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Google, Yahoo!, Apple Targeted In DoJ Antitrust Probe
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from the Washington Post:
"The Justice Department has launched an investigation into whether some of the nation's largest technology companies violated antitrust laws by negotiating the recruiting and hiring of one another's employees, according to two sources with knowledge of the review. The review, which is said to be in its preliminary stages, is focused on Google; its competitor Yahoo; Apple; and the biotech firm Genentech, among others, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. The sources said the review includes other tech companies and is 'industry-wide.' By agreeing not to hire away top talent, the companies could be stifling competition and trying to maintain their market power unfairly, antitrust experts said. ... Obama's antitrust chief at the Justice Department, Christine Varney, has said she plans to look at the network effects of high-tech companies and how their grasp on markets has cut out competitors and hurt consumers."
By agreeing not to hire away top talent, the companies could be stifling competition and trying to maintain their market power unfairly, antitrust experts said...In 2005, Microsoft sued Google for hiring away Kai-Fu Lee...
Good. Hopefully these actions will lead to the outlawing of vaguely wide-ranging NDAs which state that employees may not work for "competitors" for X years after leaving their companies. I wish that TFA provided the list of all the companies because they didn't mention whether or not Microsoft was in the list despite their example above.
Antitrust experts say that could include wireless carriers and software operators that may be blocking certain applications from running on their networks and devices.
Let's hope so.
Their anuses look like this.
Why do we trust google, again?
It seems to me like there's another angle on this, from the perspective of the affected employees, not the customers/competitors.
By forming a pact that keeps an employee at company A from getting a job at any other company in the cartel, doesn't that run afoul of federal fair labor laws?
Seriously neither Google nor Yahoo! are anything close to a monopoly. Popular, yes. Abusive, no. Apple is way more open now than it was a few years ago, almost all Apple products have something open source powering it. About the only vaguely monopolistic thing that Apple has done is with the App store for the iPhone.
Doesn't it make much more sense to go after MS rather then companies which are definitely not monopolies and not abusive ones at that?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Oh my god!!! Is this happening in the US!? Quick, someone get a camera!
Would you have voted for BHO if you knew he was going to make a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court who is pro-RIAA and that under BHO's administration we'd see Google, Apple come under major Antitrust scrutiny (but not Microsoft)? What are your thoughts?
"Obama's antitrust chief at the Justice Department, Christine Varney, has said she plans to look at the network effects of high-tech companies and how their grasp on markets has cut out competitors and hurt consumers."
They are investigating collusion in the labor market - in this case, the companies themselves are the consumer, and job seekers provide the service. But this has nothing to do with cutting out competitors and hurting consumers. What they are doing is collusion in a market which, though probably illegal, keeps costs down, not up.
"look at the network effects of high-tech companies and ... grasp on markets ..." is shorthand for increased government regulation, whether warranted or not. What will happen when they decide to investigate the companies that supply toilets, and find out that "only" 10 companies "dominate" the market? They may not be colluding, but OBVIOUSLY such a small number of companies id bad for the market, and hence requires regulation of their pricing to protect the consumer.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I dont understand how they can go after small things like this while Microsoft continues abusing OEM's.
HTTP/1.1 400
The US Government is short of that.
Even though I own multiple Apple products I would rather see DOJ bust Apple's balls than MS. At MS doesn't dictate whose machine I can run their OS on (even though I have no Windows computers art home). As for Google, they have money, they are current at issue with various "AA" groups that have relations with people in the new guy's administration.
Besides this about restricting employee for leaving for better offers by agreeing not to see out talent from agreed upon companies. In other words, if they like you they might be willing to make a deal with a competitor so you won't be offered a reason to leave.
I still figure most of it is about getting more money
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
How is what these companies doing any different than the non compete / anti-head hunting clauses the major oil companies have been using for over four decades to limit employee loss to competitors? The way I see it this is just bluff and bluster on the DoJ's part.
By not hiring from each other, they are dampening the wage escalation that occurs for the best or most strategic talent.
This does not hurt firms not in the cartel, it hurts their employees. It actually helps companies outside the cartel by reducing the cost to hire away talent from companies in the pact.
MLNN, if you think about it, a non-compete is a good idea, IF you happen to be in a sensitive position. If you worked for Google for a number of years and had an intimate knowledge of how their searching algorithm worked, would the brass really want you going to Yahoo with that knowledge being current? It would reduce Google's effectiveness as a company, and what's more, that's their proprietary data, which you might then pass on to another company.
An industry wide probe that calls out these specific companies. Odd that.
Why bother
So other than the fact that most of slashdot thinks they should be paid FAR more than they are actually worth, why exactly is this a bad thing?
You mean some companies agreed to be polite and not steal each others employees. And now they are getting in trouble? Since when did common fucking courtesy become illegal?
You people really need to get in touch with reality. I've learned that people who bitch loudest about not getting paid fairly are the lazy fuck wads that don't deserve it. Those people capable of demanding larger salaries because they really are that good, will get hired somewhere for more anyway.
The only people this 'hurts' are the people who game companies to get more money than they deserve.
If you really think this is 'wrong' you should pull your head out of your ass.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Government anti-trust law action against companies purportedly level the playing field and empowers everyone to compete equally, giving more power to consumers. However, the anti-trust laws are vague and it is hard to tell when a company has violated them. Thus, the government itself gets broad powers to interpret the laws. If the government were really interested in leveling the playing field and empowering many industry players and consumers, instead of itself, it would do something to make those laws clearer. By maintaining vague laws, the government keeps for itself the monopoly to rule on a case-by-case basis what's allowed and what's not. The government itself is guilty of violating the principles of the anti-trust laws.
I disagree! If he is so valuable to his employer that having him work for a competitor would be disastrous for the company, then he should be compensated. The best way would to give him a large enough salary so he would not be tempted to leave the company. As a second method, the company should pay his current salary if they prevent him from working for a competitor. At the very least, they should be obligated to pay the difference if his new salary is less PLUS a fixed amount more.
I'm having a tough time figuring out exactly how this hurts consumers? Can anyone lay it out for me.
Why bother
It's an illegal restraint of trade under US antitrust law. It's not "monopoly", which is sell-side, it's "monopsony", which is buy-side.
Farmers classically face monopsony situations. This was much worse when most farm products moved only by rail. When there was only one buyer with a rail loading facility in an area, farmers were really screwed. That's why there are so many farmer's cooperatives in the US, and USDA efforts to control monopsonies. For what it was like before that, see "A Deal In Wheat", from 1903.
...MS doesn't dictate whose machine I can run their OS on (even though I have no Windows computers art home).
Instead, they pressure the manufacturers into excluding competitor operating systems on computers they deem to be their target market. The "Windows tax" is collected before you get the machine, so you might as well accept the pre-installed product and use it -- like it or not.
I fail to see how that is better.
Is Obama given the authority to regulate businesses - specifically hiring practices. If we allow Obama, et al, to come in and under "anti-trust" provisions penalize these companies for NOT hiring away top talent then our nation has taken a drastic turn towards Marxism. The "hiring truce" is in no way anti-competitive in the sense that it does not affect the marketplace. We still have complete choice between any search engine. Ironically, the one oddly missing from this hiring truce is Microsoft, who is the only one to be convicted of violating anti-trust law! There is no way employments functionally produce a way to maintain market power. If you could put someone else similarly competent, in the position, you'll get a similar result.
The Russians were amazed when Obama "fired" the CEO of GM!
I don't want to hear that it "keeps wages down" or that it is a form of "non-compete". Anti-trust laws are not about jobs. They are about markets. I can use any search engine - google, yahoo, bing(wtf?) and I have plenty of hardware choices. Where I don't have enough choice though is in PC OSs. Thank you, Microsoft.
We are embarking down a dark path as a nation. Government interference in hiring practices? I can understand racial discrimination (marginally so) but a hiring truce? Give me a break.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The sound of Slashdotters' infinitely broad universe of "special rules" for monopolies collapsing as anti-MS fans realize it could apply to Apple, Google, and Yahoo.
In the technology business, the guy with the money buys up the talent to kill his competition. It was that way before IBM displaced Rand McNally. Microsoft turned it into a sledgehammer. Google headed down that path. Yahoo! said "what up with do no evil beothes?". So, folks made a pact of sorts not to do it.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Does Peter Gibbons still work at Genentech?
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
It's not about non-compete agreements between employer and employee. It's about standard boilerplate language in most IT contracts that stipulates that the parties to the agreement won't induce the other parties employees to leave. The usual recourse for the employee is to respond to a public job posting from one of the parties. Nothing sinister here, just companies attempting to protect their most valuable assets, their employees.
Isn't a non-compete basically the same thing? Employers go to great lengths to impose their non-compete agreements on prospective employees, most of whom have no trade secrets or proprietary knowledge of anything. The ultimate goal has nothing to do with the employer's competitors; they simply wish to limit the number of offers an employee might receive (from any source). Paying higher salaries would accomplish the same thing, but the paperwork solution is cheaper and gives the legal department something to do.
It just so happens that most (if not all) of the companies mentioned in TFA are California based. There are no non-competes in California. To me, it looks like these companies stand accused of doing what non-California employers already do. It's slightly more obvious in this case, but not much.
The problem could be solved if non-competes were allowed in all 50 states, for an unlimited term. But the catch would be that employers would be obligated to pay the employee their existing compensation for the duration of the non-compete period if they are terminated for any reason. If their knowledge is SOOOO valuable, then paying them to sit on the bench would be a relative bargain, no? If not, then ditch the strategy.
Google has two main differences, I think, for now:
1. They're still largely controlled by some fairly idealistic folks, who are now so filthy rich that they aren't that worried about making even more money, so much as using their multi-billion-dollar playground to incubate things they think of as cool. As long as their playground continues making significant profit margins, the third-party investors will probably let them do this.
2. In many of their market segments, their self-interest isn't as badly aligned with openness as it is for some large companies. With Google's resources, they can afford to make open protocols, avoid a walled-garden approach and allow people to move their data in/out, etc., because they're banking on the competitive advantage of, "go ahead, just try to duplicate this... here, we'll even give you the code and the APIs, now good luck coming up with and setting up / maintaining that much computing power for a lower price than it costs us". This is actually a positive marketing tool in some areas, because a few large companies have gotten burned with data locked into proprietary formats from now-defunct companies, so "we can get our data back out of this thing, right?" is something even companies that don't care about open source are asking these days.
I agree with you that it's quite possible these will change. If its profit margins start going down, investors will start demanding more "normal corporation" type of stuff to try to prop them up, and the founders and their lieutenants will no longer have complete freedom to do what they'd like. If people seem like they are starting to move off some of the services, Google will come under investor pressure to try to lock them in, or at least to no longer be so nice about helping customers avoid lock-in.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Are they too big to be looked at or have they bought off so many politicians that they are too corrupt to prosecute. Europe seems to have the right approach. While this investigation is about labor pools and collusion there needs to be a major effort to look at restraint of trade on the sell side. A 90% market share coupled with the practices M$ uses, including buying off standards committees, Norway for example, and bribing African nations to not use Linux when it is obvious that the people of the nation will not see a cent until it has been filtered through the pockets of the power people and most of it salted away in Swiss bank accounts, should at least be cause for asking some questions, no matter how much of congress they now own. Their practices make Carnegie and Rockefeller look like amateurs.
Which currently has managed a maximum of 2 hours 23 minutes.
Which is nice.
Outlaw non-competes & these deals! It'll ultimately raise all tech workers salaries.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I worked as an engineer at HP about 15 years ago. Every year they herded all the employees into meeting rooms to tell us about annual pay raises. They would make a presentation about how the HP HR people got together with HR people from other big name companies around silicon valley and decided what each engineering job position was worth and how big the raises for the current year should be. I was utterly disgusted and shocked that they would talk about it as if they were proud of the fact that they were fixing "prices".
I'm glad someone is finally suing the bastards. It should have been done a LOOOOOONG time ago. Now they need to be straightened out over H1B visas and the indentured servants they create.
I work at Google, and in the past 6 months I've received job offers from both Yahoo! and Apple. Its not much of a secret agreement if all the companies are clearly violating it by trying to recruit out from under the others.
More FUD, probably somehow initiated by Microsoft, attacking and smearing its competitors.