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Comment by fwsgonzo | Hacker News Reader

It's my biggest gripe with current society. It's everywhere, and it's not going away. Nobody is tackling it, or talking about it seriously. At some point I thought that companies would become more powerful than states, but I've changed my mind on that. Nations do retaliate hard if they feel threatened. Maybe I've just turned naive again. But when it comes to monopolies I just don't see them ever going away now. Too much globalization combined with lobbying power and corporate veils. People talk about companies and never about the people who make the decisions, and I feel like people have trouble with accepting that in the end nobody actually wants to be in a society where companies can do whatever they want and end up being a negative contributor to society.

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Some of it is lack of antitrust enforcement. Something that isn't mentioned much, though, is that business IT technology reached the point that planetary-scale companies work well. Until the 1980s or so, big companies had scaling problems. Big companies developed huge internal paperwork operations, huge headquarters staffs, too much middle management, and were choking on their own operating problems. There were inherent limits on bigness, beyond those imposed by the cost of transportation. The classic example was General Motors, which had a long history of management problems from sheer scale.

That's been fixed. Amazon, Google, WalMart, Alibaba, etc. have worldwide operations without major scaling problems. Those companies can adapt and change reasonably rapidly. The knowledge of how to do this is widespread. This is new. An inherent limit on bigness has been eliminated.

I think you are mistaken. Big Tech has the same 'human' problems as classic companies- bloated middle management, fluff work, empire buiding, process, etc. They get away with it because they are growing and can increase prices right now. Sooner or later when the vast majority of companies realize they don't have to buy software at inflated prices- the house of cards will collapse. hypothetical e.g. GM will question if they should spend $1K/car sold on advertising, CRM and internal IT if their profit is $900/car.

Seems like in most of these cases it's the advertising industry that needs to collapse, not the traditional "I give you money and you give me some software" industry.

I think an important thing is also using companies as foreign tools. The nsa would hate to see Google or Facebook broken up and supplanted everywhere by local companies. Or, worse, supplanted by a equally large Chinese monopoly.

That can be simplified even further, the NSA doesn't care about Google, Facebook, or any other specific companies, just the ability to extract data from them. They would truly hate if the Third Party Doctrine were overturned.[1]

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[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

I think we should all hate to see the latter. Unfortunately, it's already happening with TikTok, and with the rate of innovation in China, we'll see many more.

Unfortunately, I don't think that influence from NSA has had much to do with the reluctance of legislators to limit Big Corporations

I don't know, they're not fools. I'm sure they have intelligence workers in their ear telling them about Baidu, and the power effectively owning the internet gives the US.

Perhaps if these companies were not such illegally large monopolies then they would have less perceived value as "foreign tools".

> But when it comes to monopolies I just don't see them ever going away now. Too much globalization combined with lobbying power and corporate veils.

We’ve been here before though, in the era of Standard Oil. They can be broken up, but it won’t just happen on its own. The government needs to take action.

> The government needs to take action.

The government is taking action. The government is in on this consolidation via investments, contracts, preferential legal & tax treatment, etc. Think about this from the government's perspective. The government would rather govern a small number of large entities instead of a large number of small entities, thus the government is incentivized to favor monopolies/oliogopolies. The government itself is a monopoly of power in many domains.

Sure, the government may intervene with a company getting too big, but the intervention is so the government can gain a foothold with that company. e.g. any telecommunications platform will need to have back doors for the law enforcement agencies or said telecommunications platform will not be allowed to operate.

> Think about this from the government's perspective. The government would rather govern a small number of large entities instead of a large number of small entities, thus the government is incentivized to favor monopolies/oliogopolies.

According to what incentives? The government’s responsibility is to the country at large.

The business is incentivized to lobby regulators and eliminate price competitors.

> The government is taking action.

Congress sure is, as it was with Standard Oil. It was the Supreme Court that saved us that time, I'm not sure what our hope is now.

It's very beneficial to them for just a few companies to control everything. Then they can deperson you and say "It's a private company, not the government, they have to freedom to do business with whoever they want". That's quite a bit more difficult when there are thousands of equally viable competitors.

This is the conspiracy I personally believe the most. The founding fathers knew that government always wants more power and control. Logically following from that, of course they would use any means necessary to subvert the checks put on their power.

*people always want more power and control... The same logic applies to companies.

>The founding fathers knew that government always wants more power and control

As a UK resident, i'm astonished how the almost prophetic wisdom of the Founding Fathers can go ignored for so long by their spiritual heirs.

Yeah I feel like George Washington's parting letter[0] on avoiding large political parties because they lead to infighting, popularity-only contests, and foreign manipulation was completely ignored.

> Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight) the common

> & continual mischiefs of the spirit of Party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise People to discourage and restrain it.

> It serves always to distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with

> ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot & insurrection.

> It opens the door to foreign influence & corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.

[0] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-20-02-...

That's hardly even a conspiracy theory. For it to be true doesn't even require any particular government officials to coordinate at all. It just requires a large portion of government officials to correct estimate that this situation in their best interests.

> We’ve been here before though, in the era of Standard Oil.

If interested, Standard Oil was drawn as an octopus in Puck magazine (1904). The Library of Congress notes: "Illustration shows a "Standard Oil" storage tank as an octopus with many tentacles wrapped around the steel, copper, and shipping industries, as well as a state house, the U.S. Capitol, and one tentacle reaching for the White House." [0]

[0]: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001695241/

Globalization and Lobbying are not irreversible trends. The world is already starting to become less "global", with the Chinese belt-and-road initiative, Russian exclusionism, and the breakdown of NAFTA (among other things). Many world powers, including Russia, China, and the US (to some degree) want the world to be less open for trade and large corporations.

as for lobbying, America has been through this before. The Gilded Age saw lobbying to an even more extreme degree, with companies like US Steel and Standard Oil able to basically pay off senators. The same thing happened with slave plantations in the 1850s. After the great depression (and even before to some small extent; see the breakup of Standard Oil), laws were put into place heavily curbing lobbying, insider trading, among other things (like stock buybacks). Really, we're in another Gilded Age, and one day the balance of power between the individual, the state, and the industry will shift again.

> At some point I thought that companies would become more powerful than states, but I've changed my mind on that.

Companies don't need to compete with state power because they can have state power. They can essentially become states within the state. A large enough landowner can be a de facto legal jurisdiction with its own law enforcement arm. Large-scale landlords and employers can simply make and enforce any rule that isn't explicitly illegal. And in addition to eviction and firing (both of which can be catastrophic to many people) they can simply hire "off-duty" police officers to do their law enforcement. Those cops can use more or less all of their police tools and methods, and they can find a reason to arrest and charge more or less anyone in service of their masters.

And in some US states, it is legal for companies to simply have their own private police force, paid by the company and with all the powers of a state police force.

Something I've contemplated lately is what I call the chaos monkey economy. Since it's hard to politically gather the will to fight any given monopoly, we should just roll dice to do it.

Every year we look at firms above some size, and if they fail the saving throw, we liquidate them. Everyone who works there gets 6 months severance, all supplier contracts are terminated, everything they supply likewise. Get a bankruptcy administrator to sell the chairs and real estate, give the shareholders whatever is left.

If it's truly valuable what they do someone will find a way to do it again. If it's just a power position they were exploiting, we'll be free from their tyranny.

> If it's truly valuable what they do someone will find a way to do it again.

It is better than that. If it is truly valuable we'll already have someone else doing it just because of the risk of it failing its saving throw.

Progressive corporate taxation. Want to be large? Pay a higher tax rate.

This is a fun thought experiment!

I also agree, that we lose real and valuable economic agility, when we fail to let big companies die and be picked apart / liquidated.

We effectively eliminate the bottom half of the food chain (decomposers, etc), to keep formerly apex predators alive with processed food pellets, in a zombie like state. But one day we’ll run out of food pellets, what will happen then?

We don’t allow whales to fall anymore [1]. And it hurts the ecosystem.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall

> people have trouble with accepting that in the end nobody actually wants to be in a society where companies can do whatever they want and end up being a negative contributor to society

Consumer prices fall, and US consumers' brains just turn off when you show them slaves in the supply chain.

Consumer prices rise, and then people hit the street - everywhere, globally.

It doesn't really matter if their dollar is going to Amazon or 1,000,000 small main street shops. Indeed, both are sourcing the bulk of their goods from places with slave labor. Your gripe is about low prices, not "society," and like, what's your solution?

But when it comes to monopolies I just don't see them ever going away now. Too much globalization combined with lobbying power and corporate veils

tl;dr: it doesn't cost a million dollars to effect political change with money.

I think politically engaged (and frustrated!) people overestimate the exclusivity of lobbying and the power of donations. My understanding (I can't find figures right now) is that you can get a lot of access for probably less than you think. Sick of potholes? Donate $1000 to your mayor and you might find yourself face to face complaining about how many tires you lose per year.

I think someone wrote an article about how much it costs a single person with a single issue to get attention from a politician ('s team), or how little it costs, as the case may be. Yes, hiring a lobbying agency is more expensive, but that's more of a wide-spectrum approach.

There is enough money in these HN threads for people to donate $1000 to each of several politicians in the pursuit of tightening antitrust enforcement, but there's probably just as many who support the current policies. I didn't say it would be easy, but with some money and organization it's not impossible. Of course that's how every special interest started...

Yeah, because the potholes can't donate $1,000 to the mayor to keep them around. Perhaps in a future world with sentient potholes, this will become more of a problem.

Is it not obvious why this approach doesn't scale to confronting monopoly power?

The pot holes play a trivial role in the example. The point is that face time is much cheaper than people make it out to be, and politicians don't have time to be doing deep research on the hundreds of applicable topics they vote on.

I believe it was Al Franken I heard talking about this, and he said that often times politicians end up voting with the lobbyist desires because no one ever lobbied the other side of the issue. For instance an energy lobbyist asking for the inclusion of exemptions for it's potentially overweight trucks on local roads to support the new gas well jobs created, that "will easily make up the potential and definitely trivial road repair costs".

Nobody shows up to lobby the other side of the story. The energy company painted it perfectly as a 100% good thing, while someone could have donated $200 and after bit a research shown it was actually a sham and the official would have agreed. But no one did.

US corporations are extensions of US global power. Google is doing for America what Huawei is doing for the Chinese.

I feel a lot of monopolies are happening now because of network effects, not as much due to anti-competitive practices.

Which companies did whatever they want? Can you be specific? I don't follow along your worldview

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