Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

How has Intuit avoided antitrust investigations? I'm not talking about TurboTax. Intuit's Quickbooks is basically a monopoly in the U.S. with all of the attendant characteristics of a monopoly ... poor performance, huge price increases, taking advantages of SMBs and sole proprietors that are forced to use it for their businesses.

View on HN

Because the reigning ideology of anti-trust until the last year has been consumer welfare [0], where a monopoly is basically assumed ok unless you can demonstrate definite harms to consumers.

[0]: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/peeing-in-the-economists-...

In this market there is plenty of compeition that is driving down prices. me personally i switched from hr block to freetaxusa and i saved 50$. As far as markets and antitrust is concerned there are no monopoly problems here.

I wish an agency like the CFPB or FTC could step in to say, although the market here is "working" there are still consumer concerns not being addressed that you must address.

Maybe Taylor Swift needs to have a public Twitter spat with her bookkeeper. At least, that's what got the ball rolling on Ticketmaster.

It's not illegal to have a monopoly. From the FTC: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

> it is not illegal for a company to have a monopoly, to charge "high prices," or to try to achieve a monopoly position by what might be viewed by some as particularly aggressive methods. The law is violated only if the company tries to maintain or acquire a monopoly through unreasonable methods.

I wish unreasonable methods included taking away the value of someone else's labor

Then basically damn everything qualifies, unless management and the business decides for some deranged reason to work for free any business would qualify. Hell, so would working in the same field because it lowers the value of the labor by competition. Neither assumption is what could be called reasonable.

Employee owned businesses are a thing. Management still gets paid. They all profit equally.

I don't know what QuickBooks market share is, I have seen estimates between 60 and 80%. But there are definitely a lot of direct competitors as well as indirect competitors gnawing at their heels with services like invoicing and payroll and payments. I don't see any real barriers to entry created by intuit, especially since the QuickBooks export format is an open format.

But, there definitely should be a lot of scrutiny for any additional acquisitions that Intuit makes, because they are definitely big enough to just buy any company that begins to challenge them.

Because every market in the US conveniently turns into a Duopoly which is never subject to antitrust. Intuit has H&R Block.

What product or service does HR block sell that overlaps with Intuit? I cannot think of one. Intuit sells software, HR Block sells cheap (and probably bad) tax advice.

Intuit has a market cap of $114B and HRBlock has a market cap of $6B.

They both have online tax filing, TurboTax's most popular consumer product and what we're discussing in this thread.

The boxed software is a niche consumer product or targeting SMBs.

They are like a version of Adobe, but across more industries. There are competitors like Xero for small business accounting.

I'd imagine most of QuickBooks' continued market share is momentum from CPAs who drive SMBs to QB. One platform to interact with for all your clients makes life easier.

Sounds like an opportunity for some competition.

Sounds like an opportunity to get rid of unnecessary regulation and eliminate the system that is built to support tax filing companies. There's no good reason that taxes aren't automatically calculated for basic returns and you just need to sign a document. It's done in other countries. But their monopoly and lobbying have led to the government making the system more rather than less byzantine.

And even if the government "filed" your taxes for you, I'd imagine people could always file their own returns if they wanted to.

exactly.

Monopoly would imply that there are no viable alternatives, which isn’t really true at all. There are dozens of companies with similar products.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com