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Comment by schalab | Hacker News Reader

There used to be a lot of natural factors which worked against monopolies.

Every new market you introduced your product in brought along with it a layer of bureaucracy and middle management, which left you more bloated and unwieldy.

This allowed smaller,local companies to have an agility and responsiveness advantage even if they offered the same service at a higher fee.

Computers and the internet have made the process of expanding a lot smoother with instant inventory management, communication etc.

Not sure what government can do to stop this. The more power you give to the government, the more lobbyists and corruption it will result in. And even if they do manage to sign some legislation, there will be workarounds and loopholes.

I am struggling to even think of rules that would efficiently limit the growth of Amazon,Google etc. Cap their market share somehow? Tax companies which have more than x% of market share at an exorbitant rate?

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You raise some good points. But I strongly believe in the innovative solutions brought forth by the free markets. It's not called "the invisible hand" for nothing.

I am old enough to remember when whole IT industry used to be in the shadow of Microsoft (and IBM before that). Nobody could see a solution out of it! The government even tried to fix the problem and failed.

Ten years later, Microsoft is becoming a nice player in the industry, not even mentioned when in "largest sharks in IT" lists. The invisible hand of the free market at work...

The "Invisible Hand" was a phrase coined by a Scottish economist who lived in the 1700's, Adam Smith. Do you think he had any concept of US based global computer corporations the size of IBM, MS, or Apple?

Free markets are not the only source of Invisible Hand. There's a growing mountain of actual evidence that regulations also often come with Invisible Hands that are larger than the hands of free markets. Take the environment [1], for example. There's no amount of Invisible Hand that offsets pollution that kills people. The Porter Hypothesis [2] is the name of the invisible hand inside the debate on environmental policy.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2017-08/documents...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_hypothesis

So now we're in the shadow of Google/Apple instead of Microsoft. Whoop-de-fricken-doo. The larger problem of corporate feudalism remains unaddressed by the "invisible hand". Lords come and go but in the end we all remain serfs.

In the end we all win.

We win as consumers because of all the tremendous value and products those damn corporations keep creating. Like smaller, faster and cheaper computers and whatnot.

We also win as citizens because those corporations buy stuff, create jobs and pay taxes (as much as asked from them and not more!).

And we can also win as Lords by simply buying some shares and owning those evil corporations...

I really can't understand if you're being ironic or not, but I hope you are because Microsoft has been under fire for a long time for their behaviour and even fined for it in the past.

No "invisible hand" there, more like someone yelling loudly at them.

Do you really believe the fines Microsoft was ordered to pay had any effect on the direction of the company? It was on a level of mosquito bite for them. What really forced them to change in last few years is the changing landscape of the whole IT ecosystem. Their market shares dropping, because there are viable alternatives, new kinds and classes of products, the whole opensource movement etc etc. So yes, the invisible hand of market, rather then some silly fines by government.

the IE monopoly did stifle web development for yonks! If they weren't forced to drop IE from being pre-installed, i'd say web development would've still be lagging behind today.

No irony here. All that yelling and fines had zero result in changing Microsoft's behavior. They just paid up.

You know what worked? Some good, old fashioned competition. And that raised up naturally, through free market.

You're joking right? It didn't happen in a vacuum, the whole of society is not free. First off, in this case, didn't Microsoft help support apple through it's bad years specifically so they could point to them and try to avoid antitrust litigation?

Secondly, these competitors could only exist due to government internvention. What do you do when the government no longer "meddles" and the big guys start sending in Pinkertons?

Huh?

They had to change some things in the European market, them not doing anything at all is completely bogus.

I'm not delusional enough to think the fines were high impact though.

The problem is that you just traded one large shark for another. Small companies still get quashed just by another behemoth.

The proof that that's not true is that whose second-generation sharks DO appear. Not all small companies get squashed, and some of them grow large enough to grow into sharks themselves, thus breaking the monopoly.

For most small businesses it doesn't really matter whether IBM, Google or Microsoft are dominating the market and when this changes. It's still a huge company lording over the smaller ones. I think we would be much better off if growth beyond a certain size would be disadvantageous for a company and it would become less efficient. But with today's progress in automation and communication you can run a large company world wide in a very efficient manner so it's even harder for small competitors to keep up.

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