The end result will be the US anti-trust action accomplished nothing but enabling foreign replacements.
You wouldn't pit one state against the other and say "we need to keep California founded monopolies in place or else Oklahoma might end up replacing them".
We're all in this world together. Yes there are cultural differences, but we need to shift our mentality to a global one.
I know some people will call foul on China, but remember they sued Alibaba for monopolistic practices https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/09/china-fines-alibaba-in-anti-... - all is not as it may seem on the surface.
Recognition on my part there are other issues to consider in China and many other countries, which is why we're looking to Philippines, Sri Lanka, Mexico and other location for our company. Legislation is slow, action is faster.
That’s totally something my local leaders would say. States compete for business here.
Practically speaking, my vote influences how US companies operate more than it influences how foreign companies operate. Therefore, all else being equal and since monopoly implies no other choices, I’m more invested in the companies I interact with being American rather than, say, Chinese.
For us, and we're about to start producing hardware, we think our purchasing power is more influential than our vote. That's why we're avoiding China for manufacturing.
The linear outcome of this ongoing state of informal submission is a rise in effronteries / audacious behavior at the official, international level, such as https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/12/philippines-wi...
"China has said it will not accept a ruling against it in a key international legal case over strategic reefs and atolls that Beijing claims would give it control over disputed waters of the South China Sea.
The judgment by an international tribunal in The Hague came down overwhelmingly in favour of claims by the Philippines and is likely to increase global diplomatic pressure on Beijing to scale back military expansion in the area. By depriving certain outcrops of territorial-generating status, the ruling from the permanent court of arbitration effectively punches holes in China’s all-encompassing “nine-dash” line that stretches deep into the South China Sea."
Five years later, it appears the case was quietly forgotten by all.
* * *
Or how about this, more recently: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-france...
"... members of the French Senate demanded answers at a hearing with the foreign minister as to why an article they said was fake and cast them in a bad light was still up on the Chinese embassy website [...] In the post, an unnamed diplomat suggests that careworkers in Western nursing homes - using the French term EHPAD - had abandoned their jobs, leaving residents to die."
As an EU citizen, whether I'm kowtowing to Chinese or US imperialism is not all that different. Sure, I'd much rather live in the US than China, but in recent history, US influence outside their borders has been much, much worse for those under their heel than has Chinese influence.
I can think of substitutes for Apple (Huawei) and Amazon (Alibaba) with US market penetration, but I can't think of any for M. I can think of a couple reasons why off the top of my head but I'm curious as to what you think.
* Where's the monopoly? TikTok is one slice of the social media pie, unlike Facebook's ownership of Whatsapp/Messenger, Facebook.com, Instagram (with its Snapchat lite features).
* What are ByteDance doing with TikTok that's different from what US companies do with their social network data? e.g., Twitter. As a side-note one could argue Twitter aqui-killed Vine, setting the stage for TikTok.
* If desired, couldn't the Biden administration immediately return to the Trump-era policy of requiring ByteDance to sell a substantial part of their TikTok business to a US company? Which is a remedy that US companies complain about when China does it.
I see far fewer problems with TikTok's associations with China than I do with Facebook's ownership of many slices of the social media pie, never mind that the US has many 3-letter agencies hoovering up data from US owned social media networks, even about US citizens (at the very least all it takes is an interaction with a non-US account for the US account data to be considered fair game).
Relative to its size, the highly consolidated US car industry isn't a great exporter, for example, and even required bailouts to survive.
That, I think, is probably a pessimistic view - Gmail being split off from Google Display Ads and Google Search wouldn't make me any less likely to use Gmail, say. But it would also open the door for US companies to replace them, not simply foreign ones. It's not like countries that crack down on the US services have produced many better companies good enough to compete in the US to date.
I'd accept the risk of some new dominant players from other countries in exchange for limiting the risk of misuse of market power and increasing the chance of new US competition to arise. Competition from inside or outside the US should make the encumbents better. Stagnation is what will let them be replaced by disruptive newcomers.
EDIT: I think a more likely risk is that we lose some money-losing "free" services that are basically loss-leaders, maybe even some vanity project ones. I would LOVE to replace some of those with paid products that a more healthy company could grow around, with better user-facing incentives.
I bet, based on recent history, that most of the upstarts would be from the US. If that isn’t the case, it will be a wake up call and hopefully the US will rise to the occasion.
The last company broken up was AT&T; at the time everyone was worried about Japanese electronics companies.
> breaking up AT&T in 1982 was the best thing that could have happened to America. AT&T's core project in 1982 wasn't fighting Japanese electronics companies: it was suppressing the growth of the internet in the USA
> Antitrust enforcement isn't an economic drag, it's an economic STIMULUS
Source: https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/21/each-drop-of-strych-a-nin...
How is that better?
I'd think very, very hard about crippling US companies in a global marketplace. So far, I don't even see any discussion about it.
Seems very unlikely.
If it were more profitable to be based in another country, they would be. As it is, the stability of the US and the porous byzantine tax laws, corruptible politico, et al make the US ideal.
Also, as a believer in the free market, shouldn't you welcome competition, both national and international, as a means for everyone to become better at this?
I'm not disappointed to see them put under scrutiny. I hope big media companies are next.
One possible reason may be integration, which definitely is a factor for Apple, but Google’s is so hideously bad it might as well not exist.
For consumers it’ll be better whether or not the competitors are from the US (as an EU citizen I’d like to see some local options).
Couldn't the US President just decide that they should be banned if they don't sell to an American company?
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/21/915043052/trumps-tiktok-deal-...
These companies have become bloated and become a liability to the US and the dollar... Soaking up all the newly printed money and wasting it on bureaucracy whilst depriving everyone else from capital. Monopolizing user attention for the benefit of other aging, rotten, decrepit, bureaucratic corporations. They were producing big nominal gains through hoarding of newly printed money but rotting the economy from the inside. Good riddance.
If the reserve banks want to restore faith in the US dollar, they have to prove it works.
Their high visibility is why they are able to soak up fiat from the economy. When the Fed did the trillion dollar stimulus packages, it went straight into these highly visible stocks.
These companies seem to be running a kind of money laundering operation at this stage. I suspect they found a way to keep borrowing large amounts of money from banks in perpetuity and then circulate that money among themselves to pay off each other's debts to inflate revenue numbers (maybe they use shell companies or corporate partners). It seems that there's something not right going on financially speaking. They're not playing on an even playing field as other companies. They shouldn't be profitable but they are; simply because they have an unfair advantage due to having special access to the centralized money printers.
I feel like your comments would make more sense about banks.
If the environment was different (e.g. using hard money like gold or Bitcoin instead of constantly printing more), then the game would be radically different and completely different companies (IMO, more socially beneficial companies) would be winning this game.
The total market cap of all of these companies is far less than the 6-8T that’s been printed in the past year alone, so I don’t see any evidence of that assertion.
Perhaps if people listened, then it wouldn’t need to keep being made.
> They were producing big nominal gains through hoarding of newly printed money but rotting the economy from the inside.
It isn’t obvious how this statement relates to tech companies in any way.
How for example is Apple hoarding newly printed money?