Hot News; Gamers derail eBay listings to stop hardware, scalpers profiting on latest technology…///

4 min readDec 5, 2020

The moderators of /r/AMD do NOT condone locating scalper auctions, leaving dozens of absurd bids, so as to repeatedly derail a scalper’s opportunity to make a sale and ultimately de-incentivise PC hardware scalping,” the title of the post stated.

Among the many transformations taking place in the U.S. economy, none is more salient than the growth of gigantic Internet platforms. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, already powerful before the COVID-19 pandemic, have become even more so during it, as so much of everyday life moves online. As convenient as their technology is, the emergence of such dominant corporations should ring alarm bells — not just because they hold so much economic power but also because they wield so much control over political communication. These behemoths now dominate the dissemination of information and the coordination of political mobilization. That poses unique threats to a well-functioning democracy.

A tongue-in-cheek post from the moderators of the subreddit for AMD — a company that specialises in graphics units for gaming PCs — highlighted the issue.

The message joked: “Evil cyber criminals decimated this totally innocent and honest listing with dozens of fake bids. They bidded so rapidly the lister couldn’t even cancel them all — So sad!

“Doing this isn’t a good idea because it could get your account banned from eBay… unless you were to use, say, a VPN service to make a bunch of throwaway eBay accounts and stockpile their logins in a spreadsheet or something,” the post facetiously added.

While the EU has sought to enforce antitrust laws against these platforms, the United States has been much more tepid in its response. But that is beginning to change. Over the past two years, the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of state attorneys general have initiated investigations into potential abuses of these platforms’ monopoly power, and in October, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against Google. Big Tech’s critics now include both Democrats who fear manipulation by domestic and foreign extremists and Republicans who think the large platforms are biased against conservatives. Meanwhile, a growing intellectual movement, led by a coterie of influential legal scholars, is seeking to reinterpret antitrust law to confront the platforms’ dominance.

Although there is an emerging consensus about the threat that the Big Tech companies pose to democracy, there is little agreement about how to respond. Some have argued that the government needs to break up Facebook and Google. Others have called for more stringent regulations to limit these companies’ exploitation of data. Without a clear way forward, many critics have defaulted to pressuring platforms to self-regulate, encouraging them to take down dangerous content and do a better job of curating the material carried on their sites. But few recognize that the political harms posed by the platforms are more serious than the economic ones. Fewer still have considered a practical way forward: taking away the platforms’ role as gatekeepers of content. This approach would entail inviting a new group of competitive “middleware” companies to enable users to choose how information is presented to them. And it would likely be more effective than a quixotic effort to break these companies up.

Hot News; Gamers derail eBay listings to stop hardware, scalpers profiting on latest technology…///

Written by olebaba