Thursday, February 6, 2020

Antitrust Investigation Against Facebook

Image result for antitrust tech companies

As of Friday February 6th, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced that the attorneys general of eight states and the District of Columbia will be launching an antitrust investigation into Facebook. This is meant to focus on Facebook’s impact on advertising prices as well as consumer privacy. James states that she is “proud to be leading a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general” in this investigation into Facebook. The bipartisan coalition she is referring to includes Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio and Tennessee. Facebook’s vice president Will Castleberry commented, “We welcome a conversation with policymakers about the competitive environment in which we operate”. He said this days before dozens of states are expected to launch another antitrust investigation but into Google. This has begun more antitrust investigations into Amazon and Apple as well. In the meantime, the Department of Justice is performing an antitrust review for all of the nation’s largest tech companies.

           
            In my opinion I think performing these investigations is something that has been needed for a long time now. I don’t like talking about buying something with my friends and then going online and seeing ads for those items when I never searched for them. Even if I did search for them it concerns me that these companies are going through my personal information that is private and nothing they should be able to look at. For me to lookup a product on google and then go on Instagram and see ads for that same product really concerns me for my privacy as well as others. These companies should not be able to monitor what I am doing on my devices since it is none of their business. It’s also not fair since I never agreed to receiving ads about items I have searched for or simply just talked about with a friend in person.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/06/tech/facebook-antitrust-investigation/index.html

Thursday, January 30, 2020

The Founding Era Timeline




To begin the founding era timeline, we must start in 1619 with the first slaves who arrived in the Jamestown colony. It started with about twenty slaves which eventually grew to be thousands. Next came the Declaration of Independence in 1776 as well as the Revolutionary War and State constitutions. Later, the Articles of Confederation brought the first attempt at a Federal Constitution and one year later the Treaty of Paris. The Articles of Confederation basically gave a list of things the government could and could not get involved in. That same year was the end of the Revolutionary War which also brought a recession due to debt spending. 

Since the Articles of Confederation didn’t give the government enough power in 1787 the Continental Congress had a meeting ending in three compromises, 3/5 compromise, twenty-year rule and the fugitive slave clause. Two years later the Constitution was ratified with a separation of powers between the Executive branch, Judicial branch and lastly the legislative branch. Then in 1803 the Marbury V. Madison what the first case to set a precedent by establishing a rule or doctrine. This came with the term Judicial review which gave the Supreme court power to review all actions by all departments of government and deem them constitutional or unconstitutional. Finally, this timeline ends in 1808 when the twenty-year rule has ended, and the issue of slavery can be talked about once again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWRoXYRsaeo&feature=youtu.be