If the vast majority of people shopped at one supermarket, and that supermarket's most popular products were largely it's own brand products, and most industries that competed with such products had largely shrunk to providing specialty alternatives or cheap knockoffs because it was so hard to compete, then there might be a case for breaking that supermarket up.
Sears too once had a "monopoly" on mail order products. People marveled at how amazing it was that you could order a product, mail in a check, and receive the product six weeks later, all without stepping into a store! Now they're bankrupt.
The whole concept of a business "controlling" the market is ridiculous. Amazon operates in a highly competitive, low margin industry that requires a tremendous amount of logistical overhead to function. The minute they stop innovating, they're toast.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. You pay for that software even if you're unused to putting a dollar-price on its cost.
Hard for me to get too worked up about tech giants seeing as using them is optional and alternatives abound. I don’t see how my life is made worse if someone else buys a MacBook.
None of the things that do irk me about tech companies (security breaches, unethical advertising, spread of fake news, and so on) would be addressed in any way by a breakup.
Try participating in modern society without an Android or Apple smartphone or tablet. It's still possible, but becoming more difficult each day.
(And to clarify, I don't mean "leave your phone at home today". I mean not owning a smartphone or tablet at all.)
Those are two examples. What about Standard Oil for instance? AT&T?
If there's only 1 Walmart store in a small town (no competitors near by), does that mean they can't sell their house brand there?
What about a Walmart in a town with a Target and 80% of the sales are at Walmart? Can Target sell their house brand if Walmart can't in this scenario?
I believe the line is drawn at ‘large-scale winner-takes-all players’. It doesn’t necessarily have to be fair but it is supposed to benefit the entire economy. As long as there’s a relative balance between the economical power of competitors no measures are required.
You think it's easier to open a physical store to compete with Walmart than to spin up an ecommerce site to compete with Amazon?
On the other hand, I do not use ANY one-stop site for online shopping outside of Amazon.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-... -- 49% of ecommerce, 5% of total retail [1] https://www.pymnts.com/consumer-insights/2018/walmart-amazon...
Regarding the ecommerce market share I’d like to know the current numbers and the trend over the years. One should not wait for 99% to start taking measures, all competitors will be dead by then.
Regarding the physical stores Amazon isn’t really trying to capture it as the barrier to entry is much lower than online and margins are low anyway.
It’s extremely difficult to project forward 10 years in tech.
> It’s extremely difficult to project forward 10 years in tech.
I think this is a common misconception. Tech giants rise mostly because they create new markets. Since their beginnings nobody beat Microsoft on operating systems, nobody beat Google in search, nobody beat Facebook on social network market share.
The point would be that once you're dominant in a market it's very hard to be moved away and it takes more than a decade. I find it hard to believe a 1T dollar company can be outcompeted during less than a few decades.
Also as the tech/online market matures things naturally tend to slow down.
Isn't this just another way of saying survivor bias? They are big because they survived and out-competed the competition, no? There were and are other operating systems, other search engines, other social networks. And sometimes even having the same things said about them... Think MySpace before Facebook. Until they got conquered.
These giants are huge because the internet -- to some approximation -- has no geographic boundaries. It's much easier to consolidate and hold power when you don't have to literally expand to every corner of the world where people physically live to capture them. Amazon and Facebook can acquire entire towns with nothing but a few more servers in the rack.
I’m not sure if MySpace could be considered a giant at the time. Sure, it had popularity and market share, but it was not spraying billions around buying up competition or consolidating its business (Instagram, Whatsapp).
So Facebook didn’t take down any giants, instead it won a fair market competition. That was my point.
The plan we are discussing is a plan for national scale governance, and since your example is not on a national scale, the plan would not apply. If the isolated town wishes to enact their own laws to regulate Walmart, they may do so.
The locals may govern themselves locally. National leaders govern on a national scale.
Just some random thoughts, in different contexts:
1. Buying the cheap mega-supermarket can lead to non-obvious degradations in your community (e.g. you find yourself in a news desert because the local paper went bankrupt, following the closure of the local stores who advertised there).
2. Competition keeps competitors honest, but if one company gets too much of a lead, it's competitors give up leaving fewer market-based checks on its behavior (even if it was fantastic and awesome in the first place). Eventually prices will go up or quality down, as the never-ending quest to provide increasing shareholder value continues.
3. The real costs may not be reflected in the sticker price. For instance, you pay for Facebook and Google with your data and privacy, not your money. A competitor that directly charges you $20/year may actually be a better deal.
I am really not a fan of Walmart but I do shop at Costco and Target occasionally and I try to check both when making meaningful household purchases to see which one's cheaper. At some level, they do have to compete with each other on price and service.
Yes they distort their respective markets and put pressure on suppliers, but so does walmart and other big retailers. So if the law comes into place, it shouldn’t be limited to the online space
Ummm... that's exactly what I said. In response to
"The line is not 'you are not allowed to ever do this' but 'this particular instance is hurting competition'."
I replied
"I don't think they can specifically address a single entity like that: the laws have to be applicable across the board"