Corporate Monopoly in America | Hacker News Reader

Corporate Monopoly in America

bloomberg.com

The challenge in a globalized economy is that what may be a monopoly in the US is likely competing against several global corporations within a given industry. Leveraging anti-trust regulations against that dominant US player may limit its ability to compete with global rivals, leading to the demise of that company and the dominance of foreign corporations in the industry.

In the past, when the US economy was more isolated and the level of global competition was much lower than it is now, breaking up monopoly corps in the US wouldn't leave the resultant child corps vulnerable to foreign competition.

While that might be true for some organizations, it is not 'the' issue. Most mergers and consolidations that have the potential to be most damaging aren't necessarily global businesses. e.g ISP's consolidating, Health Insurance companies in the US.

And I'd argue even companies that have a global presence, example US airlines, might benefit from consolidation but it does harm their local market, in this case US domestic travellers since they inevitably end up paying more due to a lack of choice.

Honest question: How can we help companies here "playing by the rules" in a global field against (in your airport example) entities like heavily subsidized UAE airlines, when they are essentially capped in some ways like this?

Now my "opinion" section WRT the above: If preventing consolidation and economies of scale forces airlines to other avenues such as sardine can planes, deceptive ticketing (economy levels that just take away things at the same price to push upselling), and govt protectionism (potentially exemplified by the laptop bans to some arab countries recently), is this the route we want to take? I don't have fantastic suggestions outside of "treat air as part of a US infrastructure which drastically needs govt. investment" so thus my question 1. (since I neither see my pipe-dream of infra commitment coming to pass, nor am completely sold on routing tax dollars to private corps, even if it would be an improvement on where they're being routed now. Perhaps build/maintain airports and infrastructure and be a "common carrier" of hardware that the companies simply rent? (I recognize states do this now, but I also know the level of infrastructure funding my state has available, and even intact roads are a fantasy.))

Slightly tangential but, to your point about UAE airlines this is a good read to clear up some stuff coming from US airlines: Link: http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2017/03/22/campaign-a...

I'll admit there is no perfect solution to issues like these. We mostly don't want government to pick winners or losers, but being completely free market based and no monopoly protections is great for companies since it is a race to the bottom line and they get to go to town on consumers with an array of fees in the airline context. I don't think preventing consolidation however results in any of those things that you mentioned, airlines are free to do what they want and what the market will let them. I'd recommend reading that article since I feel like we are not on the same page when we talk about 'playing by the rules' airlines. +1 on infra investment though.

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