Big Companies Are Starting to Swallow the World
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Small businesses pay 10x to 100x more for compliance per dollar of gross revenue than their multinational rivals — for laws written by their armies of lobbyists, successfully architected to extinguish their more nimble and inventive small-business competitors.
I’m morbidity interested in how people will enjoy the world they’re creating for themselves...
Fully decentralized and distributed Holochain apps don’t even depend on DNS, so are even more resilient against freedom-hostile centralization.
Yes - exciting times are coming!
Therefore, it will always have some aspects of centralization: real Fiat money exchange, DNS, CDNs, etc.
If you want fully decentralized, you can build and deploy a straight Holochain app, which requires no centralized services at all, and is hosted totally on the hardware and networking of the users of the App.
You can't build an ancap dream non-state on top of an actual state.
This is the same problem with blockchains finding actual use-cases. Tamper-proof decentralized structures are useless if they're not enforced, and if you need enforcement you likely have a much more nimble solution in place already that is good enough in the few properties blockchains excel in.
All the world isn't HN.
That would be the case even without politicians doing favors and handling out monopolies, and asking for all kinds of BS regulation that only big manufacturers/companies can afford.
After a company gets large enough (because of competence) it's not easy anymore for lesser companies to compete with it.
That might have been the case back in Adam Smith's time, when it just took some ingenuity to come up with an idea, and the money to build a few factories, which were much simpler and 1/100+ the cost of today (inflation adjusted).
[That was true even back in "early web" days. It was much cheaper to make your own competitive search engine that it is to compete with Google today].
It might also have been easy when new paradigms were taking off, and old companies couldn't work with them (e.g. switch from mainframes to PC), living a spot open. Now big companies can diversify more easily, predict future trends (like Google adopted to a mobile world, and will adapt to VR or whatever comes next).
Now the technologies are more involved (even in "non tech" companies) and the stakes higher. Even if you can just design your advanced product and order units from a generic chinese manufacturer, you wont get the same economies of scale, preferential treatment, distribution, etc, as a large company.
And if some wanabbe company gets threatening enough, a bigger company can just buy it. Especially since going to the stock market as opposed to being self-owned means all companies are up for sale.
I also don’t think investors didn’t anticipate threats from bigger players. It’s more that it is unfair that Microsoft can get away with blatant copycat products. The leadership and employees at Microsoft aren’t better at any of this than Slack’s, and in fact they are almost certainly worse than those who worked through the grueling startup journey to get Slack to where it got. But Microsoft has capital, the ability to soak up losses (without needing to climb the mountain of acquiring customers/learning/clawing a way to revenue and profit), lots of existing Office customers to pivot onto Teams, and the ability to bundle products.
To put it another way, if Microsoft wasn’t Microsoft, Teams would be no different than another random Slack competitor. But they’ve reached big success without the same degree of hard work, innovation, and struggles as Slack or others. The fact that Teams is as successful as it has become is evidence that lopsided capital (and other traits of mega corps) breaks the notion of a fair free market with healthy competition - an environment that assigns success where it is most deserved.
A small manufacturer can't exactly compete when all regulatory decisions are more or less pushed/written by big companies and the government creates regulatory leeches that charge you an arm and a leg for nothing.
A society which limits the growth of mega corps will automatically see numerous benefits like redistribution of wealth and power, redundancy/resilience in the economy, decentralization away from mega cities, an increased diversity of cultures, localized circular economics, and more. I think this is something both sides of the aisle (in America) could and should support, since it achieves some of the goals of directly redistributive policies but with the market as the mechanism, rewarding hard work/success.
Outside of the US, other countries shouldn’t tolerate their customer bases being pillaged by international mega corps. It is a threat to their sovereignty, cultural independence, and limits innovation that could come from all those locations. We are super late on acting. Globally, we all should demand change from our politicians ASAP on this issue.
Of them, the only one that is not actually threatening is Apple.
I mean Apple controls many people's living (iOS developers), but ultimately everybody could just stop using Apple products tomorrow and no great harm would be done. They'd get a PC and an Android phone, and at worst lose some apps they've purchased. Apple is just a "luxury gadgets" company. You can do fine without an Apple phone/laptop/software.
Whereas Google controls web ranking and digital advertising, Amazon owns a large part of retail, books, IaaS, and so on.. those are huge powers over markets and individuals...
What I will credit Apple with is prioritizing privacy. They can afford to given their hardware margins perhaps.
I think that's part of the problem. Perverse incentives.
But I'm trying to be positive as some large companies are under pressure to adapt and in the recovery there may be new opportunities which smaller businesses are best placed to fill. At least until they're bought up by the big companies.