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Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

+1 for Warren’s market-led idea of splitting the tech giants.

Of course everyone wants the government involved until it affects their company.

More government involvement is seldom the right answer. It amazes me that even after we all witnessed the clusterf%%% of California trying to force Uber to treat drivers as employees — making it harder for people who wanted to be freelancers — that people still trust the competency of government.

Weird how you can consider this a "clusterf%%%" as opposed to the existance of Uber itself: an unprofitable company that only barters for monopoly power while treating everyone down the chain like shit.

Not that I'm behind splitting up companies. Everything that turns into a monopoly should be nationalized instead.

Nationalizing monopolies? So instead of them eventually being replaced by the market, they are forever entombed by public unions, pork, and politicians where they'd go on like rotten zombies forever? That is a horrible idea.

Temporary nationalization is a thing. Nationalize the monopoly firm, spin off the portions that are not inherently monopolistic and can be entrusted to the private sector, and run the rest - the "platform" part, where barriers to entry are inherently high and there's thus a lot of monopoly risk - as a public utility. You basically lose out on some potential for vertical integration, but the flip side is that the enterprise neatly escapes the fate of being "forever entombed by public unions, pork, and politicians where they'd go on like rotten zombies forever".

How is being unprofitable different than every VC backed company - including ones backed by YC?

Even Dropbox - one of only two YC backed companies to go public - isn’t profitable and has said repeatedly they have no idea when they will be profitable. I don’t know anything about PagerDuty.

And what happens as soon as the other party wants to implement policy you don't like?

> Everything that turns into a monopoly should be nationalized instead.

I don't think it even needs to be a monopoly there are services that makes no sense to have companies competing to provide them.

Most utilities fall under this

Don't get me started on water in the UK.

It's private and you get no choice of supplier, how this is not a national scandal i don't know. At least with Gas/Electricity/Broadband (Excluding virgin from this) at least there is competition if delivered through the same means.

More controversially, post/parcel delivery could likely benefit from being a single company IF run properly, big if, I know.

More controversially, post/parcel delivery could likely benefit from being a single company IF run properly, big if, I know.

Seeing that all of the problems with the US postal service are caused by government interference, that isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.

The postal service wanted to cut delivery days to save money - but Congress wouldn't let it. Congress also forced the USPS to fund retirement pensions in excess of any private or government organization.

Negative externalities are a real thing. Markets are a very powerful tool. But they also have various failure modes.

Unregulated monopolies have drawbacks, but so do government-regulated ones. (It's OK, I'll understand if you can't reply right away if you're on PG&E power.)

Centralization of resources is the real enemy.

I was mainly responding to the statement:

> More government involvement is seldom the right answer

Are there workable solutions to negative externalities other than government involvement?

Obviously, regulation doesn't always work perfectly, but until some other way of handling negative externalities is discovered, it seems we should focus on improving how regulation is done those cases.

There are other arguments for government, but I find this to be the simplest and most compelling.

Are there workable solutions to negative externalities other than government involvement?

When it comes to tech, "negative externalities" usually equals "a company is doing something I don't like" not "a company is killing people or harming the environment".

The main reason for my reply was that it seemed like your comment was making broad statements about government, such as implying that government is incapable of competently tackling any problem.

I responded in kind with a broad statement as I felt that was a harmful sweeping generalization that ignored fundamental dynamics such as negative externalities, and needed to be challenged.

Edit: Sorry for the repeated edits.

PG&E and all utilities are heavily regulated.

No! Say it isn't so.

So government regulation isn’t a panacea.....

>More government involvement is seldom the right answer.

Actually most of the times, more government regulation is the right answer. There's a long history where limited government involvement and corresponding lack of regulations have impacted citizens (remember AT&T and phone rentals?)

The problem with regulations now is how the process has been subverted by capitalism to provide a benefit to one (or a small number of) business(es) which does not provide a level playing field.

I don't know how we would solve this problem, because of the nature of capitalism where the corporation with the deepest pockets wins.

It was because of the government that AT&T had phone rentals. The government gave AT&T a monopoly and made it illegal to connect your own device to the phone line.

It'd be a good idea if the govt was consistent in their approach.

They split off IE from Windows, but never used the same criteria for Google and Chrome, Google and Android and the like.

Actually, they did; it just wasn't your government, so, you made little news out of it.

Search terms: Google Yandex Android settlement

https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/17/google-reaches-7-8-million...

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+settlement+russia

All the 4 posting didn't pass a score of 10 here on HN.

Microsoft didn't spend enough money on lobbying in the 90s, and so the government cracked down on them. "Nice browser you have there, shame if something happened to it."

Google learned from MS's mistakes.

Also the 90s were arguably the last time there was an anti-trust friendly majority in the US Supreme Court and various US attorneys general willing to try such a case. The Republican Party has put a lot of effort into removing trust busters from the Supreme Court and state attorneys general since the 90s.

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