Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

Because they're clearly not monopolies in the usual sense, just maybe oligopolies (note the "mono" in monopoly: it means "one"). If I want search I can use Bing and get results that are usually good enough, sometimes even better than Google's. If I want a phone, I can choose between Apple and Android, and maybe even niche brands like Jolla. If I want to message somebody, I can use Slack, WhatsApp, Skype, WeChat, Line, Telegram, Signal... If I want to post pictures or videos of myself, there's YouTube, TikTok, Facebook/Instagram. If I want to buy ads, I can buy from Google, Bing, Facebook and Twitter. They're only monopolies if we define the class of businesses so narrowly that each business model is a new class, such that each firm is a monopoly.

Contrast that with e.g. home internet, where in many parts of the US there's literally just a single company providing internet connectivity, a single ISP, and it's illegal to start a competing ISP.

View on HN

This isn't an investigation into whether these companies are monopolies. This is an antitrust investigation. Are these companies being anti-competitive?

So take the e-reader market. Amazon was able to undercut everyone else on price by a wide margin. A question could be asked whether their breadth of business allowed them to sell at a loss for long enough to kill off competition. Maybe, or maybe not, but was that their intent? I'm not sure how much intent matters in these types of cases.

And I'm sure there's more here that could be perceived as anticompetitive. I'm just picking some obvious example of where an investigation might be useful.

Lowering the price is good for consumers.

.. but only in the short term. The whole point of a loss leader is to be able to jack the price up later.

Then competitors re-enter the market and drive the jacked up price back down.

This phenomenon on its own is not anticompetitive at all. You’d need evidence of something entirely different like regulatory capture to prevent competitors from market re-entry or lobbying for laws that favor existing market leaders.

>>Contrast that with e.g. home internet, where in many parts of the US there's literally just a single company providing internet connectivity, a single ISP, and it's illegal to start a competing ISP.

You know, you might have shed some light on the core issue here. Usually for tangible goods, it is about choice, at an affordable cost. In the case of tech however, it is not about choice, but it is actually about access, at an affordable cost.

In theory, you could also just set up your own wireless mesh network to reach the internet. Its actually really simple: figure out the basic hardware, and then the software which goes with it, and then get the cooperation of your immediate neighborhood, and then the community at large, and don't centralize anything so you don't become branded as an ISP. Of course, the problem is that it is prohibitively expensive, at least in terms of time. So you might say "Well, it makes no sense. I will rather pay the very high price that my ISP charges". So you have just perpetuated the ISP's monopoly, because there is now one less person who has a good reason to potentially contribute to the wireless mesh network.

You can use Telegram instead of WhatsApp, but now you don't have access (because most of your friends are not going to move to Telegram just because you are such an amazing friend).

But here is the important thing: the fact that all these tech giants use every single dark UX pattern imaginable (to increase access on their products), and don't allow unfettered data export (to decrease access for competitors), means they are well aware of this and try to make access prohibitively expensive (again, in terms of time) if you chose one of their competitors.

I don't have a solution, but I think that is why the monopoly label makes sense.

re: mesh networking, I believe there's also scaling issues.

Also, perhaps certain liabilities could come in to play where you might be responsible for harbouring dodgy content from some of your less scrupulous neighbours.

Centralisation makes absolute sense in the case of shared public utilities. This whole business of treating them as just regular businesses is just a cod to help make some fat cats fatter.

One potential solution is to mandate some form of open cross-platform system, where the big tech companies are forced to give up our data and allow us to freely share it with others. So Telegram and WhatsApp would still both exist, but if I download Telegram, I should be able to communicate with WhatsApp users as easily as Telegram users.

I*ve been wanting something like this for a while, but I usually use Facebook as an example.

Right now, facebook is like a phone company that only allows folks to communicate with others using the same company. If you could see pages on other platforms and chat with users on other platforms - at least to an extent - that would open up some space for competition and overcome the most difficult part of building any "replacement" or competition to facebook.

All that said, I think this is probably a problem that is more complex than I make it out to be and it might or might not be a feasible solution. The first hurdle would be deciding on the standards for this stuff.

Yup. In the UK and many other places we had "local loop unbundling", allowing ISP competition for price and service. The UK lacks this, resulting in more expensive worse consumer internet in a lot of places.

It's becoming clear that we might need to "unbundle" the other end of the loop. Although that's much harder to even define. Trying to mandate the Fediverse is a pretty extreme technical and social challenge in the first place, let alone when billions of dollars are at stake.

A small thing might be to replicate the US approach to movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic.... : allow services to be either content producers or content aggregators but not both, and enforce non-discriminatory licensing of content. I.e. if Netflix pays Paramount $X for a series, any other streaming service should have the right to also buy it for $X at the same time.

> Contrast that with e.g. home internet, where in many parts of the US there's literally just a single company providing internet connectivity, a single ISP, and it's illegal to start a competing ISP.

It’s not illegal to start a competing ISP anywhere. (It’s illegal under federal law for local governments to grant exclusive franchises.) But your comparison is interesting. Almost everywhere in the US, you at least have DSL and satellite service as competition. They’re lower quality alternatives that few people choose, but the same is true for DDG and Bing. I think you correctly perceive that ISPs have market power because they have little effective competition. But by that same logic tech companies have substantial market power in many areas.

And there are theoretical reasons why these markets would tend towards concentration. In the ISP space you have the tendency toward natural monopoly that comes with physical utilities. But in the tech space you have strong network effects, which are another kind of market characteristic that tends to limit competition.

I agree with you. But I'm also pro-investigation. We're living in such a new era that old anti-trust laws may not apply very well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com