Comment by pjc50
1 year ago
> Maybe you can grow it to 30% of GDP if you start doing a bunch of bad stuff, but if it can be replaced by open source local stuff-- if it's possible to simply kill facebook, Microsoft etc. and replace them with Linux together with a couple of not incredibly expensive software packages developed to provide a substitute, then why should we have a big-software economy?
People have been saying this for twenty or thirty years, and in the meantime the economy has coalesced further into fewer American megacorps. It's a mirage. Things do not work that way.
(AI is going to be exactly the same: the huge corporate valuations are predicated on there being exactly one big AI company which takes a significant chunk of value from all word-based work being done today)
All this happening in the US due the lack of good anti-monopoly regulations.
This is by design. US government isn't gonna kneecap it's most valuable companies now, since they're also monopolizing the international tech markets including the European one, and as long as China isn't taming its own monopolistic giants, then the US has no incentive to do it to themselves considering the economic war they're in now.
The US government threw the book at Microsoft in the 90s when tech was a small slice of the US GDP and it had no international competition, but today the tech sector is the biggest engine of GDP growth in the US, so there's no way the US government is gonna throw a spanner in that just to be richeous.
In the current economic and political climate, having a monopoly on monopolistic giants like the US does, is much better than having no monopolistic giants like the EU, since nice guys do indeed finish last.
Exactly, enshittification is creeping everywhere, EU should not follow a model that is breaking up in front of us.