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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

All big corporations have to be broken up. They have ill influence on everything and they are what many describe symptoms of late stage capitalism and our failure to regulate.

They are like a player of Monopoly who bought everything.

Alphabet shouldn't exist in its current form and so Apple, Amazon and many other corporations.

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Truly, the problem is US complacency. It's a great day to tax businesses when US companies dominate the market, but as soon as a foreign competitor steps in? It's time to defend American competition and ingenuity!

Hopefully, pushback from European regulators who are harder to fool (or buy out) will force the US to admit there's egg on our face. We've let corporate America write the rules for too long, and our democratic control over their abuse has become dilute and helpless. Something's gotta give, and I'm cheering for the countries that take user privacy and consumer rights seriously.

> Hopefully, pushback from European regulators who are harder to fool (or buy out) will force the US to admit there's egg on our face. We've let corporate America write the rules for too long, and our democratic control over their abuse has become dilute and helpless. Something's gotta give, and I'm cheering for the countries that take user privacy and consumer rights seriously.

Hopefully. But don't underestimate the general public's abject apathy and religious belief that more "freedom" in markets fixes everything, even when it is obvious that bad actors are employing dark patterns to exploit the anarchy.

One downside to a bunch of small companies instead of a few large ones: competition is fiercer, the small companies can't rest on their laurels the way the large ones do. Consequently work life balance deteriorates for the average worker.

How is a "big corporation" defined? Limiting the number of employees a company has (1000? 10,000? 100,000?) would have interesting effects. Companies might be less likely to hire junior people. Bigger companies would need to outsource or hire contractors to avoid hitting their employee limit. There would be competition among companies providing outsourcing or contractor services. That could be good for companies outsourcing work (having more choices), but there would be a lot of market inefficiencies.

How big is big? And do you not want computers that can do what modern computers can? It costs billions of dollars to build a single semiconductor fab, so without any big corporations, there won't be any new fabs (or anyone big enough to own an existing one), so we'll be going back to 70s-80s IC technology at best.

Like it or not, a lot of things require very large companies to get done. Small companies can't build jumbo-jet airplanes.

The big corporations that are doing the most harm are the food companies. They inject animals with antibiotics, kill millions of them in a very cruel manner, employ cheap illegal labor to process it and contaminate the environment beyond repair. The tech industry is bad but nothing compared to the irreparable harm the food industry causes.

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