The Week in Tech: An Emerging Twist on Antitrust

Each week, we review the week’s news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry.

Greetings from San Francisco. I’m Kate Conger, your reporter for this week’s newsletter.

Lawmakers say there is plenty of blame to go around

Lawmakers and academics agree: They have not done enough to curb major technology companies from rising to dominance.

On Capitol Hill this past week, lawmakers accused the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department of letting the companies off with wrist slaps and pressed them to be more aggressive. And at the University of Chicago, where academics have for decades set the tone for antitrust regulation, one professor has been wondering if they got it wrong, my colleague Daisuke Wakabayashi reported.

Regulators and researchers were unprepared for the rocket-ship growth of Facebook and Google, and the companies have successfully argued that they’re providing a benefit to consumers by offering services at little or no cost. Historically, that has been enough to keep them out of antitrust trouble; regulators usually look for signs that monopolies are exploiting their power to skim more money from consumers. The University of Chicago helped shape this ideology, while the F.T.C. enforced it.

Now the consensus is clearly shifting. Experts are beginning to believe that tech companies aren’t healthy for their users, even if they don’t cost much money to use.

“Our antitrust laws cannot do anything against these types of monopolies,” said Luigi Zingales, a finance professor at the University of Chicago, during a convocation address in June. “The world has changed, and inevitably the Chicago position has to change, too.”

Amazon says it’s going green

After months of pressure from a group of employees, Amazon increased its commitment to fighting climate change. A day before more than 1,500 of its employees planned to walk out of their offices in protest of Amazon’s climate policies, the company said it would become carbon neutral by 2040, a decade ahead of the Paris climate agreement schedule.

To meet its climate goals, Amazon will start migrating to electric trucks for deliveries. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, sad the progression of climate change had become “dire.” Still, he resisted several of the demands that his workers had made.

Employees wanted Amazon to reach zero emissions by 2030, sever its cloud computing contracts with oil and gas companies, and freeze donations to politicians who deny climate change is happening. But Mr. Bezos said he would not consider cutting ties with companies that used Amazon’s cloud technology to find and extract fossil fuels. However, he did say the company would take a “hard look” at its political donations to determine whether any funds were routed to “active climate deniers.”

“We know that the Paris agreement, by itself, won’t get us to a livable world,” Amazon employees involved in the walkout said in a statement. “As long as Amazon uses its power to help oil and gas companies discover and extract more fossil fuel, donates to climate-denying politicians and think tanks, and enables the oppression of climate refugees, employees will keep raising our voices.”

A good time to rethink upgrades

In a spot of good news, Apple introduced its new iPhones. The iPhone 11 comes in a variety of colors, adds a third camera for better nighttime shots and pet portraits, and provides the faster speeds and longer battery life we’ve come to expect from every smartphone update.

But our personal-tech reporter, Brian X. Chen, cautioned against whipping out your credit card to preorder Apple’s latest device. Sure, the phone is nice. But the older phones are nice, too. There’s not a compelling reason to go out and upgrade your phone every two years, he argued in his review of the iPhone 11. Rather than a two-year upgrade cycle, Brian recommended getting a new phone only if your current one is more than five years old.

If you can’t restrain yourself from buying at least one new device, Apple also released a new iPod Touch. The iPod Touch hadn’t received an update in about four years, and it’s a good option for parents who want their child to have a device with limited abilities.

“It’s not about restricting; it’s more about knowing what types of technology they have access to and setting a limit on how much access they have,” Janine Anderson, a mother of two from Racine, Wis., told The Times.

Some stories you shouldn’t miss

• A Wall Street Journal profile of WeWork’s chief executive, Adam Neumann, is absolutely bananas, and you must read it. There’s a cereal box stuffed full of drugs and stashed on a private plane — and that’s only the beginning.

• Speaking of WeWork, a start-up’s entire staff was locked out of its co-working space by a rogue umbrella, and the experience went viral on Twitter. After several days, the employees finally managed to break back in. The umbrella’s owner recounted an oral history of the experience to Vice.

• More and more cafes have swapped out their cash registers for iPads, confronting consumers with a touch screen full of tipping options — and setting off a heated debate about when and how much consumers ought to tip.

• The M.I.T. Media Lab meltdown continues, with a prominent Harvard professor arguing that taking money from disgraced donors like Jeffrey Epstein might, in some circumstances, be the right move. And the free software pioneer Richard Stallman has stepped down from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after making comments defending an associate of Mr. Epstein’s.

• Vaping once seemed like a less harmful alternative to smoking cigarettes, but a string of mysterious deaths have led to increased scrutiny of vaping technology.

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