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Comment by ppf | Hacker News Reader

I thought the accepted solution to these problems was "disrupt!", not regulation.

Edit: It seems that not even Silicon Valley likes the monsters it has created.

The general solution is to do a little of both. The job of the regulators isn't to just kill off specific companies that got too powerful - it's to create conditions where disruption is possible. An important way to do this is to prevent big players from abusing their power to make themselves nearly-impossible to disrupt.

But that's the whole point of the SV business model! Strangle any competition by initially offering your products for free (and funded by huge amounts of VC), and then raise prices at your leisure once you're the last one standing.

I suppose this is tolerated because there's usually more than one party trying it at the same time, so there's technically a competition going on - but it doesn't take into account the collateral damage done to the entire market. VC subsidies run out, eventually, and if the upstarts haven't found a path to profitability by that time, society is left with a damaged market segment.

> The job of the regulators isn't to just kill off specific companies that got too powerful - it's to create conditions where disruption is possible.

Broadly speaking, the big regulations tend to create conditions where disruption is harder. Regulatory compliance is often a substantial investment, and a rather big one, thus a barrier to entry; it's a lot easier for big, profitable Google to hire a team of regulatory compliance officers and GDPR architects and the like than it is for a small startup.

That depends. Often enough, regulatory burden tends to scale with size as well! But I agree that quite a lot of compliance requirements apply to everyone, and that they're much harder for small companies to meet.

However, the reason for those requirements isn't, ostensibly, to make disruption difficult - it's to protect the society from problems that can be caused by companies of all sizes equally easily. For example, safety regulations about medical equipment. Or data protection regulations. To the extent these laws make disruption difficult, it's often unfortunate cost of safety.

(I understand though that the real world isn't perfect and big players tend to influence these laws to their benefit. But perfect being the enemy of good, and all that.)

> However, the reason for those requirements isn't, ostensibly, to make disruption difficult

Perhaps not. But public choice theory is chock full of unintended consequences.

That's exactly why we don't need "regulatory compliance" but straight up break up monopolies into multiple independent companies like what should be done in this case here.

Natural monopolies are actually one of the main places regulation helps.

In EU, maybe. However don't forget the lobbying.

Money is actually a power (via buying other people's time and effort to spend on one's problems). The money is also behaves like the mass in Universe: it sticks together in large clots. So the power does too.

We need a regulation that will automatically deal with such monopolies by ordering companies to split after reaching certain thresholds. This way we would never get companies too big to fail.

Then what is the incentive to start a company, grow it within the legal and regulatory framework and when it gets to an arbitrary, non-defined size have the legal and regulatory bodies systematically dismantle it by forcing you to sell it off?

It's not selling off but splitting. The goal should not be to create 100 billion super company, but to provide value to consumers. Companies that would be at a stage where they would be required to split have different priority - to extract value from a consumer and maximise profits for shareholders. That will be a target, not your small or medium business.

The ability to walk away with enough money to fund multiple lifetimes of obscene gluttony long before that point?

There should be no incentives to grow a company past a certain limit. Ideally, that limit should be established well in advance.

And in US, it was back in the day - but then, thanks to Reagan and Robert Bork, we effectively threw away all the anti-trust legislation that was functioning quite effectively for 80 years. The large businesses, of course, heavily lobbied in favor of that.

So, they have created the present environment - and now that we have seen (yet again) why anti-trust enforcement has to be proactive, they're complaining that it would be unfair to revert to old rules?

because the company is still intact but not it is split in two. It's obvious that there needs to be limits on capitalism when companies get too large that they can dictate what the internet/any market does on a whim because they're the only game in town. Amazon and Google are quickly approaching that if not already there. They can crush competitors on a whim.

The same incentive to start a family or a restaurant.

I don't know why people open restaurants - do they know the profit margins? They must, and they do it anyway.

So it must be for the love of it.

This idea that starting a business just to make money is a good idea, is tenuous at best. It's a sign of the times that people even ask the question of 'well, if I don't get rich, why would I do it at all?' It's a sign of how dysfunctional work has universally become, that people view it as suffering, to reach a promised land, rather than a calling to do your part as part of a larger community.

If it's suffering, maybe something is wrong. Taking away the idea of heaven enables you to say no to resistance you're experiencing now. That's a good thing - don't believe anyone promising you a heaven later on - how would they know and if they're in it, is mentoring you to suffer really a part of their heavenly experience?

Supose we take this icorrect argument - you starg a company but at arbitrary size you have to sell off chunks. Okay, you made a profit, thats the point of capitalism.

Are you suggest we should instead cater to megalomaniacs that wish to run maximally large companies and rule industries?

We'll need a second bit of regulation then (and I'd say, possibly we need it already) to counter the obvious workaround - creation of a thousand of small companies doing roughly the same thing, controlled by the same group of investors.

At some point some companies have become too big to disrupt. I think the best way is to partition companies that grew too big, that could be called disruption if you will. I'd like to see Alphabet holding to be dismantled and all products moved into separate independent companies.

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