A healthy society needs to have fair competition and reasonably distributed power. What we have right now with trillion Dollar megacorps (by market cap) is not healthy.
A healthy society needs to have fair competition and reasonably distributed power. What we have right now with trillion Dollar megacorps (by market cap) is not healthy.
Previously, companies could only grow so big. Now with a worldwide addressable market, that's increased substantially.
I'd love to see US antitrust law recast as a series of increasing restrictions. No need to make it binary.
If you exceed this threshold, these are the requirements you're held to...
If you exceed this next threshold, these are the additional requirements...
The root issue is that extremely large companies are held to the same rules as much smaller companies, while having access to resources that alone create monopoly concerns.
And, IMHO, Godzilla-style "find a big monster to fight the big monster" regulation isn't a healthy approach to creating competition. Much better to increase competition restrictions with company size.
Totally agree. Another “simple” solution is different taxes based on size (maybe based on global revenues or profits).
Throwing ideas out there:
- Past a certain size, companies are prohibited from acquiring/merging with another company
- Past a certain size, companies are subject to data interoperability requirements (i.e. 'must have takeout'), with an independent team funded and dedicated to implementing requests, and penalties if they aren't released within a certain timeframe
The goal should be that e.g. "being Alphabet-sized" is not in Alphabet's own best interest, and it would be more beneficial to itself / its shareholders to break into multiple smaller companies that would be subject to less restriction but are independent.
And critically, the same requirements would apply to international companies doing business in the US.
So, increasing competition, but keeping the playing field level for all.
I've been meaning to read Chokepoint Capitalism for a while but from the name alone it sounds like government or public intervention ought to be focused on preventing the creation of such chokepoints. Not just near-monopoly like Microsoft has over lots of PC bootloader signatures, but also avoiding duopolies like Android-Apple. In very vague terms the most sensible option would be that it should be possible for any size party to create a minimum viable product so that market forces could actually work - such as open-sourcing a "minimum viable" amount of IP that a competitor can ship a product and let customer experience and market forces come to the fore, instead of lock-in, walled gardens, regulatory capture, standards burden etc.
Personally I also would like to see standard education include something akin to "How To Get Away With Murder" except it's "How FAANG Gets Away With Fucking Everybody". Bring the technical and economic literacy of the general populace closer to the average HN level, basically. More tinkers, more hackers.
And, in a broader sweep, a comment I made recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40461326