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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

100 years in the electric chair!

This isn't an "infraction" you can police with a fine, jail, etc. It's an industrial structure. The competition is competition for monopoly, a superior & highly profitable market position of some sort. Those are what make Google, FB & so profitable.

Google competed with Yahoo & Microsoft for years in search marketing. I don't believe either ever made significant profits. Their "market share" in terms of users may have been 10%-20%. But, their share of market revenues was a fraction of that. Their share of profits was negative.

OTOH Google pays (for example) Apple $7bn per year to make Google Search default. That's better than best case scenario profits MSFT or Yahoo could have hoped to make, unless they managed to replace Google in the no. 1 position.

Competing is just a lot less profitable than cooperating in a lot of cases. What is Apple supposed to do, say "keep it, we're good?"

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>This isn't an "infraction" you can police with a fine, jail, etc.

I disagree - governments legislate their markets so it is absolutely punishable if defined as such.

I think parent’s point is that a one time slap (as big as it might be) as we do with other crimes wouldn’t solve the issue. The punishment has to be more structural, legislating for instance as you suggest, or dramatically changing the entity’s structure as we did with past monopolies.

Depends on what you think the goal of the free market/society is, e.g. is this even in our interest to solve - better to redistribute these ill gotten gains to the benefit of society and let the free market solve its own problem - if they do it again, another fine.

just like parking /speeding tickets arent considered structural problems

Your point seems to be that we would have good metrics to evaluate the actual impact of these anti-competitive practices, including everything that didn’t happen because of them, and can apply proportionate punishment that would repair the damage done.

I don’t see any of these two assumptions to be true today, and if the point is to apply heavy enough fines that Google’s behavior radically changes, we’re not that far from for instance just breaking them up or applying specific restrictions on them.

I disagree: Shatter monopoly platforms with extreme prejudice, jail the CEOs of Google and Apple, and the market with self-correct. Investors will be wary of harmful business models and CEOs will hesitate to make monopolizing decisions.

Right now, tech companies are massively overvalued because the risk of government regulation is viewed to be nonexistent. A market correction is overdue.

For Standard Oil, splitting it up actually increased shareholder value massively.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/break-ups-and-stock-price...

The same could happen with big tech. The market correction could be upwards, just spread across lots of new stocks.

I really don't think it's likely, but I suppose what "break up" means in practice is a crapshoot.

Many of our current, data & user centric monopolies are more complex. Price setting, monopoly rents and economies of scale exist, but they're often not the main point.

"Economies of scale," for example, tends to work backwards these days. Google & FB have access to a ton of advertiser-relevant data, and a ton of users. That makes one unit of Google output better, not just cheaper. The dollar value of a Google of FB ad is much higher than MSFT's or a 2nd tier social network.

It might also be cheaper to run, because of economies of scale. Often though, that's very "in theory." IRL, FB probably spends more per user than most of their competitors. They have it to spend. Reddit is a competitor to FB, for example. The defining aspect of "scale" in their rivalry is not that FB can spread their costs across more users. FB makes many times more revenue per user, because they are bigger.

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