Comment by somenameforme
21 hours ago
What you're describing would seem to be a borderline miraculously positive thing. Every single generation of tech companies starts off absolutely amazing. Then they get big, and in surprisingly rapid order enter into the abyss from which they never return
But in modern times the particularly level level of big, scaling back of anti-competitive law enforcement, and a government increasingly obsessed with making [economic] number go up, regardless of the cost, have all created a situation where the current batch is dying a lot slower than they probably otherwise would.
If 'AI' is the pandora's box of self destruction that can move the show along to the next batch of companies, then it'll have been worth the trillions of dollars in investment after all!
I tend to feel that a lack of government intervention isn't a significant piece of this puzzle. When Standard Oil held a monopoly on the oil world, it was mostly possible because they were monopolizing a discrete set of natural resources. Tech isn't that: Especially with AI lowering the barrier of entry to learning and generating code, tech is extremely resource-unconstrained. The main resource we fight over is just humans who have the ability and desire to spend money.
I also don't feel it will happen in "rapid order". These companies are too big. Its happening business-unit by business-unit. In the far future, these companies will still exist, just heavily optimized into the much smaller handful of units that still generate profit.
> I tend to feel that a lack of government intervention isn't a significant piece of this puzzle.
Depends if you agree with somenameforme's theory that tech companies start off amazing, get big, then become awful.
You may have noticed, in recent decades, we haven't bothered with enforcing anti-trust law. If Facebook wants to buy Instagram and Whatsapp, they can. If Microsoft wants to buy Github and Activision they can. If Google wants to buy Youtube, Doubleclick and Nest they can.
If we accept the premise that FAANG is where innovation goes to die, going 25 years without any antitrust enforcement might not have been the smartest move.