First, Do No Harm | Hacker News Reader

First, Do No Harm

stratechery.com

105 pointsi_am_not_elon19 comments

The first group that benefits from large tech company acquisitions is end users. The fastest possible way for a new technology or feature to be diffused to users broadly is for it to be incorporated by one of the large platforms or Aggregators. Suddenly, instead of reaching a few thousand or even a few million people, a new technology can reach billions of people. It’s difficult to overstate how compelling this point is from a consumer welfare perspective: banning acquisitions means denying billions of people access to a particular technology for years, if not forever.

This really seems like a stretch. First, its assumed that the actual features make it into a product again or the company is not simply shutdown and the current less-than-great feature is left in place (NIH). This is the web and great things spread, the whole last line is just really sounds like fear-mongering.

right, I'm not even sure if this the first group is statistically accurate, there seems to be too many small companies bought and shut down to really assume this. It would be an interesting study to see what percentage of products last after purchase, for how long, how many are incorporated, and so forth.

My interpretation of this is that this group is mostly the acquihires. He’s looking at this specifically from the Instagram view, where the product continues.

Obviously many projects are shuttered (“Our Wonderful Journey”) but I don’t think that’s what he’s addressing in this point.

I believe Instagram is the perfect counter-example to his whole thesis of helping the users. Instagram would have been just as popular, and one could even make the argument that they would have done better without Facebook because of the negative feeling of association.

There's also the question of whether Instagram is a net positive by itself.

I would hazard that before the "FROM FACEBOOK" branding last year the majority of users didn't even know it was a facebook property. And even now I bet a large plurality don't know and the majority of the rest don't care.

If not for Facebook, wouldn't their roadmap have been self service ad buying, ad analytics, etc, instead of refining the consumer side?

A former employer bought many competitors and sunset the product each time, because it was cheaper to rebuild the missing features than keep the whole product alive, especially when it did roughly the same thing as the acquirer's product.

This seemed logical but also a waste. Given that a likely outcome for any new company is acquisition, is there a way to make your technology friendlier to an acquirer? Even microservice architectures seem to usually have assumptions about users and other core concepts.

I want it to be possible to just staple the features on, like the business folks already assume is possible.

It’s an interesting thought; I suspect building microservices with well specified APIs (OpenAPI / gRPC) and a common api onto the infrastructure layer (Kubernetes) would be a compelling way to do so. I.e. spend some time being cloud-agnostic.

Honestly this seems like an effort to create a clever alternative theory just for the sake of novelty. This blog has an incentive to produce "hidden" information. This specific example is really contrived.

Small startups experiment with novel ideas, workflows and products (in a 1000 flowers blooming way). The successful subset of these that survive, get merged/molded/copied by BigTech, and acquisitions are one of the ways to do that.

More importantly, from Ben's other two points, if there were fewer startups because the expected return from investments reduce, end users lose because many of these novel ideas/products never come to market. BigTech can innovate much more slowly since they can only pick and choose a few of these ideas (even if they manage to come up with them).

My first thoughts were similar to Thompson's- investigating small acquisitions will chill the market (a market each of us dreams of being in :-)

But then, I started thinking like an entrepreneur- "Hey, Zuckerberg, I know you are only offering 7M for my awesome iphone app, but if you buy at this price it might look to the FTC you are hiding something.

Now if you upped your price to 94.1M and reported the deal, everyone will be happy!

I remain hopeful.

More seriously, pretty much everything certain "systemically important"'companies do (Utilities, banks etc) in the M&A space is reviewed and regulated - Big Tech is just going to face more and more of that in more and more countries.

I should think they could get ahead of the curve - start embracing things like GDPR and lobby for it. Get (bribe? lobby?) regulators in different jurisdictions to choose similar compatible rules - forget about trying to keep regulators off your backs while making money, if Thompson is right and these companies are in place for the next century their strategic goals should be sane, coherent and transparent regulation globally - that global regulation is coming is inevitable - that it is sane and coherent and transparent is far from not.

> I should think they could get ahead of the curve...

What makes you think they haven't?

What you are describing is straightforward regulatory capture. Every previous industry that has gotten large enough for regulation of it to get public attention has done it. There is no reason to expect big tech to be any different.

Unfortunately, I think the more strategic approach is to lobby for insane, incoherent, opaque regulation that varies wildly across jurisdictions. Then FAANG will be the only organizations large enough to handle compliance, and competitors will be shut out by the barrier to entry.

This is pretty much how most well-established industries are regulated today.

Maybe.

Well, probably based on thousands of years experience.

But ... imagine coding that shit.

It's ok to have country heads who manipulate and hide the illegal moves and regulatory shifts, but what if you want your web scale architecture to just work with simple configuration - not rewrite that shot in ten or twenty countries.

who has enough good web scale engineers who can fuck up a great design to meet country specific needs but still keep it running?

Imagine wifi being regulated in different ways in different countries? or GSM signals.

I think we are about to see a clash between the power of simple engineering and the wants of local regulations

Maybe

Here's hoping!

Absolutely :-)

Ok, totally unrelated to the article, but what on earth is up with the same creepy dead comment that is visible on what seems like every article lately (posted by beeschlenker this time). This has been appearing for months now and the user still doesn’t seem to be blocked from HN. I’m a bit perturbed that the text in his comment is even being loaded into my web browser, and while I generally like to show the dead comments, I think I’m going to have to turn them off.

Taking the article title and the author's own recommendation, it's best to gather information first and then develop an informed opinion - then once you're ready you take action if required.

That's what the FTC will do; their responsibility is to determine whether consumers are being protected against unfair or misleading practices, as stated in their about page[0].

Once no harm has been done and information has been collected for a sufficient period of time, then they might need to enforce laws against the tech companies involved - or they might not - depending on the investigation's outcome.

[0] - https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/what-we-do

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