The Federal Trade Commission is looking into Reddit’s AI licensing deals, the company disclosed in paperwork filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The FTC is worried that the big tech firms will further entrench their monopolies. They are doing a lot of good stuff lately; an underappreciated boon of the Biden Presidency. Lina Khan looks to be really set on fixing decades of mistakes.
I guess they just want to know if these deals lock out potential competitors.
Just kind of dawned on me while looking at the number, Reddit's licensing deal with Google is valued at $60 million per year. That's really not very much money at all, considering the amount of data Reddit has and continues to accumulate. And chump change for Google, no doubt. Reveals how little leverage Reddit actually has at this point. This was their flagship deal, and the best they could get was $60mil per year.
Also puts the API fiasco in a new light. "Look, we need to charge for API calls, because we need to restrict public access to data as a precondition of selling all your shit in a few months to Google, for the financial equivalent of a cup of coffee."
And more importantly, any indication of impending regulatory action tends to spook away investors who might not want to be on the hook for fines and forced changes to the business model that affect profitability. Yet another staple in the rotting cardboard casket of Huffman's favorite piggy bank.
I feel like the whole Reddit AI deal is a trap. If any real judgment comes down about data use Reddit is an easy scapegoat. There was basically nothing stopping them from scraping the site for free.