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Comment by maurys | Hacker News Reader

It surprises me not to hear more concerns about strangling U.S. based tech giants at a time that China and the rest of the world is catching up.

I'm not sure I buy that line of argument myself, but I did expect it to come up more prominently.

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From half a world away the US tech industry has looked more "strangled" in the last 6-8 years compared to the 2005-2012 period (to give just an example), one could say that happened because of the concentration at the top (of talent and money, mostly, or of money keeping that talent in golden hand-cuffs).

During that 2005-2012 timeframe you had a US search engine becoming really global, a US online retailer almost single-handedly inventing a new industry (cloud computing) and a US social-web company crushing almost all foreign competition on its own home-turf (and which could only be stopped by explicit Government intervention, as was the case with China explicitly blocking FB and with Russia directly taking control of VKontakte as a better way to counter FB).

cloud computing was invented by shared mainframes in the 70s and 80s and charges per MIPS.

Amazon applied open source software to the hosting and specifically the network stack and security stack. The model was already there.

The model wasn't already there. Everyone means the public cloud. Mainframes were at best, private clouds.

The key was VT-x/AMD-v becoming available.

I would think that the correct strategy for competing with enormous Asian tech companies is to have fierce competition and antitrust regulation in the US. It seems unlikely that a US company can do big better than a Chinese/Asian company. And at any rate, it’s certainly better for US consumers to have competition, and that’s ultimately what matters, not any notional ideas of “winning” against China.

I agree with all of this except the last sentence.

“Winning” against China isn’t just some notional idea. Like it or not, being globally competitive matters for the overall health of the US economy.

Maybe as a country the US is more powerful with healthy competition among strong tech companies than with monopolies. Look at Intel and AMD.

I think the argument is that Big tech is strangling itself with monopolies, which stifle innovation and leave the US behind. It's already behind in phones, payments, de-fi, some social media, IoT etc, and arguably the monopolies are to blame. E.g. where is the advertising innovation? it's as if the industry is dead. The iphone has not been the best-tech phone for a long time.

I don't know how you can look at phones and conclude that the US is behind. They make the only two OS that matter and Apple is #1 in mobile chip and phone design.

Apart from the OS, the phones from samsung, xiaomi and huawei are pretty great with regards to speed, cameras, screens. Apple d overall package gets high mark but thats often due to the OS, not the phone tech.

Also consider that mainstream androids are significantly cheaper.

I wont go into further comparisons, but just check out the p30 camera

Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat, Linkedin and Facebook are all very relevant. The only non-American company I can think of is Tik Tok. Anything major I'm missing?

WeChat?

Spotify. But that's the only European company I can think of off the top of my head as well.

The iPhone is not the best tech in what objective measure? Their processors are two or three years ahead of anything Android has. The $399 iPhone SE is faster than any Android at any price.

What better way to compete with the rest of the world than to dismantle the monopolies that are stifling innovation in the US?

It's for the simple reason that many, many Americans would rather get (unknowingly) fucked by corporations for all eternity rather than the government attempt any sort of solution. In many respects, you can't blame them given how insanely wasteful the federal government is. However, corporations don't give a shit about you and never will. It's this point that people can't understand.

Because nothing is getting strangled.

In the end, if any of these companies are forced to change some policies or split from an acquisition or two, they'll still be massive institutions.