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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Tech companies in particular have very concentrated employee bases - there is a lot of incentive to grandstand against them if your constituency doesn't get many benefits, especially if that constituency comes from places that don't have much in the way of technical literacy.

Still, breaking up any company for being too successful is a great way to keep your economy from growing. I don't imagine sane politicians will actually follow through, especially since breaking up trusts in the past did almost nothing to help the consumers it was supposed to.

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Saying that the reason FB is being targeted for anti-trust is that they are simply too successful feels like a vast oversimplification of the situation.

True, but I hear these conversations brought up against every tech company, regardless of what they are doing or why. Amputation may be a valid prescription for a patient, but if amputation is always the prescription, I may assume we are diagnosing wrongly.

No you don't. No one is pushing to break up Basecamp, or LinkedIn, or even companies that have actual documented histories of anticompetitive practices, like Oracle. I haven't even heard much chatter about breaking up Apple, altho that might ramp up as they move farther away from hardware into services and other areas. The conversation centers around FB, Google, and Amazon, for reasons that are unique to each of them.

Elizabeth Warren has officially listed Apple as a company to break up.

Are you saying that breaking up the company is always the action from an antitrust case? That's entirely wrong. See for instance the antitrust actions against IBM leading to the 1936 consent decree and the 1956 consent decree, which changed IBM's behavior but didn't break up the company.

Breaking up trusts definitely helped - its the concentration of wealth and non-existent trust enforcement why there's so much consolidation and market concentration in a handful of firms.

Breaking up Microsoft didn't necessarily help any competitors, but it definitely made their products worse. Breaking up Bell turned one giant monopoly (with a well funded research division that drove innovation) into a bunch of regional monopolies that didn't necessarily drive better consumer outcomes.

Trustbusting is a very blunt instrument and there's not much data that it actually drives the results it intends. It would be better to address the market conditions that drive the industry to a monopoly.

the nature of capitalist competition means that in the long-term markets will consolidate.

Breaking up Microsoft absolutely helped their competitors, but not in the PC software market. There was a time when Windows tightly integrated Internet Explorer throughout the operating system to the point that using a different browser was a hassle (and would never be done by their general audience). Microsoft subverted and contorted as many industry standards as they felt like it as they attempted to turn the internet into their own walled garden right from the start. The antitrust rulings that were made undid the clamped down version of the internet that Microsoft was trying to build. I highly doubt consumers would have somehow been better off the last two decades if this ruling wasn't made.

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