I don't have a problem with this. But I wonder why there isn't similar willpower to pursue, say, telecoms, banks, Monsanto, Luxxotica, Disney, and the like. Why is it just big tech?
It’s complete nonsense. Telecoms have been fucking people over for decades and yet we still see mergers resulting in 3 providers going to 2 despite it being downright impossible to start a new one (see: Google Fiber), that is if you’re even lucky enough to have more than one in your region.
The federal government decides the winners and losers.
Sure, some well meaning officials may enact useful policy to carve out a competitive space for smaller players. What everyone else, however, will learn is to stuff congress with more and more lobbyists.
Satellite eliminates local regulatory capture from blocking new entrants.
LEO eliminates the latency issues with current satellite.
Sadly, I imagine that big tech will catch on. It has the resources. It's just still in the process of developing the playbook.
This is just a shakedown.
The same way Microsoft was deemed a "monopoly" and what? Unbundled explorer? Is anyone seriously worried about their monopoly now? There's always a new kid on the block.
The DOJ is too slow to be effective at targeting tech monopolies. They should just quit before they look like a bunch of johnny-come-lately blowhards.
It's that "leveraging" bit that was the problem - trying to use a monopoly in one area to destroy competition in another area.
Absolutely correct. By the way, have you visited Google with a non-Chrome browser? They’ll encourage you to use Chrome for “the best experience.” Seems very much like leveraging, never understood why people don’t make a bigger deal about this.
Not arguing that starting a telecom is easier than a search engine, but I think a large part of that difficulty is inherent to the industry.
I think the overall point though is that both the telecom and search engine market experience the network effect. In a telecom's case, the effect is more literal. For search engines, they increase in value as they can collect data on more and more users (which increases the value of the search engine to the users and the cycle continues). Saying that there are dozens of alternatives to me is like saying there are dozens of alternatives to Facebook. There are, but my Grandma isn't on them so do I really care?
I think that the network effect is really hard to regulate around effectively. Just look at Bell. the resulting companies from the Bell antitrust case are the same companies we are discussing as having monopolies on internet access. I absolutely agree that we have an issue, but I just don't know of a solution.
Yet even under this situation of "competition" between say a cable company and a phone company in most regions you have a duopoly and in very rare cases you find tripolies in the US. I did accuse these companies of swapping agreements in a friendly matter like if not exactly as a Trust to evenly distribute such duopolies and make it tough to enforce the places where the laissez faire regulatory environment around the duopolies have led to de facto monopolies by benchmarks such as which provide modern internet speeds at the neighborhood and/or building level. (It's been too long since the US was last interested in trust busting. It's also maybe been too long with the hand off the regulatory rudder for those cable and phone monopoly licenses.)
That's a weird way of phrasing it. Cable companies own their lines because they paid to build them. But they haven't been "intentionally granted monopolies" as you claimed above, because another provider could come in and build lines and provide service. (Power companies, by contrast, generally do have a monopoly in that sense.)
This has always been called a "natural monopoly": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
Most regions are aware that cable and/or phone lines form a natural monopoly, and thus intentionally granted that monopoly, placing regulatory bodies just as they did power, water, etc.
Just look at how badly Google Fiber is failing some cities to see how hard it is for "another provider could come in and build lines and provide service". It may be "slightly" easier to have competing cable providers than competing power companies (though keep in mind early America did have more competing power companies in some regions), but it's not that much easier, it's still a natural monopoly.
In every state I've ever lived, for example, Comcast is the only company that provides acceptable internet speeds. DSL and satellite providers don't even come close enough to count as competition. So Comcast has the localized monopoly on the infrastructure necessary to actually provide a good product.
The biggest needing breakups are:
- ISPs / telecoms
- Banks
- Food supply
ISPs / telecom should be first, the 2017 push to remove net neutrality even with clear violations [1], privacy protections and focus on ad networks [2], data caps, throttling, prioritization and more are unforgivable. The network is a utility, it needs strong liability behind that. I'd rather the lines be run by power companies and in many places like Phoenix SRP runs all the fiber anyways [3]. Cox only ran lines when Google Fiber was here. All Cox does is overload nodes and upload is severely limited as well as prioritization is going overboard and ending up with dropped packets and a horrible QoE. While these systems have a decent QoS, the QoE is going down immensely. There are lots more things they are doing like trying to get their modems in while having access to remotely install firmware on approved but not rented modems and limiting/throttling by device when you get their shared modem/router that they can see every device.
"too big to fail banks" next which are a national security issue almost at this point. Mind blowing after the Great Recession that we let the banks handle this stimulus as a gatekeeper. The GR bubble was caused by mortgage backed securities that went into cause a credit crunch. Now we got whistleblowers coming out about commercial mortgage backed securities [4]. It is going to get bad.
With the pandemic, now the food supply has been exposed as too consolidated. Even hedge funds are saying it, when hedge funds are worried you should be worried as these are the wealth extractors [5].
Harvard Business Review recently raised the alarm about too much consolidation called "The High Price of Efficiency" and how there should be a 'rethinking efficiency' to reduce concentration [6].
> "Superefficient businesses create the potential for social disorder."
You can have too much "efficiency", it leads to stagnation and monopolies/oligopolies which stop innovating and turn to rent-seeking. Ultimately it leads to less innovation, less products, less jobs, monoculture, higher prices and missed opportunities when there is efficient competition but not super efficient markets. We need companies doing the same things and finding new ways to do things otherwise product development and research and development stop. The sales/marketing/finance takes over then from the product/engineering/creative people and we all lose.
Here's a great quick point by Steve Jobs about product stagnation and the managers/business side [7] and how they can run amok if not controlled to allow value creation to continue, and how monopolies or problems that arise when only the business/managers are in charge.
> It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
> So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
> They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
The market is like a garden. The seeds and smaller plants need help, the overgrown and large plants should be harvested and culled back so it doesn't take over the garden and then the midsize plants flourish. Our market garden is in a state of overgrowth and the rest of the crops can't survive.
What happens when the overgrowth is taken over and efficiently worked out competition and created stagnation? How will there be competition in an oligopoly that is no longer US owned? It is a national security issue as well as a fair market matter.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/05/congress-repealing-our...
[3] https://srptelecom.com/darkfiber/networkmap.aspx
[4] https://www.propublica.org/article/whistleblower-wall-street...
[5] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hedge-fund-blames-us-meat-...
[6] https://hbr.org/2019/01/rethinking-efficiency
[7] https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-why-innovation...
Too much consolidation and waste due to super efficiency that is inflexible like code that is too coupled and specialized for a certain cpu over being flexible.
Right now pork is being wasted as slaughterhouses and meat packing has been reduced dramatically in the US since the 90s, larger facilities, less of them. Too efficient that it created a security issue and potential national security attack vector. Everything is not as localized, so there are choke points in our food supply that become massive backlogs.
>In 1977, the four largest meat processing firms constituted just 25% of the market, claims Bond. Today, they control 85% of the slaughter market, as well as some 35% of cattle ranches and around 65% of the entire chicken industry, he said.
> Since 1990, the number of slaughter houses, excluding poultry, has declined by 46%, from 2,709 establishments to just 1,461 establishments.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hedge-fund-blames-us-meat-...
or Disney?
Of course it may not be prudent to go after a company that isn't doing any malicious against its competitors.
What would the punishment even be? Forcing adoption of other platforms to artificially inflate usage rates? Breaking Google Search into two competing Google Mini-Search products that aren't expected to cooperate and push search #3 and onward out of the market?
It’s probably about Google stifling competitors on their own search results page.
Yelp has complained forever that Google ranks their own reviews above Yelp.
Things like that.
Parallels could be drawn with Amazon and AWS's dominance.
Yes they do. The reason MS got put on the chopping block was because they began telling vendors that they would charge them more if they bundled Netscape or Java. Intel got slapped with a similar suite when they began telling vendors that they would charge more for their chips if they sold any configuration with AMD chips. Similarly Standard Oil did the same thing - once they began telling suppliers they would squeeze them out if they worked with any competitors they got broken up.
It's simply not enough to have a dominant position - you have to abuse it to get slapped with an anti trust suite.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23198343
"Market Power"
‘Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.’
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
Besides that, Amazon itself admits that only 5% of Enterprise workloads are on any cloud platform.
Any company - or heck most tech nerds - can build our infrastructure to suit their needs without going to managed services. Whether they should is based on their business model.
Before anyone tries to “educate me” about what AWS offers, I know the ins and outs of AWS.
Not principally:
Much of the states’ investigation has focused on Google’s online advertising business. The company owns the dominant tool at every link in the complex chain between online publishers and advertisers. The Justice Department likewise is making Google’s ad technology one of its points of emphasis. But it is also focusing more broadly on concerns that Google uses its dominant search business to stifle competition, people familiar with the matter said.
From TFA.
That seems dubious when it's blocked for 20% of the world population.
The big tech co's have made their bed, now they get to sleep in it.
With net neutrality gone, an ISP absolutely could do that.
Even if you could, does that make it right that big tech companies are censoring people and organizations for their views?
Social media platforms and telcos operate at different layers of the stack. Even if something's acceptable at one layer, doesn't mean it's OK at another, because the consequences are different.
If an ISP allows someone to express something offensive (i.e. legal, but strongly disagreeable to the majority) on their network, it doesn't affect their other customers directly - they won't know or care which ISP this person was using. If a social media platform allows posting something that most other users would find offensive, those other users will leave. And yet people are arguing for deregulating the first (anti-net-neutrality) and regulating the second. It seems backward to me.
What you call "censoring" someone else might call "curation and removal of BS". The free market can decide whether it's too much or too little.