Whenever we get people young enough to actually understand the internet, these giant tech companies might be broken up but as long as we have 90 year old senators asking tech CEOs how the internet works nothing will get done.

Whenever someone tells you "the market will regulate itself", be sure it wont. Not if the companies at the top can prevent it.

For those keeping track- both the bills mentioned in the episode are dead in the water so far, with a handful of co-sponsors each

I had a best friend say "I'm gonna Bing it.." about 5 years ago I still remember it because I never saw him again after that. Not a coincidence.

I worked for a company that did wholesale and retail business with Amazon. Many times we were selling the exact same skus retail that they bought and warehoused. Obviously Amazon would control the buy box. As an experiment, I dropped the retail price to see what Amazon would do. Their algorithms immediately dropped the price on their inventory. Since I was selling to them, I knew what they paid wholesale. So I dropped the retail price BELOW their wholesale price. Amazon's algorithms immediately dropped their price BELOW what they paid for it, and they were willing to go as low as I would go, right up against free. How can anyone compete with a company that can run losses like this?

I remember working at a local game store, and making it a point of pride whenever I convinced a customer to buy from us and not amazon. One time someone came in to buy Catan, and they said, “well, I ordered it already on Amazon, but I really want to play it tonight.” I reminded them they could cancel the order, and they did in a heartbeat. That felt very, very good.

I work for a local pool shop and we sell robotic pool cleaners. I cannot even begin to tell you how often someone comes in, asks a price, and then tells us they'll buy it off Amazon instead. Amazon doesn't just harm online retailers, it also harms actual real life retailers too. We cannot compete with prices that are as low as $900

John Oliver deserves an Oscar for his 'Can Dolphins love you?" monologue

Companies: We love capitalism Capitalism: Here's some competition Companies: NOT LIKE THAT!

Back in 2018 when John Oliver did the episode on Corporate Consolidation it inspired me so much that I applied for a Masters of Research program, got into a program, and did my entire research thesis on tech oligopolies. It was shocking to see how bad it really is; oligopolies that bordered in monopolies are rampant. My research essentially focused on the question of whether lack of enforcement of our antitrust laws caused this whole problem or whether lack of adequate laws were the core of the issue. The answer was that it was truly both. I thoroughly enjoyed my pre-doctoral masters thesis and am considering a PhD in the future. It's so lovely to see John talk about this, specifically on the tech sector! Edit: Wow! Thanks everyone for the great comments! I haven't published it yet, otherwise I would share it with all you lovely people ❤ I am now looking for a policy or qualitative research/analyst job so if anyone is hiring, let me know 😅

The fact that they mentioned both kid’s guide to the internet and the Jeremy renner app makes it clear that one of the writers was watching drew gooden

Follow up one year on. Did you just update to iOS 17.4? Live in the EU? Apple just got monopoly-busted. Thanks EU! Are you enjoying USB-C on your iPhone 15 Pro Max? Yup, that too. Send a thank you to the European Commission. Going back a number of years, do you remember those obscene roaming charges in Europe? Yup. That too. Consumer rights when flights get cancelled? Yup (always fly with European carriers whenever you can). Anyone pooh-poohing the EU thinking it’s all about government overreach isn’t paying enough attention and is taking a lot for granted.

I used to be a seller on Amazon. EVERYTHING john presented about Amazon's business practices I personally experienced myself. I had to stop my business after a few years, throw away tens of thousands worth of merchandise, and now work a regular office job. I literally could not compete with Amazon on their own platform.

I would like to point out that the fact that HBO, a media giant, puts the meat of one of its best programs on KZfaq should tell you a lot. These companies are so out of control that even OTHER MEGA CORPORATIONS have to depend on them and bow down to them.

11:26 he perfectly encapsulates the chaos of a wildly off topic and trailed off google search, and how it can emotionally wreak havoc in a matter of seconds lmaooo

I live for the day these companies are broken up. There’s no such thing as a free market when a company has enough power to strangle you out of existence, that’s not competition, that’s a cartel.

As an Amazon seller myself, absolutely being crushed by said policies on Amazon, I am so glad this got the attention that it needs. Amazon currently owes me nearly 7k and refuses to pay, and has caused so many liabilities over the past few years I couldn't even tell them all. We don't even get the chance to sue them for their mishaps because the agreement we sign when we sign up prevents us from doing so.

Mad respect to John Oliver and his team for not making us watch ads during the show. Major props.

“Can dolphins love” being answered with the case of Margaret Howe and Peter is some absolutely next level sight gags from the team who make the visuals. I understood that reference, and I appreciate you for it, visuals team.

Google's motto was "Don't be evil." Oh the irony.

You know you are a monopoly when you are having to reassure people you have competitors.

A simple rule will fix most of these problems - You cannot be both a marketplace/platform, and a seller/service provider. That means Google must separate its widgets from its search. Amazon must separate the Amazon Basics business. Apple must separate its payments processing from its App Store. Meta must... Well, fuck Meta. They should be prosecuted for privacy violations anyway.

His bits freaking out about dolphins. Genius! Oliver is SO SMART and dived deep into his subject! Luv this guy! 👍🏼💙

for anyone wondering they both passed or rather got voted to advance with a 20/2 vote for the "open app market act" and a 16/6 vote for the "American choice and innovation online act"

I opened and ran a board game store for several years and Amazon was my biggest enemy. It’s a literal rule in our family that we don’t buy from Amazon, and we try extremely hard to only buy from small businesses.

As a side note: the REALLY infuriating thing about tech companies is they still pay little to no federal taxes...

Could we have an episode where we get updates on what happened to these cases ? Like, did this bill pass ? 😅

Points that were missed: - Apple arguably has a specific Monopoly in the US with smartphones because of iMessage not being open with other multi-platform messaging apps. This weirdly only applies in the States. The rest of the world favours things like WhatsApp and Facebook messenger ( both owned by meta, Which is its own issue). That's probably the main defence Apple will bring up. - they've been in trouble before but don't forget about Microsoft, Windows 11 has seen them go back to some of their old tricks like a favouring their own software and making it difficult to remove. - this kind of got glossed over but although Google play takes the same cut for purchases as Apple, you are free to install other app stores and install apps from wherever you like, so they avoid the heat there. Google play is still the most preferred store on Android phones, so Google likely takes advantage of that fact in promoting its own software.

The dolphin rant accurately describes the rabbit hole I fall down in almost every time I Google something.

Speaking as a Non-US citizen. Guys, please do this. The US Tech industry affects pretty much all of us

The Bing Crosby line is gold.

the uniquely amazing humor on this show is finally back and i love it

I live for John's roasts of AT&T.

I used to laugh when people said that we needed less regulations. Now I cry. I don't know how so many people are blind to the fact that if you let rich people do whatever they want, we will all end up slaves to them. They will consolidate power amongst themselves and force you to stand with an empty bowl and beg for more while they laugh at you.

This is terrifying how much control a couple companies have over our lives. We can't do anything in life without having to pay them first.

This somehow reminded me when, back in the day of Macromedia Flash, they decided to let the users get their hands into coding themselves. The jump that Flash had from that version to next (I think it was from 5 to MX) was something they had never even anticipated. Users "went to the moon" with the things they created and Macromedia themselves said that they would have never even thought their product was capable of so much. Then, as everyone knows, Adobe got their hands in and killed it, but that's a different story. I really wonder what would happen if all this that Johno is talking would actually change, and something like what happened with AT&T happens with Google, Apple and Amazon.

As soon as you see Jim Cramer endorses something, you know that something is disturbingly wrong about it.

Conservatives online often express their desire to break up “big tech,” but when I mention that Elizabeth Warren was the only presidential candidate in 2020 who made that exact issue part of her platform, I never get a response of any kind

i love how this man radiated determination and confidence while getting out of his car, randomly pulling on a strap and *not* opening the tailgate, before getting back into his car, as if his important job was done.

4:50 "It turns out that ending a monopoly is almost always a good thing" damn straight. I'm reminded of a relevant quote "When you don't have to compete, you don't have to care". Big companies don't want competition, they never have. They want money, all the money, and they'd like nothing more than to be your only option so they can charge whatever they want in the knowledge you can't do anything about it.

Bezos: "We have a policy but I can't garantee [it] hasn't been violated" Now imagine your daughter's soccer coach says this.

I literally ate for an entire semester of college because of ATT, MCI and Sprint in about 1990. Those 3 were so competitive that they would send you a check for $300 to switch your long distance carrier. Not credit, not discount, a check that you could cash... and they kept no record of it. So every 2 months I would just switch my carrier, cash the check, and almost immediately the other two companies would start calling me making the same offer. And as soon as you switched away from a carrier, they would call you and offer you a check, even if you had already gotten one from the same company. The crazy part is, I had almost no long distance bill ever. It lasted for about 9 months before they stopped offering the checks. I'm going to estimate I made between $1500 and $2000 just from those 'switch to us and we will send you a check' offers.

I absolutely hate how the internet is both eliminating safe spaces for children (closing all those games sites like Disney and Cartoon Network hosted, as well as sites like club penguin, neopets, ect.) as well as trying to use them as an excuse to sanitize the rest of the internet.

Shortly after 11:50 , during the can dolphins love rant, you can faintly hear someone in the audience laughing their ass off and pleading with John, “STOP”

The issue I have with Google is I can’t ever get to what I want anymore. I use to change words and phrases and quotes and it would change the results so I can find out exactly what I was searching for but now no matter what I do I get the same results. It’s like asking a question to a person and every time they answer with “here something I thinks relates”

One important aspect I'm surprised was left out is that many of these companies (like Amazon) literally power the internet. Almost 30% of the websites on the internet are stored on Amazon servers, giving them even more access to data trends and physical control over the internet.

When john oliver said ok google it activated the assistant on my phone 😂

From Boise, THANK YOU for the shoutout! ✈

I love how No MATTER where you pause a John Oliver video, it will always look like one of his thumbnails.

the fact that I'm watching this on youtube makes this even funnier.

I noticed that even when the item is for sale from another seller for less the shipping costs can be outrageous. Then you end up ordering from Amazon even if you don't like Amazon or their policies against unions. Some of us can afford time but not money.

I love that Last Week Tonight are using clips from tapes featured on Red Letter Media. I recognize a ton of these clips!

That “f* you Flipper” was too heartfelt and low key broken to be just an act.

I'm glad there was someone that laughs like a snake in the audience as that's something I've always enjoyed, I'm not being sarcastic, it's my favourite form of laughter. :)

25:35 that aged like milk

Basically, anytime a big business says, "this will hurt small business'" you do exactly that thing.

There was actually an episode of Hawaii Five-O where Microsoft paid them to say "Bing It" it was hilarious and got them incessantly mocked.

John Oliver will never read this comment or reply to it but this man is a genius! I wish there were more of him out there.

Well most of the other options on Amazon when you do scroll down, usually have a high amount of shipping which either works out to the same price or works out to higher.

Its become more and more evident that John has had a rough past with horses and dolphins he just can’t get over.

Had to rewatch this one now.

Someone in this studio audience is doing a great impersonation of a laughing snake. Once you hear it, you won't unhear it.

I just use Amazon as a catalog. Once I find products that I'm interested in, I always always go to the manufacturer's website and buy it directly from them. I do not care if it costs more that way. It almost never cost more than just a few pennies or a few dollars more. Plus, I know I'm not going to get a counterfeit.

I hope these bills pass. The internet has sadly been dominated by monopolies for far too long.

"--the right to Pitbull's identity." 🤣

25:32 ...and we determined THAT WAS A LIE!

People living in small towns face similar issues with internet providers. Some people will only have the choice between one “regular” internet provider and satellite internet. Comcast, Verizon, etc typically have a full monopoly on certain towns.

Glad light is being shined on this topic. As a former Amazon seller, this exact situation has happened many times on products I was selling through their platform. Amazon uses it's third party sellers to collect data on what items are hot, then go directly to the source or replicate it through private label. What also need mentioning is that third party sellers are basically at the mercy of Amazon. They can remove you at any time without warning. Most times it is without explanation. To possibly get your selling account back, you have to write POAs (Plan of Action) and pray that one gets accepted.

The dolphin tangent is possibly the best thing I've ever heard 🤣

john oliver is that one guy that, no matter what he says, you will always respond with "hell yeah!".

Fun fact: this also affects how I teach my students to search for information. I have to teach them to actually follow the links, not just read what’s on the search page. The search page lacks context, and is sometimes even wrong. They have to actually go to the SOURCE. I have to always tell them: google is not a source! And if they don’t follow the link, then all they have to cite is “google”

I’ve said it since a Walmart opened in my local neighborhood as a kid and legit destroyed all the small businesses near it; when a company gets THAT much success/money, it’s ALWAYS at the cost of fair trade and ethical standards.

I remember years ago there used to be a search engine called, “Bullseye”. I could always find exactly what I was after and it wasn’t on Google or Amazon. As it is, I have never nor will I ever purchase anything from Amazon whilst their atrocious worker conditions exist.

Das ist ein guter Beitrag. Er gibt mir gute Impulse für den Wirtschaftsunterricht - Thema "Monopole".

John didn't mention, that the ad space on those free websites are mostly also provided by Google. So basically Google is protection itself from paying ad revenue. And I'm wondering how many smart devices got woken up by John saying "Ok, ok Google" at 15:10 🙂

I'm 100% convinced he said "Okay....okay google!" JUST to wake up every google home device in the vicinity of every viewer. That's the kind of troll move he'd do, lol

16:33 - that delivery though... gold!

John Oliver... Keeping it more real than anyone. Slava John Oliver

The fact that everyone from left to right agrees on this shows just how important this is.

As a computer scientist and someone who read “Big Data: Everybody lies”, this John’s presentation is just amazing. It truly highlights the problems of these big companies. Google, for example, has a lot of cleve machinery to identify what is the best model to present their information based on access to a huge amount of users. They run experiments for everything they do and that has real-world validation, because the ones validating their ideas are real users. They are the supreme gods when it comes to data harvesting and understanding human behavior.

Yeah this is a truly great segment. We need anti-trust action asap, on pretty much everything. Big tech, agriculture, meat, oil, grocery stores, news/media networks, big pharma, basically every industry.

Whoever's hissing in the audience instead of laughing, I hope your chicken is always under seasoned.

Watching a story about tech monopolies on KZfaq via an iPhone is poetic.

You're just absolutely the best J O. Don't ever change. You're brilliant. We're lucky to have you as a citizen here in the USA.

Chop Kick Panda is a real film and it’s amazing

I long for the day when KZfaq isn't the only feasible video-sharing platform.

As someone who's dreamed of working at these companies to be at the edge of new tech, I was a bit hesitant at first. I like Google's quick answers, and I do scroll if needed. I like Amazon basics, they are reliable and consistent. However, the AT&T case drove it home for me, that we don't even know what the other options are, and the problem is that there is no room for those to grow. It's kind of scary to break out of convenience, but I guess we can't get comfortable if we want to keep growing

20:30 Also, note the wording - "...we have a policy against using SELLER-SPECIFIC data..." If you've EVER worked around data in your life, you know that is, at a minimum, code for "...BUT we still use aggregate data." In other words, they may have a policy that says they are not allowed to go look at CandleSeller209's sales numbers specifically to determine what knock-off scents of candle to roll out, but if someone notices that CandleSeller209 sure seems to be selling a lot of "maple bacon" scented candles, they will look at "aggregated data" across "all 3rd party candle selling stores" to find trends, like "look at all these maple bacon candles sales..." Or even if there isn't a specific store or product that drives it, they'll just occasionally look at all candle seller data regardless--aggregated together so as not to be "seller-specific"--and start producing knock-offs of the top 5 selling scents--in aggregate--hurting many sellers and not just one. ANY time someone makes sure to include terms like "user-specific" or "seller-specific" or "age-specific" or whatever when talking about data, then I *guarantee* you they are only including that to obfuscate the fact that they ARE using aggregated data for the same basic purpose. A lot of times, this isn't a bad thing and can even be helpful (like noticing that 25% of users get stuck on this one page in your website so you redesign the page to prevent user confusion; that's a good use of aggregated data). But in situations like this, where the host has aggregated data about their, and your, competition (and yourself), and can use it to harm your business, that crafty wording is bad and doesn't mean that they aren't using your own data against you. It's just slightly more indirect than direct is all. Though not by much.

I'm "researching surfing spots" right now!

Rattouing is a real movie and it’s a masterpiece 😂

When I lived in the U.S. I spent almost $200/month for web/cable/phone. Now living in Greece I pay less than $75/month for all three and it's just as good or better. U.S. is The Land of The Gouge

What's frustrating is that for people living in countries outside of the USA, the legislation of these companies has a massive impact on us but we literally have no say on these companies are held accountable. We are at the mercy of the corporate corruption of the US government.

If you are old enough to remember MA BELL. A TOTAL MONOPOLY!

*Brilliant!*

I swear to god, members of Congress get more vacation time than anyone else. With how little they actually ever get done, they have a lot of nerve taking all these recesses.

Living in Alaska, it's easier for me to skip the Amazon company sales because 90% of the time, they won't ship to me. So I really learned how to use the other sellers list because I always need to find a smaller business that will ship to me. Having said that, I cancelled my prime membership this year and have stopped ordering online for the most part (some things I still do).

big love to John and his team, you do amazing work

i ABSOLUTELY LOVE YOU AND YOUR TEAM!!!

15:00 you can hear the camera man laugh like "s-s-s-s-s"

i think i love this show and john oliver this is like modern day activism in the age where most "shows" are shills and fake as shit, this actually seems like its trying to improve humanity, and its much appreciated by me