Comment by whatsThisBtn4

Why are these two points, countering China and keeping Europe safe, the framing for this? Who is needed to counter the US and keep foreign countries, like Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and so on, safe from the US? And who needs to be strong to counter the US's state-sponsored terrorism via Israel?

One could argue that it’s all the centralization and monopolistic behavior which hinders tech development in the usa. So a breakup might have short term stutters but long term gains.

Why would you be "torn" on this? Competition breeds innovation, and monopolies are literally the opposite of competition. A break up of big tech doesn't destroy anything or reduce economic activity, it can only accelerate it.

America is totally fucked if we keep betting it all on these monopolies. China figured out that competition is the key to winning, and is why their AI companies have been able to catch up so quickly despite all the sanctions.

> I'm unsure what the polymarket on this post is will be flagged. It's kind of surprising for HN to be so educated but not know (academic) international relations Realism.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Are you placing degenerate bets on HN threads? Also the second sentence is unrelated, so now I'm wondering if you're a bot.

Companies flooding the space with ads making the internet unusable != strong economy to counter china?

anti monopoly actions != weak economy

Actually the opposite monopolist (and oligopoles etc.) tend to sooner or later stop innovating (they don't need to, they win by default) and decay into customer abusive absurdity. And to some degree we are already seeing this with alphabet.

What such concentration of money also means, is a concentration of power under the hand of a few people, wich then can use that power to e.g. undermine or outright destroy democracy, force countries to make really bad decisions (including economic ones), destroy industries "on a whim" etc. Worst huge economic crisis tend to long term make the richest of the rich even more wealthy and more important tends to open doors for even more power/abuse, exceptions in laws, state subsidization etc. So you can't even rely on them not intentionally fucking up their countries economy because "that would be bad". Not for them, at least not long term. And tbh. at the net worth we are speaking about "it being bad" still means they can live in luxury for the not just the rest of their lives and have multiple millions left to inherit to their children.

> know (academic) international relations Realism.

or you not knowing less about economics then you think

> to counter China and keep Europe safe.

eh, the financial support of right US milliadaries of right radical political groups which want to both dismantle the EU (and overthrow democracy) in combination with US mono/-oligopols in combination with corruption & US political pressure, is effectively killing most efforts for local EU competition. Honestly this is likely doing far more harm in how much EU is "able to resist" China then any "safekeeping" the US does (mostly indirectly by protecting their own interests).

The US just added a colony in Venezuela in cooperation with their local Reichskommissar and is looking to secure its oil. American perception of their country is quite something.

Drumming up incoherent fears about China is the new favorite oligarch talking point, yes.

The realpolitik is not lost on American HN readers. It's like you say - there's a balance between maintaining a competitive economy and a fair one.

In this instance, should we let AdSense persist as a platform? It does turn out lots of revenue, but it does so by creating a closed ad space economy that Alphabet manages. This not only gives Google and YouTube unfair advantages on their own ad service, but it also creates a blind auction for businesses that don't know what their advertisements are worth. The entire system is deliberately and artificially segregated from competitors to AdSense.

We see this throughout America's economy, with Apple and Microsoft too. It undoubtedly incurs fiscal damage to legitimate competitors that should be given fair ground to offer a better service. But since the US federal government encourages consolidation, all of America's services get described as "enshittified" by their customers while China innovates.

Hahaha, today I learned that we need to keep Google's advertising income intact (~75% of their revenue) so that the US economy doesn't fall apart. We can't stop projecting these ads onto people's eyeballs, or literally the entire world goes to shit! AHAHAHAHA