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Comment by andreilys | Hacker News Reader

IMHO, everyone will be better off if Facebook, Google, and Amazon are shattered into small enough independent pieces that (1) "get bought" is no longer the startup win condition & (2) they have peer level competitors in all markets in which they participate.

I’m sure Chinese Tech co’s would absolutely love to have their Western competition knee-capped by their own governments. Will make it a lot easier for them to dominate the globe for decades to come.

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I think it’s a somewhat false dichotomy that splitting up US big tech makes China big tech win. The reason being that splitting up US big tech allow for more competitive US mid tech to arise that can outcompete China big tech in areas where it matters. I suppose you also want to prevent China Big Tech to throw its money around at Mid Tech the way US big tech did in the last 10-15 years.

Why wouldn't an international tech co just be able to acquire domestic companies and/or launch products at a significant loss to gain market share in the US?

For example, break up Amazon and you now create an opening for Alibaba to expand into the US. Spending billions in order to get customers to shift to Alibaba instead of Amazon.

Well that was the gist of my last sentence regarding not letting external Big Tech behave like current Big Tech.

ps: fwiw, I’m against breaking up BigTech. It makes for good headlines but I don’t think it solves much.

This is probably overblown if only because practice has borne out that the Asian platform model has ported very poorly to the US.

Americans don't seem to be interested in using massive platform apps that contain the kitchen sink; WeChat is available but not popular, same for LINE, and Messenger never successfully became that.

Right now the most successful overseas strategy for a software company has been Tencent's games strategy (as opposed to their WeChat one), and in that respect they're mostly just a holding company.

>Americans don't seem to be interested in using massive platform apps that contain the kitchen sink

I mean, Facebook's app is basically exactly that.

And how many young people are using Facebook?

Facebook reported declines in daily active users in North America during Q3 2020: https://www.engadget.com/facebook-q3-2020-earnings-204642328...

Dude. It’s a failed kitchen sink. We Chat was both my bank and my Amazon. I kept money on it and was the best way to go to the store. Heck—I even used WeChat as my Uber (Didi) because I didn’t have a Chinese card and the in-app WeChat app balance could pay for my ride.

Not sure how you were able to miss TikTok which has absolutely blown every other tech co out of the water with respect to stickiness and engagement.

ByteDance hasn't made substantial acquisitions since the launch of TikTok and it's not clear how they would leverage their current product's popularity into other domains.

Euhm ... tiktok ? In US and EU.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1100836/number-of-us-tik...

Responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27495441

>Why wouldn't an international tech co just be able to acquire domestic companies and/or launch products at a significant loss to gain market share in the US?

Because international companies wouldn't be exempt from US regulation if they operate in the US.

If we protect out markets from all monopolies, foreign included, we'd end up with tons of competitive companies all scrapping to be the best. Instead what we've got now are monoliths that will gradually ossify into cable-company levels of innovation and customer service. Breaking up domestic monopolies would be one of the best things we could do to compete internationally.

Breaking up domestic monopolies would be one of the best things we could do to compete internationally.

International monopolies will be able to expand into the US and burn cash to acquire users and grow market share. Then when they've run all domestic companies out of business, they will raise prices.

US monopolies couldn't penetrate into China without the Chinese government's say so. Xiaomi had its share of US and Indian sanctions (albeit temporarily).

The problem is not only competition in US or Chinese as markets; it is also about global markets.

Why do you assume that the US wouldn't block foreign monopolies as well?

China just fined Alibaba $3 billion for breaking anti-monopoly laws[1]. China also issued new anti-monopoly rules targeting its tech companies[2] in February.

Besides, everyone in the US benefits from increased competition between our domestic companies.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/10/986112628/china-fines-alibaba...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-internet-anti-monop...

I'm speculating:

I think China is okay with big monopolies. Just as long as they control them. This particular anti monopoly fine was part of a larger power struggle with Jack Ma:

https://www.reuters.com/business/chinas-ant-group-become-fin...

It's a valid point. Less so specifically to China, and more so generally to all countries with national champions (e.g. South Korea).

In some sense, it's a zero sum game, where if your country don't scale or allow companies to scale, they find the next most favorable country. Or another country's companies succeed because of the additional support provided.

But subsidies and government support have always been the biggest fracas in international economic politics for centuries for the same reason.

To which I'd reiterate not_exactly__'s point: although business-harmful actions look like shooting yourself in the foot, hampering competition and supporting companies for extraneous reasons ultimately makes your economy and your companies less competitive globally.

How is it a zero sum game?

Edited my post to clarify the language a bit.

Sort of, protonmail or fastmail could get 20 million customers and gmail would be juuust fine.

But would the NSA and FBI? (Limiting for purposes of discussion to legal, specific subpoenas)

General point being that the US government will tend to avoid doing things that are bad for the US government.

Their services will just be banned and access made difficult enough to dissuade the average person. By that point I'm sure China will have perfected the technology enough that we can just copy them.

If we decimate domestic economic engines, then the internationals will figure out ways to push us into ever deeper economic dependency and subservience. We need the REAL hackers to paralyze monopolies.

Well China doesn’t let US companies freely do business there, so just block Chinese companies from the US market - that problem is solved.

We’re talking regulation here, so that should definitely be on the table.

So we should leave things as they are for our companies to compete with Chinese companies?

This just feels like fear mongering. "Don't tamper with what we have now! The other guys will win"

So China shouldn't dominate?

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