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Comment by mrep | Hacker News Reader

That was a lot of words for very little content. I still don't really know what this breakthrough idea is but I do know way more than I need to know about Lina Khan. The only 2 paragraphs that allude to it are:

In Ms. Khan’s view, a company like Amazon — one that sells things, competes against others selling things, and owns the platform where the deals are done — has an inherent advantage that undermines fair competition.

From Amazon’s point of view, however, it is a problem indeed that Ms. Khan concludes in the Yale paper that regulating parts of the company like a utility “could make sense.” She also said it “could make sense” to treat Amazon’s e-commerce operation like a bridge, highway, port, power grid or telephone network — all of which are required to allow access to their infrastructure on a nondiscriminatory basis.

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> I still don't really know what this breakthrough idea is ..

As far as I can tell it is the European monopoly model. (My info all comes from Stratechery's coverage - errors are all mine.)

Monopoly regulators look at consumer harm, with US regulators focusing on price. Increasing prices are seen as monopoly power, and that is what they coordinate around. That for example (as the article notes) is why Facebook, Google etc are not seen as monopolies because they charge consumers zero.

Conversely the EU approach is looking at supply - eg can there be new entrants? The Google shopping stuff was an issue because it is way harder to be a new entrant if Google (where many find the sites) demotes or hides the new comer. Facebook is an issue because it is impractical to start a new social network. A new network has to get users to re-do their social graph - they can't just get a copy from Facebook. GDPR making more sense now?

With the "supply" view on, you can see how network effects keep making Amazon more and more efficient (economies of scale) while also making it increasingly difficult for there to be competitors. Their size also lets them impose their own policies (eg see ebooks over the years).

The focus of antitrust on prices is the direct result of Bork's influence on the Supreme Court, as this excellent article makes clear [1]:

>And so Bork argued that federal judges must resolve the “paradox” by declaring that the only legitimate purpose of antitrust law was to promote “consumer welfare,” basically meaning lower prices. And the only way to promote consumer welfare was to promote efficiency, because efficiency meant more production, which meant cheaper products. Any other purpose would interfere with efficiency and must therefore be ignored.

>To see how radical this was, just consider one example of something not captured by consumer welfare: employee welfare. In a town dominated by a single employer, workers may be forced to submit to poverty wages and abusive work conditions. Coal miners know this all too well—so do Walmart employees. (See Alec MacGillis, “What J. D. Vance Doesn’t Get About Appalachia.”) But to Bork, that could never justify antitrust enforcement so long as the product stayed cheap.

>The Antitrust Paradox makes for remarkable reading today. Like a caricature of a Chicago School economist, Bork explicitly warned against learning from experience. Rather, all business practices should be judged based on what “simple” (his word) economic models predict. “Only theory can separate the competitive from the anticompetitive,” he wrote. And theory says consolidation is good, because it means strong firms are crushing weak ones.

[1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2017...

thanks for that article. this was the money quote for me:

"... a central riddle of the 2000s: from 1999 to 2009, the economy had added zero new jobs. Even before the real estate bubble burst, growth was historically weak. Explanations like technology and offshoring didn’t quite add up.

Longman and Lynn had a novel theory: the rise in corporate consolidation was the culprit. Small businesses drive most job creation in the U.S. A monopoly, meanwhile, has little reason to hire more workers, because it can just charge higher prices."

people who talk about automation taking jobs being the problem or universal basic income being the answer should take heed of this, the central economic issue underlying today's societal and political challenges.

monopolies are anti-capitalist.

I think it's the most pressing political issue right now.

Monopolies are not anti-capitalist; they are the natural result of unregulated capitalism.

it's well-accepted that monopolized markets are undesireable in capitalism, so i don't think it's wrong to state it as anti-capitalist. but let's leave the semantics aside.

strictly speaking, unregulated markets don't have to devolve into monopoly, but functional markets are not particularly stable on their own, so monopoly does tend to be a common result. it's like a dipolar chaotic system where the second pole is stronger than the first--once the system flips to the second pole, it's hard to get it back.

even regulated markets can devolve into monopoly, as we all well know just by looking around. the early 20th century compromise was to allow monopolies to form but strongly regulate them. over time, we've allowed moneyed interests to weaken those regulations, with the entirely predictable result of the current imbalance of wealth distribution and social unrest.

Points taken. Well-said.

> Monopoly regulators look at consumer harm, with US regulators focusing on price.

I was under the impression for US regulators it was about unfair intentional competition stifling (for different values of "fair" than EU definitions).

> GDPR making more sense now?

Not exactly. One might expect more active measures if inability to compete was the motive. GDPR, despite my issues with it personally, appears intended to prevent data misuse regardless of company size. Granted skeptics view it as a lance to joust large US companies with. But EU has laws on the books to punish companies misusing their size.

In the EU, rulings taken collectively begin to feel like punishment is just for being a certain size. But in theory, neither side of the ocean makes it illegal to just be big and good at what you do.

The paradox is that environments where competitors organically grow most of the time are the same ones where monopolies grow too. You can't really build a healthy private sector via legislation alone, much less so if the legislation favors consumers over businesses in an unbalanced way.

> you can see how network effects keep making Amazon more and more efficient

If we were in court, the argument that you just gave would be used by the amazon lawyers, in defense of why they shouldn't be regulated.

Networks effects are a good thing. Making companies more and more efficient is a good thing. Cheaper goods and services are a good thing.

I have yet to see anyone bring up any arguments as for why any of these things hurt consumers.

In order for me to support regulation, I want to see actual consumers being harmed, and for the things you mentioned, such as efficiency, to be protected and encouraged, instead of discouraged.

Why do the consumers deserve government subsidy to protect them against negative effects of monopolies, but not employees or small business owners?

Well for one, the government isnt subsidizing anything. They are instead allowing customers to do what they want with their money.

And 2, I don't care what happens to business owners. They are wealthy enough to handle themselves. (Yes, if you are even a small business owner, that still counts as "wealthy" in my book. Most people don't own much of anything)

And 3, we are talking about a product monopoly, and not an employment monopoly. Nobody has shown any evidence that Amazon has any sort of monopoly on hiring people. People are instead arguing that they have a monopoly on the markets that they sell in.

Consumers deserve the protections because they are much less well off than either large or small companies.

You don't need the government for that - you just let people do whatever they want. Any sort of anti-monopoly legislation is a subsidy in a sense, because it gives those protected some degree of economic power that they wouldn't otherwise have, enabling them to make better deals etc. And there's nothing wrong with that in principle, if you believe in common good - but then the question of scope arises.

And we're talking about all kinds of monopolies. The effect that Amazon has is not so much on its own employees (although there are some obvious issues there as well), but on employees of all the competitors that it puts out of business. All those people also benefit from the lower prices that Amazon offers - but that is more than offset by the loss of income. It's kinda like Walmart - it's more affordable, but at the cost of making a lot of people poorer such that they need that high affordability. For the owners, it's a win-win, of course, because it creates a lock-in. But I don't see why we should accept that as a society.

Monopolies are rents, in the sense that a network effect isn't something that the company built, but is surplus value it's gained access to and can extract. The situation is exceedingly path dependent and often rewards little other than luck or ruthlessness, with monopolists retaining value not by continuing to innovate, but by choking off, buying, or outright killing competitors.

> That for example (as the article notes) is why Facebook, Google etc are not seen as monopolies because they charge consumers zero.

I can see this point, but also the point that many consumers consider the collection of data about them amounts to a cost, given our current system. (e.g. there's a new, expensive risk for the consumer: suppose that Facebook's systems are hacked and otherwise private data related to security questions, location, income, gender and so on are used to help steal the consumer's identity)

I mean, does economics need to catch up here? Can we really say there's "no cost" to the consumer?

That is the entire argument of the Hipster Antitrust

Could you clarify? This reads as snark.

This is a profile of a person who has sparked a revival of antitrust in America. If you want to read the actual paper she wrote, which is linked to in the article, you should do that.

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...

Well then they should have titled it something like "Lina Khan, Amazon’s Antitrust Antagonist" and not "Amazon’s Antitrust Antagonist Has a Breakthrough Idea". I expected to actually read and learn about her ideas.

If you want to learn about the breakthrough idea, you can read the actual paper she wrote, which is linked to the article.

Isn’t the purpose of journalism to inform on these ideas. I assume there is no idea if the Times did an in depth piece without describing the idea.

This is because the Times is well resourced and basically competent enough to not fuck up the point of a story.

If I read the paper and find the great idea not in the article then that makes me think the author of the article is not so good.

I feel like we are talking past each other. I'm fine with life story articles/books. I've even read the full steve jobs and elon musk books. However, the title is "Amazon’s Antitrust Antagonist Has a Breakthrough Idea". That alludes that it is about the ideas of the person and not a life story of "Amazon’s Antitrust Antagonist". I spent like 10 minutes reading through this long article trying to figure out what these ideas were until I finally realized it is not actually about this person's ideas and just a life story which is not what the title suggests and what I am mad about.

It is not that it is a bad article, it is just that it has a completely misleading title based on the actual content of the article.

There is a link in it, to Yale Law Journal article. It's a lengthy read, but that just reflects the underlying complexity: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...

There is quite a bit there, you're just missing it because it's written to cause someone not interested in people to tune it out (the stereotype of a tech bro).

While being very interesting to someone interested in people. Complete with Khan's current work, her past work, other people she's working with now, examples of her reputation (almost a ninth district clerk), previous examples where her reasoning was used, and the outcomes of the examples. All very interesting to someone who is writing policy (or the stereotype of a hyper social ladder climbing politician).

The examples used are actually pretty brilliant if you want to take Amazon down a peg. The worst case Rockefeller example (which was nightmarish), and a grocery store that slowly failed after it was regulated (and let's be honest grocery stores are an industry where every company eventually fails, since even small decisions can change which side of red/black you're on). Biased, but stills fill the requisite we showed two sided of the story slot.

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