I think perhaps a legislative approach to monopoly should be nationalizing rather than breaking up. Monopolies can be valuable for consumers if their claws are trimmed.
I think perhaps a legislative approach to monopoly should be nationalizing rather than breaking up. Monopolies can be valuable for consumers if their claws are trimmed.
Splitting up a technology company like Amazon or Google would probably just make matters worse over the long haul. Instead of 1 obvious regulatory target you would wind up with several and this creates more shadowy areas for perverse incentives to grow like mold. Just look at how splitting up ATT has played out. It ultimately re-aggregated into more-or-less the same monster but with even more power and influence than in the 80s. If ATT would have been nationalized instead of split up, I'd have a hard time believing we wouldn't have better internet access on average today.
Insurance is another highly networked product that benefits from monopoly
The insurance companies of the 19th and 20th centuries were boons to society because their local buckets of money could be invested in local businesses and spent (practically as a donation) on advertising at the minor league baseball diamond or the church bulletin
The sooner we mitigate the loss of those good effects, the sooner We can benefit from the efficiency of insurance monopolies whose risk pools will be as large as is practicable rather than driven by historical accidents
I agree with you about ISPs, but I don't see the sense in the argument that I keep seeing about designating social media as a utility or public good. What would that even mean?
Twitter continues to shore up ill will from all sides of the political spectrum. Mastodon, Matrix, and other decentralized, federated communication platforms are increasingly in a good position to put themselves forward as the actual solution to this problem.