I work in ad-tech and let me tell you all these wall gardens are so arrogant that they create their own metrics for measurement and bully industry (especially marketers to follow them).
I strongly believe only way to bring these mega companies to senses and rein in on their arrogance by trust busting and creating level playing field for competition.
We need DOJ and anti-trust into big 3 oligopoly (GOOG, FB, AMZN) to crack down on them. They are too big for small players to compete.
For anyone in the U.S. who feels similarly, I urge you to write to the FTC and your representatives, and specifically:
1) Call for abandoning the "Consumer Welfare Standard"
2) Enumerate how the Tech Tyrants have negatively affected the competitiveness of companies/projects you've worked on (M&A, canceled products, vaporware, embrace and extend, pricing changes, etc.)
I once saw an economics paper that used a simple model and showed that when the top 4 companies in a given industry controlled more than 60% of the market they would naturally behave like a cartel even if they weren't coordinating. So that's probably the tipping point.
This is not right. I'm a founder of Series C startup/venture and I'd be inclined to take money from SB only if numbers are looking shaky. Going public creates a strong brand value, and liquidity for all the employees (not just VCs and founders). Not to mention, makes recruiting easy due to perception of "this company made it". While there is lot of scrutiny, I think it's worth it if your numbers are somewhat good (no need to be great as public markets have shown to be forgiving tech companies if you have bright growth prospects or you can paint a great futuristic story).
Not everyone is shill or a bot. I neither support nor critique their decision. They are entitled to make this decision. I just believe this is dangerous precedence to set and can open whole lot of can of worms.
As much as I detest that site, this is now dangerous precedence. Payment processors choosing not to do business at their whim.
Imagine scenario - there is a totalitarian government in some banana republic that forces these companies (who are already global) not to support dissidents of it's regime in order to operate in their countries, what moral high ground will they take? The totalitarian regime will say you are doing this in US then why not in our country too?
Internet was supposed to be great equalizer. But supposedly monopolies are abusing their power. This is too close to net neutrality argument. Payment processors is oligopoly business like ISPs. It's a high barrier to enter due to governmental regulations. Now why can't be case made for net neutrality for payment processors?
And "build your payment processing company" -- give me a break. Any media organization can't just build payment processing services. I know there is BTC/ETH, saving grace for decentralization of Internet and working as true intended goal.
> Payment processors choosing not to do business at their whim.
Where have you been the past decade? This is nothing new, especially for Paypal. Payment processors choose not to do business at their whim, whether it's because you have too high a chargeback, you're from the wrong country, you're too troublesome or your business simply is in a category card issuers don't like.
Payment processing is an area there's never ever even been a semblance of a "neutral pipe" system.
Payment processors choosing not to do business at their whim.
It's not on a whim.
Payment processors -- including Visa, Amex, Discover, Mastercard -- have clear rules about hate sites and promoting violence. This is a rule clearly spelled out that all merchants must follow.
Infowars violates rules they agreed to follow when they became a merchant. That's breach of contract.
You may not use the PayPal service for activities that: ... relate to transactions involving ... the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory
Seriously... that's breach of contract. Does infowars need to follow the contracts they agree to? Do those that promote hate get to disregard contracts?
Peddling hate speech does not earn you the ability to disregard contracts you have agreed to.
Hate speech is protected free speech. Not because anyone loves hate speech, but defining your opponents views and journalism as “hate” is very easy to do depending on your worldview.
The government intervenes and is involved all of the time in private companies regarding constitutional rights (e.g., a bakery making cakes for non-traditional marriages).
I don't like Alex Jones or his view, but we have strong protections for speech in this country for good reasons and I don't want to see us sacrifice them because someone we hate comes along.
I refuse to do business with you because you’re gay vs. I am terminating our business relationship because you violated our Acceptable Use Policy that you previously agreed to abide by.
I’m not a lawyer, but these sound quite different.
Oh, so you can receive money via PayPal without accepting their Acceptable Use Policy? No? Then that sounds like a ban with a fig leaf on top.
Or would an online bakery with a terms of use that banned "using their products in a way that could be seen to endorse or support gay marriage" be acceptable?
I mean, we make KKK-owned enterprises do business with black people...
One's a choice and one's not of course, but there is still a comparison to be made there.
Edit to add: it's possible that being a conspiracy theorist is as much a choice as being schizophrenic is. If that was the case - true, proved beyond any doubt, it's genetic or environmental, whatever - would you be willing to extend the same protections to conspiracy theorists as you would to other protected classes?
Well... yes. Why not? Equal protection under the law means exactly that. If you--as a government--force a business to cater to customers it doesn't like, then you need to do this to all businesses. Why else use the words 'equal protection'? Otherwise just let businesses themselves decide who they cater to (black-owned printers, PayPal, Christian bakers, etc.)
As for defending PayPal's 'free speech rights'... that's pretty rich considering PayPal seeks to make further inroads into China, a nation decidedly anti-'free speech rights.'
That's something I find strange among most respondents here--they're very quick to defend PayPal's association rights against Infowars, yet they seem all too willing to overlook PayPal's ignoring its own core values just to do business with an oppressive regime, i.e. PayPal refuses to do business with Infowars because Infowars' 'promotion of hate and discrimination runs counter to our core value of inclusion.' China is inclusive? Huh.
It certainly makes me wonder how many of YC's community are budding authoritarians working towards the day they, too, can PayPal a person out of existence?
I do not criticize their decision to select customers with whom they want to do business.
Definition of hate alone is extremely broad. And depends from culture to culture, country to country. Do we want many Interents with each having it's own rules? Or one Internet connecting people like it was envisioned to be?
I'm asking more meta/philosophical question here. What kind of precedence do they set with these actions?
I don't think they're setting any precedent here. It's not a new thing for people and businesses to distance themselves from people who say batshit crazy things like this. You cannot talk like this and be surprised when people want to distance themselves from you:
When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her. Yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can't hold back the truth anymore. Hillary Clinton is one of the most vicious serial killers the planet's ever seen.
It is on a whim. "Hate" clauses are essentially put there to let companies or governments make decisions on a whim. Try nailing down a precise definition of the term and then applying it consistently and you'll find it's impossible: either you can't define or it you can't apply it consistently. These clauses are always and everywhere a form of selective discrimination.
> there is a totalitarian government in some banana republic that forces these companies (who are already global) not to support dissidents of it's regime in order to operate in their countries, what moral high ground will they take?
I mean, I get your point, but doesn't the US do this exact thing? Forcing companies not to do business with what it considers to be dissidents in foreign countries (ones that just happen to not align with its interests...)
> ...this is now dangerous precedence. Payment processors choosing not to do business at their whim.
Hasn't this been going on since the beginning of payment processors? I'm pretty confident in thinking that almost every payment processor does this frequently for all kinds of reasons.
This is an effect of free speech: a merchant is not obligated to engage in business with customers they do not approve of, unless it runs afoul of the law. The law does not grant Alex Jones protected status to spread bullshit.
Freedom of speech does not imply freedom from consequence.
> Freedom of speech does not imply freedom from consequence.
This is double speak. If the government throws you in jail for saying something, you could say the same thing. You had freedom of speech but not freedom from consequence. You're distorting the meaning of freedom of speech.
With all due respect, PayPal has already been pulling the "choosing not to do business at their whim" shit for QUITE some time now. And yes, it IS a serious problem. But it's way, way too late to set the precedent.
> Imagine scenario - there is a totalitarian government in some banana republic that forces these companies (who are already global) not to support dissidents of it's regime in order to operate in their countries, what moral high ground will they take?
This is already how it works with gambling and sex related sites in the United States. The CC processors crank up the merchant fees for those businesses (sometimes above 30%) and in exchange congress backs down on whatever regulatory threat they have pending. Then congress can tell their constituents that they are “cracking down on vice”
> It's a high barrier to enter due to governmental regulations.
Well-designed regulations can also protect consumer choice. In europe there's SEPA and IBAN transfers between any bank, and there's plenty of those. And banks are obligated to give anyone an account.
So it would be near-impossible to shut someone down like this.
Banks in Europe are not obligated to give anyone an account when it comes to business accounts this isn’t about individual basic accounts, current accounts and business accounts are completely discretionary and business accounts are actually notoriously hard to open in some countries even the UK.
Banks can't pick and choose like PayPal can. PayPal has gone to great lengths to avoid being classified as a bank specifically so they can avoid banking regulations, like cutting off services to people without oversight.
Doesn’t PayPal has a banking license in the US and the EU?
IIRC they merged with x.com specifically because x had a banking license and they had gotten an EU license in the mid 2000’s.
Also banks can pick and choose in fact they do it all the time try asking for a loan form a bank as a porn production company or even opening a business account with one, most of them won’t touch you same goes for many other businesses.
Banks in some cases may not be allowed to deny services to individuals for non financial reasons they same does not hold true for businesses and organizations.
I'm an engineer and not a lawyer, but from what I remember, the license lets them do some banking functions, but doesn't make them count as a full bank subject to all the banking regulations.
PayPal issues credit and loans and credit cards they are an issuing bank and they also serve as an acquiring bank for processing payments.
Their account balance may not count as deposit and as such that part might not be under banking regulations in the US but in the EU they are regulated as one.
> Payment processors choosing not to do business at their whim.
In the case of Jones, everyone can see with his/her own eyes what Jones/Infowars have been doing: peddling lies and inciting vile hatred (especially the "crisis actor" conspiracy stuff). Either one stands up against such people or one supports them. There is no "center" when it comes to Jones and his neo-Nazi friends.
I’m not sure this is a good argument. You could say the same thing about pretty much any mainstream media, e.g. in relation to Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” (and they probably resulted in more deaths than anything reported by Infowars).
We're really saying Alex Jones calling politicians serial killers and rapists is comparable to typical mainstream media bias, and is more or less a reasonable thing to say depending on if you're 'Liberal' or 'Conservative'? C'mon:
When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped, I have zero fear standing up against her. Yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children. I just can't hold back the truth anymore. Hillary Clinton is one of the most vicious serial killers the planet's ever seen.[0]
I don't know anything about Alex Jones and never listen to his shows. But this is the second time now I've investigated an apparently absurd statement from him and discovered it's being selectively quoted to make him look bad.
The page you link to has a clip of the audio in question:
"Am I talking about [snip some reference to a devil worshipping story], oh no, I don't mean that, I'm not talking about that, I mean 200,000+ dead Christians, with her operation with Syria, and her operation in Libya, and not let the Christians get out, and directing Al Queda and ISIS, who target and murder children and put them through sex slavery, and throw Catholic priests off cliffs, and kill people en-masse, and murder gays, and everything else you can imagine, because they don't like peaceful people."
Obviously Alex Jones is very far from being a precise user of language. Clinton has not "personally murdered" anyone. That accusation on its own is clearly absurd, but put in context as a reference to her support for various wars in the Middle East it merely becomes the sort of dumb overblown rhetoric that you tend to find at the political extremes. Likewise for the claim she directed ISIS. Clinton was/still is a supporter of the various militant groups that are allied against both Assad and ISIS, although from what I've read there wasn't that much between these groups and ISIS religiously or behaviourally. So his grip on the situation in Syria is also pretty bad.
But this is hardly unique to Alex Jones. For example here's an article that claims "For profit, Tony Blair murdered over a million humans in Iraq and Afghanistan":
The author of that article, Louis Cypher, is a nobody. But if I had claimed Louis Cypher said "Tony Blair murdered over a million humans" and omitted the rest he'd obviously sound totally crazy. Making someone look bad by deleting parts of what they say is just that easy.
Anyway, I have to admit, this is apparently becoming some sort of pattern - I read someone explaining on Hacker News why Alex Jones must obviously be suppressed and crushed by providing some idiotic sounding quote, I spend about 30 seconds finding the source of the quote and then I discover his words have been maliciously chopped up in order to manipulate me. I don't like this.
I know the US has very lax laws around these things, but doesn’t that rise to the level of defamation/libel even there? Out and out accusing someone of serial murder and child rape seems a bit much.
Public figures are much less protected. Imagine if this were not the case: most of the people responding to Trump's tweets would be in prison for defamation/libel now.
A random ordinary American would be protected from such accusations.
> We undertook an extensive review of the Infowars sites, and found instances that promoted hate or discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions, which run counter to our core value of inclusion
Stop trying to come up with far fetching conclusions that don't even make sense. Why can't Paypal ban someone (especially someone like Alex Jones) for this reason? Would I want to earn transaction fees from Alex Jones' sales? If I were the owner of Paypal, I wouldn't want to do business with him, either.
What was the reasoning behind social credit system? To keep track of bad actors or create surveillance nation?
On a side note, this is what happens when "technocrats" become the ruling class in overwhelming majority. Ability to apply technical solution to societal problems. Most of the China's ruling class are technocrats. We need anthropologists, social scientists, philosophers as law makers. Yes technocrats should be there in the mix too but they alone won't fix societal problems.
Probably both. It's no secret that China has long aspired to transform into Singapore - clean and sterile. CCP leaders have been openly talking about it for decades now. Compared to the mainland, Singapore doesn't have large issues with stuff like crime or social order. imo Singapore has achieved it via a technological Big Bro state.
Fundraising might have fell through at last moment. Some major customer/partnership might've pulled the deal at the last moment. This all happens at startup level cashflow is tight. And all the investors thought there is no way this business with make sense based on the data they might have had on their hands. So they pulled the plug
To be honest so much corporate speak. Only Sergei's voice seems to be authentic. Everyone else trying to be extremely careful with their language of comments even though it's not a public event.
And "misinformation" and "fake news" will be combatted by AI? Seriously? That is like saying, "I have no clue but I will use some buzzwords". Pichai/GOOG knows AI better than everyone. I think they still don't have plan for combatting misinformation.
I think they are being genuine when they say their plan is to combat fake news with AI; their business is built around AI. It is one of their core competencies.
I think they are going to fail, and quietly increase the human involvement once they realize that their AI isn't good enough. Then they will slowly scale back the humans as their AI improves, until the next controversy when they realize that they still need humans.
> I think they are going to fail, and quietly increase the human involvement once they realize that their AI isn't good enough. Then they will slowly scale back the humans as their AI improves, until the next controversy when they realize that they still need humans.
Exactly. AI is not good at subjective decisions of qualitative data. For example, nobody knows any political candidate's net worth apart from IRS, until they make those records public. And say political candidates make statements that they are way less or way more than their net worth they cannot detect it is true or false.
That's why I was surprised. Pichai is smart enough that AI can't combat fake news. Hence he was just saying to save face.
"Fake news" has lost all meaning in the intervening years, but at the time, it is hard to remember, we were concerned about essentially phishing websites that made themselves out to be (say) CNN, but were not.
As others have said, evaluating trust on the internet using computers (call it AI or not) is literally Google's core competency.
Realistically there doesn't exist a good solution for this. That's why every single site out there with user content that is large enough is struggling with moderation.
There is no solution that scales up to billions of users, and while it's true that AI most likely won't work, it is the best they've got right now. Do you have a better solution? Because Google has hired some of the smartest people and even then they still are having issues with Youtube every other week, so I'm sure you'd be paid a pretty hefty sum if you could solve this.
Let the receiver evaluate the information? Sure, some will have false believes. Cannot change that and you shouldn't even attempt to do so. Because authority has been wrong to an equal degree.
The whole premise falls flat in my opinion.
There won't be any viable solution, if the problem cannot even be defined. Currently it is based on a feeling that there are mean and false statements on social media.
And this fact is emphasized by parties who like more control about content.
Anyone aware of the current capabilities of AI should know, that it is no solution, at least in its current state. Sure, big tech likes to signal otherwise. But these statements just underline their business interest in that sector. Nothing wrong with that.
This ignores one of Google's primary missions. As jlebar posted in a different comment
> evaluating trust on the internet using computers (call it AI or not) is literally Google's core competency.
This idea that we should pretend as if there is no problem to solve seems incredibly strange to me. Particularly when we know unreliable information is being weaponized by bad actors to influence entire populations of people. This is a very real problem which needs solving.
Humans have limited time for research and we value reliability. Consider all of the hype around the recent severe decline in trust of authenticity and reliability of products purchased through Amazon. We tend to prefer shopping at places where we know the products we purchase will be of a certain standard. We go to trusted sources (as amazon was previously) because we don't have the time to carefully evaluate each of the many many items we purchase every week. We choose a store we trust will have already done that quality check.
It seems as if Google believes it is important for it's business that the information it prioritizes has a certain quality or reliability level. Google prefers their information be more like a Target store than a back alley tent. And if the amount of people who shop at Target stores over back alley tents is any indicator, I'm guessing Google is probably on to something.
I'm certainly skeptical about who should be able to decide what is "true" on subjective issues, but I don't see how we can pretend as if there isn't a very real problem of actual provably false information being weaponized.
I for one am fairly busy and just as I don't have time to do a deep dive of research into whether or not the shampoo, deodorant, milk, cereal, orange juice, whiskey, dish soap, cold medicine etc etc etc are fake; I also don't have time to deep dive research if the 30+ articles I skim everyday are provable outright lies. Not only don't I have the time, I don't necessarily have the inclination.
> We tend to prefer shopping at places where we know the products we purchase will be of a certain standard.
we don't just prefer; we pay to shop at places where we trust that the products will be of high quality (or at least authentic).
no one i know around my age pays for any news whatsoever (including myself, admittedly). this should tell you something about how much we value quality news.
>AI is not good at subjective decisions of qualitative data
That's exactly the core strength of AI. It is what differentiates AI from hard coded solutions. Estimations(subjective decisions) based on correlations in fuzzy (qualitative) data.
In your example, you could take a set of data containing the net worths and other characteristics, e.g. birth zip code, spending habits, affiliations, and if there are any trends related to net worth, a properly architected neural network trained on the appropriate data could easily estimate subjectively on what amounts to qualitative data.
Ah, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but search engines don't even come close to rating every new page on the internet in real time.
There are like days of lag, in search engine results, unless you eagerly, eagerly, eagerly force your way into strategic points of the existing index for each independent search engine, separately.
Nevermind DNS replication, which is it's own beast. So, from domain registration, to DNS replication, to getting listed, to becoming relevant (which requires all kinds of meta tags and dom restructuring for crawlability, plus roll-your-own-site-maps, and so on), to being recognized as a reliable source of information, such as press releases, before we even get to news possibly going viral?
Well, news actually doesn't even go viral without humans in the loop. I mean consider how viral a high karma rank gets you on hacker news? It's just enough to get 10K eyes on a site in unison, to overwhelm a non-load-balanced server. And that's the voting of users doing all the work.
And then to include heavier social sites like reddit, twitter and facebook in the mix? That's almost purely human opinion performing the ranking factor. The attention of the users closes the feedback loop, and the chain reaction can strap a booster rocket to notoriety.
So, I'd almost say the really real time (like viral real time) stuff is almost only humans doing the work, and the robots are just there for the chatter threshold tripwires.
> Nevermind DNS replication, which is it's own beast.
There’s a lot wrong with your post, but let’s start here. How do you think DNS works? Your statements about it indicate a complete lack of knowledge on the topic. I can register a new domain and have it resolveable anywhere in the world in minutes.
How did we get to the state where the "truth" is such an elusive concept?
Is it so hard to determine whether basic statements are true or false? And to build larger, higher constructs out of those building blocks? That's basically what science has been and is.
It seems comically easy to identify fake news in most cases. Was this inauguration crowd larger than that one? That's a simple question to answer.
We got to that state when we started talking about so much information that it is impracticable to have a human read all of it, let alone provide a truth judgement for all of it. Even getting computers to read all of it is a significant engineering effort.
Simply getting computers to understand the statements is one of the holy grails of AI research; let alone determining if they are true.
> How did we get to the state where the "truth" is such an elusive concept?
Look into the fields of epistemology and the philosophy of science, in particular the works of Karl Popper such as The Logic of Scientific Discovery. The "truth" has always been an elusive concept. Outside the realm of mathematics, it's rather difficult to objectively prove most things "true".
Two days ago, partisan advocacy site ThinkProgress ran an article with the headline "Brett Kavanaught said he would kill Roe v. Wade last week and almost no-one noticed". The reason no-one noticed is because he said nothing of the sort and ThinkProgess knew as much. One of the fact checkers partnered with Facebook labelled it as false, they attached the usual warning, and this made ThinkProgress and a chunk of the left-leaning press furious. They accused Facebook of "defaming" and "censoring" them to "appease the right wing", claiming that this was actually some kind of partisan attack on the truth.
That, in essence, is how we got here. There are plenty of loud, vocal defenders of "truth" out there, it's just that the loudest and most vocal of them define "truth" to mean "what our side believes".
Why would you expect the truth of basic statements to be easy to establish? Science is hard and many basic questions are debated by experts. Political consensus is difficult.
Science is not a public endeavor. Science is conducted by trained professionals. Besides the training, there exist filters (self selection, academic tests, etc) which ensure the scientific community has a higher than average connection with "the truth".
The public at large has never been particularly well connected to truth. One difference now is that, in the past, the public at least respected and trusted scientists, academics, etc. Nowadays they're scorned.
I think humility of knowing how little any single individual knows, and how much "details" matter, would be much better attitude for everyone to take, rather than thinking the truth is easy, even for seemingly basic stuff.
All of them are too big and we need someone like Teddy Roosevelt going on trust busting crusade. This is the second position of POTUS that I agree with (first being merit based immigration, as I'm myself an immigrant). In a weird sense, I think POTUS may achieve it as he is all about anti-establishment.
Now why do I think they deserve Sherman Antitrust investigations (and IANAL).
All of them have control over people's different dimensions of data that nobody has.
- Amazon: With acquisition of Whole Foods they control retail like nobody. Yes, Walmart is trying to make a dent. So does best buy. But they have pretty much monopoly over e-books business when it comes to publishing. Apple already had eBooks settlement.
- Google: They make or break Internet with control over gateway (Chrome), Search (gatekeeper, and promoting their own content) and monetization (Google Doubleclick/Adx is majority of share in ad-tech market for on-walled garden s, good luck competing against it). Given their control and 1B users across multiple platforms they constantly engage in anti-competitive behavior. Read about rise of header bidding and how AdX used to anti-competitive in ad-tech. Google's ad-tech division needs to thoroughly investigated over anti-competitive behavior.
Secondly, Android is free but Google has iron grip over Android using play store. I think gated App Stores are inherently anti-competitive and not in best interests of users and developers. OS should allow multiple app stores and DoJ should go after this. Fortnite already tried to highlight this issue.
Facebook - I think Facebook might be spared as for social they are not the only platform. But given their data scandals
Apple - As I said app stores are inherently anti-competitive. Same thing applies here like Android.
Anyway, these companies can make or break business with their anti-competitive practices. As discussed in another comment, Sherman Antitrust Act doesn't apply in monopoly positions but against businesses that may stifle overall competitive behavior. I strongly believe these companies are even more scarier in telcos as they are wolves in sheep's clothing and always try to play nice.
I agree that they need regulation probably never should’ve been allowed to get as big as they are. The near total lack of oversight as they’ve come to control giant portions of the economy is pretty worrying.
That’s sad I can’t agree with Trump on this because I know that he’s doing it for completely the wrong reasons. He sees them as political enemies and he wants them suppressed/controlled. I don’t believe he actually cares how big they are. That’s just the excuse.
This isn’t a “stopped clock is right twice a day“ thing.
You could come up with other reasons that I don’t necessarily agree with, say “tax dodging“, that I wouldn’t mind. If I agree with the goal and reason is just, even if it’s not my reason, that could be fine. There was something relatively small Trump did that I agreed with on these lines, though I don’t remember what it was.
This is a pure authoritarian threat. You don’t tie my line so I’ll find some justification to make you’re life hell.
Yeah lets just habe a warmongering politican who randomly destroyes companies based on who his political friends and enemies are.
Peoples over romatezised history of Anti-Trust is ridicouluse. It was mostly a way for buissness that were outcometed based on price to try to use government power to their advantage.
The fist state level Anti-Trust law was basically butchers who were angry at the invention of the frozzen rail transport and slaughterhouses.
And when you want to talk about Anti-Trust on the internet you should actually know how it is applied today.
Anti-competetive actions are simply not going to make an Anti-Trust case. An Anti-Trust case requeres clear harm to consumers.
So if Whole Food would triple its prices because nobody else can compete in that market then you might have an Anti-Trust case.
"Of the 1m green cards (permanent residence visas) issued [in the US] each year, only 15% are granted because of the applicants' skills, notes John Dearie of Startups USA, a pressure group; in Australia the figure is 68%."
I would rather have 0 H1Bs and all those numbers converted straight to green cards so that immigrants were able to join unions and otherwise compete without fear of being sent to some other country just because they had even a minor disagreement with their current employer.
Except that to him and his supporters, "merit" is really just code for "skin color". They don't want Hispanics, period. To the point where they are apparently willing to go after natural-born Hispanic citizens on the sketchy basis that they might be fraudulent (of course actually bothering to investigate isn't necessary).
I strongly believe only way to bring these mega companies to senses and rein in on their arrogance by trust busting and creating level playing field for competition.
We need DOJ and anti-trust into big 3 oligopoly (GOOG, FB, AMZN) to crack down on them. They are too big for small players to compete.