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Comment by bradley13 | Hacker News Reader

Once companies reach a certain size, they become actively evil. It's all about money, and they no longer care about their supposed customers.

Governments have forgotten their antitrust responsibilities. We need to make it simple and automatic: Define an upper limit where a company is too big to exist. Companies above this size must divest.

Micrisoft, Alphabet, Apple, Meta - many tech companies are too big, by an order of magnitude. Split them up.

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the trouble with big tech for the USA is that everyone else (at least in europe) is unable to compete as long as these companies are able to be so large they squeeze out (or buy out) all possible competition.

Similar to how it's difficult to go to war with countries that supply you energy (like.. Germany's recent tough time with Russia): USA being in this position means they dictate the rules of the internet and internet companies. This is an amazing position politically because they are the de facto owners of the economy for the next century.

Imagine making a business without AWS, GCP or Azure? Imagine Making a business without Google Docs or MS Office? -- it's unfathomable to most, I promise, and that's a great amount of power.

All they have to do, is not break the monopolies.

I think that this time around it's not actually something that falls under US antitrust law. At the time of the 2001 IE antitrust suit, Internet Explorer had 90% browser marketshare and was using it to prop up the dominance of Windows as well. Many websites relied on IE-only features such as ActiveX controls, so you could get shut out of things if you didn't use IE, which in turn meant you'd be shut out of them if you didn't use Windows.

Nowadays, Microsoft's behavior is undeniably shitty. But Edge's 10% or 15% marketshare is hardly a monopoly, so I don't think it falls under the jurisdiction of antitrust laws. Though I certainly wouldn't cry to find out that it falls under some other kind of consumer protection law.

Yes, antitrust is probably not the best conceptual framework to think about the problems arising from having several very similar vertically integrated platforms.

The EU's upcoming Digital Markets Act seems to more explicitly target that problem – I'm very curious how that will go.

> The EU's upcoming Digital Markets Act seems to more explicitly target that problem

You are naive if you think that this is what DMA is about. DMA is simply about Europe squeezing some money out of American companies. This is evident in the design and how carefully it was written to capture as many American companies and as few European ones as possible.

Wasnt it that IE was being pushed by the monopoly desktop operating system.

afaik, thats still the case.

I had thought that the argument was that bundling was more using Windows (near monopoly) to prop up IE usage, rather than vice-versa. If in 2001 (with no smartphones), IE only runs on Windows, it's kind of hard to have IE have a _higher_ share of the market than Windows.

> Once companies reach a certain size, they become actively evil.

Because they can't just be steady earners. Everyone has to show quarter after quarter after quarter increases. It's madness and it really needs to stop.

> Once companies reach a certain size, they become actively evil.

> Governments have forgotten their antitrust responsibilities.

Is it possible that these are two sides of the same thing? That is, what's the real difference between a corporation versus a government? I'd imagine a lot of similarity in terms of organizational dynamics. If we see a problem from corporations when they grow too large, shouldn't we also expect problems from governments when they get big?

I agree with you and think anything larger than 1% of GDP should be split but the problem is that other countries might not do the same, making it difficult for domestic companies to compete with a foreign company like Samsung, which is over 20% of South Korea's GDP. Even accounting for the difference in national GDPs, Samsung would have an advantage over the five or six Baby Apples that would result from the 1% rule.

> Governments have forgotten their antitrust responsibilities.

Have they forgotten, or have they simply reached that certain size whereby they must actively become evil?

It's no longer about "free market" once they get to a certain size. It's all about monopoly.

It's not size, it's function. Their evil only becomes apparent at scale, it still exists at every level. Capitalists, fundamentally, are parasites. I think a better idea would be to make it so that all companies must be worker-owned coops instead of slavery operations owned by a small group of parasites.

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