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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

The problem with the free market is really language. Humans tend to converge to a small number of words for everything. It's Google for search, iPhone for phones, and Coke for cola. If we solve this language problem, then we can hope to solve the problems caused by monopolistic behavior.

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It's an intriguing idea that language might cause humans to be biased towards exploiting knowledge about common brands rather than exploring new ones. Do we derive utility from having a thinner "tail" on our (shared societal) vocabulary?

Unfortunately, the distinction between "brand" and "corporation" makes this point, while interesting, somewhat moot. Consider that the Koch brothers have been able to consolidate brands ranging from TIME to Sports Illustrated, from Brawny towels to Dixie cups. In a world where users desire a "long tail" of brands, corporations continue to consolidate but simply invest in a wider variety of brand names and marketing for them. There's still synergy to be gained from a consolidated entity operating all of those brands. And so we're right back where we started.

> In a world where users desire a "long tail" of brands, corporations continue to consolidate but simply invest in a wider variety of brand names and marketing for them. There's still synergy to be gained from a consolidated entity operating all of those brands. And so we're right back where we started.

Exactly. An example: Whirlpool owns many major appliance brands (e.g. Maytag and Amana). They can afford to make ever crappier products, because they know when a customer is unsatisfied, they'll more than likely buy another Whirlpool under a different brand name.

https://recraigslist.com/2015/10/they-used-to-last-50-years/

Or you can just prevent companies from having too much market share within an industry, which we've enforced before and worked pretty well.

Removing the consumer price standard for anti-trust enforcement would go a long way to preventing these huge oligopolies from forming

If a company grows organically to have a large market share due to superior product, service, or even luck, don't break them up. But I would say having a dozen serious competitors in a market really prevents a lot of problems. Don't let companies buy each other when it would put the combined company over 10% of the market. Of course this rule can be immediately gamed in many ways but might be able to be done in some decently reasonable way.

Even further.. only allow humans to own shares in companys or units in trusts..

this would help prevent things being hidden or manipulated.

This seems like an interesting idea — a very complex constraint but easily said...

Technically humans do own everything. The problem is not being able to find out who owns what because at some point in the chain, there's an entity outside the country or somewhere that has different disclosure rules.

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.

> The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, "normal" knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann's great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for "language rules."

-- Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil"

> When daily life requires turning a blind eye to the falsity of countless things we’re told, it weakens the power of language to sort truth from fiction.

-- Oliver Burkeman

> The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

-- Philip K. Dick

> The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

-- George Orwell

> All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. [..] But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

-- George Orwell

If it's iPhone for phones, why are they far from being a monopoly? That theory seems suspect even with your examples.

There is not one of those without a giant marketing budget and a powerful corporation behind it. Further, you're confusing market monopolization with specific terms sometimes becoming generic. You could look at Xerox as a counterexample: the term became generic for "photocopy", but that doesn't mean they're dominant like Google. Xerox has something like 17% market share for copiers; they're third place in a robust market.

The Sapir-Whorf-Coke hypothesis?

> The problem with the free market is really language... If we solve this language problem, then we can hope to solve the problems caused by monopolistic behavior.

Do you have evidence for any of this?

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