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Comment by ronnier | Hacker News Reader

Sure, break them up and eventually get replaced by even larger Chinese companies that you can’t break up.

I don’t see how this would work. The US can use sanctions or other legal means of preventing such companies from doing business in the US. China did this for years to ensure US companies didn’t dominate their market (among other reasons).

What happens when one of those giant Chinese (or maybe in the future Indian) companies produces, due to economies of scale, something really useful? Stupid example: 7G internet with steady 10GB/s bandwidth. If America bans it, they'll be at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the world. They could try and copy it / help their own companies develop an equivalent (as China did to try and catch up with the US), but then they'd have just done a reversal, going from breaking up their big companies to trying to help them grow big to compete with China.

The further American companies fell behind technogically, the more it would hurt to ban foreign technologies. And the more that large US technology companies were broken up, the slower America would advance technologically. A huge percentage of RND is currently funded by FANG and the like; being somewhat monopoly-like (and having huge economies of scale) is actually what allows them to fund this: in a perfectly competitive market, where margins are razor-thing, nobody has any money to invest in research or moonshots.

Cool. We fix government intervention with more government intervention....

Except that you can regulate those Chinese companies easily when they become a problem. Just force them to split or face high import taxes, job done.

If, at that point, there's no domestic competition, then you create a vacuum and a problem for the entire economy that depends on those Chinese companies.

See the tariffs the past couple years and their impact on US manufacturing.

These arguments of “monopolies are OK because China does it” are slippery slopes to authoritarianism.

The arguments that "we should break up these companies because they're too successful" are slippery slopes to authoritarianism.

The problem with the modern economy is that companies can become “too successful” using underhanded and ethically questionable practices. They influence the government to pass laws that can strengthen their hold or eliminate competition entirely. They hide behind a wall of government when it is convenient and act like angels when the people want the government to break them up.

I don’t know what the answer is, but rewarding corruption and discouraging success are not feasible in the long term. Both arguments above seem legitimate.

>They influence the government to pass laws that can strengthen their hold or eliminate competition entirely. They hide behind a wall of government when it is convenient and act like angels when the people want the government to break them up.

>I don’t know what the answer is, but rewarding corruption and discouraging success are not feasible in the long term.

Maybe the answer is limiting the government's ability to pass laws that unfairly privilege one company over others. Power that doesn't exist can't be misused.

The United States has been breaking up monopolies longer than China has been the CCP.

We still haven’t become an authoritarian government like China.

But the US government is becoming more authoritarian every year.

The history of labor rights in the US should indicate just how bad things will get if companies aren't curtailed.

That's not my argument. My argument is that if you permit a Chinese monopoly, as the person I replied to suggests, and then break it up, also as they suggest, you would royally fuck the US domestic economy.

And government involvement in the free market is not a slippery slope to authoritarianism?

The same government led by a president who threatened to “shut down Twitter”?

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