Taking on the Monopoly
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There are a lot of monopolies that are hard to break because VC won't touch them (this is our case). But at some point the incumbent becomes so full of themselves that customers have enough and then you can compete. But it can take many years.
I’m game to join or kick one of :)
Apple did not have a monopoly on podcasts, they were basically the default option for consumption on iOS and a LOT of people have iOS devices. Anyone can make a competing podcast app - that is not to undermine the difficulty of getting any significant market share here - but the barriers are not that high.
True monopolies have built in market barriers that is impossible without nearly unlimited monetary and political capital.
An example of a true monopoly might be your local electric utility company. They have a monopoly on delivering electricity to your home and (in certain areas) a monopoly on generation as well.
Even if you had the political backing - the enormous amount capex to acquire any amount of marketshare just to deliver a commodity with relatively slim margins means no startup could ever tackle it.
a natural monopoly.
For at least a decade - nobody made any significant money off podcasting - neither service providers nor the shows themselves. It wasn't until probably 2015 that it really started taking off (with the likes of Joe Rogan) and Apple did not truly monetize it until 2019 when they introduced subscriptions.
Now that podcasting is a multi-billion dollar industry, its easy for people to point the finger and cry that Apple has had a "monopoly" on podcasting since 2005 when in reality it was a very niche market for a very very long time and there was no competition simply because there wasn't much money to be made.
For example, mobile phones for taxis, LLMs for web search.
A startup can only take on monopolies at rare opportunistic moments.
Not sure how repeatable ignoring laws are in battling monopolies.
That being said, I wonder how much money the founders spent on private security for themselves meanwhile?
Unions (including taxi unions) are known to play funny buggers in the real world against those they perceive as threats.
The same is true with scales of logistics in traditional businesses where middle companies always take a cut that includes a profit, and only major chains can get some value if the decide to outsource where it makes sense.
This is all the more true if a disruptor might be more customer focused than price competition focused.
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I'm not sure how to fix this. I am sure that any fix should come at things from a consumer benefits perspective and not just a broken window fallacy perspective. Maybe breaking up integrations (vertical and horizontal), and possibly higher taxes on anyone that has more than 20% of a given market, with some sort of startup support (think government agencies as VCs / prefer to go with not the >20% of the market where possible).
Antitrust regulatory enforcement.
You don't want to discourage success. You want to discourage gatekeeping. If consumers choose one company overwhelmingly over another, leading to a "monopoly", it's not antitrust worthy enough to break up.
If the company changes the landscape by making rules, protocols and standards with their products such that others cannot compete, then yes, antitrust would need to come in.
Therefore, it's a judgement, rather than a set of rules. And it is in this judgement that one must foster.
I’m not advocating for this solution, I’m just saying that it’s possible.
The article talks about these things in a roundabout way but doesn't seem to address the core issue. Yes, there's gold in the "no trespassing" hills, but any startup that does succeed in going that route is often blind to the legion of failed startups before it, in addition to being blind of what conditions have changed to then allow them to overtake the monopoly at the point in time they were successful.
The way to attack monopolies is often obliquely. One method is to serve a market that they don't want to serve because the margins aren't good and they prioritize short term rate of return. The monopoly isn't only not serving that market, they're often happy when they can outsource that part, removing the cost of their balance sheet to then focus on the higher end and higher rate of return products.
Eventually this is done for every service and the competitors eat the ladder from the bottom up, overtaking the monopoly on their high end services.
This is my interpretation of what Christensen is talking about in his "Where Does Growth Come From?" talks [0].
The other way is to serve an adjacent need, often creating their own market, and then overtaking the monopoly.
I would like to see a more introspective analysis of startups overtaking monopolies than a "move fast and break things" kind of article.
You need capital and increasing amounts as you get closer to threatening any monopoly. Who do you think have that capital? People that want to end monopolies? No they want to just be part of a new one. So unless you’re just offering a new monopoly opportunity they won’t see the value and you’ll not even start.
Don’t forget, you don’t accidentally become a monopoly, the govt protects you. So beyond a certain point, you start dealing with government impeding you on behalf of corporations you’re affecting
In my opinion the only way to end this process without just making a new set of monopolies is with non-stock cooperatives but it’s going to be a long road
It’s impossible to sustain even for an individual so they are only benefiting from it temporarily.
Michael Porter basically just took IO texts and rewrote them for business people. He's a nice entry point if you're interested.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/counterfeit-capitalism-wh...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickwwatson/2019/02/27/fake-...
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Myth+of+Capitalism%3A+Monopo...
Teddy Roosevelt was known for trust busting
The business plot was literally bankers trying to stage a coup on Washington because they hated FDR
https://connecticuthistory.org/gerald-macguire-and-the-plot-...
Basically everyone for themselves with no rules and total corporate control of the economy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism
Corporate control over the economy is not what anarcho capitalism is about. In such a world there isn't even "an economy" as we traditionally know it.
I think “Democracy the God that failed” was the final straw where I was like “this is basically advocating for private kinghoods”
If you extrapolate, then you basically get Amazon, United Health, and 8 other companies with their own currencies and mercenary armies and all manner nonsense that winds up basically just looking like a Corporate wasteland as described by Mike Judge
And frankly we’re pretty close -with Apple Cash and Apple hiring city and municipal police to guard stores the transition is effectively complete
If anything defines the current epoch it is "post-legal".
For example, massive fines, now in the billions of dollars, pay superficial lip-service to laws, but for mega-corps are simply the cost of doing business.
The irony of course is that giant monopolies exist only because the protection the rule of law bestows allows that. They are _very_ vulnerable. If we interpret "take on monopolies" using their own rules, they'd be hacked off the grid in weeks if not days.
The problem is congressman all want to get rich now, and Congress is a path to riches, whereas it was not always so directly the case
Taking on a monopoly and taking over their position are two different things. If you can carve out 1% of any monopoly you have a huge success.
Given a company A that does B for C, create a company A' that does B++ for C--.
DoubleClick and Google were a breath of fresh air, with their simple text only ads.
(The ban was imposed by the US government, but most or all of the internet's backbone was under US jurisdiction back then, resulting in the ban's scope being global in practice, or at least that is my guess: I only ever used the internet in the US. The main reason for the ban was lobbying by telecommunications providers who objected to the US government's competing with them for commercial customers.)
The old old internet was very cool, but of course most people had no idea it existed, and with the exception of the web (which was quite small in 1992) consisted entirely of terminal user interfaces in my experience.
Despite the ban on commercial activity, by 1992, the internet was the largest network of computers in the world.
I was referring to the 2000s to 2010 internet where creators often built useful free tools and websites around making a living through ads.
I think by "very small", you mean to imply it was not scaleable, and I disagree with that, too.
Specifically, most users pay a monthly fee to an internet service provider; this fee is all that would be needed to fund or sustain an internet along the lines of the old old internet -- without ads -- even if the old old internet was scaled to modern numbers of users.
Now you are going to try to tell us that the old old internet must have sucked compared to the modern ad-supported internet, right?
It was just for surfing
https://genodians.org/nfeske/2024-02-15-fosdem-aftermath
It clearly still has a ways to go, but Genode is looking like it'll become an actual option (for basic use) on the PinePhone over the next year.
Thanks, Captain Obvious.