House committee approves bill that could break up Amazon, Apple, and Google | Hacker News Reader

House committee approves bill that could break up Amazon, Apple, and Google

arstechnica.com

44 pointssamizdis25 comments

very unpopular opinion here, but I think we need to retain the mega-corps to be able to compete with the mega-corps from China in the future. In 20 years China is going to have dozens of state sized companies and if we're breaking up companies because they get too big, we're not going to be able to play their game.

Not unpopular to the non socialists on HN. I agree with you.

Definitely not a socialist but big companies hurt consumers as individuals and other businesses and society as a whole. Not by default, eg MS of today but due to their tendencies.

The thing is, it used to be "government has to intervene in monopolies" now it's "governments need to intervene if company's get too big". Seems like the usa is about to disincentivise companies being number one in anything.

The problem is that “too big” becomes synonymous with monopolistic behavior. It’s the nature of our system that drives them to that end. Winner takes all.

The thing governments try to intervene to stop is anticompetitive behavior. Monopolies easily lead to this, so we single those out and stop them early, but that's just one situation that leads to anticompetitive behavior. There are many aspects of megacorps that also can and do lead to anticompetitive behavior, all that remains is to determine if additional categories of behavior that are more common today also rise to the level that we want them specifically singles out and regulated as well.

Monopolies aren't inherently bad, they're regulated because they incentivize anticompetitive behavior that hurts consumers and the economy in the long run (you have to assume companies will act against their best interests for them to not cause problems). Megacorps aren't inherently bad, but we may want to regulate them because they may incentivize anticompetitive behavior that hurts consumers and the economy in the long run.

Could the opposite happen? Companies getting too large causing innovation to sag (I have no data) as we increasingly work towards rent seeking and no economic output? That seems like it would put us behind.

We see some of this already on the inverse. FAANGs and their ilk frequently hire and keep talented developers with various forms of golden handcuffs. They could be doing much more to innovate, but the risk/reward vs being a code janitor making six figures is far safer.

As well as buying up innovative competitors while their product stagnates.

I think FAANG have mostly lost innovation, not gained it as they grew. They protect their prior innovations with large legal teams

Exactly this. None of them are nearly as hungry as they were just over ten years ago.

Not true.

Very high quality AI research regularly come from Facebool, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Yann LeCun at FAIR is pioneering Self-Supervised Learning which is likely to be a gamechanger in AI.

I'm generally not counting acquisitions as innovation in my statement.

The weird exception is Microsoft which isn't in FAANG but hit 2T market cap recently. These days both Microsoft and Amazon are primarily cloud server providers.

You only have to compete with foreign mega corps if you allow them to compete on their terms. Unlike smaller markets, the US is able to dictate terms and still have people lining up for access. If the price of admission is to play by the same rules that forced US companies to be broken up, then the smaller US corps, smaller foreign corps and foreign mega corps will all be competing on equal footing. Well, not really equal since US companies will always have the home team advantage.

Companies with a monopoly position in a market aren’t exactly known for their ability to compete. You’re missing the point of breaking up monopolies and making it easier for people to send their data between services. It keeps the potentially competitive companies from getting crushed from the start.

The ownership of the platform itself is the problem. We now have the tools to build platforms that are not dependent on individual companies.

Yep. It's reform-washing. The problem is the symbiotic corruption of government, media, and extremely rich individuals who are acceleratingly-enriched by ownership of corporations as cash extraction leviathans. The problem Aaron Swartz identified to Larry Lessig cannot be "solved" by half-measures when powerful people can buy their ways out-of, around, and through any attempts to impose limits on their effectively-absolute power. The billionaires' money is the source of their power, as are the ruthless, callous, greed of the individuals themselves. If you want a just civilization, end the billionaires, one way or another because we're only facing a conflagration of several existential crises and billions of people put-upon with unnatural stress and misery.

I’m curious how would this work for products like apple? One would argue it’s only as good as it is because they control their platform fully.

What a great idea! Remember how well that worked with AT&T?

Worked well until every administration let them re-merge back together

I think that’s the point.

You get better price discovery, but lose on internal transactions becoming taxable. maybe if they removed business to business sales tax…

Something must be done, and this is something.

Let's hold a committee to propose which harsh words we shall scream at the Googleplex.

I vote for "bastards."

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