Mergers ruin everything

Optimizing for efficiency has led to some of the worst problems we've seen in recent years. Just off the top of my head, "lean staffing", which is an abusive management practice, and the inability to comfortably withstand shocks to the system, as we saw when COVID hit.

If you can innovate at a certain scale, stay successful within x standard deviations year over year, paying dividends and making profits...why MUST it always end up being underpinned by 'the market' demanding endless scaling.

If what you want is to expand horizontally or the so-called pie gets bigger and more to gain? Fine. But that, as the end all and be all itself, is growing quite daft.

It's goddamn inane.

And many of today's biggest tech companies largely get a pass because antitrust law focuses on price and ignores all other negative externalities that result from monopolistic behavior like quality, timeliness, ease of access to customer service, user privacy, and corporate social responsibility. But the product is "free" so how can the consumer possibly derive any further benefit?(/s)

When there is competition in a market not only do prices fall but the customer experience improves. Businesses don't (and can't) compete on price. They compete on value. But US antitrust law ignores value entirely and consumers everywhere pay the price.

Bad things like... a supply chain crisis:

https://prospect.org/economy/we-were-warned-about-the-ports/

They were tightly regulated, which worked well until technology moved ahead of the operations.

Tight regulation works well when change rates are slow and you need to make capital investments. Short term decision making driven by final optimization always constrain capital investment. That’s why your power grid is less robust than it was 40 years ago.

The pattern there is that small producers for the most part fail and fizzle out. The few successful ones get snapped up by the big players.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dalebuss/2019/04/30/fortress-ma...

I believe that auctioning spectrum is a huge factor in creating monopolies because only the biggest companies get spectrum. No small guy can afford to compete in the auction. I don't think that auction (to the highest bidder) is the best way to allocate spectrum if the goal is to preserve competition.

Without those laws the big companies would steal and copy every small business idea or IP with no impunity. The laws protect small companies much more than big companies. Of course big companies sits on a lot of patents so they are still powerful, but not as powerful as if they could just abuse espionage etc as much as they wanted.

For example, what do you think would happen with the harry potter books? Others would just print their own copies, write their own books with the same characters and names, and the company with the biggest marketing budget to throw around would win and sell the most. That doesn't seem very good for the little guy to me, rather it would make it basically impossible for the little guy to compete.

http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/monopoly-money.html

> The counterargument is that this only happens in markets with high barriers to entry, which in turn are mostly caused by regulatory barriers.

Not necessarily. For instance: if the barriers to entry are zero but the monopoly can price things below cost (e.g. due to cash reserves or strength in other markets), it can bury any competitor. The mere existence of that ability could have a deterrent effect that prevents competitors from forming in the first place.

Some problems are just hard, and tend to favor incumbents with economies of scale. Until very recently (post-GDPR), there were no regulatory barriers protecting Search, for example; nevertheless, new entrants found it very difficult to get traction because search is a hard problem. Same goes for putting up cell towers, and burying fiber lines, and maintaining an electric grid.

I'd also argue that most oligopolies aren't formed by technical or government constraints, but rather by branding and consumer behavior. Consumers usually have a desire to stick with familiar, trusted brands, and to try new brands only when they've been recommended by people they trust. This creates barriers to new entrants, because you don't start out with any baseline trust and you have to compete against companies that have been in use for a century. There's nothing technically difficult about bottling carbonated sugar-water; regardless, Coca-Cola enjoys enormous margins because it's ingrained in the habits of hundreds of millions of people.

When there's actual regulatory capture, we should address that, and untangle the regulations so new firms can enter. But don't expect that solving regulatory capture is going to fix all instances of monopoly.

> Suppose instead they held a new auction every year or every month for use of the spectrum in a given region until the next auction.

This would work if the government or some common third party were responsible for putting up towers (and lease them to the telecoms like MVNOs), but as it is the telecoms build and operate the towers themselves, and the hardware loadout changes slightly depending on which frequency bands that telecom is allowed to use.

There are hundreds of entire industries that have gigantic barriers to entry no matter what the regulations are. Covering the country in cell towers, building fleets of container ships, designing an operating systems and full suite of applications — these things aren't cheap

Not entirely... there's a tradeoff. People forget that monopolies can be a good thing in that it can force a standard. For example, if English were said to have a monopoly on language, it would become very easy to speak and communicate around the world, as it would be the only language spoken everywhere. Contrast, if we have 200 versions of spoken languages, we'd have communication barriers to overcome when we try to communicate with someone foreign.

There’s more than blocking advertising and distribution at these competitions. Webb admitted that in at least one contest, cheerleaders got more points if they used more Varsity equipment as props. In other words, it’s not just a rigged game as some sort of metaphor, Varsity actually rigged the rules of its cheerleading competition to coerce purchases of Varsity products. Indeed, Webb has testified in court that the competitions exist solely for the “promotion of his cheerleading supply business.”

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/this-is-not-a-democracy-i...

When a working branch falls behind main, I prefer to rebase it instead of merging from main to keep it up to date. However, if you've already pushed your working branch to a repo, after rebasing you need to `git push --force` - which is a problem if there are others who have previously cloned the working branch.

This isn't true for regulations categorically, to be sure- the established companies can wield lobbying power for particular regulations to pass. That makes them look good in the public eye, the government wins for adding "oversight", but the actual competitive landscape becomes more encumbered, not less.

But it isn't so much that the regulation is designed to protect the incumbent, it is: - the volume of regulations requires a compliance overhead that is more easily amortized by larger firms - incumbents are involved in the design (or provide feedback) into the regulations such that they are able to comply specific rules, which might not actually fulfill the intent of the protecting the public. The process of codifying and validating practices to check boxes is often just waste.