Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

I think we should make life difficult for companies from a certain size on. These large companies kill competition and innovation.

View on HN

I would prefer we "make life difficult" for companies based on their behavior, not their size.

At the risk of sounding like a libertarian, I'm of the mind that monopolies aren't inherently bad until they start buying politicians and bills that reinforce their hold on the market.

Tesla is huge for electric-only car companies, but I don't hear the average person screaming that they should be shut down in states where they are trying to bypass dealership-protectionist state laws. In fact, there are anecdotes of people buying Teslas used from other states because they (aren't|weren't) available new in some states.

Monopolies are inherently bad because not being subject to competitive forces means they can charge what the market can bear, rather than the rate set by competition. This is bad for the consumer, bad for competition, and bad for the economy (fewer people are making transactions than at the market clearing price, slowing down economic growth). If that makes you sound like a libertarian it speaks poorly to their general economic literacy.

On the flip side, Tesla is also treated a lot better than smaller competitors, because its size enables it to play states off against each other:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_1#State_competitio...

> Monopolies are inherently bad

Yeah but is Tesla a tiny car company or a monopoly electric car company?

It's neither? It has more market power than, say, Chevrolet, but less than AT&T. Receiving ~1.25Bn from the taxpayer where smaller companies wouldn't get anything is more a function of its size and institutional failure on behalf of the individual states.

I don't think Tesla is anywhere close to market dominance. Their problem may be more long-term survival than achieving a monopoly in my view.

They are leading in the niche, but that's besides the point: market power refers to the ability to raise prices above what is truly competitive, which they certainly have to some extent while not being a monopoly.

> ... market power refers to the ability to raise prices above what is truly competitive, which they certainly have to some extent while not being a monopoly.

Have they really, though? I mean, a Maserati is also priced very highly. Certainly much higher than what is "truly competitive" for a luxury vehicle. But I don't think anyone would call them a monopoly. Likewise, Tesla is selling a unique product within a class, and some people are willing to pay more for that product. In other words, they have a product with a competitive advantage, and that allows them to price higher than the competition. This is healthy and normal elastic demand. I mean, price was a big reason the Model 3 presold in a week about three times the entire Model S volume.

The typical argument in that favour is that a product comes with certain intangible benefits, be it social signalling or personal actualisation that helps explain why firms with strong brand identity can push higher margins in otherwise competitive markets. This is a partial explanation to the extent that it doesn't play nicely with another prevailing theory that mindshare and niche dominance enables market power through greater information asymmetry. The presence of a larger car market curtails how market power can be exercised, to the extent that your hydrocarbon cars are substitute goods for electric ones.

I have no real issue with Tesla from a competitive perspective. I'm simply making two fairly seperate points, that monopolies are always bad, and Tesla has accrued many more benefits from the state than penalties, on account of its size.

They created a little niche in large market but it's pretty easy to avoid them if you don't like their cars.

I'm just saying determination of market is hard, it is responsible for endless arguments in trade and tax law.

I used to think we should have a form of progressive taxation based on market power. Incent, but do not mandate, smaller firms. Tax anticompetitive potential to siphon rents.

I still like the theory but now worry it would be unmanageable because market determination is an unsolved problem.

> Monopolies are inherently bad because not being subject to competitive forces

Some companies are a "monopoly" in a small sector, but there are substitute products which are close enough to provide market-like forces. Don't want to pay for a Tesla? Buy an internal-combustion engine car, a gas-electric hybrid car, pay a premium for a Fisker Kharma, get one of the less desirable tiny electrics from any one of a dozen tiny-production manufacturers, or simply buy a Tesla used.

If Tesla was a monopoly, they could (would?) charge far more now than they are for the early delivery units (time-price discrimination). As far as I can tell, they have biased early delivery Model 3 cars to premium features, but they are charging the same price in delivery month 1 than delivery month 3.

> If that makes you sound like a libertarian it speaks poorly to their general economic literacy.

I'm reasonably well versed on the basics of economics (both classical and behavioral). "Libertarian" comes with a connotation, which I don't prefer to adopt. Some of it comes from Ayn Rand acolytes, some from the ignorance/naiveté of AnCaps (although I admit that there's enough ignorance on all sides of economics).

But more extreme libertarians tend to think that the market will correct itself faster and better than any government intervention, so "monopolies don't exist for long in free-market conditions" (although this assumes perfect information transparency, which never has and never will exist).

> On the flip side, Tesla is also treated a lot better than smaller competitors, because its size enables it to play states off against each other

Every big company that has already raised the funds (or promise of funds) can get similar attention and courting when shopping for a cite for jobs. It's not unique to Tesla, or even large companies:

  * Amazon is shopping with HQ2 to major metro areas
  * Google Fiber had cities put together competitive bids, including cutting red tape and cheap access to utility poles
  * Wisconsin just offered a *massive* tax discount package to woo FoxConn to build a factory in the US
  * Almost *every* auto manufacturer gets courted by different states to build plants (incl. Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, etc) in Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama
  * Boeing gets many bids on their plants and Airbus recently got similar incentives for building a plant in Alabama
  * The Kansas Cities (two adjacent cities in two states) have long been at economic war, offering unsustainable tax incentives to keep companies from "crossing the street" into another tax jurisdiction[1]
  * Video Effects ("VFX") is in a tax-free treadmill[2]

[1] https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21599368-missou...

[2] http://www.studiodaily.com/2013/04/ending-the-vfx-crisis-wha...

Google has done a few things in the antitrust area that are noteworthy. http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/

Great, let's focus the discussion on that -- not on their size.

As someone who identifies mostly as a libertarian, monopolies are inherently bad and almost exclusively caused by government. If a company has nothing but market share and reputation to keep users or prevent competition from stepping up that is not a monopoly. I think you meant simply that being a popular service is not a bad thing. Corporatism and government kick backs and protections cause the economic issues and stifle small competition.

" I would prefer we "make life difficult" for companies based on their behavior, not their size."

It's pretty hard to measure behavior but size is easier to measure. As as Tesla goes they are still a very small company compared to their competition so I don't think there is any need to think about their market power and suppression of competition.

> As as Tesla goes they are still a very small company compared to their competition so I don't think there is any need to think about their market power and suppression of competition.

It all depends how you slice and dice, which is the flexibility and the unjust part of anticompetitive lawsuits.

Did MS have a "monopoly" on browsers just by bundling IE with Windows? How much effort would it take for consumers to install Mozilla or Opera or AOL?

Does Apple have a monopoly on "apps"? You can always buy an Android to avoid an iPhone, a Surface to avoid an iPad, a Zune to avoid an iPod (oh, wait...). You can argue that Apple has a monopoly on the Apple iTunes/App stores, but is it an honest argument if you look at the wider industry?

I would argue that size still doesn't mean anything. Apple is huge but they got there because consumers willingly bought their products. There was no geographical monopoly (as utilities have), no IP monopoly (iPod competed with Zune, MBP with a lot of WinTel laptops, iPad with Surface, iPhone with any number of feature Phones, BlackBerries, and later Android), and they didn't pay legislators to build walls that benefitted Apple.

Does Google deserve to be sued for anticompetitive behavior? Perhaps. Does Google deserve to be sued just because it's large? No.

The game would change, they would just do as much behavior as they can get away with until they got large enough to change the law.

That's a hypothetical in a world that doesn't (yet) exist. Let's leave the lawsuits for when actual harm has happened, not potential harm.

20 years ago, people wondered could anyone overtake Microsoft. But look at the big tech companies now.

1. Apple -- approaching a one trillion dollar market cap was almost bankrupt 20 years ago.

2. Amazon -- a little spunky online book seller

3 Google - a little research project that wasn't even incorporated

4 Facebook -- wouldn't exist for 7 years.

As hard as MS tried, they weren't able to kill competition.

Microsoft's troubles started after the DOJ antitrust investigations. I think if Microsoft had been allowed to aggressively leverage their Windows monopoly as they wished, we woul be looking at a far different landscape now

This seems to be a great example of correlation does not imply causation.

Sadly I can't disprove this fallacy because I don't have a counterfactual world to show you.

But I would argue that if you look at post-DOJ Microsoft, that also happened to be the same time that:

  * Microsoft was rudderless
  * the internet became the source of lots of extremely cheap software (including SaaS),
  * Windows software quality gave us gifts like Conficker
  * Microsoft was busy prosecuting software pirates and burdoning legit users with licensing keys
  * Microsoft lost out on smart phones, tablets, cloud services, etc which grew *far* faster than desktop software
  * OS X became a more compelling alternative to Windows for home/business users
  * Linux continued to eat Windows server market share

You are blaming the DOJ (ad EU Commission) investigations for Microsoft being a massive ship and turning slowly in an age of rapid innovation. They got fat on intellectual property and patents, then never bothered to trim their business to their core competency. Perhaps this will change in the post-Balmer years, but only time will tell. I would argue that the only thing that Microsoft has really dominated recently has been console-based gaming, and it's not because MS got split up for anti-competitive behavior (because they didn't).

Did the DOJ stop MS from trying to compete in Music - where Apple first mounted its comeback before the iPhone. No, Microsoft has tried and failed at music four times.

Did the DOJ prevent Microsoft from trying to compete at search - where Google dominates. No, MS has poured billions in Bing.

MS didn't try to compete in social or ecommerce.

It seems we are trading one behemoth against another. I would much prefer if we had more smaller companies competing with each other.

In other words: Unless you kill all competition forever, you aren't killing competition at all?

Should we apply the same to homicides? Unless you kill everyone with no survivors left, you didn't kill anyone?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com