Comment by akst

You know you CAN actually quantify how bad or good these things are in what respect and their second order effects. The trades off are pretty well understood. Increasing returns to scale are a thing, as are natural monopolies where consolidation is more efficient even with the headaches that comes with regulating a monopoly.

Car makers, entertainment companies, news organisations are very different kinds of industries to the ones we’re talking about here. They aren’t natural monopolies and don’t feature increasing to scale (at all output levels). In media, the reasons we’re seeing consolidation is due to entry barriers primarily with how IPs protections work. This is entirely unrelated.

Also you’re talking about this entirely from a consumers point of view. From economy wide point of view, duplication of a product will pull resources away from other industries that might be more profitable for a country. Which is bad for the same reason tariffs are bad. These are real costs that will affect quality of life and crowd out desirable economic activity.

Just circling back to this original article. This is arguably not one of those cases.

But redundancy and duplication purely on principle is dogmatic and shortsighted, and yes wasteful. We don’t have infinite resources in the world.