Comment by bsimpson
1 year ago
I don't understand how this worldview coexists with countries like Russia and China.
If the feds kneecap US companies, it's not going to make the next generation of US companies stronger, just cede influence to worse jurisdictions.
Yeah but it's also not great when Amazon can undercut their way into every market because AWS is a crazy cash cow, which hurt other US companies. Do you really need Amazon to be a "second government" who can decide what "you" buy, see and to some degree think.
It "works" in China where the government just stomps their feet if companies misbehave too much and everyone complies instantly or get replaced.
Edit: s/Amazon/Jeff Bezos/g?
We have megacorps in EU too, Airbus and Lidl comes to mind, though I don't think Lidl operates anything but their main business outside of Germany, in Sweden we have Lidl grocery stores however.
Absolutely agree on the fact that we don't need / should not have "second gouvernements" (and non democratically choosen too). Which is why we should also apply this regular "maintainance split" to largest fortunes too.
Some companies / services are just not viable as a standalone company, but still provide immense value to customers.
What will end up happening is not that Amazon will have to compete with others on video game streaming for example, what will happen is that video game streaming will disappear because not viable.
Browsers won't suddenly flourish when Google cannot finance browsers anymore, they'll just turn to shit.
People won't spend $50 a month to subscribe to what Google currently provides for free, they will just lose access.
In the end the users will just flock to the Chinese equivalents which will be happy to steal all of the western data for the low cost of providing file hosting.
> Browsers won't suddenly flourish when Google cannot finance browsers anymore, they'll just turn to shit.
Maybe what will happen is there will be a slowdown of new browser standards as Google wont have the muscle to push things through in the browser space anymore. This would be a great thing, as it would stop the moving target of web standards and would allow other browsers to catch up.
It would also stop google being able to do things like force Manifest V2 out of Chromium just because it serves their own purpose.
I'd like to see this outcome.
> Browsers won't suddenly flourish when Google cannot finance browsers anymore, they'll just turn to shit.
Great! Let's go back to actual applications.
Why would browsers turn to "shit"? The web platform is quite capable these days.
I think Chrome on Android is already pretty "shit" these days, because it doesn't support ad blocking at all.
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Breaking monopolies doesn't kneecap US companies. Noncompetitive markets do that. Forcing healthy competition is how we keep competitive advantage, failing to do so is how we lose it. See: Deepseek
Seen this argument a lot recently, it's a really interesting take that I wouldn't have really considered before.
The common argument for breaking up monopolies is to provide more competition in the key area, since monopolies tend to focus efforts on things that don't benefit the consumer (like buying out smaller companies to stop them existing).
From that view, monopolies don't really benefit the US, if anything it stops the US market functioning competitively, and eventually running themselves into the ground.
I guess the other view is that "somebody is going to have a monopoly so why shouldn't it be my country?", but I'd say that ignores the fact that you can just curb other non-competitive behaviour fron foreign countries, like the EU has been trying to do with Apple and Google.
Smaller companies would be more nimble and efficient. Also, Google’s main dominant product (e.g. search & ads) would be forced to compete & innovate vs leveraging Chrome & Android to keep themselves dominant.
Smaller is less efficient. They don't get to benefit from economy of scale as much as larger.
They also don’t have the communication and process overheads and don’t have existing contracts that constrain how fast and where they can go. If smaller companies weren’t possibly to run more efficiently, you’d never see startups leapfrogging established players. Economies of scale are a strength and can also be a weakness (e.g. your economy of scale to do X means you can’t do Y which is more profitable / cheaper)
We should run our economy in the way that has the best long term outcome, which is likely with plenty of competition rather than monopolies.
If other countries are doing something to advantage themselves relative to that, there’s tariffs or other ways to relevel the playing field.
> If the feds kneecap US companies, it's not going to make the next generation of US companies stronger
Worked pretty well when they broke AT&T and not only got an extremely innovative lab full of small projects, but also kickstarted the internet era.
AT&T did not have international competitors.
You think monopolies should exist?
Instead of smashing up successful businesses, you should tax them, and use the tax revenue to improve deficiencies in the market.
If the government thinks there should be more browsers, (or mobile os's) they should tax the existing ones and pay folks to improve the open source alternatives.
You _should_ outlaw behavior that creates monopolies, like predatory pricing etc
Canada tries this.
The result is higher prices for consumers and taxpayer money flowing into zombie companies that just happen be in regions where the party in power needs votes.
> Instead of smashing up successful businesses, you should tax them, and use the tax revenue to improve deficiencies in the market.
The deficiency in the market is that laws exist that allow market concentration. Should we tax them to fund regulatory reform?
> If the government thinks there should be more browsers, (or mobile os's) they should tax the existing ones and pay folks to improve the open source alternatives.
Let's review the problem with Chrome.
Chromium is open source. Chrome is Chromium with some corporate misfeatures like DRM, but is also the thing with an advertising budget. Nobody notices that their browser quietly supports DRM, except that then more sites use it, and then open source browsers on open hardware cease to be viable because if you try to use it, it doesn't support the DRM, and then no matter how much better it is people won't use it because half the internet is broken.
If you made Chromium better, Google would just keep making Chrome based on Chromium and then Chrome would have all the improvements you made to Chromium and you've solved nothing. If you made a different open source browser under a license that didn't allow them to do that then they still have billions of dollars so if you do anything better then they can just add the same feature to Chrome. At which point people still don't use your thing because they want to watch Netflix, and Netflix continues to require windvine because the Judas browsers have the most market share so devices that support DRM are common and demanding it doesn't bankrupt them.
Or, you could fix the law that allows DRM to be used as a fig leaf for the true motivation of vendor lock-in and simply create an explicit adversarial interoperability exception to DMCA 1201, not only as a defense but as an affirmative right. Then the open source browser can legally break the DRM in order to implement an ad blocker and create a feature that Google won't put in Chrome, without giving Chrome any abilities the open alternative doesn't, allowing the alternative to gain market share.
> You _should_ outlaw behavior that creates monopolies, like predatory pricing etc
Predatory pricing isn't a cause of monopolies, it's a consequence. If it's happening, the last thing you want to do is ban it, because it's a red flag that tells you the market is broken and you need to fix it. If you leave the market broken, a company with enough market power to charge excessive margins has enough market power to screw the customer in a hundred other ways, and trying to ban every possible abuse of market power is a million times harder than smashing up monopolies.
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There has never been a problem with having a monopoly because your product is so good that everyone wants it. There's also no problem with natural monopolies, for example there's no sense in having a competitive market for utilities.
I've noticed that the bigger a company gets, the shittier they get. I don't think the answer to the threats posed by countries like Russia and China lies in consolidating our markets under an oligarchy of bloated mega-corps.
Smaller companies are faster, more agile, and hungry for success. This breeds market competition, spurring innovation and rendering better products for the consumer. The Amazons and Googles and Microsofts of the world have largely outlived their purpose and only exist to hoover up money in their cornered markets rather than innovate.
I think with the current monopolistic trajectory there will not be the next generation of US companies because current companies just buy up everything that shows any kind of potential. There's no benefit to society from trillion-dollar companies - they don't need to innovate and they have the power to stop any would-be competitors.
and how does your worldview work in practice? a protected and empowered US/Western conglomerate is more motivated innovate and outcompete mega corps of Russia/China/latest-boogieman and destroys them because of this? or is the point to just say: well Russia/China have their own mediocre protected conglomerates lets have ours too?
Both of those countries dislike powerful, large corporations because they are a base of power that could compete with the state or party. The Wagner Group comes to mind. But China also did a huge crackdown affecting companies like Alibaba and Tencent.
There's no reason why there can't be international co-operation on this subject.
> Both of those countries dislike powerful, large corporations because they are a base of power that could compete with the state or party.
These countries are not different from any other in the world. The US also has anti-monopoly laws exactly for this reason: nobody wants a corporation that can compete with the government, be it democratic or not.
What does compete with the government mean?
Should FedEx not compete with USPS on parcel delivery?
Just ban the ones from worse jurisdictions then.
I'm happy to let China and Russia be the global leaders in panopticons and mass propaganda for their citizens. Google and Meta would be no great loss for Americans.
So competition isn’t actually good for free market economics?
A level playing field is good. The playing field includes other countries.
Why wouldn't antitrust laws apply to companies from other countries? If you ban tying app stores to phone platforms and then China creates a phone platform and wants to tie an app store to it, they're not any less banned from selling that into your market than a domestic company.
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