{"id":296196,"date":"2021-07-11T05:57:01","date_gmt":"2021-07-11T02:57:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/pandemics-tech-saviors-face-lefty-reg-heat\/"},"modified":"2021-07-11T05:57:01","modified_gmt":"2021-07-11T02:57:01","slug":"pandemics-tech-saviors-face-lefty-reg-heat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/pandemics-tech-saviors-face-lefty-reg-heat\/","title":{"rendered":"#Pandemic\u2019s tech \u2018saviors\u2019 face lefty-reg heat"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Pandemic\u2019s tech \u2018saviors\u2019 face lefty-reg heat<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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SUN VALLEY, Idaho \u2014 It should have been a glorious time for the tech and media<\/a> honchos who gathered here last week at this posh mountain \u00adresort.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The nation is recovering from a horrible pandemic, which they helped us survive. Recall how Netflix binging made the lockdowns \u00adalmost bearable. Amazon helped<\/a> us to eat when we were too afraid to risk COVID by venturing inside a supermarket.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Because of this success, investors continue to reward the moguls with ever higher stock prices that have sent their already insane net worth even higher.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So everyone here should have been happ<\/a>y, right?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yes, but my gut tells me they weren\u2019t. There was a foreboding mood that seemed to ooze through the fake smiles of the billionaires as they deplaned their carbon-emitting private jets and took their motorcades to attend the annual media and tech conference sponsored by boutique investment bank Allen & Co.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You could see it in the hostility of the rent-a-cop crew hired to help protect the honchos \u2014 mainly from reporters begging for scraps of information about what was going on inside the conference, which was closed off to everyone except the billionaires and some select reporters from CNN and CNBC.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Bill
Bill Gates was one of the many attendees at Sun Valley.<\/figcaption>
Kevin Dietsch\/Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The security here, some of whom in the past have been moonlighting New York City cops, can be foreboding. I\u2019ve likened them to aggressive bouncers keeping order at a party in the Hamptons. Since I\u2019m old enough to remember, they also remind me of the cranky dudes outside the old Studio 54, who busted up fights and decided who could enter the swanky nightclub during its disco heyday.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to diminish the job they have to do. Protecting billionaires from possible bad guys disguised as nerdy reporters is difficult work. But this year their tactics seemed excessive even by their historical standards. Guards prevented reporters from asking the CEOs even the most benign questions. In one instance security was quick to step in and shut down my Fox Business camera crew because we might intimidate some of the CEOs with our mere presence near the conference center.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What did the richest, most powerful people in media and tech have to worry about? Here\u2019s my theory: The contingent of billionaires navel-gazing here really weren\u2019t too stoked about the conference agenda of woke corporate issues \u2014 criminal-justice reform and climate control, the latter courtesy of a seminar led by Bill Gates, who presumably also flew here in his carbon-emitting \u00adprivate jet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Former
Former President Trump\u2019s DOJ attempted to stop AT&T\u2019s merger with Time Warner.<\/figcaption>
Seth Wenig\/AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nor were they all that consumed by dealmaking, which is the real purpose of throwing a bunch of bankers and CEOs together in the same room. Instead, top of mind for them was the fear of what\u2019s happening in DC. They knew that for all their power, their world is about to be turned upside down by a bunch of bureaucrats who make no more than $180,000 year and now want to make their lives miserable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As this column goes to press, the Biden administration is on the verge of appointing its next Department of Justice antitrust chief \u2014 who, if past actions mean anything, will want to break up Amazon and Google, and make dealmaking for media giants like Comcast nearly impossible. That\u2019s on top of a slew of appointees who see targets \u00adinstead of billionaires when they hear the words \u201cSun Valley.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course, former President Don\u00adald Trump wasn\u2019t exactly best buds with media and tech guys. In 2018, just as the conference was underway, his DOJ filed an appeal to prevent the AT&T-Time Warner merger. Trump failed in court, but the deal recently blew up on its own with AT&T spinning off the media assets including CNN in a deal that creates a new company with Discovery\u2019s David Zaslav at the helm.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Trump\u2019s trust busting was more personal than ideological. He hated CNN for its allegedly one-sided coverage of his administration. Likewise, he wanted to stick it to Amazon founder \u201cJeff Bozo\u201d because of Bezos\u2019 ownership of the Trump-unfriendly Washington Post.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, Trump and his free-market-oriented regulators never challenged Amazon\u2019s dominance of e-commerce, nor Facebook\u2019s and Twitter\u2019s dominance of social media. Even his suit against Google\u2019s dominance of search just before the 2020 election seemed more like a rush job to score political points than a true threat to the company\u2019s business model.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Amazon
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013.<\/figcaption>
NurPhoto via Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Not so from the crew assembled by the Biden people aimed at Big Business. Lina Khan, the new head of the Federal Trade Commission, for instance, wrote a Law \u00adReview treatise about breaking up Amazon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s enough to ruin any billionaire\u2019s Idaho getaway.\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Pandemic\u2019s tech \u2018saviors\u2019 face lefty-reg heat” SUN VALLEY, Idaho \u2014 It should have been a glorious time for the tech and media honchos who gathered here last week at this posh mountain \u00adresort.\u00a0 The nation is recovering from a horrible pandemic, which they helped us survive. Recall how Netflix binging made the lockdowns \u00adalmost bearable….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":296197,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/07\/zuckerberg-sun-valley.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[111601,2758,1377,70359,111109,111387,70759],"class_list":["post-296196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-7-10-21","tag-amazon","tag-netflix","tag-stocks","tag-sun-valley","tag-sun-valley-chronicles","tag-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296196\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}