#Big Tech Monopoly

[reasonsforhope]

Article | Paywall Free

"A bid to break up Alphabet Inc.’s Google is one of the options being considered by the Justice Department after a landmark court ruling found that the company monopolized the online search market, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.

The move would be Washington’s first push to dismantle a company for illegal monopolization since unsuccessful efforts to break up Microsoft Corp. two decades ago. Less severe options include forcing Google to share more data with competitors and measures to prevent it from gaining an unfair advantage in AI products, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations.

Regardless, the government will likely seek a ban on the type of exclusive contracts that were at the center of its case against Google. If the Justice Department pushes ahead with a breakup plan, the most likely units for divestment are the Android operating system and Google’s web browser Chrome, said the people. Officials are also looking at trying to force a possible sale of AdWords, the platform the company uses to sell text advertising, one of the people said.

The Justice Department discussions have intensified in the wake of Judge Amit Mehta’s Aug. 5 ruling that Google illegally monopolized the markets of online search and search text ads. Google has said it will appeal that decision, but Mehta has ordered both sides to begin plans for the second phase of the case, which will involve the government’s proposals for restoring competition, including a possible breakup request.

The US plan will need to be accepted by Mehta, who would direct the company to comply. A forced breakup of Google would be the biggest of a US company since AT&T was dismantled in the 1980s."

-via Bloomberg, August 13, 2024

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The enshittification of tech jobs

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND on May 2, and in WELLINGTON on May 3. More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.

Tech workers are a weird choice for "princes of labor," but for decades they've enjoyed unparalleled labor power, expressed in high wages, lavish stock grants, and whimsical campuses with free laundry and dry-cleaning, gourmet cafeterias, and kombucha on tap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhUtdgVZ7MY

All of this, despite the fact that tech union density is so low it can barely be charted. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. When you're getting five new recruiter emails every day, you don't need a shop steward to tell your boss to go fuck themselves at the morning scrum. You can do it yourself, secure in the knowledge that there's a company across the road who'll give you a better job by lunchtime.

Tech bosses sucked up to their workers because tech workers are insanely productive. Even with sky-high salaries, every hour a tech worker puts in on the job translates into massive profits. Which created a conundrum for tech bosses: if tech workers produce incalculable value for the company every time they touch their keyboards, and if there aren't enough tech workers to go around, how do you get whichever tech workers you can hire to put in as many hours as possible?

The answer is a tactic that Fobazi Ettarh called "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

"Vocational awe" describes the feeling that your work matters so much that you should accept all manner of tradeoffs and calamities to get the job done. Ettarh uses the term to describe the pathology of librarians, teachers, nurses and other underpaid, easily exploited workers in "caring professions." Tech workers are weird candidates for vocational awe, given how well-paid they are, but never let it be said that tech bosses don't know how to innovate – they successfully transposed an exploitation tactic from the most precarious professionals to the least precarious.

As farcical as all the engineer-pampering tech bosses got up to for the first couple decades of this century was, it certainly paid off. Tech workers stayed at the office for every hour that god sent, skipping their parents' funerals and their kids' graduations to ship on time. Snark all you like about empty platitudes like "organize the world's information and make it useful" or "bring the world closer together," but you can't argue with results: workers who could – and did – bargain for anything from their bosses…except a 40-hour work-week.

But for tech bosses, this vocational awe wheeze had a fatal flaw: if you convince your workforce that they are monk-warriors engaged in the holy labor of bringing forth a new, better technological age, they aren't going to be very happy when you order them to enshittify the products they ruined their lives to ship. "I fight for the user" has been lurking in the hindbrains of so many tech workers since the Tron years, somehow nestling comfortably alongside of the idea that "I don't need a union, I'm a temporarily embarrassed founder."

Tech bosses don't actually like workers. You can tell by the way they treat the workers they don't fear. Sure, Tim Cook's engineers get beer-fattened, chestnut finished and massaged like Kobe cows, but Cook's factory workers in China are so maltreated that Foxconn (the cutout Apple uses to run "iPhone City" where Apple's products are made) had to install suicide nets to reduce the amount of spatter from workers who would rather die than put in another hour at Tim Apple's funtime distraction rectangle factory:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract

Jeff Bezos's engineers get soft-play areas, one imported Australian barista for each mini-kitchen, and the kind of Japanese toilet that doesn't just wash you after but also offers you a trim and dye-job, but Amazon delivery drivers are monitored by AIs that narc them out for driving with their mouths open (singing is prohibited in Uncle Jeff's delivery pods!) and have to piss in bottles; meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers are injured at three times the rate of other warehouse workers.

This is how tech bosses would treat tech workers…if they could.

And now? They can.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Katherine Bindley describes the new labor dynamics at Big Tech:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tech-workers-are-just-like-the-rest-of-us-miserable-at-work/ar-AA1DDKjh

It starts with Meta, who just announced a 5% across-the-board layoff – on the same day that it doubled executive bonuses. But it's not just the workers who get shown the door who suffer in this new tech reality – the workers on the job are having to do two or three jobs, for worse pay, and without all those lovely perks.

Take Google, where founder Sergey Brin just told his workers that they should be aiming for a "sweet spot" of 60 hours/week. Brin returned to Google to oversee its sweaty and desperate "pivot to AI," and like so many tech execs, he's been trumpeting the increased productivity that chatbots will deliver for coders. But a coder who picks up their fired colleagues' work load by pulling 60-hour work-weeks isn't "more productive," they're more exploited.

Amazon is another firm whose top exec, Andy Jassy, has boasted about the productivity gains of AI, but an Amazon Web Services manager who spoke to Bindley says that he's lost so many coders that he's now writing code for the first time in a decade.

Then there's a Meta recruiter who got fired and then immediately re-hired, but as a "short term employee" with no merit pay, stock grants, or promotions. She has to continuously reapply for her job, and has picked up the workload of several fired colleagues who weren't re-hired. Meta managers (the ones whose bonuses were just doubled) call this initiative "agility." Amazon is famous for spying on its warehouse workers and drivers – and now its tech staff report getting popups warning them that their keystrokes are being monitored and analyzed, and their screens are being recorded.

Bindley spoke to David Markley, an Amazon veteran turned executive coach, who attributed the worsening conditions (for example, managers being given 30 direct reports) to the "narrative" of AI. Not, you'll note, the actual reality of AI, but rather, the story that AI lets you "collapse the organization," slash headcount and salaries, and pauperize the (former) princes of labor.

The point of AI isn't to make workers more productive, it's to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses. Another of Bindley's sources went through eight rounds of interviews with a company, received an offer, countered with a request for 12% more than the offer, and had the job withdrawn, because "the company didn’t want to move ahead anymore based on the way the compensation conversation had gone."

For decades, tech workers were able to flatter themselves that they were peers with their bosses – that "temporarily embarrassed founder" syndrome again. The Google founders and Zuck held regular "town hall" meetings where the rank-and-file engineers could ask impertinent questions. At Google, these have been replaced with "tightly scripted events." Zuckerberg has discontinued his participation in company-wide Q&As, because they are "no longer a good use of his time."

Companies are scaling back perks in both meaningful ways (Netflix hacking away at parental leave), and petty ones (Netflix and Google cutting back on free branded swag for workers). Google's hacked back its "fun budget" for offsite team-building activities and replacement laptops for workers needing faster machines (so much for prioritizing "increasing worker productivity").

Trump's new gangster capitalism pits immiserated blue collar workers against the "professional and managerial class," attacking universities and other institutions that promised social mobility to the children of working families. Trump had a point when he lionized factory work as a source of excellent wages and benefits for working people without degrees, but he conspicuously fails to mention that factory work was deadly, low-waged and miserable – until factory workers formed unions:

https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/unions-not-just-factories-will-make

Re-shoring industrial jobs to the USA is a perfectly reasonable goal. Between uncertain geopolitics, climate chaos, monopolization and the lurking spectre of the next pandemic, we should assume that supply-chains will be repeatedly and cataclysmicly shocked over the next century or more. And yes, re-shoring product could provide good jobs to working people – but only if they're unionized.

But Trump has gutted the National Labor Relations Board and stacked his administration with bloodsucking scabs like Elon Musk. Trump doesn't want to bring good jobs back to America – he wants to bring bad jobs back to America. He wants to reshore manufacturing jobs from territories with terrible wages, deadly labor conditions, and no environment controls by taking away Americans' wages, labor rights and environmental protections. He doesn't just want to bring home iPhone production, he wants to import the suicide nets of iPhone City, too.

Tech workers are workers, and they once held the line against enshittification, refusing to break the things they'd built for their bosses in meaningless all-nighters motivated by vocational awe. Long after tech bosses were able to buy all their competitors, capture their regulators, and expand IP law to neutralize the threat of innovative, interoperable products like alternative app stores, ad-blockers and jailbreaking kits, tech workers held the line.

There've been half a million US tech layoff since 2023. Tech workers' scarcity-derived power has been vaporized. Tech workers can avoid the fate of the factory, warehouse and delivery workers their bosses literally work to death – but only by unionizing.

In other words, the workers in re-shored factories and tech workers need the same thing. They are class allies – and tech bosses are their class enemies. This is class war.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/25/some-animals/#are-more-equal-than-others

[destiel-news-network]

(Apple source, Google source)

Note: technically the Apple "fine" is an order to pay back taxes.

[ya-killin-me-smalls]

Long Loading Times on YouTube Videos?

for my Firefox-using followers who may have noticed that Youtube now takes 8 years to load a video, it's because they're in bed with Google and intentionally making videos take an extra 5 seconds to run on anything but chrome

the solution? firstly, disable cookies so they can't see if you're using an adblocker or anything of the sort

second, install this add-on:

and then to set it up, here's what you do

select Extensions in the top right corner, looks like a little puzzle piece

select User-Agent Switcher and Manager

it'll pull down the menu below, make sure chrome is selected in the top left box and whatever OS you're running

delete existing text in the box at the bottom of the menu, then select the button for the latest version of chrome

the agent ID will appear in the box, then you just click Apply(containter) at the bottom right

Youtube should load with zero issues after that

stick it to the man

[monetizeme]

"Spotify just reported record-breaking profits.

In totally unrelated news, Spotify stopped paying nearly 90% of artists on the service ANYTHING (no royalties for songs w <1k streams/year)"

Aram Sinnreich on Mastodon

[because--palestine]

Chinese AI company DeepSeek shocked the West with a groundbreaking open-source artificial intelligence model that beats huge Silicon Valley Big Tech monopolies. The US government is already trying to ban it, like TikTok, using "national security" as an excuse.

[sarcasticsouthernbookworm]

It’s really sad how these iconic companies are so bad at what made them famous

Apple’s music app is infuriating

Google doesn’t really function as a search engine now

And YouTube is just chock full of ads

I know there are other examples these are just the ones that are frustrating me right now

[web-three-point-ohhh]

Let's talk about why Google changed the Gulf of Mexico's name, and why all the big tech companies are bending the knee to Trump. This part is really important.

Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft all hold monopolies. Each are worth trillions of dollars thanks to the anti-competitive practices the US government has allowed them to get away with for two decades.

Remember when we were young, that cool older brother of one of our friends who drank tea and let us smoke some of his weed if we let him talk about how the Egyptians invented electricity? And how he'd tell us that the US government was fifty years ahead of consumer technology? That whatever the US military is using right now, we'd get to buy at Radio Shack when we're old and gray? Was that ever true? I don't know. But it certainly isn't now.

The US has privatized our technology efforts, and in many ways, our national security. Google and Microsoft provide AI technology for killing machines. Meta routinely hands over American data to the NSA, CIA and FBI, which effectively makes all Meta platforms government surveillance tools.

The US relies heavily on these companies for war, anti-terrorism efforts, and general national security. In exchange, our politicians have allowed these companies to grow to inconceivable sizes, destroying competition in the process. Of course, our politicians enriched themselves along the way, trading stock based on insider information about upcoming government contracts and regulations.

It used to be that big tech could just bribe our politicians to keep their monopolies. Sure, our progressive wing on the left has been screaming anti-trust, but they don't hold any real power so it's not a big deal. It's been a nice equilibrium where everyone got rich and everyone was happy; everyone except the poors, of course.

Anyway, here comes Trump—a dipshit chaos agent, who, like it or not, came to power on a populous message. Most people hate big tech, if they've been paying attention, and Trump could very well decide to break these companies up on a whim. Big tech is petrified of anti-trust, and even more, Trump's erratic behavior. Bribes are required, but that's not enough. They need to cater to his ego.

So we see these companies do goofy shit like change the names of bodies of water, or go on Joe Rogan to talk about masculine energy. But it's not the goofy shit we need to worry about.

What we should worry about, what is truly scary about these trillion dollar-companies with CEOs all on edge, is the invisible shit. What are the companies doing to appease Donald Trump's ego that the general population cannot see? These companies control our communications, commerce, businesses, and effectively the infrastructure for the entire internet.

What are they willing to do for Trump behind the scenes to avoid anti-trust?

Crying and puking, Google maps made the Gulf of Mexico say Gulf of America

[firstoccupier]

Gatekeepers or Collaborators?

Google and YouTube In an era where information is power, the world’s most powerful search engine and video platform stand accused of something darker than monopoly—collaboration with authoritarian regimes, algorithmic censorship, and even the erasure of history, such as grassroots movements like Occupy Chicago. 1. Censorship and Complicity with Authoritarianism Google’s development of Project…

[codexofforbiddenknowledge]

Could the Great Tech Merger be real? Rumors swirl that Google, Amazon, and Meta are joining forces in a digital monopoly, seizing data control and threatening privacy. This mind-blowing video on YouTube dives into the conspiracy—watch it now!

[stevensaus]

Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)

Today’s links The enshittification of tech jobs: Our last line of defense has fallen. Hey look a...

Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)

Archive Links: ia

[simplicius-simplicissimus]

Big Tech must go - a plea for a fair market!

„If we wanted to, we could put Big Tech in its place within twelve months.“

-Martin Andree

Comment: I work for a large IT provider. We used to have an annual event where we celebrated our success, looked back on the past fiscal year, and also looked ahead to the future. We usually invited representatives from our partners like Cisco, Microsoft etc. – almost exclusively American tech companies, to the event. One of these representatives gave an interesting speech about the evolution of the internet. He posed the following question: What do you think the sports shoe manufacturer Nike makes most of its money from? No, not from making sports shoes. From data mining! Nike sells these fitness watches that allow Nike to create movement profiles. Where do their customers go in their spare time? How long do they stay there? Data – and whoever controls it – is worth its weight in gold!

The more data "Big Tech" gets, the better they or their advertising customers can manipulate us. When we buy things, a part of the price is the fee paid to "Big Tech“ - they are becoming greedier in this regard every time. Amazon, Google and Facebook produce nothing, but control everything - and make an incredible amount of money simply by providing software platforms.

These companies are not philanthropist, they are capitalists through and through. Societies should not tolerate this concentration of power and money in form of monopolies. It poses a threat to our free markets and even our democracies, as recent developments in the US have demonstrated.

The US's hypocrisy on this issue is highlighted by the TikTok case and the allegation that the app poses a security risk to the USA. Western corporate networks and the internet are predominantly built on American technology today. Our companies moving their data in data centers owned by „Big Tech“. This dependence is questionable for security and data protection reasons as well. Europe must rethink this dependence, as the US becomes increasingly aggressive and hostile. As a solution in the dispute above, TikTok should disclose its „source code“ and „algorithms“ to solve the "spying problem“. We've learned that "open source" is exactly what „Big Tech“ doesn't want because that would threaten their business model which is based on closed plattforms.

How strong would the US outcry be if the EU would do to „Big Tech“ what the US did to TikTok? The US has only 300 million inhabitants – the EU has 500 million inhabitants. The EU is, above all, one thing: a mega-attractive market - and „Big Tech“ do not want to lose its global markets. Because without them, „Big Tech“ would be a much smaller player.

„All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.“

-George Orwell, Animal Farm

The problem with US-style protectionism is that other nations and markets then also drop all inhibitions and do everything to protect their market as well. And if the relationship with the US is already destroyed, then it will be easier to enforce measures in the EU to stop „Big Tech“ - because what is already broken cannot be made worse. You can't win an economic world war if the enemy is the rest of the world – no matter how strong you supposedly feel. The past has repeatedly demonstrated how quickly so-called technical leadership can be lost when parameters change (e.g. the political will of the opponent to be independent in certain strategic industries for security reasons).

Free markets are inherently good – as long as all participants behave fairly. Trade disputes should be resolved by a supranational and independent organization. The World Trade Organization (WTO) should be that organization - but it's a „toothless tiger“. Simply put, the US's main problem is the dollar as the reserve currency. On the one hand, it has enabled the US to achieve its preeminent position in the global economy - on the other hand, the strong dollar makes importing goods from abroad cheaper than producing them domestically. You can't have both!

-Simplicius Simplicissimus

[tnlnyc]

Rewind: "Points of Control" and "I Killed the Internet"

I’m busy celebrating my birthday this weekend so no new content this week. But in the famous words of French writer André Gide “Everything has been said before. But since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.” So with that in mind, here are two pieces I wrote a long time ago, that remain foundational to the series you’re currently reading: Internet…

[wat3rm370n]

5G mmWave was big hype by big telecom -so many bought inferior and or more expensive phones for nothin.

The big telecoms and big tech companies need to be broken up. Consolidation doesn’t work. 

LightReading – The plummeting value of 5G mmWave spectrum Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T and others spent billions of dollars in the early days of 5G on millimeter wave spectrum licenses. But the value of those licenses appears to be rapidly declining. Picture of Mike Dano Mike Dano, Editorial Director, 5G & Mobile Strategies November 20, 2024 T-Mobile received FCC approval to cut up some of its mmWave spectrum licenses into smaller geographic areas that are easier to cover. Giving up spectrum without any financial payback is virtually unheard of in the US 5G industry. Finally, it’s worth noting that American operators are the only ones that ever chased mmWave spectrum licenses. “The price of US mmWave spectrum is about the highest in the world,” Rayal told Light Reading. He noted that in most other countries where regulators have auctioned mmWave licenses, those licenses either went unsold or they sold at the minimum bid price. That’s likely why Apple continues to eschew mmWave in its international products. As noted by MacRumors, all four of Apple’s new iPhone 16‌ models offer mmWave 5G in the US but not in any other countries. Value in an era of scarcity. “I believe US mmWave spectrum was valued based on a mobile use case,” Rayal explained. Verizon chased mmWave spectrum between 2017 and 2020 because 5G was on the horizon and the FCC did not make any other spectrum available at that time, according to Rayal. Verizon viewed the spectrum as suitable for mobile uses, like smartphones, rather than fixed uses like high-speed Internet for homes and offices. Then, when the FCC began auctioning midband C-band spectrum in 2021, Verizon pivoted to that type of spectrum with bids totaling $53 billion. (emphasis added)

Many people had noticed this hype was going nowhere — slowly.

The Verge – G’s false start is over and the iPhone SE proves it – By Sean Hollister Mar 9, 2022 But it now seems the millimeter-wave 5G carriers have been slinging from the start was just a gigantic head fake — a way to stay in the game until their actually useful 5G spectrum was ready. On Tuesday, Apple announced the 2022 iPhone SE, the first 5G iPhone for the United States that lacks the millimeter-wave 5G that AT&T and especially Verizon have doggedly insisted on for years. Instead of rejecting that iPhone or insisting that Apple make a special version for its millimeter-wave network, Verizon will simply… carry it.

I noticed this because I know someone who prefers the SE because of its size, and I looked into mmWave at the time and decided it wasn’t at all important with regards to this person’s use.

Devices were made less capable, and or more expensive, in order to support something that wasn’t even rolled out yet, and now never will be in any big way.

Verizon’s Samsung Galaxy S20 has mmWave 5G but less RAM / There are some compromises for this 5G smartphone By Taylor Lyles Jun 10, 2020 Samsung released a new model of the Galaxy S20 with support for Verizon’s Ultra Wideband millimeter-wave 5G network last week, but it turns out the device includes some compromises over the standard model. As spotted by Digital Trends, the Galaxy S20 5G UW has 8GB of RAM, which is 4GB less than the standard Galaxy S20. The Verizon model also does not include a microSD card slot, which allows owners to expand the phone’s storage capacity.

The people who believed conspiracy theories about covid and 5G I guess saved some money and frustration by accident.

Reddit – r/Android • Sept 20, 2020 iamvinoth Including expensive mmWave 5G on the Pixel 5 was a big mistake, Google. deleted user Oct 1, 2020 Currently its only purpose is for carriers to misrepresent what 5G will do for people. The thing is: mmWave is awesome for consumers, but its use case is very limited. It is GREAT for extremely dense situations like festivals, sports games, concerts and train stations: all huge open spaces with a huge amount of people that are pretty active on the mobile network. mmWave will enable those thousands of people to all have a stable fast conenction simultaniously, which simply is impossible now even with LTE-A. The things is: showing “you can still get 50 Mbps even with a ton of other people online” is less sexy than shouting “LOOK 20000 MBPS!!!!”. Those speeds simply won’t ever be realistic on 5G, but that is how the lying lazy corrupt idiots carriers chose to sell 5G. (emphasis added)

I feel bad for the rural people who avoid crowds but bought junkier phones because some marketing material or some sales person told them they needed mmWave 5G. I still see marketing material linked from various mobile providers insisting that you need a phone that’s got mmWave 5G or you’re doing it wrong.

Apple made an iPad Pro released back in May 2024, quietly leaving out mmWave, so they saw the writing on the wall awhile back.

Mac Rumors – New iPad Pro Lacks mmWave 5G and Ultra-Wide Camera Tuesday May 7, 2024 10:14 am PDT by Joe Rossignol While the iPad Pro was updated with the M4 chip and more today, the latest 11-inch and 13-inch models lack two features that are available on some previous models, including mmWave 5G support and an Ultra Wide camera.

I dunno, maybe having these big telecoms so consolidated isn’t such a great idea for actual practical application. Maybe consolidation just makes a bigger mess with missteps and a bigger target. Just like with school consolidation.

N2K Cyberwire – V3 | Issue 1 | 1.2.25 Caveat Briefing for 01.02.25 Last Friday, updates continued to emerge regarding the significant telecommunications cybersecurity breach. In this latest update, reports have detailed how the Chinese hacking campaign, known as Salt Typhoon, was able to both record phone calls at will and was able to use geolocation services to track millions of Americans. For greater context, this breach was initially discovered in September earlier this year, when the Wall Street Journal reported that these Chinese-affiliated hackers were able to breach several telecommunications providers gaining access to cell phone records as well as listening to conversations of top United States (US) political figures, including Donald Trump, JD Vance, and other top officials. Since this initial discovery, reports have continued to emerge, almost weekly, detailing the scope of this incident, which has now become known as the greatest telecommunications attack in the US to date. While it is still unclear how many Americans were impacted by this breach, Anne Neuberger, the Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology, highlighted how the US believes these phone tracking efforts centered around targeting citizens in the Washington, D.C. area. Neuberger also commented that “we believe it was the [hacking campaign’s] goal of identifying who those phones [belonged] to and if they were government targets of interest for follow-on espionage and intelligence collection of…texts and phone calls on those particular phones.” With this announcement, officials are still unable to confirm that if Chinese hackers have been fully removed from all telecommunications networks and are still unable to confirm the full scope and scale of the hacking campaign. The Knowledge. Aside from this update, other news has emerged surrounding this significant breach. Apart from gaining insights into the scale of the attack, Neuberger released another statement that expanded the scope of the attack highlighting that there was another telecommunications company that was compromised in this campaign, bringing the total number of companies impacted to nine. However, US officials have still not provided a comprehensive list of the impacted companies as well as how many Americans were impacted nor exactly what metadata was harvested by the attackers. (emphasis added)

My letter to reps:

Break up the big telecoms & big tech. Consolidation doesn’t work for society. Big mobile phone companies and the device makers went all in on selling people less capable technically inferior, and or more expensive phones just to see the abandonment and plummeting value of the 5G mmWave spectrum. When a hacker wants in, they get breached like the Salt Typhoon, and the damage is widespread. They lock customers into poor service with locked up devices that install things and send information to companies for marketing without the user’s permission, on devices that are less useful than they can be. I’m sick of it. Break ’em up!

Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.