Ask HN: Why big tech companies don’t compete fairly? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why big tech companies don’t compete fairly?

1 pointredbell8 comments

Antitrust, monopoly, lobbying, anticompetitive practices, dark patterns, extensive acquisitions, market disruption via selling with loss.. and the list goes on.

Why [on earth] we wake up [almost] every day on the news with keywords like FTC, EUR/GDPR, Supreme Court, attorney..

Why big tech companies, despite the huge amount of capital they possess along with some of the best talents/engineers on existence, can’t compete fairly? Why there is no bare-minimum level of ethics?

View on HN

The primary purpose of most businesses is to make money. Sometimes they are even legally obligated to pursue the best financial outcomes for their shareholders.

There are alternatives of course, like non-profits and B-corps, but those are outliers.

Profit, greed, regulatory capture, corruption. The word “ethics” functions merely as a deceptive feel-good buzzword when deployed by corporations and politicians.

Once a tech company gets bloated enough, they can’t ship stuff efficiently and are ripe for disruption. That’s why they need to resort to foul play.

Public companies are psychopathic profit maximizing automatons (and so blaming them is like blaming gravity for a tree falling on you). There should be healthy tension between companies pushing boundaries and regulations keeping them aligned with society's values. That strengthens regulation and oversight against bad actors and lets companies be innovative. But legislators and regulators are lazy, corrupt, or absent, and people are dumb enough to blame companies for anything that happens, so the tension doesn't exist and they run amok. Blame government for letting companies do it's job for it (and by extension the voters that don't care).

Human nature.

The "happy story told to little kids" version of human nature is, ah, not actually true. Or anywhere close.

Because they can, because this is how natural selection works, because this is the soul essence of the capitalism, because cartels and monopoly is what they want to become at the end of the day to squeeze even more money and suppress any concurrency in the process (nothing personal for them it is just a survival strategy). The better question is why are they allowed to be like that? The short answer is money. The politicians are cheap to buy these days. The longer answer - no body gives a fck beside those wich are loosing money. Most of the population does not even understand what exactly they are loosing. Take an IBM for example, they are known to kill any concurrency for decades already. Nobody gives a fck.

That's how they got to be big.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely

Reply on news.ycombinator.com