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Comment by fixermark | Hacker News Reader

It seems to be an open question whether letting a corp play benevolent dictator for some timeframe, at least, is a useful thing.

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Bell Labs was a monopoly (at least for a time period) and yielded countless high-impact, transformative innovations that a company with fewer resources (probably) would not have been able to develop. I think (although I could be wrong) most would agree they were a net benefit to society.

In our local post-monopoly phone provider, 30 years ago dispatchers would call the local strip club bartender to reach their technicians. They were all on a first name basis.

It was much better to work for these companies back then. Now, everything is super efficient and all that extra value the technicians generate go straight to executives and shareholders.

Bell Labs was not a monopoly: it did not prevent operation of other research labs. E.g. the highly successful Xeroc PARC co-existed with them for a decade or two.

Bell the telecom company was a monopoly that financed Bell Labs. Bell Labs did not go down in flames when Bell was partitioned in 1982, and continued providing the world with great achievements.

Totally true; I glossed over the distinction between Bell and Bell Labs -- I suppose this might be analogous (with the full understanding that the analogy is incomplete) to separating Google[x] and Google. However, is it not the case that Bell Labs was able to undertake such ambitious research projects because it was backed by a monopoly?

Also, while Xerox PARC was also a legendary research institution in its day, I don't put it at the scale of Bell Labs, which touched a much broader array of fields. To quantify this distinction, compare the research budgets in 2018 dollars:

- Xerox PARC: ~$450 million (http://articles.latimes.com/2001/dec/12/business/fi-parc12)

- Bell Labs: $6 billion (https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/08/comparing-research-bud...)

These sources might be imperfect.

Gee, that sounds familiar.

I guess it's totally different because google only uses their duopoly position in ads to finance everything else.

Basically it works until they have a reason to defend themselves.

I don't think it can be considered an open question if we're all just waiting for the inevitable disaster.

The problem is we're just being slowly boiled so nothing has been done to stop the complete perversion of democracy and slide into a corporate oligarchy.

Complete perversion of democracy?

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