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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

So this is a fairly recent development: an effective cartel when all the players use the same software that spits out the same numbers. The defense is that they're acting independently and some can choose to use the software or not but that doesn't stand up to reality

Unfettered markets create monopoloies and oligopolies.

Housing isn't like other goods. If you don't want to buy an air fryer or can't because of price or supply, that's OK. You won't starve. But people need housing and we've built our economy entirely on ever-increasing housing prices.

This is a Ponzi scheme. The next generation has to work 3 times as hard or long to pay for your house to get that pricing increase. It's quite literally just theft from the next generation. Except it's worse than that because that threat is backed by state violence: evictions and homelessness.

We are quite literally choosing to kill people by witholding a basic human need: shelter.

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I hope that the principle that emerges from this is that market fixing collusion is still collusion when arranged by algorithm

> is still collusion when arranged by algorithm

Saying "my software said to do x" isn't a defense when you are accused of x. In fact, it may be seen as negligent or systemic, both of which are bad places to be. I'm not sure where people think they can get off the hook for criminal behavior because they outsourced pulling the trigger.

This is only true to some degree though. People can (and do) move to other areas of the country when cost of living becomes too expensive. They buy land and build on it themselves. It's not like there is a fixed housing stock and a fixed set of players has control over it (although it can be close to that in specific geographic areas, ie cities).

this has become less of an option though because pretty much all semi-decent job markets are really frothy now.

one could theoretically maybe move to the barren wilderness of Nevada or Alaska or somewhere else desolate but given the lack of services, job, etc. it's not very practical. WFH didn't really lower home prices in the Bay, but it did make a bunch of attractive rural towns really expensive.

Health care has a similar provider that tells insurances how much they should pay for out of network providers. We really need to reduce the data that entities can hold. There is way too much power in having so much data.

It's enshittification. Rent-seeking capitalism has become the norm.

Don't start watering down that word by applying it to everything under the sky.

Or, do, and thereby point out that the problem is systemic, to a culture too enmeshed in the system to understand critique.

So either way. Do what you were gonna do.

What these companies are doing is the very definition of the second stage of enshittification.

Well, in this case it is very literally rent-seeking, eh.

gorbachev has spoken.

>Unfettered markets create monopoloies and oligopolies.

Rental markets aren't "monopoloies" or "oligopolies" by any stretch of the imagination.

Don't quite follow, are you saying that there are too many players for there to be `*opolies`? The FBI seems to disagree, right?

I think this is more correctly described as cartel behavior (also illegal under anti-trust laws and likely what the FBI is investigating here).

I do think there are far too many players involved for it to fit the reasonable description of an oligopoly. (I am not the upthread objector to the use of that word, though I think the objection is valid.)

"*opolies" =/= price fixing/collusion, which is what the FBI is investigating them for. Even if you don't have a monopoly but you agree to fix prices with a competitor, it's still illegal.

"encompassing 70% of multi-family apartment buildings"

The hair splitting meme around "monopoly" and effective monopoly power (and the common meaning of these terms) is just ugly.

>"encompassing 70% of multi-family apartment buildings"

You conveniently left out the part before: "at least 21 large landlords and institutional investors [...]". Wikipedia says the definition of oligopoly is:

"An oligopoly (from Ancient Greek ὀλίγος (olígos) 'few', and πωλέω (pōléō) 'to sell') is a market in which control over an industry lies in the hands of a few large sellers who own a dominant share of the market."

"at least 21" is not "a few" by any stretch of the imagination.

21 is too many? Is it not relative to the market size and ownership of the "product"/"service" for the market? How many landlords are there and much of the market do they own?

Yes? At some point you have to draw the line between "oligopoly" and "normal market". I don't know what the number is, but it's safe to say that for most industries "at least 21" would make up the majority of market share and therefore it would be absurd to call that "oligopoly".

Agree with you fully on this.

As far as the rental.market being an oligopoly, there's an argument to be made that the existence of things like RealPage makes large sections of the market act as it would with an oligopoly, even if it doesn't quite meet the definition.

That is an interesting conversation to have, separate from the illegal price fixing.

An oligopoly does not imply price fixing, but does a monopoly imply price fixing/collusion because the entity group is size 1, an entity colludes with itself, always?

No. A single entity setting prices is not collusion, collusion requires multiple parties.

This is syntax. The original cause and practical effect are identical. The point stands.

They are when the pricing for them is set by one or few entities.

They’re also a necessary expense. It is the last thing a person can choose not to spend money on.

We've moved well beyond the traditional monopoly like Standard Oil. We moved onto conglomerates: about everything you buy comes from like ~8 conglomerates. We then recognized the user of market power for an effective monopoly (eg Paramount [1]).

So what we have now is a whole bunch of landlords who largely all use the same software. That doesn't sound illegal. Now if it happens to spit out the same results for all the users, that's one thing (and problematic all on it's own). But the allegation here is that landlords bought into and use the software knowing this would be the outcome.

This is just an evolution of the old cartel of 10 or so CEOs scheming to fix prices in a dark cigar-filled room except now companies attempt to remove their own responsibility by waving their hands at The Algorithm [tm].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

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