Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

Good decision. Then do the same thing to AWS and Amazon's media branch, and then go undo the whatsapp acquisition. Then stop platforms from subsidizing competing products while they charge competitors high fees like Spotify vs Apple Music.

The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is absolutely abysmal in the long run. I don't care if it increases consumer prices by 10 cents or whatever, it's time to look at the long term health of the ecosystem overall. It's really the private analog to a state capitalist country subsidizing its own firms while foreigners have to compete on a one-by-one basis. Everyone considers that to be detrimental when it happens between two nations, I don't see why it's not detrimental when it happens in the tech industry.

View on HN

>Good decision. Then do the same thing to AWS and Amazon's media branch, and then go undo the whatsapp acquisition

Exactly. My concern is that Google is being uniquely targeted, and that breaking them up and calling it a day just exposes us to further abuses from the rest of the tech industry. At least with Google, evil is divided across five tech giants that can serve as checks against one another, instead of merely four.

Similarly, I feel that the tech industry as a whole, while far from not evil, has emerged with a set of interests distinct from those of other monopolies, and helped protect the internet from being subordinated to the interests of telecoms. Which isn't to say that I enjoy monopolies, far from it. I just want to see similar willpower to break up the giants of other industries.

For that matter, if we really have to go the route of the uniquely targeting a specific tech company, I would at least start with Amazon and then Facebook. Or if we thought more broadly than just tech, I would start with the oil industry giants, finance industry giants, and then telecoms, and then health insurance companies, and then Amazon and Facebook.

Those other industries you mention have each been subjected to relatively large amounts of regulation over their history, some have been targeted for antitrust in the past. By comparison the "tech" industry has been subjected to very little regulation in the US, almost none. We have seen these "concerns" from other commenters in the past -- "it is not fair to keep picking on X" or "everybody else is doing it" -- but it just comes across as being from people working within or dependent on the industry. Why would anyone else be sympathetic to these concerns?

>At least with Google, evil is divided across five tech giants that can serve as checks against one another, instead of merely four.

I find it interesting that we're reasoning in terms of balance of power, pre-eminence, and hegemony, to address issues related to a few companies. Cardinal de Richelieu sure would have found his footing.

No wonder some Google had a "Head of International Relations" whose job is to deal with diplomats, the U.N and the like[^1]. I believe Condoleezza Rice is also on the board of Dropbox.

[^1]: https://medium.com/@rossformaine/i-was-googles-head-of-inter...

When you have quarterly profits larger than some small nations entire yearly GDP, it’s as much a question of if you need international relations so much as it’s a question of if you would benefit from having one, and the answer is an obvious yes. They can afford the best, so they can meet with and wine and dine the best.

Perhaps all this familiarity is finally breeding contempt from certain quarters? Perhaps it’s a bit of envy on both sides; nations envious of multinational profits and reach, and multinational firms envious of national self-justifying existence.

I wonder how long til Starlink starts providing extraterritorial/extraterrestrial VPS?

>"The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is absolutely abysmal in the long run."

That's literally how every company ever in any industry since the dawn of commerce has operated. You use profits to grow and diversify. You can't perform capital expenditure without capital...

Deliberately targeting growing competitors using things like predatory pricing [0] is not the same as growing and diversifying.

[0] https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/who-should-ant...

How is that any different than every VC backed startup?

Still, it has been part of capitalism since its dawn... not saying its the best for us all - far from it, but no huge multinational corporation grew to its size by playing nice and polite.

The thing is, amoral behavior can be seen left and right, through large part of history of Silicon Valley (remember Gates & Jobs & Xerox).

To me as an end consumer, Facebook has a true monopoly and progressively shittier products compared to Google - ads comprising half of my feed, their core product is still broken and buggy in many places but that's another topic. Recent UI changes made it much worse product. Google looks great compared. But again that's very personal and limited view.

>Still, it has been part of capitalism since its dawn...

So was slavery. Yet somehow we managed to legislate that away.

Those competitors are fueled by VC money which let's them price their products below sustainable levels. In other words they're doing predatory pricing just as much as Amazon. Banning it will probably help Amazon more than it hurts them.

my answer to that is, yes that is how every other industry operates, which is why every other industry is painfully slow. Tech was the rare exception of having the advantage of starting from a blank slate a few decades ago, and it was insanely innovative. There's no excuse to let it calcify into the state of every other industry, and I'd take your point and go further, go to every other industry and do the same.

Go to telecommunications and break the big players up and create marketplaces in which small players can innovate. Do it in news media and undo that awful communications act from 96 that led to industry concentration.

We need to take an activist attitude to anti-trust that actively seeks to create rabidly competitive markets which is what fuelled early tech's growth, instead of letting tech slide into the status quo.

And of course all of these companies will still have access to capital. They'll just need to convince investors that their product is better.

The only reason Google can be Google is economy of scale. No matter how friendly you make the marketplace for proto-Google hopefuls, they an never even approach the infrastructure capable of making the same product.

Telecom and the like are the same, competition leads to fragmentation and destruction of opportunity. Monopolies lead to bad platforms, but platforms that hit the scale divided and broken half solutions never will.

I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Their edge in search and email is eroding. The general public wouldn’t see much difference if their default search engine was DDG. Not saying it’s not a monopoly, but I see it more as brand power than impossible to match by competition. Same for email or maps, you can switch on a individual level for nearly the same experience.

I’m way more concerned by Facebook in terms of monopoly, because here I truly don’t have a choice between products, just to opt out with social consequences. That’s not the case with search or email.

That is a theory; not necessarily a decided reality.

Google is an ad company; their product is an audience and an advertising system. There is no reason that advertising should be untouchable except at scale. There are plenty of tiny players who eke out a profitable existence at small scale with ads. It is likely there is a path from there up into a mega-giant if someone really goes to look for it.

If anything, advertising might suffer diseconomies of scale for most products. Small businesses want to advertise locally.

Each search costs 0.0003 kWh of energy in Google infrastructure. That's just energy bill. Now think about massive infrastructure that is out there giving you sub-second results for 40,000 queries each second all over the world. Think about the man power that does on day-in day-out to make sure things are not gamed in constant war of SEO. I highly doubt Google can function in same way without economy of scale.

Google is a search engine company that gives better results because it has more opportunities to improve the product with each request it sees.

Advertising is the same way: The more opportunities you have to try matching a person with a thing they might like, the more you'll learn.

Google is on a scale that are likely two orders of magnitude more than their closest competitor.

Hilariously, Google is by far the best at mapping local people with local businesses, as they've mapped most commercial centers, and run heavy machine learning across them to extract information their competitors can't even hope to try for another decade.

That is a feature, not a bug. Fragmentation leads to protocols instead of products which is why we have the internet instead of whatever monstrosity Bell would have produced had the arpanet never happened.

Yes, that's why the US has the most absurd cell phone network even while I sit in Silicon Valley, but I don't have reception in a half dozen places during my commute, or in my home.

Why I pay absurd amounts more for my healthcare, even when I can choose between several different insurance companies.

That's why my power in a massive center in California is completely unreliable here, I've experienced more power failures in the past year in a major city than I did in 30 years in the middle of fucking nowhere Canada.

Because competition makes it work.

Well, seems like your country is broken, maybe you should reconsider your apparently destructive regulations. Fairly free competition does make it work year-round and cheap all around Europe.

Natural monopolies are best run by the government.

That's why Mussolini got the trains to run on time. He also used them to ship all the Jews to concentration camps, but what's a few million lives compared to being slightly inconvenienced?

This is false. Italy did not ship its Jews to concentration camps during WWII.

After Italy switches sides, and joined the Allies, the Germans, who quickly occupied northern Italy immediately started carrying out the Holocaust.

They were not very successful, because of resistance and non-cooperation by Italian civilian authorities. Less than 10% of Italy's jewish population died in the Holocaust. (Compared to 50% of Romania's, 90% of Poland's, 70% of Hungary's, 30% of Austria's, and 90% of Greece's)

Some of them got on ships, where the Americans competed to see who could send the most back, of course

Early markets were fueled by capital, not competition. Capital needs to be reigned in with these monopolies or we’ll just sprout more. Let’s not pretend like competitive markets are possible with the kind of capital needed to compete.

> Let’s not pretend like competitive markets are possible with the kind of capital needed to compete.

The entire purpose of injecting capital in such large amounts is to prevent competition. That's literally the entire point.

Ok, so you have some spare capital from being successful in one market. You want to move into a new market, and that spare capital is your ticket in. There's a difference between building a sustainable, independent business with that capital, and strangling competitors in the new market by moving in and charging well below your cost until those competitors are dead.

The former benefits consumers by giving them more choice. The latter gives consumers lower prices in the short term, but then hurts them overall when the competitors are forced out and prices inevitably rise again, this time without any competitive pressure to keep costs low, margins reasonable, and product/service quality high.

And regardless of whether or not the latter is common, or has always been common, I maintain that it is a huge negative aspect of capitalism that destroys wealth, creates inefficiency, and hurts consumers. Regulation that targets that practice would be welcome.

>"but then hurts them overall when the competitors are forced out and prices inevitably rise again,"

Can you provide a contempory example of this happening?

If you include traders and creators in the various ecosystems and not just "customer" in the retail sense, examples aren't hard to find.

Google and Facebook. The two biggest ad auction oligopolies own virtually all of ad-space between them. Is there real competition? No, there isn't.

Apple. More and more locked down, less and less reliable, more and more expensive. Want to move? Want to repair something out of warranty? That's going to be... difficult.

Ebay + PayPal. If one doesn't screw on fees, the other will screw you on fees. Ideally both will screw you on fees. Now with added Etsy, because also.

Amazon. The giant changes its mind because something something ToS violation and leaves you with n figures of dead inventory and a locked pay out. What are you going to do?

Spotify. You pay us for the music, we don't pay the artists. [1]

YouTube. The record companies get income even if they don't have the rights to it, for the bargain price of a robo copyright claim. Because recognition algos are so very complicated and they make such terrible mistakes, so much of the time.

These aren't just monopolies, they're massive market distortions where money is so dense it warps the Internet into stagnant pools of pseudo-inevitability, with a chilling effect on real innovation and creativity.

And that's not even getting into issues of privacy, political influence, and the market value of personal data.

[1] Not technically true, but considering the pitiful pay outs it might as well be.

> Spotify. You pay us for the music, we don't pay the artists.

To be fair, it's not like the major record labels paid artists well when you bought a CD previously.

It's hard to find an example, because no company is stupid enough to push out all the competitors. Instead they push out most of the competitors, while keeping one or two around (so they don't get into trouble with monopoly laws), and building big barriers to entry for anyone else.

Then they can increase prices a bit, although the main profit source is in reducing unit costs now you have a big business and making all your profit through volume.

It's certainly non-ideal for customers, but at the same time I think customers usually get a better service for a lower price than in a world with hundreds of competing companies (where overheads work out much larger)

What would be the ideal situation? Like you said, having too many competing companies doesn't lead to great services at low cost because of the extra overhead and lack of volume, and having a monopoly gives one company too much power, then isn't duopoly a nice equilibrium?

There’s a large spectrum between monopoly and perfect competition. Duopoly isn’t the only other option.

Intel sold low core count, repackaged CPUs for ridiculous prices for years, because they didn't have any competition.

Now AMD's managed to claw black some of the market for itself, but it is still at a huge disadvantage compared to Intel. And AMD's only lucky that IBM insisted on two independent OEMs for its PC CPU's and that Intel wanted that deal bad enough.

When it comes to the desktop CPU market itself, x86 has an unquestionable monopoly and no new player can attempt to design x86 chips without getting sued. But without x86 there's no point designing desktop chips in the first place.

Apple designs plenty of chips that have better performance than most computers shipping today. No one really cares about the desktop anymore. Apple alone sells more devices using its own chips than all PC sells combined and they are less than 15% of the market.

Even when it comes to the better margin server market there is a move toward both AMD and custom ARM chips.

For consumption? Sure.

For creative work? Not so much.

As for the performance, we don't really know yet. Single core benchmarks of a CPU with low core count may play out differently with tens or hundreds of cores, 5GHz frequencies, active cooling etc. You can't extrapolate benchmarks in a linear fashion.

No doubt the A Series is impressive, however it hasn't really been tested in a "Mac Pro" yet, so we'd have to see.

Then there's the issue of compatibility and I fail to see how Apple plans to break the Wintel monopoly on the desktop. Sure, it may be able to transition to ARM with the Mac, but unless its chips are available to everybody, (unlikely), there's hardly a route I see for Apple to end x86 dominance.

There is plenty of software for “creative” work for iPads. Adobe in particular has shown how much better performance is on ARM chips than Intel.

The vast majority of consumers are running Mac Pro level hardware. In fact, most computers that are sold are laptops.

Why would Apple care about “dominance” in the PC market? It cares about going after the most profitable share of the market. It’s not like most PC makers are making money hand over fist selling consumer PCs.

In the server market, both Amazon and Google are creating their own Arm chips for their data centers.

We're talking about x86 being a monopoly. Without Windows & major developer buy in, Apple's ARM platform would not affect x86 desktop dominance in a significant way. It would be a platform with a significant niche of macOS users, but x86 would remain dominant.

Windows' deployed in places Mac never visited, like the majority of world's government institutions, schools, (Chromebooks aren't big outside U.S. & Western Europe).

You may argue that Apple will have the "high-value" market, but in terms of sheer numbers I don't see them competing with x86 anytime soon.

As for the iPad being "pro", once you're able to develop serious software on the device itself, we may have a discussion, (I am aware of rumors that XCode is present in iPad OS 14, really curious about that). The existing "Pro" apps still lag behind desktop in many areas and no serious programmer or video editor uses iPad OS full time.

To be clear, am not doubting Apple's ARM chips being really competent, just doubt it will unseat x86 on the desktop.

As for ARM on the server, probably eventually it will be the majority, but I'd guess another decade. Current efforts are more experiments than anything.

My fear is also that if something does displace x86, it won't be a clearly superior, relatively open platform to develop for, but rather a patchwork of workload specific vendor ARM chips with entirely proprietary ways to interact with them. In that scenario, I'd rather take x86.

Despite the HN bubble, there are a lot bigger markets for pro users than developers. I would venture to say that from a profit motive, it makes little sense to bring development to the iPad. There is no money in development tools.

For places that must have bespoke internal apps, a lot of them are moving toward dumb clients and some type of Citrix solution.

In terms of “sheer numbers”, the desktop market is minuscule, the laptop market could easily go to ARM if MS could ever figure out a good transition strategy, and the server market runs Linux where power is big as important as overall power consumption.

Don’t you think that Intel would rather be in ARMs position than what it is now? I don’t have numbers on the server market, but outside of that Apple ships more chips than Intel.

Edit: this was just submitted to HN showing the performance of Intel chips to Amazon’s custom designed ARM chips.

https://blog.min.io/intel_vs_gravitron/

Microsoft?

Microsoft did the opposite. They bundled for free. They never pushed up costs

That conclusion is based on the premise that their software would have been priced the same if they hadn't bundled in "free" software. Not sure we have enough data to make that conclusion.

Ultimately you were charged for the "free" bundled software, you just couldn't get a line item break down of how of the bundle price was made up by that "free" software.

Not saying that Microsoft should break down their OS prices by bundled software, or that it makes sense. But without that breakdown you can't make the assertion that "They never pushed up costs".

PC makers lose money when removing Windows from consumer PCs. The bundle crapware more than makes up for the Windows license fee.

I’m talking about the software Microsoft bundles (the classic example being Internet Explorer). Not software bundles on top by OEMs.

That ain’t a good thing, it just means this kind of hellscape is inevitable.

> That's literally how every company ever in any industry since the dawn of commerce has operated.

Not even close to true, you're describing how "financial capitalism" works which is relatively modern (in the US, it begin in the early 1900s after the creation of the Federal Reserve). Until you financialize an economy, businesses can't use that kind of strategy to compete. Once you do, only those with access to finance can win.

Read up on industrial capitalism which relies on the quality of products and services—not access to finance, aka money printing—to compete in the marketplace. That's how the US was built originally, and what most Americans mean when they say they support "capitalism."

So where does Standard Oil fall into this classification? It spent the 1880s and 1890s using its vast profits from refining oil to buy up railroads to stifle competing oil refineries by restricting access to rail transport.

That's an early example of the general approach taken by financial capitalism (essentially, the prototype for how to do it), though in the case of Standard Oil (aka Exxon), it wasn't through money printing: Standard Oil just reinvested its profits to buy up the competition (with the hopes of raising prices later).

Prior to its monopolization actions, Standard Oil was a successful industrial capitalism firm: they had better oil refinery tech than the competition which is how they came into having money to re-invest in the first place.

This is materially false. Throughout history capital has been used to stop competitors. Capital is not necessarily money in a practical sense. Regardless, money has decided these things for hundreds of years as well. Whether nation states rose or fell depended on whether they could pay mercenaries to fight for them. The largest brick castle in the world, Malbork fell when the Teutonic order was besieged and could no longer pay the castles defenders. They were then “bought out” by a Polish general. This doesn’t just apply to mercenary armies, or war, by the way. This isn’t just some product of “modern capitalism”.

> Throughout history capital has been used to stop competitors.

Your examples are nations, not businesses. Obviously the economics of warfare are different: money (and resources more generally) are how you defeat your "enemies."

I'm talking about capitalism, both industrial (Wealth of Nations-style) and modern financial capitalism which is the domain of business and markets, not war.

Yeah, but these are primates and no primate is evolved enough to handle consolidation without turning into a total fuck-off tyrant. You know at one point the British Empire controlled over a quarter of the entire world? They had a real opportunity to usher in a new era of peace and cooperation. Did they do it? NOOOOO!!! NO ONE EVER DOES!

That’s not the anti-competitive behavior described above.

It's incredibly anti-competitive behaviour and it's baffling that governments are allowing it to go unchecked. Even the WhatsApp purchase was greenlit with caveats (not combining FB and WhatsApp user data) ... which were promptly ignored by Facebook. I seriously want to know who they paid off to get that acquisition. There's no way that was above board.

That’s why Zuck has dinner with Steve Bannon and Trump.

Impressive, Zuck knew in 2014 while Facebook was acquiring Instagram that Trump would someday be President and it was prudent to have dinner with him.

All those sound great in theory if the US was an isolated nation.

However all these companies compete on a global stage. You better believe that Huawei, tencent, Alibaba are going to take advantage of weakened US companies.

I think the EU provides a pretty good example of what could happen. They seem much more aggressive with anti-trust and as a result they aren't very competitive on the global tech stage.

There are a handful a tech companies from Europe that operate globally, but they're usually niche (Spotify, Minecraft, Qwant).

Adyen, Booking.com, ASML, Just eat, Nokia, Shazam, Skype, Zalando, Hello Fresh, Takeaway.com, NXP, Nginx, Rasberry Pi, Waze

Sure, they are no Google or Amazon, but they are or were nothing to sneeze at either

I'm also highly doubtful that this is mainly because of anti-trust laws.

A much more likely reason to me seems that Europe is much more diversified in law and culture, a Paris company has a much harder time expanding to London or Berlin than an San Fransisco one will have for Los Angeles or New York. This naturally leads to more, smaller companies.

I think the combined market cap/revenue of all the companies you mention would still be less than any of the 4 biggest tech companies of the US. Even the Chinese companies are way bigger.

> A much more likely reason to me seems that Europe is much more diversified in law and culture, a Paris company has a much harder time expanding to London or Berlin than an San Fransisco one will have for Los Angeles or New York. This naturally leads to more, smaller companies.

I am not sure that's the case. The EU car companies had overtaken the US car companies, inspite of the above scenarios.

Europe has plenty of very big companies. They are just not in tech (as in consumer computing, social media).

Check the top companies in Europe, it's mostly the same companies founded 100 years ago or something. The increased regulation in Europe just helped existing big companies, not new ones. Compare this with the US where the list changes every 20 years or so. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2019/05/15/eur...

That deserves a challenge. Many significant contributors to US GDP are long-standing (>100yo) firms. Ford (founded 1903), General Motors (1908), Walgreens (1901), McKesson (1833), IBM (1911), Kroger (1883), Boeing (1917), Wells Fargo (1852), General Electric (1890), Johnson & Johnson (1886), Phillips Petroleum (1917).

Or the large companies that are repackaged versions of much older companies, with lineage back to the 19th century. Exxon & Chevron, for example, trace back to Standard Oil (1870); AT&T and Verizon (from Bell, 1877), Dow/DuPont (1897 or 1802, take your pick), Citigroup (from Citicorp, 1812). Banking often goes further back: BofA (Massachusetts Bank, 1784), JPMorgan (Manhattan Company, 1799).

Moving cuts of the pie around is a shell game. For sure the US is less regulated than Europe, so labels change more often, but the old money doesn't.

17.5% of the S&P 500 is Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google. What percentage of the top European companies are that new?

New? Microsoft was founded 45 years ago, Apple is 44.

Top? The S&P 500 is riddled with mediocrities and rent-seekers.

17.5%? Five out of five hundred is 1%.

Microsoft and Apple are still new by European standards. The only newish European megacorp is SAP, which is older than Microsoft and Apple.

17.5% of the market share.

Not sure what that number means to you, but see above about why it’s so low; established money protects itself.

Half of the companies in your list were bought by a big American tech company. Splitting up American tech companies will allow Chinese giants to buy off the bite-sized chunks.

A counterpoint, although perhaps an exception, to the idea that diversified law and culture results in smaller companies in Europe might be Airbus.

Good luck telling Thales, Airbus, BAE, Siemens, Nokia, SAP, Bosch, Ericsson (and that's just off the top of my head) they are not true Scotsmen.

Fun fact: Nokia now owns Bell Labs.

Isn't this an example that you don't want to break up the companies?

i.e. EU companies are not as competitive, presumably lack scale for lower pricing, lack scale to invest into expensive R&D

And that's bad for consumers

Companies such as Facebook, Amazon and Google are so large and powerful that they are bad for consumers or society.

Google can, and has, change the web single handedly. Other companies and browser-makers have no choice but to follow due to Chrome's enormous market share and Google's massive market change in services.. I wouldn't call that good for consumers.

AMD has significantly better processors at the moment on a sliver of Intel's R&D budget. Innovation is happening at startups and small companies (which are then bought by the incumbents). I highly contest your statement that Google size is necessary for the best consumer R&D.

But I am just responding to the parent right.

Why are European companies not competitive? Why not break up US large companies and expect them to be competitive with other global companies

Economic competition is generally a good thing. Breaking up monopolies fosters competition within a country, and competition promotes progress. Historically, companies in free societies have generally performed much better than govt granted/allowed monopolies in more centralized countries.

Sure you can get some economies of scale as a monopoly, but it comes with a lot of corruption, incompetence, and anti-competitive behavior.

I agree with everything you’re saying.

I also think that a hamstrung western company will be steamrolled by international companies with significant state backing/support.

This isn’t a simple equation, there are second and third order effects that we can’t appreciate until after the fact.

That’s an argument for a level playing field on trade, enforced via regulatory means; what’s wrong with that?

Level playing field how? What's the US going to do, regulate other companies in foreign countries? Magically convince China to de-integrate its tech companies in the same way?

The counter argument is that the US needs to keep FAANG companies large as a weapon/counter measure against large rival Chinese companies.

People used to make this exact argument in the 80s when it came to Japan, and even when it came to the Soviet Union[1]. There were countless of people who had already written off competitive markets in favour of supporting domestic industry.

In the car industry people actually listened and enacted domestic protection, what did that get the US? Two lost decades of shoddy cars. Have Japanese conglomerates overtaken the world? Nope.

I think it's an absolute smokescreen and such a blatant attempt by Facebook to use nationalism to protect their status. In the long run we're better served by trusting in innovation than trying to protect domestic business. It was always the right bet. And if China continues to prop up giants they'll just stagnate. The reason they caught up in the first place is because, for at least a short time, they allowed free-wheeling fierce competition.

[1]https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/12/why_were_americ.htm...

> In the car industry people actually listened and enacted domestic protection, what did that get the US? Two lost decades of shoddy cars. Have Japanese conglomerates overtaken the world? Nope.

Toyota, Honda, Nissan - they pretty much dominate global car sales, but that’s because they had a better product.

I think there is a profound difference between car companies, which produce a "dumb" item that's consumed, and "big tech" companies which have shown they can have a major cultural and political impact both domestically and abroad because their business is information itself. It doesn't make sense to discount an argument because of a similar one which applied to something almost completely different.

Car companies haven't had a major impact on American culture and politics? Have you been to an American city or suburb?

> because their business is information itself

No they haven’t, not in that way.

Why is Facebook included in that? If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, dopamine addicts would switch to a different drug and your 3rd cousin would have to put more effort into bothering you.

For better or worse, social media is here to stay. Do you prefer Facebook or TikTok?

Disagree.

Google is far worse than Facebook. The amount of hackers ok with what google does is just sad.

Could you elaborate how Google is worse than Facebook? I thought the general (hacker) consensus was that Facebook has much more negative impacts on society.

That's (IMO, obviously) mostly driven by cognitive dissonance. Google provides such a useful product for nerds, that it must be an OK company, right?

Whereas FB is for social connections, which are often less important to many hackers than access to information.

Depends on if you want one very large but somewhat lazy defender or a swarm of small, fast and aggressive defenders.

> The increasing trend of large tech conglomerates to use one money printing product like AWS or search or the Apple Store to tactically snipe competitors to destroy or acquire them is absolutely abysmal in the long run.

You're confusing competitive behavior with anti-competitive. When a company throws money at consumers in order to get their business, that's competitive.

Using a monopoly in one area (and how could it not be effectively a monopoly if it prints money) to gain marketshare in another is textbook anti-competitive practice though, isn't it? I recognize that I'm using the European legal definition, but that doesn't make it incorrect, just inapplicable in American courts.

In my mind, the cause of this sort of conglomeration is that our society is an exponential meritocracy rather than a linear one. In that the more merit (money, power, points, karma etc.) you accumulate, your ability to accumulate even more merit rises, resulting in a stratification of society that starts out slow but rapidly accelerates after a while.

Best expressed as: "To turn 100 dollars into 110 is work. To turn 100 million into 110 million is inevitable." -- Edgar Bronfman, Sr.

It doesn't matter what you think..The only thing that matters is whether they have the legal authority and can show the consumers are harmed.

Amazon selling their in-house brand based on their private sales data could meet that threshold. Amazon making money on AWS, OTOH, will probably not meet that threshold.

Amazon just needs to release their sales data publicly if they want to use it and hope they can execute on it better.

I agree, and let's not stop there! What business did Apple have getting into the music player business or the cell phone business? They already have a profitable computer business! General Electric makes appliances, lightbulbs, jet engines, nuclear plants, and a dozen other things, split them up!

We can divide up the world into little boxes and carefully decide who is allowed to participate in each box. Hell, we can go back to giving people occupational surnames - if your name is Smith or Barber or Carpenter, your box is already picked out for you. GET BACK IN.

Not sure what this snark gets you, other than obscure what you're trying to communicate.

<It's a slippery slope to do something once?> <Apples to oranges comparison about Apple, Inc which never had close to a monopoly> <Something about the justification for breaking up a company that's also apples to oranges> <Whataboutism>

Boy have things changed.

When the biggest complaint that people have about these companies is that their services are too good and too amazing, and that customers love them too much, that no one else can possibly provide as amazing of a service as them... Well I think that says something.

Apple doesn’t charge Spotify anything. Spotify hasn’t allowed in app payment for years

Apple's services businesses should be next. Anybody should be able to start an app store on any platform, and services like Apple TV+ shouldn't be bundled with hardware.

How much should Apple charge Spotify to build it's business on top of the infrastructure that Apple designed, developed and deployed so that Spotify didn't have to?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com