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Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

AT&T was founded in the 1870s. But it wasn't until 1925 the research activities had gotten so massive that they spun it out in Bell Labs.

Apple and Microsoft are around 40 years old, but Amazon and Google are much younger companies and Facebook is not even a teenager yet (although it's no longer run by one).

Give these companies a few more years to build equally impressive research wings :-)

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I just don't think that's going to happen. Bell Labs was never profitable, was it? Look at Xerox PARC--all the stuff they invented there that Xerox never profited from, although many others did. It's just not in company DNA anymore. They would rather buy out startups.

So we should be anticipating the breakup of those monopolies somewhere around 2076?

We could keep subsidizing these companies by giving up our privacy while they build up said research wings, or we could just spend it on research wings that are already decades old (you know, the unis that made those companies possible).

You're right, they do produce useful stuff, but it's a really inefficient way of doing it.

If free enterprise does not produce innovation, or is inefficient at it, then unfree economies should be fountains of innovation. I haven't noticed any such coming from such economies.

The argument isn't black and white. We're a "free economy" but we still control and regulate certain things in the market. The argument is that this is a specific instance where our "free economy" is failing and so we should use government to address that. It bears no comparison to "unfree economies."

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