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Comment by swingingFlyFish | Hacker News Reader

When AT&T got fragmented we got C. I think It's time Apple, Google, Amazon and maybe even Microsoft got restructured.

As I recall, we got C and UNIX because the conditions of AT&T’s telecommunications monopoly prevented them from competing in software. So they gave away the source code to academic institutions for a comparatively small fee and weak licensing

Tried to find a references for this and found a blog post and comments

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/11/16/why-att-licensed-u...

> When AT&T got fragmented

We temporarily had like 20 phone services, and we ended up back with (barely) 3.

This is normal. Markets tend towards consolidation because of the beneficial effects of economies of scale. Absent outside intervention, monopoly is the natural end state of a market. Sometimes this intervention comes naturally (tech changes, consumer tastes change, companies randomly implode), but where it doesn't, it's the government's role to periodically reset the market to a competitive state. This is necessary to have efficient markets.

Network effect is another cause for consolidation in the case of the current tech giants.

I wish more people understood this. You can't go full communist top-down economy because it will inevitably lead to sub-optimal and inefficient solution. But full-blown competition will inevitably lead to a "mega" winner, because over time he can use his superior efficiency/technology (whatever advantage makes him better) to buy or starve the competition. In the end when the market is finally dominated by a few players you tend to lose the benefits of efficiency of scale because they abuse their position to raise prices, collude and whatnot. So, something needs to be done eventually.

I think there are 2 "solutions" to try: - breaking up a company once it becomes too big; separating the various business it operates, so that they cannot have unfair advantage of consolidation and competitors have a better chance (it's easy to "win" when you can subsidize one branch losses with another high margins...) - preventing them from becoming so big in the first place by forbidding them to buy any other business. If they have to grow organically it would take lots more time, require more ressource from the main business and take years to be competitive. I never understood why we let some companies swallow another just because it has the money. Companies with too much cash on hand are pointing at an economic inefficiency and it just means they should be taxe more because they are stealing too much ressources from the world.

Anyway, we end up in those situations because we assume a lot of things that are just plain wrong, in the first place the notion that the pie just gets bigger. It's fundamentally false because ressource are limited (natural ressources, numbers of humans, total available time, etc). When you make runners compete, you give all of them a single, similar lane; you don't just let a single runner push everyone out of a single lane... But the second case is exactly how our economy works...

Maybe that "tree of liberty" quote accurately applies to corporate hegemony as well.

The tree of the free market must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of corporate tyrants.

You seem to be adapting the common butchering of the quote, which omits an important part:

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” (emphasis added)

https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...

Technically, that one also omits the rest of the letter, which is more measured and less punchy anyway, pointing out that many rebellions themselves are founded in ignorance.

They were all regional, and local got unbundled from long-distance. Was that really a win for the consumer?

Pardon? C was developed in the 70s[0], and AT&T wasn't broken up until 1982[1]. Or am I misinterpreting "fragmented"?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

C and UNIX were proprietary Bell Labs technologies until Ma Bell was broken up and told they couldn't compete in software.

Ah, clears it up for me now, thanks.

Are you arguing for or against?

More seriously, each of those companies could be split without too much trouble and no loss of shareholder value. Microsoft in particular seems to be made up of components that work against each other.

Wow, I didn't know about this correlation, where can I read more about that?

We actually got a lot more. For example, we got modems and without modems it is likely we would not have Internet, at least not free version of it.

That doesn't make much sense to me. Modems existed before the AT&T breakup. You can't encode a digital signal for transmission ever an analogue medium without a modem, and a modem seems entirely beside any point of a free internet to me.

I think we’ve got enough programming languages..

We didn't, back then. C changed the game for low-level machine coding - what other games would be changed by fragmenting FAANG?

I'd like to see something around operating systems (mobile and desktop) and personal assistants/AI. But that may be too high-level.

Honestly, just getting back to the point that you can write your own app and easily install it on your friends' phones would change the world. The amount of interesting stuff we lose to the inability of hobbyists to tinker with their technology is incalculable.

Write a mobile responsive website in HTML/CSS/JS and port it to hybrid mobile with Capacitor.JS?

That doesn't allow you to do a large number of things that ordinary apps can do -- or that "approved" apps also can't do, e.g. by modifying parts of the system in advantageous ways.

You can also obviously just buy a PC and run whatever you want, but the entire point is the barrier to entry. If it's easy, more people do it, and that's good. If they have to contend with a convoluted mess, people give up, and you lose whatever they might have created.

>Apple, Google, Amazon and maybe even Microsoft

What would be the economic and geopolitical consequences of the US breaking up the only US companies that are globally competitive? Chinese giants will outcompete the smaller less competitive remnants after these kind of corporate breakups.

evaluation of Chinese companies will be more stringent than local companies against the rules of monopolies.

That’s a strong argument for nationalization of large businesses. Competition fosters innovation, and monopoly kills it. Competition with larger companies gave birth to Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

Neither Apple, Google, Amazon, nor Microsoft have a systemic monopoly.

Apple, Google and Microsoft were all in new early markets when they started up. They weren't really competing with giant successful companies.

Your comment presupposes that bigger = better.

This may or may not be true, but size is not necessarily a predictor of victory, especially in warfare.

History is rife with smaller belligerents defeating larger ones through innovation/force multiplication/asymmetrical warfare.

I think it's fair to say that an oligopoly stifles innovation; you can see it in how expensive and slow companies like Lockheed, Boeing, or BAE are when it comes to providing matériel needed by actual warfighters.

I don't think this is an either-or scenario – you need both – but saying that we can only be globally competitive on the backs of megacorporations is incorrect.

TikTok is an example of a successful Chinese company that is out-competing US social media giants. If they were a US company, Facebook or Google would've bought and killed them when they were an early startup.

American big tech companies aren't competitive in anything. They're entrenched monopolies. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon products are all shit, but users don't really have any other choice. If we break them up, it will create market opportunity for actual innovation in the US.

The question is whether we actually have the talent and expertise to innovate once you remove all of the current artificial barriers (big tech monopolies, walled gardens, etc).

I think we do. At least more than China, where most of their big tech companies seem to be built on stolen and cloned tech.

> They're entrenched monopolies. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon products are all shit, but users don't really have any other choice.

If their products are all shit, how are they able to maintain their monopolies? Why hasn't a competitor started up that offered a better product?

Is this question meant to be rhetorical, or are you genuinely asking? Because the answer is simple: that's how monopolies work. Monopolies don't need to compete to succeed, they just need some way to exclude competitors. All of those companies have multiple ways to do that for most/all of their products.

> Is this question meant to be rhetorical, or are you genuinely asking?

It's a little of both to be honest. I disagree that their products are shit (in fact some of their products I think are really damn good), and I don't see how short of coercion with government or a private army or something that you could maintain a monopoly with products that suck.

But I genuinely think I might be missing something here. Maybe a better question is, how are they able to maintain their monopolies with shit products? Huge barriers to entry combined with quick acquisition of competitors? That's mostly how Rockefeller did it in the 19th century, but that's not a good parallel either because he didn't have a shit product.

TikTok is based on a US company - musical.ly - which was not bought by any US social media giant, maybe due to anti-trust concerns.

Wasn't Musical.ly a Chinese company too? Wikipedia says they were headquartered in Shanghai with an office in California.

You're right, I misremembered that.

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