they look kind of Monopoly E
Rich Ziade: they do know there’s no way around it. And so does Google, right? I mean, in a lot of ways, we’ve talked about Google as well. This is end game success, like of the most extreme kind, right? And, and to say, well, you could still go to Walmart. I know I can still go to Walmart.
That’s not the point. The point is a trucking company is not, I can’t go to a bank or an investor and say, I want to start a trucking company. Cause a lot of people are getting deliveries. Because they have shut out the channel, effectively. Um, and, if I’m a, you know, I sell slippers, or I sell, you know, headphones or whatever, if it’s coming in cheaper than Amazon for the same product, they’re gonna knock me out of the
Paul Ford: the same product, they’re going to knock the counter argument. Don’t sell on Amazon. That is the counter argument. It’s the [00:22:00] killer, it’s like, you, you, you don’t like how we’re, you’re literally using
Rich Ziade: our shelves.
Paul Ford: create a store called flipflopsoross.
Rich Ziade: Walmart. go to
Paul Ford: to
Wal Mart. Yeah,
Rich Ziade: Go wherever the hell you want. What do you want from
Paul Ford: the only retail in the
Rich Ziade: We’re definitely not doing so there are counter
arguments here to be made
Paul Ford: I mean, Wal Mart I’m sure owns, Wal Mart owns lots of trucks.
Rich Ziade: Walmart has a similar model by the way, you can buy a lot of products that aren’t made by Walmart They have a marketplace as well. They do it as well They just don’t have the muscle that Amazon has in the reach Amazon has
Amazon
Paul Ford: God, that’s wild too. Wal Mart used to be the terrifying company in America.
Rich Ziade: If you’re gonna, if you think you’ve got a cool iPhone case that glitters, that glows in the dark, you have to use Amazon. You have no choice. There is no other option
Paul Ford: that’s the
argument. That’s the
Rich Ziade: That’s the argument, like you are the only ones that are gonna, and you cannot use that HOV lane. that access to muscle people out.
That’s the
Paul Ford: I mean, it makes intuitive sense from everything we’ve seen out of Amazon over the last 15 years. Like, okay, I get this [00:23:00] case.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. I mean, that’s the case. And, and, and by the way, the leadership at the FTC, why now? Why not five years ago? I mean, you know, these are people that are appointed by presidents. This woman has very strong feelings about antitrust being out of sync. Let’s go back to what I was saying before. It’s very subtle.
Owning every train depot
means you can have a monopoly on trains. What Amazon did was they didn’t just keep selling their stuff. They turned their presence into a marketplace. It, it, no one said, Oh my God, Amazon used to be a store, now it’s a platform. Nobody said that.
But that’s what happened. They effect,
Paul Ford: said that.
Rich Ziade: you might have said that. And, What the FTC Commissioner, Lina Khan, is saying is the old antitrust laws, which were for railroads and oil, need to be updated, and we’re going to be, and until you pass laws, we, as the FTC, we have to get creative with making sure there, there aren’t new anti [00:24:00] competitive practices that don’t necessarily fall right into the letter of the law, but have to get
enforced somehow.
Paul Ford: What do you think will happen? Make a prediction.
Rich Ziade: Um, I don’t know. Breaking up companies seems out of
fashion. My
Paul Ford: I doubt
Rich Ziade: a, wicked
fine.
Paul Ford: is a, there is a case to be made that like AWS and the trucking company. There is a case to be made that these should be separate entities.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, I, I think, I don’t know if that solves it, right? Like, if you just move AWS out, you could still do that. I think there’s gonna be two things. I think one is a nasty, nasty bill gets sent to Amazon. Um, and it’s probably settled between lawyers and they
can like, Alright,
Paul Ford: you just move AWS out,
Rich Ziade: Exactly. Uh, and then there are a set of changes that have to get made. EU does this all the time. They’re like… I mean, the most explicit example is like, Hey, Apple, I have too many wires. You have to use USB C and now the new iPhone is USB [00:25:00] C.
Paul Ford: Or so it’ll be like a drop down to pick your shipping company.
Rich Ziade: something, some set of agreed upon changes. The shattering of Amazon into a million companies, I don’t think is realistic, but I’m not an expert in antitrust law.
I just think it’s nearly
Paul Ford: that fee. That just feels like a, we’re not in that world anymore.
Rich Ziade: don’t know if we’re in that world anymore. And it’s not a matter of like, it’s the only store. So we have to break
it up.
It’s not the only
Paul Ford: Be fun though, to break it up. Oh, it’d be fun to see and just to see a lot of, just it’s chaos.
Like shattering the tech industry would be great. It’d be great for the world.
Rich Ziade: It would be great
for
the world.
Paul Ford: We can’t have it. I don’t think we can have it. I
Rich Ziade: I don’t think we can have it. I think what you can do is you can rein it in through
regulation,
Paul Ford: wild, man, is that, like, they broke up AT& T and it all kind of found itself again. Like, there’s, there is a giant AT& T.
Rich Ziade: still
Boost Mobile, dude.
Paul Ford: They’re all huge. They’re all, all enormous. And many of
Rich Ziade: Yeah,
Verizon,
Paul Ford: many of them rolled back up into, the Babybels became these sort of blobby
Rich Ziade: Yeah, there’s like [00:26:00] three or four big sell companies
now. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Paul Ford: Yeah, no, it’s, it’s the true diversity of choice is not there.
Rich Ziade: It’s not, it’s not. It’s always rolls up, but you can’t be one. You can’t be a party of
one.
Paul Ford: No, that’s true. They still
compete. That’s
Rich Ziade: They have to compete, right? And T Mobile and Verizon are at each other’s throats
every day, right? And that’s
Paul Ford: Ugh, yeah, let them fight. Fight it out in the arena. So look, I’m actually, I am, uh, I talk to you all day, but I’m more informed now that we did this podcast. I like that.
Rich Ziade: Are you saying you’re never informed when you talk
to me outside of the
Paul Ford: Usually we’re
Rich Ziade: great. We’ll talk about this once we go off the
Paul Ford: Yeah, we’re often complaining. Um, sounds good. Alright, so we’re going to watch it. We’ll see what happens. It’s good to, good to have a plan. Good to know. But, alright, so no, like, AWS is going to suddenly become, like, socialist web services.
Rich Ziade: this shit is slow. Like, this is the news because the lawsuit was filed. But,
like, bleh.
Paul Ford: we got yours.
Rich Ziade: I don’t know about years, but it’s boring. Uh, you can keep up on it. Lawyers like to. Antitrust lawyers
like [00:27:00] to.
Paul Ford: is, this is great for them.
Rich Ziade: but, you know,
it’s not the most exciting.
Paul Ford: right, but now, now, we know.
Rich Ziade: now we know.
Paul Ford: All right, so check out Aboard. com, our wonderful sponsor, the company we co founded. Check us out at helloatziadeford. com if you want to email us or atziadeford on x slash Twitter. We love to hear from you. We’ll talk to you soon.
Rich Ziade: Have a lovely week.