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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

Great as far as it goes; but there's many a slip 'twixt dress and drawers in Congress.

What could we do to fix "corporations" longer term? How about some sort of union-like "customer representative" on the board of directors? as well as a labor representative.

Personally I have issues with the legal recognition of corporations, even though it's at least theoretically open to all the real people its amazing how much it works out to be a class privilege in law.

Yet another cause to throw in the bonfire with "Tort reform." Pleasant bait for theoretical debates but any real world implementation is almost certain to be too complicated to ever get much agreement on.

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Well, I’m no expert. But a center piece of Matt Stoller’s argument has been that this problem has been solved before in the US. There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to reach for the same solutions. It doesn’t mean commerce or corporations should be torn down. Merely making certain maneuvers and strategies unacceptable, punishable, criminal (in extreme cases) would be enough to deflate the outsize power monopolies have. And I agree with this - Stoller convincingly writes about how the US was amazingly good at enforcing antitrust. Business communities simply did not reach for monopolistic strategies in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. And the US economy of that time was amazingly strong at that time, delivering prosperity, innovation and consumer choice.

The reason why it seems to be unachievable is that it seems too complicated/hard. But monopolies like Standard Oil were complicated too.

Every acquisition over $100m should automatically trigger a review, especially if said company is a "leader" in ANY market, and looked at from the perspective of:

"Is the company removing this competitor from the market hurting competition in their own market in the long term?"

It's way better for the market to let the cash-rich large corporations attempt to develop their own competitor to a new threat they might see in the market than to allow them to buy that competitor.

It would've been better for us if Instagram was never bought by Facebook, Admob never bought by Google, and so on.

Sure, maybe they wouldn't have gotten quite as successful on their own, but for one perhaps Facebook wouldn't have become as strong as it became in the social media space (a good thing) or they would've been forced to create a NEW competitor, and we all benefit from more competitors in the market. Instead they removed one and made themselves even more powerful.

It would've been better for us if Instagram was never bought by Facebook, Admob never bought by Google, and so on.

What makes you think that?

Oligopolies are bad, competition is good or something

Because the essential feature of very large companies is their attempting to create a market where they can invest as little as possible and continue to extract revenue.

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